--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, January 19th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Today is President Trump's final full day in office. Over the Trump years, we had two impeachments, a pandemic, false claims of an illegitimate election, and an assault on the Capitol by his supporters. It was a lot to process.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And while all of that was going on, so many important changes just didn't get the same headlines. Political Magazine highlights 30 key policy moves you may have missed. We're looking at just six of them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Let's start with national defense. Politico writes that the Trump administration's rewriting of the United States national defense strategy is, quote, one of the most important defense policy shifts of the last generation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2018, the Trump administration reoriented the Defense Department. It moved its priorities from fighting insurgents and terrorists in the Middle East to confronting Russia and China. And that meant changes in military training, budgeting, and deployments.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It is very likely that Biden will stick with this strategy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When it comes to education, faith-based groups won really big. The Trump administration expanded federal support for religious schools and organizations.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It established new protections for faith-based campus organizations at public universities. It also began allowing religious organizations to receive federal grants intended for charter schools.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Trump administration also really scaled back the food safety net. It cut $60 billion from SNAP, which is the program that many still call food stamps.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And as a result, about three quarters of a million people lost their access to food aid.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, on the flip side of this, Trump allocated billions of dollars in subsidies to farmers. Many of them suffered because of Trump's trade wars.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Politico reports that government payments are forecast to make up 40 percent of net farm income. That's an all-time high.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As for housing, Politico explains the Trump administration pared back Obama-era rules that were meant to combat racial segregation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now the racial housing gap in the U is wide. Right now about 70 percent of white Americans own their homes compared to just over 40 percent of black Americans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Biden administration can revoke this change pretty quickly, but backing that up with enforcement won't be so straightforward.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And finally, Shemitah, if we could focus on the mechanism used to buy homes. Banks scored big wins on the Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The president signed a bill into law that rolled back several banking regulations that were created to prevent another financial crisis like the one we had in 2008.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, among other things, banks got out of some restrictions on mortgage lending and risky trading.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Politico says it's unlikely the law will be undone. There is so much ground covered in this Politico piece, including Trump's policies on trade, on the environment, immigration.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you're listening right now on the Apple News app, you can find a link to the Politico article by tapping on the notification that we send you about halfway through the show.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the week after President Trump was kicked off most social media platforms, posts that were spreading misinformation about election fraud dropped 73 percent.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's according to Signal Labs, which is an analytics firm.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This idea of stripping people of their online reach is called deplatforming. It's a strategy that's been used to curb the spread of extremism on the Internet before, and experts agree it is pretty effective.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: An analysis published on CNN looks at research on how violent extremism gets shared on the Internet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the consensus is by taking down accounts that spread messages of violence and hate, you reduce the chance that other people will find and maybe be persuaded by these dangerous messages.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One researcher points to what happened when these sites started kicking ISIS off their platforms. The move significantly reduced the terror group's reach and sent it scrambling to find new ways to disseminate their content.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Of course, ISIS is far more violent and extreme than what we're dealing with here in the U.S.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Part of the reason ISIS was able to reach so many young adults online in 2013 and 2014 is that their content was just out there in the open.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It was easy to unwittingly come across these extreme posts on mainstream social media websites.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There this one researcher Maura Conway who studies far extremism on the Internet and she tells CNN two things make combating extremist speech from the right difficult to take down.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The first is a lot of that speech has gone mainstream. We hear it coming from politicians and media personalities.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the second is money. Conway says far-right content is very effective at getting clicks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And more clicks means more profit for advertisers on those pages.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She explains that profit is an incentive for social media companies to leave things the way they are.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But when you deplatform, you also run the risk that people will gather in darker, harder to reach corners of the web.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NBC cites research that found after Reddit shut down message boards that were embracing toxic, hateful language, some users regrouped other places online.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there's evidence those people's comments became even more toxic. Some of them started using even more extreme language.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Overall, many of these experts that CNN spoke to agree, deplatforming is not perfect. It's not the end of the story, but it is a way to curb the spread of ideas that can, at the very least, normalize hateful or violent speech, and at the worst, have deadly real-world consequences.
--:-- Shamita Basu: West Virginia is blowing away other states when it comes to getting vaccines into people's arms.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It was the first state to finish inoculating everyone in nursing homes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And before you go dismissing this tiny state, just focus on the data.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: CDC stats show West Virginia's overall vaccination rate outpaces big and small states.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Governor Jim Justice told CBS how his state did it. We didn't sit on our hands.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I mean, we acted. We brought our local pharmacies in. We brought our local health departments in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We brought our National Guard in, and we started putting shots in people's arms.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Let's focus on what we heard there just now, because some key aspects of what West Virginia is doing differently are all in that little soundbite that we just heard.
--:-- Shamita Basu: First, the governor said local pharmacies. West Virginia is the only state to opt out of the federal program that uses CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate people who live in long care facilities.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now there are many of those big pharmacy chains in West Virginia, so the state bet on getting mom pharmacies involved and it paid off.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One thing that helped was these small local pharmacies usually have closer relationships with nursing homes in their communities, so they can move fast.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And as the governor mentioned, bringing in the National Guard helped too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Get this, West Virginia troops did drills ahead of time to get ready to give out the vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: More than a dozen other states are now using their National Guard forces to speed up distribution.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, there have been some missteps, too. Early on, one county in West Virginia injected 42 people with an antibody cocktail instead of the vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It was an error. And so far, at least, there have been no reported negative consequences.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So you know how more than 20,000 National Guard troops are in D.C. right now? They're there to provide security ahead of President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Well, one guardsman is doing double duty as a public school music teacher.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That is the sound of Sergeant Jacob Cohut adding a little Puccini to our day.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Washington Post has this story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He teaches music and band to elementary school kids in Fairfax County, Virginia.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And right now he's deployed to D.C., like you said, but he didn't want to stop teaching.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So this week he's been holding classes remotely while in uniform.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's this one picture of him sitting in the back of a Humvee. He's like balancing a laptop on his knees and playing a flute.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's got this flute sticking out of the back of the Humvee. I like that pic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You know, he starts every day virtually teaching his students. Then works a 12-hour guard shift.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And at some point during a break, he teaches again.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Cohet is part of the 257th Army Band. It's also known as the Band of the Nation's Capital.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he told the Post, I'm a soldier for the guard, but I feel like I'm as much a soldier for music education.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
