--:-- [Upbeat music fades out. Host, Shamita Basu, and Guest, Duarte Giraldino, introduce the show.]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, May 24th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Biden wanted to sign major police reform legislation by the anniversary of George Floyd's murder. That day is tomorrow. So lawmakers are most certainly not going to meet that deadline.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The past year has revealed just how challenging it can be to make meaningful changes to the way police do their jobs. The George Floyd Justice and Policing Act passed the House in March, but it still has to get through the Senate. Both parties are trying to reach a compromise.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Senior White House adviser Cedric Richmond was on CNN's State of the Union yesterday. We believe that we're making meaningful progress there, and the president wants to see it happen.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We are very concerned about the relationship between the police and the communities they police. A lot of the headlines around this story are about Biden missing this deadline.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NBC News reports that police reform advocates say they'd rather have a substantial bill rather than a weak one that's been rushed through. The current bill would ban chokeholds at the federal level and require local police to ban them in order to receive funding.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It also includes changes to police training and investment for community programs that are meant to improve policing. The Washington Post looks at how the city where Floyd was murdered is rethinking policing and public safety.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's having a hard time. Minneapolis made some changes to the way it polices. It banned chokeholds and neck restraints like the one used to kill Floyd. But as the Post reports, the city is still deeply divided.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Crime is up in Minneapolis. Last year, the city's homicide rate hit highs not seen in decades. So far this year, nearly 200 people have been shot. That's more than twice the number of people shot during the same period last year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For the complicating matters since Floyd's murder, a third of the police force resigned or tried to leave. And there is a lot of disagreement about how to solve these problems.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some city council members want to replace the police force with a public safety agency. But the Post talks to activists in Minneapolis's Black community who question this approach.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One civil rights attorney and critic of the police department says, politicians working to defund police haven't been listening to the Black community. She says we shouldn't have to choose between no police or corrupt police.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A $10 billion lawsuit against McDonald's isn't about burgers and fries. It's a big development in a changing debate about diversity, opportunity, and money in America.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg News has this story. Entrepreneur Byron Allen is suing McDonald's, saying it doesn't spend enough of its money advertising on Black-owned media companies like his.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Allen is claiming the fast food giant spent less than a half a percent of its ad budget with media companies that are owned by Black people. He's picked fights with corporate America before.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He and other Black executives accused General Motors of racial bias in a full-page newspaper ad. GM later committed to move more of its ad spending budget to Black-owned media. He also took a fight with Comcast over carrying his cable channels all the way to the Supreme Court.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Bloomberg News explains this latest lawsuit is part of an interesting shift in the discussion around diversity in advertising. See, earlier conversations were more focused on who appears in ads.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Allen wants to put pressure on companies to spend more money running ads on Black-owned media. McDonald says it got a plan in place to invest more in companies owned by minorities and women and that it will review and respond to Allen's lawsuit.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But whatever comes of the latest legal fight, McDonald and other big companies are having to think more about whether their ad dollars are supporting diverse businesses.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The biggest headline this month around the death penalty came out of South Carolina. That's where a new law allows executions by firing squad.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And there was a recent story that went beyond that striking detail. And it looks at the big picture of capital punishment in America. It's from Vox senior correspondent Ian Milheiser.
--:-- Ian Milheiser: First, you might be wondering, how is the firing squad back on the table? The explanation for this is largely about the drugs used in lethal injections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: States that have the death penalty often can't get these drugs. And that's because many drug companies refuse to sell them for use in executions.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Only four states now allow the firing squad. But it's possible that others might follow South Carolina.
--:-- Ian Milheiser: The larger trend here is that in America, the death penalty is steadily fading away. Over the last two decades, death sentences declined.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And even though the Trump administration resumed federal executions, last year, only five states executed people.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Milheiser lays out a few reasons for the decline in the death penalty. For one, homicides dropped sharply in recent decades. Also, public support for the death penalty is at its lowest since the early 70s.
--:-- Ian Milheiser: The majority of states now ban the death penalty. And in states that still allow it, recent laws have given people better access to capital defense lawyers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The idea being, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once put it, people who are well represented at trial don't get the death penalty.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Milheiser watches the Supreme Court very closely, and he sees a pattern of support for capital punishment and doesn't think that justices are going to be issuing a sweeping national ruling against the death penalty.
--:-- Ian Milheiser: So its future is more in the hands of states, judges, and attorneys.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a sound some people are calling angelic, but it really irritates some people. If you're near the Golden Gate Bridge on a windy day, you're going to hear this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, you hear that? That weird sort of flute-like humming?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Golden Gate Bridge has been singing ever since engineers made some structural changes to it last year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, the changes were to make the bridge safer in high winds, but it had an unexpected side effect.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As wind passes through the bridge, it now creates this eerie, blowing-over-a-glass-bottle kind of sound. And it's driving people nuts.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Apparently it's so loud, sometimes you can hear it from 10 miles away.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The San Francisco Chronicle explains how engineers are working on a solution to make the bridge stop humming.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They're not saying much about what the exact plan is just yet, but a bridge spokesperson says the teams want to get it right.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the Chronicle sheds a little light on what went wrong last time. Apparently, engineers were working with small-scale models of the bridge.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And when they tested it with wind, they said they thought it might have a minor harmonic effect. But they didn't anticipate how loud it was going to be in real life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So this time, engineers are working with true-to-life-size sections of the bridge in a huge wind tunnel.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They want to finalize plans in the coming weeks, but it could take many months to actually install the fix and quiet that humming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
