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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, April 7th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita 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: Since Russia invaded, more than half of all children in Ukraine have left their homes. That's the largest and fastest displacement of kids since World War II. And yet, many of them are still attending school.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NPR reports how, according to the Ukrainian Education Ministry, a majority of kids are still logging on for online classes, sometimes far from home in other countries.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Educators and relief agencies say even through disasters, education must go on. NPR spoke with Yasmin Sharif, the director of the UN Fund that helps kids who are affected by war continue to study.
--:-- Yasmin Sharif: Often when you have a humanitarian crisis, you under-prioritize education and focus on water and shelter, which is important. However, what we have seen from many countries of crisis is that they are protracted. They can last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For educators, teaching during a war is a challenge. NPR spoke with one teacher who talks about what it's like for her classes to be interrupted by air raid sirens, how she does breathing exercises with her students to help them cope. She also does a daily check-in on their mood and mental health.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For kids who have fled to neighboring countries, some are enrolling in local schools. Poland, which has taken in many Ukrainian refugees, is creating special classes for Ukrainian children and teachers. The plan is for them to follow the same curriculum that's taught at home in their native language.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These displaced Ukrainian students, they're part of a much larger problem. The UN estimates there are 128 million children worldwide whose learning is now disrupted by war, COVID or environmental disasters.
--:-- Yasmin Sharif: The Education Fund director is hoping this new attention on Ukraine's children is going to inspire more support for struggling students around the world.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The hottest ticket in sports right now is for the Masters, which starts today. Ticket prices are soaring because people want to see Tiger Woods. He said he planning to return to the course a year after he was seriously injured in a car crash.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We talked to Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay.
--:-- Jason Gay: There were serious questions about whether or not he would be able to walk properly again much less play competitive golf. And his rehabilitation from this, by his own admission, has been slow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He said not long ago that his days of sort of being a day in, day out, week in, week out professional golfer are probably over. And so for him to come back, and not just come back, but to come back on this major stage like the Augusta National Masters Tournament is a real surprise and a real shot in the arm for the sport.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Masters is where Woods had some of his biggest moments, including a 2019 win after battling severe back pain. And remember, that victory came at a time when many people were thinking his competitive days were over.
--:-- Jason Gay: There have been multiple comebacks over the athletic career of Tiger Woods. He's somebody who's struggled with injuries throughout his career, especially in the last half of it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Woods has also dealt with personal issues over the years. He's somebody who is not just this world-class athlete who has an incredible resume of accomplishments, but as we all well know, a bit of a personal saga.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's had major setbacks, tabloid trouble, accidents. There was a DUI in the past. But now the focus is squarely on what he can do on the course.
--:-- Jason Gay: This is a moment that's much bigger than the Masters, much bigger than the sport itself. Tiger Woods is not just the most recognizable name in golf. He's one of the most recognizable names in anything, in any sport, in any platform.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He is somebody who draws in the casual viewer. He is somebody that bridges generations. People who don't even like him want to watch him play golf. He is somebody who just has this magnetic appeal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's as if Michael Jordan never left playing basketball and is still out there. It's a big week for sports in that it's also opening day for Major League Baseball. Our sports editors have prepared a special collection of baseball stories that you can find in the Apple News app.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It used to be that for serious musicians, playing at small private parties was pretty much hitting rock bottom. It was seen as a D-list stunt, a quick cash grab. Think vanilla ice at a bat mitzvah, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: But lately, big-name entertainers are saying yes to private gigs for the ultra-wealthy. Jennifer Lopez was paid a million dollars to perform for 20 people at a birthday party in Macau.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Beyonce reportedly got millions to play at a wedding of the children of two Indian billionaires. Seal played on a yacht off the coast of Monaco.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David Brown wrote about this trend for Rolling Stone. He says during the pandemic, more artists were willing to give private parties a try.
--:-- David Brown: For some artists, they've seen a drop off in touring income over the last two years. And their staff and their road crew and people who were on their payrolls also suffered.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These big-name performers get a huge payday for a relatively short gig. And the people who hire them, they get an exclusive experience. They still want to see live music, but they don't want to sit in a big crowd and risk their health.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So that's become an interesting new twist to it all. Brown told us even before the pandemic, other forces in the music industry were pointing entertainers toward this shift.
--:-- David Brown: Artists just don't make as much money off record and CD sales as they used to. But there are some musicians who are resisting the pull and saying they can't be bought.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are still people like Bruce Springsteen and U2 who are kind of on everybody's wish list. If you're especially if you're an older rock fan, you'd love to have them play one of your private events or do one of these things.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there are certainly two artists who have routinely said no to such requests.
--:-- David Brown: This also brings up new questions for artists like, do I really want to be photographed on this person's yacht? Take it from J.Lo, who in 2013 performed for the president of Turkmenistan. The country's government has been accused of human rights violations, and she was criticized for taking that gig.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Her camp later said, if there had been knowledge of human rights issues, J.Lo would not have attended. For the most part, Brown says artists are not talking about taking these kinds of jobs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's a lot of secrecy around it, especially as performers are trying to come up with their own ways of vetting who and how much they're willing to play for.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What's it like to be able to speak dozens of languages? That's the question Washington Post reporter Jessica Contrera answers in this story that takes her to some surprising places, from cleaning up carpet stains to sliding into a brain scanning machine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it all started when she met this person.
--:-- Jessica Contrera: Okay, so I was able to catch the Spanish and the Mandarin, you know, because he's really good. But most of what he said I didn't understand.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Von Smith is what's called a hyperpolyglot, a master of many, many languages. He can speak 24 languages well enough to have a conversation and has basic command of many more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Living in the D.C. area, you might think he's an interpreter for an embassy or something, but he cleans carpets for a living.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: See, we told you there would be carpet stains involved. His job made him even more interesting to this reporter because he's never really cashed in on his talent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Smith says he only counted how many languages he knows because the reporter asked him to. For him, language learning is about connecting with people.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He learned American Sign Language after he met people at a nightclub that was popular with deaf students. He picked up Japanese through the workers at a restaurant where he cleaned the fish tank.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Contrera got in touch with a neuroscientist to learn more. She ends up inviting the reporter, Ann Smith, to the lab for brain scans.
--:-- Jessica Contrera: He has a blast. Now, one of the scientists speaks Catalan, and so he starts chatting her up in that language. She says his accent is really precise.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And when the brain scans come back, there is a surprise for the reporter. She's not very good with languages, in her own words, so she expected the language areas of Smith's brain to be way more active than hers, but it was actually the opposite.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The researchers say this is because her brain has to work extra hard to process other languages, but Smith's brain barely breaks a sweat as he switches from Arabic to Icelandic to Indonesian to Navajo and back again.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's not clear how this works. Maybe it's something he was born with, something about the language errors in his brain. Or maybe his brain developed differently as he learned languages when he was young. It could be both.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the brain scans from this story might actually help researchers figure out how hyperpolyglots do what they do. You should definitely check out this full story, which includes a video of Smith speaking all kinds of languages, even some that you may not have known existed. It's on the Apple News app.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can also find coverage of the confirmation vote for Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson. The Senate is expected to confirm her today as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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