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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, November 8th. 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: Eight people died in a crowd crush at the Astroworld Festival in Houston over the weekend. Around 50,000 people were at the outdoor concert headlined by Travis Scott.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Authorities and the event organizers are investigating what happened. There are already legal actions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is not a first. The Washington Post looks at the history of these kinds of deadly incidents at concerts.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 11 people killed at a concert by The Who in the 1970s. Three teens killed at an ACDC show in the 90s.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One concert safety consultant tells The Post, every time the industry has a wake-up call, it hits the snooze button.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Crowd safety experts say events like these show the potential danger of concerts. But it's not clear the music industry is learning from these events.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Investigations of fatalities often lead to calls for tighter safety standards and better crowd control planning. But problems keep happening.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Investigators looking into what happened in Houston are going to be focusing on several things. But they'll want to know if too many people were at the festival in the first place.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are all these social media videos that appear to show people barreling through security. One safety expert tells The Post, Overcrowding is the original sin of event planning.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If a lot of people were let in without tickets, that could have grown the crowds to unsafe levels.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over 750 people in the U have died from COVID 72 of Americans say they know someone who was hospitalized or who has died from the disease
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But many jobs don't offer employees much support when it comes to taking time off to grieve.
--:-- Chad Broughton: Not having sufficient time to deal with laws can create long-term consequences for your mental health.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And yet, the reality is, if you lose a loved one in the United States, When it comes to getting time off, the law doesn't really have your back.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's no federal guarantee to a bereavement leave. That's Chad Broughton, a sociologist at the University of Chicago.
--:-- Chad Broughton: In the absence of a federal guarantee, a federal right to grieve, state policies can sometimes fill the void, but there's only three states that actually offer any kind of guarantee.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it's usually left to employers. And oftentimes employers don't offer a bereavement leave that's paid.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As a way to retain talent, some large companies do offer generous leave. But here's where inequality rears its ugly head.
--:-- Chad Broughton: Low-wage workers rarely get that benefit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Broughton explains how different America is from other countries. In France, employees receive three days for the death of a spouse or partner or parent or father or mother-in-law or a sibling.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And they're entitled to five days for the death of a child.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some countries, like New Zealand, have instituted laws that allow for bereavement leave for the loss of pregnancy as well.
--:-- Chad Broughton: So some countries have taken a more kind of inclusive approach to bereavement leave.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He explains what so many of us who have suffered this type of loss know. Grief takes a physical toll on you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are cognitive and physiological consequences of grief, of acute grief, that can extend for weeks at a time
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it can interfere with not just regular daily functioning but with work
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Mental health experts predict that with so much loss because of the pandemic we could see a rise in what's known as prolonged grief disorder, the kind of persistent grief that interferes with people's lives.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Broughton worries that with so little bereavement leave, as a country, we're not prepared for the amount of grief we need to deal with.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: At around 35 years old, the human body begins to go downhill, slowly at first, losing about 1% muscle mass a year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As the decades slip by, it's reaction time, bone density, your ligaments, tendons, joints, everything gets worse, right?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Then why is 44-year-old Tom Brady still a Super Bowl champion? Or how did basketball player Sue Bird win her fifth Olympic gold medal at 40?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Turns out, the answer is not that surprising. Pro athletes have a whole lot that we amateurs simply don't, especially money and time.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But there might be something we can learn from them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sports Illustrated looks at all the ways athletes are trying to extend their careers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the numbers show how the science of athletics has come a really long way.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In 1982, there was only one player in the NBA, 35 or older. Last season, there were 16.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, superstar athletes have access to the most cutting-edge technology.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The NBA's Kevin Durant is a good example. In 2019, he tore his Achilles tendon, which used to be a career-ending injury.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But he had access to an anti-gravity treadmill, biosensors that tracked his every movement.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He was able not just to come back, but to be a star.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, if you're not an elite athlete with millions of dollars backing you, this kind of technology might as well be science fiction
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But it does eventually make its way to the broader population
--:-- Shamita Basu: The article explains how a breakthrough in a lab will move to elite athletics about five years later
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And to reach the rest of us, it takes another 10 years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So if playing your favorite sport hurts a little bit more than it used to, hang tight for a decade or so.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Your favorite athlete's favorite breakthrough might reach you by then.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There may be something of a breakthrough in one of the weird stories of last year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Back then, pilots in the Los Angeles area reported seeing someone flying around with a jetpack.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it led to some really odd exchanges on air traffic control.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We just passed a guy in a jetpack. Don't hear that every day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, jetpack experts were skeptical. Known jetpack technology wasn't powerful enough to carry people up that high.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now the Miami Herald has this update.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it may not have been a jetpack or even a person that people were spotting in the sky.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A new theory is that it was a big balloon of Jack Skellington.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yes, it may have been a blow-up doll of the main character from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A newly revealed photo taken from the LAPD helicopter last November appears to show this man-shaped balloon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, there's still a lot that we don't know, but there's a good chance that the airborne mystery was not a case of secret flight technology.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Might have just been a Halloween decoration that got away and took a wild ride.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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