Juvenile curfews and gun violence, wildfire threatens Yosemite sequoias: 5 Things podcast
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Juvenile curfews and gun violence
Reporter Sarah Elbeshbishi looks into whether curfews work to cut down gun violence. Plus, 15 people are dead in Russia's latest attack on Ukrainian civilians, money and tech reporter Terry Collins explains Elon Musk's legal standing to back out of the Twitter deal, heat records keep getting broken and a wildfire threatens sequoias in Yosemite National Park.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 11th of July, 2022. Today, do juvenile curfews work to stop gun violence? Plus, a closer look at whether Elon Musk can really walk away from his Twitter deal and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
At least 15 people have been killed in a bar shooting in South Africa. Police say they're investigating reports of a group of men carrying out the attack.
Former White House strategist, Steve Bannon, has told the House January 6th Committee that he's willing to testify. He previously refused to comply with a subpoena last fall.
And Novak Djokovic has won his seventh Wimbledon. He beat Nick Kyrgios in four sets yesterday for his 21st Grand Slam title. He's one Grand Slam behind Rafael Nadal for the most ever in men's singles tennis.
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A study has found that juvenile curfews come with consequences, but not the ones they're designed for, as local leaders explore ways to curb gun violence. Reporter Sarah Elbeshbishi has more.
Sarah Elbeshbishi:
The Justice Department has a program, an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In this report looking at juvenile justice and delinquency, determining rates of crime perpetrated by juveniles or them being victims of it, they discuss curfews and the origins of curfews, how they're used, different things like that. They also discuss the efficacy of it. So the National Council of Crime and Delinquency said that curfews - and actually echoed a lot of what studies have shown and experts have said - that curfews aren't really effective and don't really do what they are intended. In fact, it says that they unnecessarily funnel large numbers of non-delinquent youth in a criminal justice system that's already inundated with alleged offenders. That's just kind of saying that it further advances these individuals to get into the criminal justice system when otherwise they really wouldn't have. So you do see that in some other studies and some concerns because depending on what the offense is - like some people are charged with a misdemeanor or an actual crime or something like that, or some are just fined, some are just returned home with a warning - but depending on what the city's punishment is, some kids can actually end up having a criminal record because they violated this curfew. So that council was noting that. That rather than helping, they were actually hindering kids because that would be the reason why they ended up having a criminal record, which can obviously harm them in the future.
In my research, I've seen that Austin in Texas actually had a working group look at their specific curfew ordinance and understand the effects of it and determine if it was effective, if it was worth still having. They ended up just determining that it wasn't effective in what they were aiming to do, and it actually did more harm than good. So I believe in 2017, they got rid of their curfew ordinance because they just found that there was no evidence of it being effective or helpful in the way that they originally thought.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find Sarah's full piece in today's episode description.
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At least 15 people were killed and another 20 potentially buried in rubble after Russian rockets destroyed apartment buildings in eastern Ukraine. Three buildings in a residential area in Chasiv Yar were destroyed on Saturday. Local resident, Irina Shulimova, was devastated.
Taylor Wilson translating for Irina Shulimova:
"I used to know all the people who lived there. I was told that a child died."
Taylor Wilson:
Chasiv Yar is 12 miles from Kramatorsk, a major Russian target. After taking control of the Luhansk Province as part of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is now focused on seizing the Donetsk, which would give the country full command of the Donbas region.
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Billionaire Elon Musk has called off his deal to buy Twitter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. But Money and Tech Reporter Terry Collins says it might not be that easy to just walk away at this point.
Terry Collins:
On Friday, Elon Musk called off his deal to buy Twitter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Basically, in turn, Musk thinks that Twitter is holding back on information including the number of bots and spam that actually is on the platform. It's kind of a complicated situation in which Musk is saying that Twitter isn't living up to its end of the deal. Twitter, for its part, said that it is. Now we're just in the middle of a huge, huge mess. On Friday, Twitter stock plummeted 5%. Now who knows? On Monday, it could be, as one analyst, Dan Ives, said, "It's in a code red situation," which means anything could happen between now and if we ever get a deal. So in theory, he said they shed stuff right now that's worth billions of dollars in so many ways.
Musk isn't going to back down. He's likely going to double, triple down his belief, and he's willing to go to court about it. So there will be a legal battle, both in the courts possibly and in the court of public opinion over this. Meanwhile, we could likely see Twitter stock plummet to numbers it's probably never seen before. I mean, it's one thing to not meet the goals of investors, but to see their investment literally tank because of the uncertainty that may be out of their control. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter counter-sues Musk on a possibly reneging of purchase as probably as early as next week.
If you're Twitter, you don't want this to linger on and the value of the company will really be low. Its current market cap is under $30 billion, far more than what Musk offered to pay for it. So if his objective is to purchase the company at a lower price, he's going to do everything he can to do it.
Here's the street-level coffee shop and text conversations I've had with many since Friday's news. A lot of it's centered around Twitter's bot count that Musk thinks is higher than what Twitter claims, somewhere lower than 5%. Whether he's using that to back out of the deal or get the cost down to buy Twitter at lower price is something worth watching.
This deal was complex from the start. We spent nearly four months wondering about this. For what it's worth, Musk has 100 million followers on Twitter, so he has a certain unique experience in seeing how the platform operates compared to many of us. Maybe that intrigued him enough to want to buy it in the first place. He's always been a harsh critic of Twitter, a loud critic, so I guess in his own way, he thinks he's a savior to fix the platform.
Why is this all important? Well, love it or hate it, Twitter is one of the largest communication and online marketplace platforms in the world. We, like you and I, use Twitter to promote and advertise our work to reach the largest audience possible. Businesses big and small use it to sell their wares and products. Small businesses especially rely on Twitter to make a living. Of course, it's a place where there's a lot of disinformation, awful rhetoric that can cause problems on levels that we are still trying to decipher and will continue to do so. So we don't know who's going to be the boss, but if you are a company that's considering advertising on Twitter and with all this drama, you really have to take a close look given all the uncertainty.
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At least 10 heat records were broken in cities across the Southwest and Central US over the weekend. That includes places in Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas with record highs on Friday and Saturday, one of them 100 degrees at Denver's airport, a record for July 9th. High temperatures are largely the result of a so-called heat dome, a constant region of high pressure trapping heat over the area. The dome is expected to shift and expand to the West as the week begins with temperatures on the rise in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah.
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A wildfire is threatening Yosemite National Park's largest and most iconic sequoia grove. The Washburn Fire was first reported on Thursday in Yosemite's Mariposa Grove home to more than 500 mature sequoias, including the 3,000-year-old Grizzly Giant. The fire grew to 2,000 acres yesterday, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, up from less than 500 on Friday, thanks to hot and dry weather conditions. It's also threatened the nearby community of Wawona, forcing evacuations from homes and campsites.
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us seven mornings a week right here, wherever you're listening right now. Thanks to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show, and I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Elon Musk's Twitter bail, sequoias threatened by wildfire: 5 Things podcast
