--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Hey there. Before we get into the show today, we want to ask for your help.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's the end of the summer, schools across the country are starting to open back up, and we're about to head into a cooler season with more indoor time. But the pandemic is still a part of our lives, and many parents are saying they don't know how to make the best decisions for their children, especially if they're too young to be vaccinated.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So parents, caregivers, we want to hear what questions you have that haven't been answered yet. What are you still unsure about when it comes to school and socializing for your kids? Tell us about your concerns, uncertainties, those nagging doubts that are keeping you up at night.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Record your question as a voice memo and send it to Apple News Today at Apple.com. And remember to tell us your name and where you are and try to keep it under a minute. We might use your question in an upcoming episode. And thanks.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Tuesday, August 31st. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And 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: The damage from Hurricane Ida is now becoming clear. In photos, you can see roads covered in water, crumpled buildings, homes without roofs. More than a million homes and businesses lost power. We know at least two people are dead, but that number is expected to grow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Emergency planners in the region say Hurricane Ida became a monster storm too quickly to issue a mandatory evacuation order of New Orleans. They had 48 hours, 50 hours, just not enough time to actually make the call and then do all the work needed to get everyone out of the city in time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Robinson Meyer. He covers climate for the Atlantic.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: A city like New Orleans needs at least 72 hours to issue an evacuation order. But as waters become warmer, storms get bigger and deadlier faster than that. In the past few years, actually, Hurricane Patricia in the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Michael in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Harvey, which deluged Houston. Those all intensified very quickly up until the final moment of landfall as they fed off these super hot ocean temperatures.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And it does seem like this rapid intensification is something we're seeing more under climate change.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: And if this trend continues, local officials are going to find it harder and harder to make emergency plans. Making the decision to evacuate is not a costless one for local officials. You know, in Hurricane Rita in 2005, more people in Houston actually died in the kind of traffic pandemonium and car crashes that result from a mandatory evacuation than died in the storm itself.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also, if you make everyone evacuate for a storm that turns out to not be that major, then they're less likely to trust you the next time around when another major storm might actually come and hit.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: And so it really puts officials in this awful position of not knowing at the moment that they need to make an evacuation call, whether a storm demands an evacuation or not.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Other places around the world have strategies that the U.S. could learn from. Cities and countries on the Pacific coast, particularly in Asia and Australia, that are more used to dealing with these tsunami timelines where you only have 15 or 20 minutes to evacuate could be a real lesson for us in how to improve hurricane preparedness.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: So instead of maybe getting everyone out of the city, you create structures within the city that everyone can evacuate to very quickly that are elevated or really protected in some way so that they're able to just withstand the storm impacts themselves.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Meyer explains we're going to need better transportation and infrastructure to be ready for future storms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the military mission to evacuate American citizens, third country nationals, and vulnerable Afghans. The last planes carrying American troops have left Kabul.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: America's nearly 20-year military presence in Afghanistan is officially over. In the two weeks since the Taliban took control of the country, more than 122,000 people were airlifted out. Many of these people are Afghans who helped the U.S.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But those who were lucky enough to get out face a system so backlogged it could be years before some of them find permanent homes in the U.S.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Roughly 88 Afghans who worked for the U.S. government during the war are trying to resettle with their families in the U.S. through the Special Immigrant Visa Program, or SIV.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vox explains, this program has an intense 14-step application process. It's often hard to get a hold of some of the documents you need. And right now, there's a massive backlog from slow processing during the Trump years.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some Afghans could get to America through other programs, but there are bottlenecks everywhere. Many people are going to have to wait in other countries for processing, which means they'll have to find work to support their families while they wait.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jury selection begins today in the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. She's charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She's accused of misleading patients, doctors, and investors. There was a time when she was the talk of Silicon Valley. Holmes used to say she wanted to revolutionize the blood testing industry and claimed Theranos technology could diagnose dozens of conditions with just a few drops of blood.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At one point, Theranos was valued at more than $9 billion. But it all fell apart when the technology didn't live up to the sales pitch.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We spoke to Sarah Rendazzo from The Wall Street Journal about the rise and fall of the company and the founder.
--:-- Sarah Rendazzo: Theranos really captured the imagination, I think because of Elizabeth Holmes and her personality and how compelling she was. She was this young woman who dropped out of Stanford. She cultivated this image where people were calling her the next Steve Jobs and then a super high-profile board.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She had George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former secretaries of state. She had Jim Mattis, who would later become the defense secretary. She had luminaries of the business and political world and high-profile lawyers.
--:-- Sarah Rendazzo: There are these newly revealed court documents, and they give us insight into what Holmes' defense might look like. She might be considering a defense that sets her up against her former number two executive, a man named Sonny Balwani, whom she also dated.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And so she alleging that there was an abusive relationship essentially and that that weighs on her decision making that happened at the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Balwani denies being abusive. His fraud and conspiracy trial is scheduled for next year.
--:-- Sarah Rendazzo: Randazzo told us there's another defense Holmes might use here. She could say she actually believed in Theranos' technology and that she wasn't lying, as prosecutors claim.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Holmes' case could have implications for startups across the tech world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I do think that this trial in some ways will put Silicon Valley on trial. There's that phrase, fake it till you make it, that's very common in the startup world.
--:-- Sarah Rendazzo: And there's a lot of startups that might tell investors things that aren't quite true yet, but that they expect to be true.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And so I think the nature of how that played out in Theranos will definitely come out at trial in terms of what she told investors and then what the reality might have been and if it fell short of that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New research shows our immune system seems to be learning from COVID vaccines how to keep us out of the hospital.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Bloomberg reports on a new study that's adding to the discussion about booster shot recommendations.
--:-- Sarah Rendazzo: Studies show that over time, your antibodies against COVID seem to wane. But scientists found months after getting vaccinated, people's immune systems appear to know how to generate new antibodies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This data also suggests vaccinated people, they're less likely to transmit the coronavirus to others.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This ties into the conversation around whether we need booster shots to up the number of antibodies in our system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Biden said the administration is considering recommending boosters as soon as five months after full vaccination.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These findings are adding to our understanding of just how effective vaccines are keeping people out of the hospital and alive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Almost all the people who were hospitalized or died from COVID recently, they were never vaccinated.
--:-- 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+ partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
