On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: 19 children killed in Texas school shooting
The nation is struggling to make sense of the latest mass shooting. Plus, hear reactions to the shooting from politics to sports, reporters Jessica Guynn and Jayme Fraser look at how Black women are still largely being denied high paying executive jobs, Depp v. Heard continues and reporter Marina Pitofsky tells us how the rich got richer during the pandemic.
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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 Wednesday, the 25th of May, 2022. Today, 19 children are dead after the nation’s latest mass shooting. Plus, two years since the murder of George Floyd, and more.
Here are some of the top headlines.
- North Korea launched two ballistic missiles toward the sea yesterday. The firings came three days after the US and South Korea agreed, during President Joe Biden’s visit, to consider expanded military exercises to deter North Korean nuclear threats.
- The US today will close the door on the last chance for Russia to pay its billions in debts to international investors. That makes the country’s first default on its debts in more than a century all but inevitable.
- And the UN says more than a million children under the age of five will likely face the most severe form of malnutrition in Afghanistan this year.
Taylor Wilson:
A gunman killed 19 children at a Texas elementary school yesterday. It was the deadliest shooting at a US grade school since the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.
Speaker 2:
Are you injured?
Speaker 3:
Oh my God!
Speaker 2:
Where? Where? A kid?
Speaker 4:
They shot a kid?
Taylor Wilson:
That was the scene yesterday afternoon as some parents frantically waited outside a police perimeter, trying to find out what was going on. An 18 year old wearing body armor fired hundreds of rounds inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a city between San Antonio and the US/Mexico border. In addition to the 19 children, the gunman also killed two adults. A US border protection agent later shot and killed the attacker. Officials said he also shot his grandmother before traveling to the school. She was airlifted and was in critical condition this morning.
The overall death toll is also expected to continue rising. Parents yesterday were desperate to get information about their kids. Ryan Ramirez is the parent of a fourth grader at Robb Elementary.
Ryan Ramirez:
I keep asking questions of, “What’s going on?”, and nobody’s telling me anything. Nobody’s telling me anything. One of the parents were saying that there’s kids possibly held at the funeral home, and that’s what brought me over here to find out what’s going on.
Reporter:
Were you seeing other kids leaving the-
Ryan Ramirez:
Yes. Yes. Yes. There’s kids there still right now, but my daughter’s not there yet.
Reporter:
Okay. And you checked in with them and they didn’t know where she was?
Ryan Ramirez:
No. No. No.
Reporter:
And how are you feeling right now?
Ryan Ramirez:
Just confused and worried. I’m trying to find out where my baby’s at.
Taylor Wilson:
The school district’s superintendent Hal Harrell struggled to make sense of what happened.
Hal Harrell:
This was a tragic and senseless event today, and my heart was broke today. Our hearts and thoughts and prayers are with all our families as we go through this day and days to come. Again, my heart was broken today. We’re a small community and we will need your prayers to get us through this.
Taylor Wilson:
Officials have not yet revealed a motive for the shooting, but said the shooter was a member of the community. Texas governor Greg Abbott identified him as Salvador Ramos. Authorities believe he acted alone.
♦
The nation is waking up this morning, trying to understand how another mass shooting of children has happened. President Joe Biden immediately pushed for new gun restrictions.
President Joe Biden:
What struck me was these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why? They have mental health problems, they have domestic disputes in other countries, they have people who are lost, but these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency they happen in America. Why? Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up to the lobbyists?
It’s time to turn this pain into action for every parent, for every citizen in this country. We have to make it clear to every elected official in this country, it’s time to act. It’s time for those who obstruct or delay or block the common sense gun laws, we need to let you know that we will not forget. We can do so much more. We have to do more.
Taylor Wilson:
There were 249 shootings on school grounds last year, more than any other year since 1970. There are already 137 this year. That’s according to David Riedman, lead researcher at the K-12 School Shooting Database at the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
Taylor Wilson:
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy yesterday also urged action during an emotional speech on the Senate floor.
Senator Chris Murphy:
What are we doing? What are we doing? Just days after a shooter walked into a grocery store to gun down African American patrons, we have another Sandy Hook on our hands. What are we doing? There’ve been more mass shootings than days in the year. Our kids are living in fear every single time they set foot in a classroom because they think they’re going to be next. What are we doing? Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate? Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority if your answer is that, as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?
Taylor Wilson:
And even NBA coach Steve Kerr spoke out.
Steve Kerr:
Children murdered at school. When are we going to do something? I’m tired. I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I’m so tired … I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough.
Taylor Wilson:
We’ll have more updates throughout the day on USATODAY.com.
♦
Today marks two years since a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minnesota. The 46 year old black man died after white police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee onto his neck for more than nine minutes even as Floyd said he couldn’t breathe. Chauvin was later sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison. Floyd’s murder led to months of protests and a nationwide reflection on police brutality and systemic racism. And after his death, lots of companies pledged to fix their own deep racial inequities. But two years on, Black women are still being denied executive jobs with the most pay and power.
Taylor Wilson:
Reporters Jessica Guynn and Jayme Fraser have more.
Jayme Fraser:
With the murder of George Floyd, a lot of big corporations in the country promised to do better at closing gaps and representation for Black workers, but we found, looking at workforce demographic data from 2019 through ’21, that very little has changed, and at the current rate of change, it’ll be 40 years before black women have an equal percentage of seats in executive roles as they do in the overall workforce of some of the nation’s largest companies.
Jessica Gwinn:
What we found, and what Jayme found when she dug into the data, is that white women are four and a half times more likely than Black women to hold a leadership position in these companies, white men are almost eight times as likely as Black women, and even Black men, who are pretty scarce at the executive level, are twice as likely as Black women to hold these leadership roles.
I would just add that this is part of an ongoing data project that Jayme and I started last summer, in which we collect and analyze workforce demographic reports from the nation’s largest companies. These reports break down a company’s workforce by gender and race and allow us to spot these kinds of patterns. The reports are filed with the federal government, but it does not make them public. Companies have been turning them over to us and making them public under pressure from customers, employees, and investors who are very concerned about how little change has occurred in recent years in terms of addressing really deep racial disparities in these companies.
Jayme Fraser:
Yeah. And I would add that the murder of George Floyd increased the volume of pressure on companies to release this data. You know, before that push from advocates and investors and customers, only a handful of the country’s largest companies released these data reports, and now hundreds do. And they are the only way to get a good picture of what corporate hierarchies actually look like in terms of race and gender, and to make comparisons year to year, or more importantly, to compare companies to one another, because they’re all using the same federal definition and have to collect this data in the same way. So it’ll be interesting to see in the years ahead if more companies continue to make this public and provide transparency to their efforts to do better.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find a link to this full story in today’s episode description.
♦
The high profile trial of Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard continues. Depp is suing Heard, his ex-wife, for libel in Virginia. He says her 2018 Washington Post op-ed defamed him when she described herself as a public figure representing domestic abuse. The piece never mentioned Depp by name, but his lawyers say he was still defamed because it’s a clear reference to abuse allegations she made against him in 2016.
Most recently, Heard returned to the stand on Monday, alleging that Depp physically and sexually assaulted her. She also said she was worried she would not survive the marriage.
Amber Heard:
I knew if I didn’t, I’d likely not literally survive. I was so scared that it was going to end really badly for me. The promise and the hope that I had had become less and less regular and more and more rare. The monster had been this thing that was now the normal and not the exception. The violence was now normal and not the exception.
Taylor Wilson:
Depp, during the trial, has denied that he hit Heard.
Johnny Depp:
Never did I myself reach the point of striking Ms. Heard in any way, nor have I ever struck any woman in my life.
Taylor Wilson:
Heard and her attorneys have argued that the Washington Post column did nothing to damage Depp’s reputation and that his spiraling career was actually the result of heavy drinking and drug usage. During the trial, a forensic psychologist testified on behalf of Depp, and after a dozen hours of interviews with Heard and a review of her mental health records, gave the opinion that Heard suffers from both a Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder. But another psychologist, testifying on Heard’s behalf, said Heard suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from violence caused by Depp, including multiple acts of sexual assault.
Today, British model Kate Moss is expected to take the stand. She dated Depp in the nineties and will testify on his behalf. During Heard’s testimony, she looked back on a 2015 fight near a staircase when she said she hit Depp in the face out of fear he would hit her sister. She said she was reminded of Kate Moss at the moment. Heard previously claimed in 2020 that two people told her Depp once pushed Moss down the stairs. Moss though has never accused Depp of abuse. That moment may have opened the door for Depp’s legal team to bring up past domestic abuse charges against Heard.
♦
Wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased for the world’s richest people. That’s according to a new report out from Oxfam, the international organization focused on fighting poverty. Reporter Marina Pitofsky has the details.
Marina Pitofsky:
So this analysis from an organization called Oxfam basically showed that a new billionaire reached the pretty lofty status an average of every 30 hours during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It sends a few other signals about how billionaires have fared basically over the last two years. For example, it says that 573 people became new billionaires during the pandemic. It also says that the world’s richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the total combined GDP of all of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The report issues some pretty dire warnings about non-billionaires around the world. It warns, and this is a quote, that, “263 million more people could crash into extreme poverty this year.” That’s about a rate of a million people every 33 hours in comparison to the stat about billionaires reaching that status every 30 hours.
Just one other thing that might be worth noting for listeners; the release of the analysis coincides with the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. This is a place where some of the wealthiest people around the world gather. So perhaps something just to note.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every morning right here, wherever you’re listening right now. For more updates on the Texas shooting, stay with usatoday.com. Thanks to PJ Elliot for his great work on the show, and I’ll be back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.
www.usatoday.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism