--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, September 27th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. 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: Florida is bracing for the worst, and Cuba is already feeling the impact of Hurricane Ian. It strengthened into a Category 3 storm early this morning. Forecasters are watching for it to get stronger and expecting it to take aim at Florida's west coast later this week. Residents have been told to evacuate, and many are doing that. Highways were packed with people driving away from the Tampa area.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Floridians up and down the Gulf Coast should feel the impacts of this. That's Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He said Floridians should expect power outages and load up on food, water, medicine, batteries, and fuel.
--:-- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: This is a really, really big hurricane at this point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Cuba, conditions got worse starting last night with powerful wind, heavy rain, and storm surges. The economy there has been troubled for a long time, so there were already regular blackouts and empty grocery shelves. An elderly man in Havana, waiting in a blocks-long line for bread, told Reuters he was waiting now because he won't be able to get out of his home once it floods.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This hurricane season was relatively quiet when it started, but lately, the Caribbean has been hit hard. Earlier this month, Hurricane Fiona tore through Puerto Rico. More than half a million people in the country are still without power. Fiona's path continued north and affected Canada, too, where officials say it left an unprecedented trail of destruction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can track Hurricane Ian and follow developments throughout the day on the Apple News app. Stock markets have been tanking worldwide. Currency markets have been haywire. At one point yesterday, the British pound hit the lowest level against the dollar in history. Some traders are making big moves based on concerns about a global slowdown and policy changes by central banks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And things could get wilder this week, with critical inflation numbers coming and top Fed officials giving speeches that have traders parsing every word. The Fed is leading the way by aggressively raising interest rates hoping to get a handle on the runaway inflation. Fed Chair Jay Powell sounds a little bit like a personal trainer these days, saying there needs to be some hurt to get the economy in shape.
--:-- Fed Chair Jay Powell: We have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn't. The pain now is concentrated in stocks and foreign currency. If a recession comes, it could expand to job losses.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last week, Powell talked about a particular kind of pain, one that could affect homeowners. He said the housing market needs a correction, that prices have risen too much and need to get back to a reasonable level. Some might think that Powell is saying it's a seller's market now and it needs to be more of a buyer's market. But that's missing a key point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of the time, home buyers are also selling their old homes and vice versa. When home prices are crazy up or crazy down, it makes it difficult for everyone in the deal. Money Magazine looks at how to process the latest market and Fed news if you're a homeowner or you want to be someday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Mortgage rates don't move in lockstep with the Federal Reserve rates, but they are influenced by them, and they've gone up lately. When rates rise, monthly payments do too, which means some people won't be able to afford as much house. That could be a drag on demand, which could cool off prices. But it can take a while for prices to get lower.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Money Magazine points out that psychology plays a big role here. Someone who listed a while ago tends to think of the original price as the right price. Behavioral economists call this anchoring. It's a powerful feeling that makes it mentally painful to lower the price, even if the listing is sitting on the market.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read this whole piece for details, but here's the bottom line advice for navigating this housing market in just a few words. You can't predict the future. Don't wait for prices or mortgage rates or the Fed to move in a way that's going to help you, because they could just as easily go against you. If you need to move or if you find your dream home and it fits your budget, Money Magazine says, don't wait, go for it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The NFL has a race problem. There's the discrepancy on the field. The majority of the players are Black while the head coaches are mostly White. There's also a discrepancy in the pipeline, with Black coaches serving longer in lower-level roles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nearly 20 years ago, the league introduced what's known as the Rooney Rule. It required teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching spots. But almost two decades later, 13 teams have never hired a Black full-time head coach. In fact, this season, there are just three Black head coaches in the NFL. That's the same number of Black coaches that were in place in 2003 when the Rooney Rule was first introduced.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Minority coaches are frustrated today more so than maybe any time that I've ever seen. That's Tony Dungy, the Super Bowl-winning former head coach, speaking to The Washington Post.
--:-- Tony Dungy: We're switching jobs a lot. Half the league turns over every three years, it seems like. It doesn't seem to matter what criteria we're looking at. It just hasn't been reflected in the hiring process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's the disappointing thing, I think, to so many coaches right now. What is the process? All this hard work that I'm putting in, I'm ready to go. Am I going to get the opportunity? Dungy is just one voice captured in The Washington Post's major new investigation. It's all about how and why Black coaches continue to be denied head coaching positions in the NFL.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sports reporter Michael Lee explains how many face a different standard than white coaches. Black coaches spend a longer time paying their dues, so to speak, where you serve as an assistant for nine years longer on average than your white counterpart before getting a head coaching opportunity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This issue got national attention earlier this year when former Dolphins coach Brian Flores was fired. He's now suing the league and its teams, accusing them of discriminating against Black coaches and paying them less than their white counterparts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Brian Flores had back-to-back winning seasons. He was the first Dolphins coach to have consecutive winning seasons in over 20 years. And he got fired despite winning seven of his last eight games as a head coach. The NFL and the teams involved have denied his allegations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Two other Black coaches have joined the lawsuit. The Washington Post points out that the 32 individual NFL teams are owned almost exclusively by white men and their biases likely trickle down into the hiring process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in a lot of instances, these are old money people who have grown up in a certain environment where their idea or their concept of a leader, a Black person doesn't fit that mold. And so when it comes to the hiring and firing of coaches, you sort of base it on what you consider a leader to be.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you've never, say, had a Black coach or a Black principal or a Black teacher or a Black person of authority at any point in your life, it's going to be hard to all of a sudden say, I'm going to place my multibillion-dollar organization into the hands of someone whose leadership style I don't even know exists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Which means it often falls on other Black leaders within the league, people like Tony Dungy, to try to bring change. And it's a huge responsibility and this huge burden that's on Black coaches, because if they're not going to look out for each other, it's not guaranteed that a white coach is going to do the same.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Iceland, this is around the time of year when you'll see locals tossing thousands of baby puffins off of cliffs and into the sea. It might sound harsh, but it's actually an act of love and a necessary step in the puffin's survival.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NPR has this story. See, puffins come to the cliffs to lay their eggs. And when the little pufflings hatch, they're used to finding their way back to the sea using the light of the moon. But these days, bright lights from the city get them confused, and the pufflings often end up in the wrong direction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's where Icelanders step in to help. Families head out with flashlights looking for pufflings. They gather them up, they take them to the cliffside, and literally chuck them off the edge. It's surreal. If you love something, throw it off a cliff situation. One person said it's a really great feeling because you've just rescued a living thing and introduced it to the ocean, setting it up to live a great life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
