--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, August 5th. 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: First, just a quick look at some big news on a deal to move ahead on the Democrats' climate and health care spending bill. Senator Kyrsten Sinema is now on board. To get there, Democrats agreed to scale back some taxes, but also add a tax on stock buybacks. The bill is now expected to pass and eventually be signed into law by Biden. You can read more on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Monkeypox is now a national public health emergency in the United States. Health Secretary Javier Becerra says the government is stepping up. We're prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus. And we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The medical publication Stab explains that this declaration isn't just for show. It gives the government additional powers, which could allow the administration to access more federal money. Critics say the U.S. health system hasn't moved fast enough on testing and vaccination for monkeypox. About 1.6 million people in America are considered high risk, but the U.S. only has enough supply to vaccinate about a third of those people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of the strongest critics of the U.S. response are in the LGBTQ plus community. NBC News spoke to longtime AIDS activists who say this moment reminds them of public health failures in the early days of AIDS. There's a particular critique about messaging. Getting it right raises complicated issues. Some AIDS activists don't like the fact that public health officials are basically saying anyone can get monkeypox. That's technically correct, but the current reality is this outbreak is largely spreading among men who have sex with men.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some in the LGBTQ plus community want more targeted messages and help for those most at risk. Public health officials have to walk a tricky line of sending a message without stigmatizing a whole community all while fighting an outbreak where test kits and vaccines are hard to come by.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The emergency declaration may be new, but for a lot of people on the front lines, monkeypox has been urgent for some time. Getting an organ transplant is a difficult and emotional process. Right now, more than 100,000 people in this country are on the waiting list. About 22 people die every day waiting for a transplant. That's why the latest reporting from the Washington Post about major problems in the transplant system is so important.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Todd Frankel is one of the reporters on this story. Todd Frankel: There were problems with testing. There were problems with accessing the right organs. There were problems with lost organs, either lost in the plane or sometimes they're thrown out in the operating room accidentally. So there was just a legion of problems.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A Senate investigation cited data from 2008 to 2015 showing that 70 people died because of mistakes in screening and matching donated organs. It's an unbelievable waste of a very scarce resource. The organs are in need, right? We have a shortage of enough livers and kidneys and hearts for the people who need them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post points out most transplants go successfully. Deaths and illnesses are rare. But given how vital these procedures are and how rare the organs themselves are, advocates say there are too many errors happening. Doctors who do these transplants say the system is badly broken.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A nonprofit agency called the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, has run the transplant network for decades. It's under fire for outdated technology that slows down the process and makes mistakes. So if you have the wrong blood type, your body is very likely going to reject the organ.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we had examples of, unfortunately, one lung transplant person who died when his body rejected the lungs. You know, parts that had to be removed, kidneys, livers, pancreas, all of the organs that basically were affected by these sort of errors. And they're unusable at this point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There was a case where two healthy kidneys were accidentally thrown in the trash. In another case an airline lost a kidney in transit. The investigation also uncovered several cases where transplanted organs had to be removed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Frankel told us one patient received devastating news after surgery. Nine weeks later, they were told, oh, by the way, your donor had a very aggressive form of brain cancer, and it's very possible that you will develop brain cancer as a result, which, as you can imagine, is someone who's just survived an organ transplant surgery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is incredibly bad and unfortunate news. Data show that about one in five donated kidneys in America never gets transplanted. That's about double the rate of some European countries. It's a lot of organs going to waste. UNOS says it disagrees with assessments that say its technology is out of date and says it's working to improve tracking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Frankel told us Congress is fed up. Senators held a hearing this week to grill the UNOS executives and to sort of get to the bottom of what was going on. And they're quite upset. Both Republicans and Democrats were quite angry with UNOS about how they were operating things.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Senator Elizabeth Warren said flatly they should lose this contract.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When you sit down to watch a romantic comedy, you pretty much know what you're signing up for. They're predictable, on purpose. They kind of fit a formula that's been around for hundreds of years where, you know, there's a meet-cute and then there's some kind of a conflict and then eventually the couple gets together.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Alyssa Wilkinson, senior culture reporter at Vox. Alyssa Wilkinson: Many of the movies out this summer are changing that formula. They're not just about couples. Some deal with the love between family and friends. I think we're seeing movies that address loneliness through stories about love and connection.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wilkinson recommends the movie A Love Song, about someone who's mourning her late husband and thinking about rekindling an old flame. Then there's Good Luck to You, Leo Grand. It stars Emma Thompson as a widow who decides to hire a young male sex worker on impulse. It a touching comedy that takes both characters to some pretty surprising places.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wilkinson also recommends a documentary called We Met in Virtual Reality. The whole movie was recorded in a VR platform. It includes interviews with people who felt disconnected from the world during the pandemic. And this film actually, I think, shows a lot of what the love stories of today are about, which is loneliness and connection, which I think is really something that we all, maybe, you know, after coming through the pandemic in a time of real profound loneliness for a lot of people and that hasn't really ended for a lot of people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wilkinson says many of the movies she's writing about here are funny. They're definitely not romantic comedies in the old sense. They're much broader in how they define love. And she's hoping more filmmakers will go beyond the formula and keep exploring all kinds of love on the big screen.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you can't think about going to the movies without your movie theater candy, this next story, or should I say job opportunity, is for you. Fortune reports on a company that's hiring a chief candy officer. It pays around $78,000 a year. The job is to taste test more than 3,500 pieces of candy a month. So that's around 113 pieces of candy a day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yes, it's kind of a PR stunt, but it's a fun one. Applicants can be as young as five years old. The company promises extensive palate training and an extensive dental plan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And check out our weekend interview show, In Conversation. This week, I talked to Jim Dirigatis, the journalist who broke the R. Kelly story back in 2000. Kelly's been sentenced to 30 years for sex trafficking. And he's got another federal trial scheduled this month.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jim told me why he thinks it took so long for Kelly to be brought down. Well, this is a man who generated over the course of his career a billion dollars for Jive Records and a half billion for himself. And as long as the gravy train was rolling, no one was going to derail that gravy train.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Check out that weekend listen. I'll be back with the news on Monday. Thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thanks for listening to Apple News Today.
