--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, June 29th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, investigating the Greek government's actions in the deadly migrant shipwreck. California wrestles with reparations for Black residents. And a new English dialect emerges in South Florida. But first, the Supreme Court has ruled in the affirmative action case, striking down the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The vote in both cases fell along ideological lines, with the conservative majority ruling that schools cannot consider race in admissions practices. It's a decision that has major implications for affirmative action.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Over on the Apple News app, our editors have curated some of the best stories to help you make sense of this decision and what comes next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Wall Street Journal has a profile of Edward Bloom. The journal describes him as the driving force behind the legal battle to do away with affirmative action. He's also said he thinks schools should get rid of practices that disproportionately benefit white students, like legacy admissions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, NBC news reports on how administrators at schools have been preparing for this moment. Some elite schools are considering getting rid of standardized testing, or at least relying on them less heavily. That's one way, they say, they can help to ensure their student bodies remain diverse, since data shows standardized testing benefits wealthier students.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A few months ago, on our weekly show Apple News In Conversation, I spoke with Evan Mandary about what we're getting wrong when it comes to higher ed and closing the race gap. He's a Harvard graduate himself and the author of the book Poison Ivy, How Elite Colleges Divide Us.
--:-- Evan Mandary: We've been way too focused on whether affirmative action is the right or wrong approach, when really what we should be focusing on is how the admissions process favors certain groups of applicants.
--:-- Evan Mandary: The recruited athlete has a greater than two-thirds chance of getting in. The children of faculty members and donors get in at about 50% rate, and I think legacy rate is in the high 30%.
--:-- Evan Mandary: In our conversation, I broke down how everything from SATs and ACTs to early admissions is skewed to benefit people who come from wealthy, well-resourced families. How fundamentally, the system is stacked against poor people.
--:-- Evan Mandary: This is such a complicated issue for people because I'm asking white people to surrender a little bit of their status. That doesn't mean that they have to stop advocating for their children, but they have to stop advocating for institutional mechanisms that disadvantage poor students of color.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the Apple News app right now and you want to hear Mandari full arguments for yourself, we queue up that conversation to play for you right after this episode.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Now let's take a quick look at a few other big stories in the news on a morning where so much of America is waking up to severe weather. Either extreme heat in parts of the South and California, or polluted air from Canadian wildfires stretching from the center of the country to the East Coast.
--:-- Shumita Basu: As one environmental researcher puts it to the Washington Post, we are seeing a climate that didn't exist before.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In other news, the CDC says there have been five locally contracted cases of malaria in the U.S., in Florida and Texas.
--:-- Shumita Basu: There are thousands of malaria cases in America every year, but they come from travel abroad. This is the first time in 20 years that the disease has been caught here.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The CDC says the risk of getting malaria in the U.S. is extremely low, and the five patients are improving.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Johns Hopkins infectious disease expert Dr. Emesh Adalja tells CBS that it's a good move to wear mosquito repellent for many reasons, but there's no need to overreact to a handful of cases.
--:-- Dr. Emesh Adalja: It's not a generalized worry for the whole country. There are certain areas where malarious mosquitoes have always resided and they just got lucky and bit somebody with malaria and then have been able to transmit it.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And quickly to sports for a couple of major stories. Simone Biles will return to competition for the first time since the Tokyo Olympics.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The gymnast pulled out of that Games, citing mental health concerns. There was speculation that she might retire, but the four-time gold medalist is on the roster for the U.S. Classic in August.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And in Major League Baseball, a very rare thing happened last night. Grounded to third! Donaldson has it! There it is! Perfection for Domingo Hermann!
--:-- Shumita Basu: Yankees pitcher Domingo Hermann threw a perfect game, keeping every single Oakland A's batter from getting on base. That hasn't happened in more than a decade. And it's only the 24th perfect game in baseball history, going back to the 1800s.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Yesterday, we talked about some of the life stories and circumstances of the migrants on board the boat that sunk off the coast of Greece this month. Hundreds of people died.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Today, we're looking at investigative reporting on the Greek authorities' response. There are conflicting stories about what happened.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Migrants on board say the boat capsized after the Greek Coast Guard tried to tow it. The Coast Guard says it did not try to tow the boat and says people on board refused its offer of help.
--:-- Shumita Basu: CNN reviewed marine traffic data and spoke with survivors and activists who were in contact with people on board.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Activists said they repeatedly called authorities over the many hours the Coast Guard was monitoring the boat and asked them to rescue it.
--:-- Shumita Basu: One survivor told CNN through a translator what passengers saw in the moments before the disaster.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They decided to throw us a rope, so the guys at the front tied it. They towed us. The boat tilted to the right and everyone was screaming. People began falling into the sea and the boat capsized.
--:-- Shumita Basu: People couldn't get out from under the boat. He told CNN he can still hear their calls for help.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A UN special envoy told CNN that because this was a clear example of trafficking, putting lives at risk, Greek authorities had a legal responsibility to help.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It's the latest issue involving Greek government policies toward migrants arriving by sea.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Human rights campaigners have criticized the country for prosecuting volunteer rescuers working to save migrants from drowning.
--:-- Shumita Basu: According to the UN, so far this year, nearly 2,000 migrants have died trying to reach Europe by sea.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Washington Post reporter Louisa Lovelock, who we heard from yesterday, points out that discussions about responsibility for the migrant deaths shouldn't focus only on Greece.
--:-- Louisa Lovelock: We have to remember that all the government officials who have stood up in their home countries and said that they're very sorry for the deaths of these people are also responsible for the crisis of governance that had effectively pushed them out of those countries to seek another life.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's turn now to State of the State, our series where we zoom in on a state issue and talk about how it's impacting people who live there.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The place, California. And the issue is how it's dealing with the question of reparations for the impact of slavery and discrimination on Black Americans.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Today, a task force will put out an extensive report on the topic for state lawmakers.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Christine Maiduke covers California politics for The Wall Street Journal and told us about the project, which has been in the works for a few years.
--:-- Christine Maiduke: What they did was hire economists to quantify the value of harm that was placed on each person. For example, the harm caused by redlining or racist real estate policies, the amount of money that it cost Black Californians for over-policing and over-incarceration.
--:-- Christine Maiduke: And basically, you know, a team of economists came in and put a number, a monetary value to that. It adds up to more than $800 billion.
--:-- Christine Maiduke: Some people could be entitled to more than $1.3 million under the task force's calculations.
--:-- Christine Maiduke: The panel took personal testimonies into consideration.
--:-- Christine Maiduke: Last year, Jonathan Burgess told them about his great-great-grandfather, who was formerly enslaved. He was forced to sell his land to California for less than it was worth.
--:-- Jonathan Burgess: For any state building any state park any state institution Those properties should be returned to actual owners in leases enacted for 200 years and they pay all the back pay with restitution
--:-- Christine Maiduke: That would be fine for the Burgess family and any other family that's proven whose land was wrongfully taken through legislative practices that discriminated against descendants of slaves in California.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Burgess family are among many Black Californians hoping this report can have a real impact on state policies and possibly be a blueprint for other states.
--:-- Christine Maiduke: But as I think those who are really leading this effort and supporting the reparations effort recognize that checks in hand for Black Californians could take a long time if maybe not happen at all.
--:-- Shumita Basu: California state lawmakers are not expected to take action on reparations until January at the earliest.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're headed to Miami anytime soon, you might hear some things that'll catch your ear a little differently if you don't speak Spanish.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Someone hopping out of an Uber might say they just got down from the car. Or maybe you'll hear, my friend got married with her partner.
--:-- Shumita Basu: These are signs of a new English dialect emerging in the Miami area.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Florida International University linguist Philip Carter writes about this for The Conversation.
--:-- Philip Carter: He says this dialect has been developing since 1959, when hundreds of thousands of Cubans arrived in South Florida after the revolution.
--:-- Philip Carter: To get what's going on, you need to understand what linguists call a calc, as I explain on NPR.
--:-- Philip Carter: The calc is sort of a loan translation where you don't borrow the word, but you borrow the concept and you translate it into the target language.
--:-- Philip Carter: To go back to the example of get down from the car, which comes from the Spanish bajar del carro, literally get down from the car.
--:-- Philip Carter: So what happens is when speakers come into a new language context, they sometimes rely on their mother tongue or their home language.
--:-- Philip Carter: They lean into that as a source to help them get through acquiring the target language. and they literally just translate expressions.
--:-- Philip Carter: Carter says this happens a lot, especially when bilingual speakers move between cultures and places, influencing the language.
--:-- Shumita Basu: I guess the real message of the story is that every word has a history. Every sound has a history, and it is our history.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if you're already listening in the news app right now, stick around. We've got my conversation with Evan Mandry about the fight to end affirmative action queued up to play for you next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: So sit back, enjoy listening to that, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
