--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, September 2nd. 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: First, a brief update on the extreme weather on the East Coast. Heavy rainfall in New York triggered the first ever flash flood emergency in the city.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Emergency declarations went into effect in New York and New Jersey, and in the two states, at least eight people have died.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This severe weather is a dangerous remnant of Hurricane Ida, and there are still major problems along the more than 1,000-mile path of this storm.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As of this morning, close to a million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi didn't have electricity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're following this developing story across the country all day in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are 750,000 households on shaky ground right now. The people living in them are likely to be evicted this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's according to one of the most comprehensive impact estimates of the end of the eviction moratorium.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Goldman Sachs report says tenants are behind on up to $17 billion in rent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last week, the Supreme Court blocked the eviction pause, which was put in place by the CDC.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The court said it's up to Congress to authorize this type of pause, but it's not likely lawmakers will be able to get another eviction ban in place anytime soon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are safety nets designed to help, but it doesn't look like they're going to catch everyone.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Only a small fraction of the nearly $47 billion in federal aid earmarked for renters in need has been distributed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Affordable housing groups are criticizing local governments for giving out the money too slowly.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Without a federal ban, it's up to states and cities to make their own renter protections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Biden administration is putting pressure on more of them to act.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But right now, just six states and D.C. have their own eviction moratoriums in place.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The spread of the Delta variant is complicating the start of the school year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In places like Florida, Texas, and Iowa, schools are running into familiar problems.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Outbreaks delayed reopenings and more shutdowns. Now the nation's second-largest school district is using an aggressive testing policy to try to break this cycle.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Los Angeles Unified School District now requires its roughly half-million students, teachers, and staff be tested for the coronavirus every week indefinitely, even if you're already vaccinated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as The Washington Post reports, this is in addition to requiring everyone wear masks and faculty and staff being vaccinated.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you test positive, you have to stay home for 10 days. If you refuse to test, you won't be allowed in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The goal of mass testing is not to eliminate the spread of the virus.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The district said that would be impossible given the size of the student body and how quickly Delta spreads.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But by staying on top of outbreaks as they happen, L.A. hopes it'll be able to minimize the number of kids who are forced to quarantine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Post says, overall, families are mostly going along with the new policy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Only 3% of students are choosing to study remotely, but this testing program has its challenges.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People are complaining about how long it takes to get test results, and the logistics that come with collecting and analyzing all these tests.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's all pretty expensive. I'm talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The district is counting on the federal government to pay for the bulk of the program.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been 20 years since R&B singer Aaliyah died in a plane crash.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She's one of R. Kelly's alleged victims. He's currently on trial and has pled not guilty to racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Court records show Kelly and Aaliyah were married in an illegal ceremony when Aaliyah was only 15 years old.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Kelly was 27 at the time. The marriage was annulled quickly, and Aaliyah spent the rest of her career trying to distance herself from him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Constance Grady covers culture for Vox. She recently wrote about how, at the time, much of the media covered Kelly and Aaliyah's relationship as a non-traditional love story, rather than focusing on signs of abuse.
--:-- Constance Grady: She was able to combine R&B and hip-hop in really exciting and, at the time, unknown ways.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, this was at a time when those two genres were still kind of siloed and hip-hop would sort of sample R&B, but R&B generally wasn't interacting with hip-hop in the same way.
--:-- Constance Grady: And Aaliyah changed that. She was working with Timbaland and Missy Elliott when they were just up-and-comers, basically unknown and combining all of their sounds together to create this really unique style.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think Kalei Fasena at The New York Times described it as avant-garde.
--:-- Constance Grady: She brought that sound together and introduced it into the mainstream. We've learned a little bit more about Aaliyah's relationship with her former producer, R. Kelly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Describe that dynamic.
--:-- Constance Grady: So Aaliyah meets R. Kelly when she's 12 years old. Her uncle is his manager, and she's been looking to break into the music industry for quite a while.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She was a little bit of a child star. She was on Star Search when she was 10.
--:-- Constance Grady: And R. Kelly agrees to be her professional mentor. When she's 14, they start working on the album that he eventually produces for her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Her first album, Age Ain't Nothing But a Number. Which, in retrospect, knowing what we know about the relationship between R. Kelly and Aaliyah, is a kind of disconcerting title, right?
--:-- Constance Grady: He has her dressed like him. Anytime they go out in public, they're dressed in matching outfits.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the music that he writes for her is very similar sounding to the music that he writes for himself.
--:-- Constance Grady: What we've heard from Aaliyah's friends and family since that relationship ended and since Aaliyah's death is that it was traumatic for her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jim Derogatis, who is the journalist who broke most of the R. Kelly abuse story, has said that Aaliyah's mother told him that Aaliyah was never the same after that relationship and that Kelly ruined her life.
--:-- Constance Grady: So why do you think a lot of the press at the time didn't dig deeper and look more critically at Kelly's behavior?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think there are a few reasons for this.
--:-- Constance Grady: First of all, there is a tendency in our culture for people to treat women's sexuality as being somehow the woman's fault, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there's a desire to position the man as a victim of his own desires and sort of project the responsibility for what happens onto the woman.
--:-- Constance Grady: I think especially because Aaliyah was a Black girl, there's a tendency to refuse to allow young Black teenagers any sort of innocence or freedom from guilt and a desire to ascribe to them all kinds of adult responsibilities and actions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Aaliyah was in a position where she was somehow expected to be the adult in her relationship with her professional mentor who was 12 years older than her when she was a child, in part because she was a Black girl.
--:-- Constance Grady: How should we be thinking about Aaliyah?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't know if there's necessarily a great way into thinking about Aaliyah except to just think about how hard she worked to get away from R. Kelly and how incredible what she was able to accomplish was, not only escaping from this alleged predator, but also transcending the image he set for her and becoming a star in her own right, someone who was able to advance her genre so far and bring in this new sound to the world that is still incredibly future-forward.
--:-- Constance Grady: And I think one of the great tragedies of her very early death is that we don't get to see what she could have done beyond that and what would have happened if she had been able to completely transcend and escape from R. Kelly forever.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Constance Grady is a senior culture reporter at Vox. Thanks for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Constance Grady: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Raise the cost of a cup of joe or switch to cheaper beans. That is the question for coffee shops around the country.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They're feeling the crunch as coffee bean prices rise.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal has some pretty good reporting on this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's got all the familiar themes of the pandemic economy, you know, supply chain issues, labor shortages.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But on top of that, some of the world's top coffee-growing regions had poor harvests.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Brazil had a few months of drought and a cold snap. There was snow on the ground in parts of the South American country, which is pretty rare.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Farmers are waiting for spring showers. They're also hoping they can recover enough beans for next year's supply.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All of this means there are fewer precious beans in the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And coffee retailers are now thinking through what it would mean to pass on the price increase to you, the paying, caffeinated customer.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But if the past is any indication, it'll take more than a price spike to force coffee drinkers to change their routines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, check out the Read Local feature. Every Thursday, we highlight standout stories from local news outlets across the U.S.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you.
