--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, December 24th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today. This is also our final show of the year. Apple News Today is taking a break for the holidays.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 2020 has been a year of hard news, of stories that have made us slow down, hold our breath, or search for something to make us smile. So today, we're focusing on good things that came out of 2020.
--:-- Shamita Basu: From the way live concerts and shows have had to move online. That's songwriting. Thank you kindly. To some prolific young kids putting out their versions of local newspapers. To a year of some pretty big environmental wins. Plus, we'll end the show hearing from you about some of the people who helped you get through 2020.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: My hero is my 11-year-old daughter, Sammy. My heroes are my parents. My hero is my wife. My coach. My 2020 hero is my dog. The K-pop group, BTS.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of my favorite good news stories out this year is a coming out of retirement story. The Washington Post profiled Peter Tsai, the inventor of the filter in N95 masks. And he came out of retirement in the early months of the pandemic because he saw an urgent need.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now Tsai worked 20 hours a day to figure out how to reuse masks in a safe way. And the trick was determining how to sterilize them without damaging the filter that provides the protection. And it turns out baking the masks can do it. He even used his own oven for testing, but please don't try to do that at home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He also helped one lab figure out how to ramp up production to make more N95 masks. And scientists around the country praised his work. Tsai said the real heroes are the health care workers. He just used what he knew to help them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Next up, my pick for one of the best good news stories of 2020 is Maya Moore and the incredible year she had. She's a four-time WNBA champion, and she surprised everyone in 2019 when she decided to step away from the game at the peak of her career.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She instead focused on advocating for a wrongfully convicted man named Jonathan Irons. Slate has this story, and it goes back farther than most people realize. Irons was 18 years old when he was convicted on charges of burglary and assault and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The first time he ever spoke to Maya Moore was 13 years ago. They were introduced through Moore's godparents who were involved in advocacy work to get Irons released. Earlier this year, a judge vacated his conviction after acknowledging that the prosecution had suppressed evidence that could have helped his case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And by the time Irons got out in July, he'd been in prison for over 20 years. And along the way, the couple says they fell in love. This September, they got married.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Okay, file this one under things that unexpectedly took off during the pandemic. Multi-platinum music producers Swiss Beats and Timbaland were just messing around on Instagram Live one night in March, taking turns playing songs from their own catalogs, some favorites, some deep cuts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the viewer count just kept ticking up to over 20,000 people. That's how they knew that they were onto something. Yeah, that something is now called Versus. It's sort of a callback to those old school DJ battles.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These two producers have been using their star power to match up big names in R&B and hip hop and have them battle it out on a live video stream. There have been over 20 of them so far. I'm talking about Alicia Keys versus John legend, Gucci Mane versus Jeezy, Gladys Knight versus Patti LaBelle.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But as Salon points out, most of these battles turned into celebrations. You know, a chance for each artist to tell their matchup how much the other's work influenced them. One of the most talked about battles was between Erykah Badu and Jill Scott in May. Over 700,000 people tuned in for close to three hours.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This year was also filled with some really positive environmental news involving fossil fuels, the oceans, and Wall Street. National Geographic goes into detail about how 2020 was a year of wins for the planet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The U.S. committed to spending billions of dollars to help maintain America's forests, refuges, and other efforts. It's part of the Great American Outdoors Act. Congress hasn't set aside this kind of money for national lands since the 1950s.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And many national parks have long and expensive maintenance backlogs. Wall Street meanwhile is also becoming more climate conscious. Six of America's largest banks, names like JPMorgan Chase Bank of America and Wells Fargo, all said they will no longer fund drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in 2020, 14 nations committed to showing our oceans a little more love. Countries like Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Kenya, Ghana, Norway, and others agreed to sustainably protect and manage 100% of their coastal waters by 2025.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All of this coastal area adds up to roughly the size of the African continent. Each country is vowing to combat overfishing, invest in reducing pollution, and set aside 30% of its national waters as marine protected areas by 2030.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay, it looks like we're getting some breaking news right now from a news outlet called The Daily Excitement Worldwide. The editor-in-chief, Gwen, reports she and her grandmother planted blueberries. That's it. That's the top story.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Oh, and by the way, Gwen is seven years old. What a scoop. And it seems like in lockdown, some kids have made it their mission to pick up a reporter's notebook and keep everyone in their household informed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post shared some of their favorite front pages from kids newspapers across the country. One of them is called Galilee's Gazette. Eight-year-old Sylvia writes about how the Statue of Liberty was built on buried treasure.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Hmm. The front page story of the Butterfly News is some local caller from eight-year-old Reese, who reports his cousin Maggie celebrated her baptism at a Mexican restaurant. And Reese's sources tell him Maggie loved it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One paper called The Coaster Times includes a 10-year-old's reviews of virtual tours you can take online, like of the Sydney Opera House and the Kentucky Derby Stables, which the reviewer says you don't want to miss.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: OK, one last one. Quarantine Daily News includes a joke of the week. And here's one of them. Why did all of the School of Fish go home? Because they need to social distance and learn on schooloffish.com.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't quite get it. I don't know what that means. It made me laugh, though, so maybe it worked.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And finally, probably the best good news story of the entire year. History was just made. The Food and Drug Administration just approved Pfizer's vaccine for emergency use.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And within 24 hours we expect to start seeing trucks moving from this Pfizer plant. Moderna showed that it is nearly 95% effective. The COVID vaccines are not just the first promising step in returning our lives to normal.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Wall Street Journal reports on how the breakthrough science that made those vaccines possible could also have a huge impact on the future of medicine. As we've talked about on the show, for the first time, scientists figured out how to use messenger RNA or mRNA to combat a virus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Think of mRNA as a recipe. It basically teaches our bodies to cook up their own special defense to fight disease. Now that research may also lead to new treatments for cancer, for heart disease, and more.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Okay. All right. That felt good, right? It felt kind of nice to go back and remind myself that there were some good things that happened this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sure was. And you know, for as hard as 2020 was, it made so many of us value the people in our lives who helped us get through it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I know for me, I could not have made it through the year without my family, my kids. And despite all the bad news of this year, they were the joy of my life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We asked you, our listeners, who was your 2020 hero? The person who helped you get through. So that's how we're going to end today's show, by giving you the last word.
--:-- [Guest 1]: This is Nancy Morrison. The frontline people in the medical community that have kept us alive during this pandemic, those are the real heroes.
--:-- [Guest 2]: I'm a high school teacher, and I would like to take a moment to nominate David Lapatino, my school district's instructional innovation coordinator, as my hero of 2020.
--:-- [Guest 3]: I'm Clinton from California. My hero for 2020 is George Floyd.
--:-- [Guest 4]: Good afternoon. My name is Richard Hudak. My hero of the year is someone I think who's unsung, Dr. Nirav Shah, our CDC director here.
--:-- [Guest 5]: Hello, this is Jason Davis from Folsom, California. I want to talk about my hero. I'm out walking her right now in my neighborhood. It's my dog.
--:-- [Guest 6]: My name is Madison Johnson. I'm from Fort Collins, Colorado. And my hero is my physical therapist, Dr. Kim Saunders.
--:-- [Guest 7]: Hi, my name's Daniel from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the hero of the pandemic was my mother.
--:-- [Guest 8]: My mom volunteered to get votes counted so that people who were more at risk than she was could stay at home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lots of family members, lots of understanding bosses, and lots of dogs in your calls. Thank you so much for calling in and sharing the heroes that got you through this year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Have a very happy and healthy holiday season. We'll talk with you again after the new year.
