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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Monday, August 16th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Taliban now controls Afghanistan. Its fighters took control of Kabul on Sunday. Government forces didn't resist much. And as the government collapsed, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. By the evening, armed Taliban fighters were in the presidential palace. That's where its leadership was giving TV interviews.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Crowds of people trying to leave the country gathered at the airport. And the Pentagon is now sending in extra troops to help evacuations.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: New Yorker writer Robin Wright has a long track record of covering Afghanistan on the ground, going back to the original Taliban rule in the late 90s. In her latest piece, she lays out the long-term impact of the U.S. withdrawal.
--:-- Robin Wright: First, she says jihadism has defeated democracy in a key battle. She writes the Taliban will most likely install Sharia law again. Young women studying in colleges are wondering whether they'll ever finish their degrees. And the country could again become a refuge for al-Qaeda or similar militants.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Wright argues it's now clear the United States is not capable of building nations or creating armies. Washington spent tens of billions of dollars over two decades on this mission, and now it's ending on what she calls a dishonorable exit.
--:-- Robin Wright: Wright also points out what's happening in Afghanistan now is profoundly damaging America's reputation abroad. In the future, she's predicting the U.S. government is going to have a very difficult time getting allies to work together again on a large scale.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We are highlighting a range of strong journalism on the evolving situation in Afghanistan. You can find this story and many more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: More than 1 people have died in Haiti following the massive earthquake over the weekend and thousands more people are injured. These numbers might rise as rescuers search through destroyed homes and buildings.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This Caribbean nation is an area where strong quakes can happen, but they're not the world's most powerful. And yet, the 2010 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people there.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: National Geographic explains why earthquakes are so deadly in Haiti. One of the key points of its reporting is that many Haitian buildings are not designed to withstand earthquakes.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A lot of them are made of concrete, which can stand up to hurricane winds. But the problem is they lack internal reinforcement, something like steel, which would keep these buildings from crumbling in earthquakes.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Stronger materials cost more, and Haiti is the poorest country in the region. The poverty there is a legacy of a country that was exploited for years, its people enslaved.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One geophysicist described the state of construction in Haiti as the perfect storm of unfortunate factors, everything you don't want in an earthquake.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. This is creating dangerous conditions for American workers, but there's no federal standard protecting them from extreme heat.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Politico teamed up with E&E News, and they looked into why there are not national rules around this. From 1992 to 2017, heat killed 815 workers and seriously injured 70,000 more.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is the federal agency that's responsible for workplace safety. And the CDC has called on OSHA several times to establish some kind of temperature threshold.
--:-- Zach Coleman: So there have been three warnings to OSHA to write these heat standards going back decades. The most recent one came in 2016. And it's a little bit surprising when you look at the sheer magnitude of heat and how we all feel it that this has been ignored.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: And I think there is this idea that it's a very complicated regulation to write since it's so person-specific and OSHA is under-resourced. They don't necessarily do a great job with the responsibilities they already have.
--:-- Zach Coleman: But there is political pressure now. I mean, you see what's happening with climate change. You saw what was happening in the Pacific Northwest this summer. There has been a lot of conversation about heat.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Coleman says setting a federal standard isn't as straightforward as it sounds. It's a really challenging kind of idiosyncratic regulation to write. You think about every human is different. Everyone has different pre-existing conditions. Everybody has different weights. Everybody has different heat tolerances.
--:-- Zach Coleman: Even when you talk about writing standards at a national level, well, people who are accustomed to heat in Southwest California might actually be able to stand a higher level of heat than people in northern Minnesota.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: But we also know that climate change is making everywhere hotter. Federal guidance encourages employers to provide cooling areas and water breaks for their employees. But on the ground, that's not always what happens.
--:-- Zach Coleman: People affected by extreme heat on the job, they're more likely to be low-wage workers and people of color. So the occupations that we see most exposed to extreme heat are those that work in the outdoors. We're talking about agriculture. We're talking about construction.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: It's also a big environmental justice issue because a large proportion of those workers happen to be low income or Latino. So there is this big social equity conversation that needs to happen about extreme heat and outdoor workers.
--:-- Zach Coleman: The White House says in the coming months OSHA will explore the possibility of a heat standard. As one public health expert points out even without factoring in climate change there should be enough motivation to protect people from heat. But add to that more frequent, hotter heat waves, he says taking action at the federal level becomes urgent.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Sports Illustrated has a special issue out on gambling, how it's affecting teams and athletes as it becomes legal in more places. And it includes the story of one surprising winner from the sports betting boom, Linwood Pizza in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This restaurant, it has the stuff sports fans like. You can get wings, you can get pizza, and if you can't decide, they'll even make you a buffalo wing pizza. But it's not the food that's drawing people. It's the location. The pizzeria is just over the bridge from New York.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: In 2018, New Jersey legalized online sports gambling, but it's not legal in New York. Once bettors across the Hudson discovered the restaurant, it turned into a gambler's paradise of sorts, a place where New Yorkers can get a slice, watch a game, and place legal bets on their phones.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The owner of this restaurant says during football season, on the weekends, the place is slammed from the moment he opens his doors. He has to make extra pies to serve all of the hungry gamblers that show up.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: On game days, he says it feels like a party inside. He's never seen anything like it in more than 40 years of slinging pies. The owner loves this extra business, but there's one line he says he does not cross. He refuses to give any betting advice. And that's because if he gives someone a loser, they know where to find them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
