--:-- Shamita Basu: Hey there. So listen, we want to include your story in an upcoming show. In a couple of weeks, we'll be marking one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. And we're reflecting on all the things that have changed in this past year. So much that's impacted our families, our communities, our jobs, our country. So here's what we want to know from you. Tell us about something you'll never look at the same way again. We want you to weigh in. Send a voice memo to Apple News Today at Apple dot com. That's Apple News Today at Apple dot com. Make sure to include your name and where you're from and try to keep it to under a minute. We may use your voice and story in an upcoming show. And thanks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, February 23rd. 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: Vaccine apartheid. That's what a Doctors Without Borders official is calling the growing gap in vaccine access between wealthy and poor countries. The way things are looking right now, about a quarter of the world's population may not get COVID vaccines until next year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: An international agreement called COVAX was designed to make sure all countries have equitable access to vaccines. But even with that, Vox says America and the world's wealthiest countries are not doing enough.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, on its face, it looks like wealthy nations are trying to do the right thing. Just last week, Biden confirmed the U.S. is pledging $4 billion to COVAX. The European Union, for its part, pledged $1 billion. Bach says, while this money is important and can make a big difference, what's the point of having billions of dollars if the vaccine supply is already bought up?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And make no mistake, that's exactly what's happening. Wealthier countries, like the United States, are planning to buy more vaccines than they'll need. Buy a lot in some cases. An international anti-poverty group called One Campaign tried to quantify how many doses the wealthiest countries have secured for themselves.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the group's analysis found the United States has deals that will lead to about 453 million extra vaccine doses. The UN is calling for richer nations to commit to donating their excess supplies.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The other obstacle to equitable distribution is price transparency NPR is reporting companies are keeping their prices secret Even COVAX won't disclose how much it's paying This is one of the reasons why UNICEF started compiling a price chart that's based on local news reports in various countries.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It found some less developed nations paid significantly more than rich countries for the exact same product. Just to rattle off a few numbers on this UNICEF chart, South Africa is reportedly paying $5.25 per dose for a vaccine that was sold to European nations for only $3.50 a pop.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And this isn't a small difference, especially when you multiply it by the millions of doses that are needed. Just a few days ago, Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Keith Rowley spoke at a WHO conference. He appealed to wealthy nations. Think about how history books are going to remember you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Our history as people is littered with instances of destructive behavior, disrespectful dominance, imbalances, and other forms of man's inhumanity to man. It is my hope and plea that when the journal of this experience is written, it will deviate from what is mostly the norm and record that on this occasion, the rich took care of the poor.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Since Election Day, at least six Facebook employees have quit. In their farewell posts, they called out the social network's leaders for failing to address the spread of misinformation and hate speech on their platform. BuzzFeed News has the details.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You know Mark Zuckerberg's name, of course, but someone you may not know a whole lot about is Joel Kaplan. He's the company's VP of global public policy. And here's where he fits into the company's organizational chart.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's the public policy team, which is in charge of government relations and lobbying. And then there's the content policy team, which makes rules about content moderation. Both of those teams report to Kaplan.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some of these ex-employees are saying that's a major conflict, and they claim that conflict caused Facebook to reject product changes because it was worried about political or public backlash.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And in so doing, as one employee writes, the company is, quote, knowingly exposing users to risks of integrity. Just one example that they cite in this BuzzFeed piece, an example that has far-reaching implications, is Alex Jones.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He's a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He called the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax. He referred to the victims of the Parkland shooting as crisis actors. In 2019 Facebook decided Alex Jones posts violated their rules.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: His lies, his misinformation, his hate speech against Muslims and transgender people, all of it qualified him for removal. But then, according to BuzzFeed, Mark Zuckerberg intervened.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: While Zuckerberg agreed to remove Jones, he said other people who continue to post about Jones and share his lies and his hate speech, those posts would be okay and could stay up.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As one ex-employee put it, Zuckerberg didn't like the punishment, so he changed the rules. That decision had a cascading effect.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It reportedly changed the way Facebook looked at bans on other extremists. According to BuzzFeed's investigation, pressure is building from within the company for leaders to start listening to Facebook's internal teams, the people whose jobs it is, to make sure misinformation doesn't spread on the platform.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: More than 60 years ago, a Black teenager was arrested after she refused to let a white person take her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was March 1955, and Claudette Colvin was just 15 years old.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She took the stance 10 months before Rosa Parks got national attention for a similar act of civil disobedience. And did you know it was actually Colvin's lawsuit that eventually led to Alabama's bus segregation practice being overturned, not Rosa Parks's, as you might think.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, there's a reason you might not have heard of her. They want to use the one that would be image that Rosa Parks would be more acceptable to the white community than a dark-skinned teenager.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People said I was crazy. Why? Because I was 15 years old and was defiant and was shouting this by constitutional rights. That's Colvin speaking to CNN's Abby Phillips for a new series they're calling History Refocused.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Here, they look at the role Black women played in the civil rights movement. Because while we can name a lot of men who were important to the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, I could go on and on, women were not enshrined in the same way.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: CNN highlights women like Erica Huggins, who they call one of the most consequential figures of the Black Power movement. She was a former leading member of the Black Panther Party.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the way she put it, quote, women ran the party and the men thought they did. Another name that CNN calls attention to here is Gloria Richardson. She was an early leader in the fight for equal access to education.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She's 98 years old today and she still fighting for equal rights. It's been a good 28-year run, but now music's most influential robots are ready to power down.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yesterday, Daft Punk announced they're calling it quits. GQ has a great piece about how they influenced music and culture, and this article really captures what a special experience it was to see them live.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Daft Punk formed in Paris in 1993. The band's two members created some of the most popular dance and pop songs. You probably know one of their most iconic songs, Harder, better, faster, stronger.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, this song is a great example of everything that Daft Punk was about. Electronic pop, plus heavy disco influence, that repetition that just makes it such an earworm.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All right, I'm going to place myself squarely at a point in history here, but there was this very specific choreography to this song that I remember was very popular when I was in high school and college.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The thing to do was record a video of yourselves doing it and post the video on the internet. And this was in a time way before TikTok when it was still okay to be kind of bad at dancing online.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In total, the band released just four studio albums, two live ones, and they won several Grammys, including Album of the Year for Random Access Memories.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The lead single on that album was the song Get Lucky. But what made them special was more than just the music. It was their vision, their wonderfully weird music videos.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The LA Times compiled a list of 10 essential moments in the group's career. We're going to link to that in our show notes page.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And of course, we have to talk about the helmets. This was their signature look. Back in the 90s, they created this folklore around the helmets, saying that they'd been turned into robots.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And they stuck with the story for 20-something years, all the way through their last music video. Daft Punk ended their career with this eight-minute farewell video. It was called Epilogue.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And when you watch it, you see them walking around the desert, dressed as these robots, before one of them sets the other to self-destruct. And then he just explodes. That's an ending.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow. Thank you.
