--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Monday, November 15th. 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: President Joe Biden is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a virtual summit today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: U.S. officials say the two leaders are going to be talking about how to responsibly and effectively manage competition between these two world powers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All eyes are going to be on this meeting because tensions between the U.S. and China, they're rising over everything from trade and cyber threats to human rights and the status of Taiwan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal reports Biden is expected to press Xi to uphold trade agreements made under Trump, but that Biden is unlikely to offer to lift tariffs on Chinese goods, which is something Beijing has been pushing for.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Biden administration is also concerned with China's recent scaling up of military exercises near Taiwan. And it's criticized the country for its genocidal treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Biden and Xi have also said they want to work together where their interests overlap. As part of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, the U.S. and China issued a surprise joint agreement on combating climate change. This could suggest a more cooperative tone in the summit today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This meeting is also coming after Xi further cemented his power in China. This happened late last week. Senior Communist Party officials approved a resolution that paves the way for Xi to claim a third term and at least another five years in office.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This resolution anointed Xi as the only leader with the ability to push China toward achieving his goal of becoming the world's number one economic and political power.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For perspective here, China and the U.S. are the largest economies in the world. And as they talk about managing competition today, Bloomberg is reporting how over the last 20 years, China's made extraordinary gains.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It cites a new report by global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. that shows, in the race to create wealth, China overtook the U.S. It accounted for almost one-third of gains in global net worth since 2000.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One in four Americans has a disability. And for many of them, air travel can be an especially stressful and even dehumanizing experience.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wheelchairs broken in transit, airport escorts who don't show up, children with autism separated from their parents.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In 2018, Congress told the TSA and airlines they needed to have more training on how to better serve customers with disabilities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But according to an NPR report, these types of problems still persist.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: I've spoken to passengers with disabilities who've had traumatic experiences at airports. They're still being traumatized.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One man, Nathaniel Ross, has multiple physical disabilities. He has a feeding tube in his stomach and an intravenous line in his chest.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: Because of his medical condition, while he travels, Ross needs to carry sterile bags of IV fluid in a temperature-controlled container.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: On one trip, agents opened the bags and x-rayed them. Ross said the agents didn't properly return the bags, and when he and his mom asked them to put them back, he says they were scolded.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: He was subjected to a pat-down of his chest and stomach. One agent came in front of all the other passengers and checked him with the back part of their hand.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And then they took him in private and gave him another second, more intrusive, and he calls it a humiliating pat-down.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: One of the most common problems happens when airlines gate-check wheelchairs and motorized scooters.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: According to Department of Transportation data, during the past July and August, about 26 wheelchairs and scooters were lost, damaged, or destroyed. Every day.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: One Army veteran told NPR, it's like they're taking our legs away from us.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Shapiro told us another story about a disability activist named Ingracia Figueroa. Her custom wheelchair was damaged after a flight with United Airlines.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: It set off a chain of consequences that ended in her death. She ended up in a loner chair, kind of a cheap chair. Very quickly, she developed those dangerous bed sores.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And they grew, and they grew, and they got infected, and she spent months in the hospital.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: The doctor said, look, that not having access to her special chair that had cushioning that protected her, this had led to her developing these very dangerous skin ulcers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NPR heard from hundreds of their listeners and found in most cases where a person with a disability had a bad experience, TSA agents were not following the training.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: An executive with the TSA told NPR that while protecting physical security is their priority, there is a growing demand for agents to create a culture of dignity and respect.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Australian farmer Jodi Brown says her ranch looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie.
--:-- Jodi Brown: Temperatures rose so much, lizards and emus essentially disappeared. Her grass turned to ash.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She's seen kangaroo mothers on her land abandon babies they can't support.
--:-- Jodi Brown: Brown's experience is not unique. Bloomberg News explores how farmers like her are trying to adapt to climate change.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They're raising crops and livestock against the backdrop of a changing world.
--:-- Jodi Brown: The UN estimates in the next few decades, food demand could increase by 50 percent. At the same time, global crop yields could decline by 30 percent.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So farmers are experimenting with new ways of doing things to adapt to climate change.
--:-- Jodi Brown: For Brown, that means testing out regenerative farming techniques.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That term, regenerative farming, describes a number of methods to promote soil health, even in drought conditions.
--:-- Jodi Brown: Farmers around the world are switching out crops and seeds, and they're also increasing irrigation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some companies are even developing new vegetable varieties that can stand up to extreme weather, like white cabbage that's specifically bred to survive the heat.
--:-- Jodi Brown: One farmer in Brazil is getting rid of half his coffee trees and replacing them with hardier plants like corn and soybean.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Because his coffee crops got hit badly by a recent drought and then extreme frost, which is a terrible combination for such sensitive trees.
--:-- Jodi Brown: In the Philippines, one farmer said he started covering his lettuce and cabbage plants with a type of plastic that protects against UV rays.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And he estimates that the plastic has saved around 80 percent of his food crops from wilting.
--:-- Jodi Brown: Now, money is an issue for farmers and innovation is expensive.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Right now, there's no mass effort to coordinate access to the amount of money needed to make mass transformations happen.
--:-- Jodi Brown: At the COP26 climate conference, a group of countries pledged to allocate about $4 billion toward developing sustainable agricultural techniques.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But the U.N. says what's needed is closer to $50 billion annually for the next decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you ever tried learning another language as an adult, how did you learn new vocabulary?
--:-- Joe Shapiro: I used to make flashcards and put sticky notes on things around the house. These are all methods that rely on memorization.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But there's a recent study that suggests an even stronger way of retaining words in a new language is by pairing a word with a hand gesture.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: Scientific American has this story.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These researchers wanted to really test this idea. So they took a group of German-speaking adults and introduced them to 90 totally made-up words.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: For example, they told them that the word la mube means camera.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: While they were learning these new words, they were shown a video of a person making a hand gesture that matched the meaning of the word.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: Five months later, the researchers gave them a multiple choice test.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And this wasn't just any test. The subjects were hooked up to a device that sent weak magnetic pulses to the part of the brain that controls arm movement.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: And when the researchers sent these pulses to interfere with that part of the brain, subjects found it harder to remember their vocabulary words.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Without the pulses, their scores were better.
--:-- Joe Shapiro: One researcher in a related field told Scientific American, there's now a lot of research showing gestures play a role in learning.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This study tries to take it a step further to understand why that link exists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning, and thanks for listening to Apple News Today.
