Reuters World News - Mexico migrant fire, Turkey’s post-quake poll and Starbucks on the Hill

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Dozens of migrants from Central and South America die in Mexico detention center fire. Nashville shooter's collection of guns revealed. Quake survivors try to stop Turkey’s election from counting the dead. Bank regulators and Starbucks face questions on the Hill. Plus, experts call for pause on AI, new charges for Sam Bankman Fried and scientists serve up a mammoth meatball. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, in Juarez, Mexico, devastation for migrants after a fire in a detention centre kills at least 38 people. Bank regulators and Starbucks are in the hot seat on the hill. As fallen Crypto King, Sam Bankman-Fried, is hit with new criminal charges. And an earthquake survivor in Turkey prepares to stop an election from counting the dead. It's Wednesday, March 29th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front. lines in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vennel in London. We begin in Nashville with what we now know about the assailant in the elementary school shooting. Police say Audrey Elizabeth Hale bought

seven guns legally from local stores. Hale was also being treated by doctors for what they called an emotional disorder. Authorities have also released body cam footage of the room-to-room search by officers that ended with Hale being fatally shot. This is the latest in a long line of mass shootings that have turned schools into killing zones in America, adding fuel to the debate over gun laws. The victims here were nine-year-olds Evelyn Dickhouse, William Kinney and Haley Scroggs, and custodian Mike Hill, schoolhead, Catherine Coontz, and substitute teacher Cynthia Peake. In other headlines around the world, China is threatening to retaliate if House Speaker Kevin McCarthy meets Taiwan President

Sai-ing-wen in the United States. She's set to stop in L.A. and New York on the way back from Guatemala and Belize. China says any meeting would be a provocation. As she left for the trip on Wednesday, Sai said external pressure will not stop Taiwan engaging with the world. In Washington, a federal judge has ruled Mike Pence must testify to a grand jury probing the January 6 attack. The former vice president will have to testify about conversations he had with Donald Trump leading up to the assault on the Capitol. A source told Reuters that Pence, who is exploring a challenge to Trump in 2024, is considering appealing the ruling.

To Russia, and a case that has provoked an outcry among human rights activists, a father who was investigated after his daughter drew an anti-war picture at school, has been sentenced to two years in a penal colony. His 13-year-old daughter, Marsha, has been put in a children's home in their hometown. Alexei Moskolaov was convicted over online comments about the war in Ukraine. He escaped from house arrest before the ruling and is now on the run. The head of the imploded crypto exchange FTX can add bribing Chinese officials to his

list of criminal charges. US prosecutors say Sam Bankman-Fried offered $40 million to persuade Chinese authorities to unfreeze accounts. SBF is expected in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday. Adidas is dropping its opposition to a Black Lives Matter logo. On Monday, the sports brand asked the US trademark office to reject the trademark featuring three parallel stripes. It said it could create confusion with its own three-stripe mark.

Now, its reversing course, out of concern, its objection could be interpreted as criticism of the Black Lives Matter mission. Let's all wait a while on the AI, please. That is the message from Elon Musk and more than a thousand top tech executives and researchers. They're calling for a six-month pause in training new super-powerful AI systems so that safety protocols can be developed. On Capitol Hill, senators took US bank regulators to task on Tuesday for missing the warning signs on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

While Republicans like South Carolina, Carolina's Tim Scott scoffed at the idea of more regulation, given that watchdogs missed the warning signs this time. How can you ask Congress for more authority with a straight face? Democrats like Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren lambasted Trump-era rollbacks of Dodd-Frank banking regulations. Once the Fed began torching rule after rule in 2018 for big banks, the FDIC, under your predecessor, joined in on the fund. Federal regulators tried to reassure senators

that the wider financial system is solid, pointing the finger back at SVB's risky practices. Essentially, the risk model was not at all aligned with reality. Michael Barr, the Federal Reserve's vice chairman for supervision. Fed regulators say they'll review procedures to prevent further bank collapses. It's former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's turn on Capitol Hill today. Schultz is expected to be grilled by lawmakers, such as Bernie Sanders,

over allegations of anti-union pressure by the coffee maker. Hillary Russ will be covering the hearing for Reuters. So, Hillary, what are you watching for? I think one of the things that I'd be really curious to see in hearings is if the senators are able to get Howard Schultz to talk about how much control he had over the company's union policies. One of the other big questions that could come up is the idea that these incredible benefits that the company has, some of those new benefits that were offered just over the last year or two only went to non-unionized stores. And that's something that the

National Labor Relations Board has said violates labor law. And obviously, I'll be looking for any insights into the new CEO and whether he's going to change any of these policies and practices. Thank you, Hillary. Now to that tragic fire at a migrant detention center on the border. Our immigration correspondent, Mika Rosenberg, is here to help us understand how something like this could happen. This was a facility operated by the Mexican government to detain migrants. And when the migrants who were housed there found out that they were going to be deported to their home countries, they were very upset and lit a mattress on fire, which is how

the whole tragedy began. The COVID-era rule, known as Title 42, which allows the U.S. to expel migrants because they might have the coronavirus, is still in effect in the U.S. Is that contributing to a sort of bottleneck of migrants in Mexico? It is, it is. Yeah. When Biden took office, he pledged to reverse many of the sort of harsher immigration policies that Trump put in place, but he kept Title 42 in place.

And as the number of migrants arriving at the border began to surge and reach record highs during the first few years of his administration, he actually decided to expand that policy to additional nationalities. Last fall, he had expanded it to Venezuelans. So Venezuelans were included in many of the migrants who died in this detention center. And that's often because these migrants are now in Mexico languishing in these dangerous border cities. hoping to get to the United States through some legal pathways that have been opened up, but often without hope

of entering the United States. What could change how many people are stuck in Mexico and centers like these? On May 11th, the pandemic health emergency is set to end, which would eliminate the justification for Title 42

and potentially that policy would go away. Now to Turkey, where President Recep type Erdogan is gearing up for a high-stakes election in May, while the country still reels from a devastating earthquake. With thousands dead and millions homeless, concerns about voting irregularities are high. 26-year-old Yitz is a voter from southern Turkey who suffered a tragic loss in the quake. Now he wants to make sure that doesn't translate into vote tampering.

I lost my father, my mother and my cousin during this earthquake, and unfortunately we still couldn't find their bodies. And since we couldn't find their bodies, they're still registered in the system. He's so concerned that ballots will be cast in the name of his dead family that he's going to monitor the ballot box on the day. I'm going to wait to see if someone else

was for my father or my mother. I'm trying to be sure that this doesn't happen. Reuters Esgi Urquhune reported on Yidd's story and the wider concerns. So, Eski, how founded are his fears? So election security has been a concern for years. Because in previous elections, it's been electricity got cut out. It happened that state-owned broadcaster stopped releasing results while the opposition candidate is ahead.

So it's kind of like an existing concern. But earthquake and the death toll, like more than 50,000 people died in the area, added to it. More than 3 million people actually moved from there. And their election registrations, the voter registrations, are not quite properly done. So people are volunteering to wait by the ballot box to make sure every vote is counted properly. Thank you, Ezgi Uruguayun.

And finally, would you eat a woolly mammoth meatball? An Australian cultured meat company has produced one using the DNA of the extinct creature. The 4,000-year-old protein ball is currently not for consumption. But for those interested, it apparently has the aroma of crocodile meat. And that's it for Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, you can find more trusted news at Reuters.com.