Let's start with the wraparound. Today's need to know headlines.
South Korea's president has declared a period of national mourning
after a Halloween crowd surge killed at least 100 53 people
that includes at least two americans and this all
happened in a packed nightlife area in Seoul.
The victims were mostly teenagers and people in their twenties,
witnesses described the crowd becoming increasingly unruly and agitated.
Then chaos erupted just before the stampede around 10:20
p.m. With police struggling to control the crowd.
It was the first Halloween event in Seoul in
three years to be virtually free of covid 19 restrictions
and nine people have been arrested in this weekend's deadly bridge collapse.
In India, at least 134 people died.
More than 60 were taken to the hospital and several more are missing.
At least 30 of those victims were Children.
This happened around 6:30 p.m. When officials say
a cable on a suspension bridge collapsed,
The indian officials have established a
special committee to investigate the incident.
The country's Prime minister announced victims,
families will receive compensation from the National Relief Fund
And onto the messiest thing happening online today, Twitter,
the newly musk-owned platform is reportedly drafting plans for broad layoffs.
According to the Washington Post Twitter plan to let go of a quarter of its staff.
That's about 2000 people in total.
There's a growing pressure within twitter to
perform rapidly or face termination must plan to
charge $20 a month to anyone with a blue checkmark marking a verified account.
The verge reports.
The team is creating a revamped twitter
blue subscription service and they've been told that
they will be fired if they missed the must mandated november 7th launch date,
Twitter's verified users will lose their checkmark in 90 days
if they do not subscribe to the new Twitter Blue Service after it launches
and an instagram outage this morning is locking users
out of the platform and dropping follower accounts.
Reports of the issue are concentrated towards iphone users
with some saying the app was recently crashing and unusable
data on down detector showed a sharp spike of
more than 7000 users submitted reports of instagram outages,
instagram confirmed the issue in a statement saying quote,
we're aware that some of you are having issues accessing your instagram account,
we're looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience.
As of now some accounts are back online
and eagle eyed astronomers may have spotted a
massive asteroid hiding in the sun's glare.
They actually found three asteroids blocked by the light,
but only one of them is big enough to be classified as a quote planet killer
asteroid 2022 87 is roughly a mile long and does cross orbits with
Earth getting as close as 4.4 million miles to our home planet,
but there's no need to build your bunkers yet now
because if the asteroid did manage to collide with Earth,
it wouldn't happen for about 1000 years
and one lucky lottery player could be in for a very
big Halloween treat on Halloween night with no winner saturday night.
The powerball jackpot stands at a staggering $1 billion.
It's only the second time in Powerball's 30 year
history that the jackpot has hit a billion bucks.
Seven tickets matched five winning numbers on saturday but not
the powerball of 23 according to the multi state lottery
association.
The next drawing is tonight and is expected to
be the second largest jackpot in powerball history.
The biggest of all time however was january 2016. Nearly $1.6 billion
turning down to politics. The Supreme Court is hearing another high profile case
that could shatter precedent.
Today's case
on affirmative action in college admissions and tenders.
Ariel Hickson has the details from Washington, D. C.
The Conservative Supreme Court supermajority might
soon be overturning another major precedent.
The court choosing to take two cases challenging a
2003 Supreme Court ruling that allows colleges to consider race
in their admissions process is the two new challenges
surrounding emissions policies at University of Carolina and Harvard.
Those two institutions give slightly more weight
to applicants that come from underrepresented groups.
The court hearing today from the organization suing to stop affirmative action
that the 2003 case allowing the practice was egregiously wrong from the start.
Both Harvard and U. N. C.
Argue that diversity is essential to its educational mission
and affirmative action guarantees that diversity is maintained.
Lower courts in both cases,
sided with the universities with federal judges in the Harvard case saying Harvard
does not discriminate against asian american students
with its race conscious emissions processes.
In the north Carolina case, a federal judge ruled that U. N. C.
Only considers race as a plus factor as part of a holistic review of each student
and that their emissions policy with stands the
highest level of judicial review strict scrutiny.
These two cases are the latest in a series of cases organized and funded
by conservative activist Ed bloom with a
goal of Ultimately striking down affirmative action
the most recent of those to make it to the Supreme
Court was a 2016 case against the University of Texas.
In that case, Texas emissions policies were narrowly upheld.
But three members of today's conservative majority,
including Chief Justice John Roberts, dissented from that ruling.
The conservatives on the court giving hints to where the
ruling might go with questions from today's oral arguments.
Take a listen.
I've heard the word diversity quite a few times and I don't have a clue what it means.
Uh It seems to mean everything for everyone.
And I'd also like you to give us a a clear idea of exactly
uh what the educational benefits of diversity at the University of north Carolina,
The conservative 6-3 majority on the court chose to take
up this case despite no major disagreements in lower courts.
And while the appeals process was still underway,
this points to a likely defeat for affirmative action at the nation's
highest court when the decisions come later on this term in Washington,
I'm Ariel Hixson.