--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, October 24th. 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: Reporting from the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald offers new insight into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' arrests of felons who voted in the state. Many of them say they were misled to believe they were eligible to vote in 2020.
--:-- Lawrence Maurer: Back in August, DeSantis announced the first arrests. A handful of people were accused of knowingly committing voter fraud. According to state law, people with certain felony convictions can vote, not if you've been convicted for murder or sex crimes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New body camera footage of those arrests, recently obtained by the Times and the Herald, shows that some of the people arrested were surprised. They told police they didn't know they were ineligible to vote.
--:-- Ramona Oliver: I'm like, voting for that? Voted, but I ain't committing no fraud.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's 55-year-old Ramona Oliver. She was getting in her car to head to work when police arrived with a warrant. She spent 18 years in state prison for second-degree murder. She's somebody who's gotten out. She's been married since then. She was on her way to work when you see police roll up to her house and arrest her for voting illegally. It's shocking.
--:-- Lawrence Maurer: Lawrence Maurer is a correspondent for The Times and The Herald. He interviewed some of the voters accused of fraud. Most arrested were Black, and a majority were registered as Democrats. Nobody told them they couldn't vote. They showed up at the polls, cast a ballot, and should they get arrested for that?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The law that they're accused of violating basically says that you have to willfully violate it. It's not enough that you just vote when you're ineligible. That's not breaking the law. What breaking the law is willfully doing that. They face up to five years in prison.
--:-- Lawrence Maurer: Legal observers have questioned the prosecutions. On Friday, a Miami judge dismissed charges against one of the voters. Even if DeSantis seems to see the arrests as useful politically, it's not clear whether they'll hold up legally.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Maybe you remember hearing about thousands of beagles who were rescued from a breeding facility over the summer. It got a lot of attention, with people lining up to adopt the dogs that had been bred for animal testing after they suffered in poor conditions.
--:-- Lizzie Johnson: We like how the Washington Post stayed on that story, finding out what happened to the dogs months later. They had been mistreated for most of their lives, and so for them to get used to being in the world was difficult.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lizzie Johnson is a reporter at The Washington Post. She was at the Invego facility in Virginia when it released many of the dogs to the Humane Society. The handoff was secretive. No cell phones, photos, or videos were allowed. But Johnson managed to tell the story by getting as close as she could.
--:-- Lizzie Johnson: I did go and parked right outside the gate. And so the rescue groups would go in one by one, fill up one of their vans full of beagles and then drive off and leave. I followed some of them to an adoption center. And she says she'll never forget the first steps that they took after getting their freedom.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It was like they didn't know how to be dogs. They wrapped the dogs in towels and carried them outside and set them onto grass for the very first time. I mean, these were dogs who had spent their entire lives in enclosures and in cages, who had never had toys. They'd never felt the earth underneath their paws before. And so when these dogs were set on the ground, they just froze. They, like, didn't know what to do.
--:-- Lizzie Johnson: Johnson says people who adopted the beagles have had a tough time too. But they formed an online support system where they swap tips and celebrate little wins. Trauma is really instilled in the core of these dogs. And so I thought that was important for people to realize and just to understand what a big deal it is for one of those beagles when they learn how to jump up on the bed or that a hot dog tastes really good or that running across the grass is really, really fun.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read The Washington Post's full coverage of the Beagles' post-rescue lives on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Striking new data makes a possible connection between potential future pandemics and climate change. This study is about potential risk, so it's important not to get alarmed. The Guardian explains how scientists looked at soil samples near where glaciers had melted to find out what kinds of viruses and bacteria might be there. And they found several.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Their research suggests that as rising temperatures melt more glaciers, there could be higher risk of viruses and bacteria that were trapped in the ice getting out and infecting wildlife. Something like this happened in 2016, when Siberia had an anthrax outbreak, the region's first in 75 years. A heatwave melted permafrost exposing an infected reindeer carcass.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the researchers in this recent study says it's not known whether glaciers melting could lead to pandemics, but it's an area that needs more study to help us understand what could happen if a frozen virus thaws out and enters the wild.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Abraham Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, George Washington. You know their faces from history books and from U coins. And today, the U.S. Mint will debut a new quarter featuring the actress Anna Mae Wong. She'll be the first Asian American person on U.S. currency.
--:-- Lizzie Johnson: NPR has a piece about her legacy as an actor in the early 20th century. She was considered Hollywood's first Asian American movie star, eventually earning a spot on the Walk of Fame. She starred in more than 60 films, including this one called The Island of Lost Men.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When I first saw Prima, he was wearing the jade medallion of the House of Lings. To him, it was just a Chinese trinket. But to me, it meant that his footsteps had crossed my father's. Somewhere, somehow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This was a time when Hollywood was mostly casting white people to play Asian characters, often based on stereotypes. And when they did cast Asian Americans, they were grossly underpaid. In the film Daughter of the Dragon, for example, Wong earned $6,000 for her starring role. But a white actor with a minor part got double that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The U.S. Mint calls Wong a courageous advocate for Asian American actors. More than 300 million quarters, with her face on them, will be produced.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. There's also MLB coverage. The World Series is now set after the Houston Astros and the Philadelphia Phillies advanced. And if you're listening in the News app, stick around. We've got a narrated article coming up next from Vanity Fair. It goes deeper on Ron DeSantis and his attempt to set himself up as a successor to Trump. That's cued up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
