--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Friday, July 2nd. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Shemitah Basu is off. 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: It could be more difficult to challenge local election rules under the Voting Rights Act. This is because of the latest Supreme Court decision. In a 6-3 vote, the court upheld two Arizona voting provisions. These are the same provisions which civil rights groups and Democrats argued disproportionately hurt voters of color. SCOTUS blog breaks down this ruling.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One Arizona regulation requires election officials to throw out any ballot cast in the wrong precinct. The other bars collecting and delivering someone else's ballot in most cases. Now, if you asked Democrats and civil rights groups, they would tell you these rules violated section 2 of the voting rights act. It prohibits racial discrimination in election practices.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A lower court had ruled that voters of color were unfairly burdened, and it found no evidence of fraud. The need to prevent fraud was how Arizona justified these rules. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion in this case.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And he says the unequal impact of these provisions on people of color was not significant enough to violate Section 2. He goes on to say, mere inconvenience is not enough to demonstrate a legal violation.
--:-- Nina Totenberg: This opinion renders the Voting Rights Act, quote, close to a dead letter. He interpreted the law as so narrow that it will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to challenge most of the provisions in the law.
--:-- Ian Millhiser: Yet in Vox, I write this ruling is a blow to voting rights but not an apocalypse. I'm a former federal court clerk, and I argue Alito's opinion is narrow enough that it only applies to a slice of voting rights cases. And restrictive state voting laws can still be challenged in some ways.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Biden administration is pausing federal executions. Attorney General Merrick Garland cited concerns about capital punishment's disparate impact on black people. He also stressed what he calls the troubling number of exonerations among people sent to death row.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Wall Street Journal explains how this reverses the previous administration's policy. Under President Trump, a 17-year moratorium on federal executions ended. In the final months of the Trump presidency, 13 people were put to death. That was the highest rate of federal executions in more than a century.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In a memo, Garland says the Justice Department is going to review its death penalty policies. Pausing federal executions is in line with President Biden's campaign trail rhetoric. He campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty and pushing states to end capital punishment.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center tells the Journal, while this reversal undoes damage caused by the Trump administration, it falls short of Biden's campaign promise. Repealing the federal death penalty requires Congress to act, but Biden can commute sentences.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Right now, there are around 50 people on federal death row. During the pandemic, people ordered delivery way more often. Now that restaurants reopening and dining out is a thing again, The Atlantic looks at just how much the coronavirus changed the way we tipped and whether our pandemic habits are here to stay.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Last time you ordered in or ate out, did you tip more than you might have before COVID-19? Your answer matters a lot to restaurant and delivery servers because they didn't get the same hazard pay and hero bonuses that other frontline workers got.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you look at it differently, each of us made a decision about their hazard pay every time we calculated how much of a tip we would leave them. On average, we've been tipping more. The Atlantic interviewed waiters around the U.S. and talked to the payment company Square. Its data shows the average restaurant tip rose about a full percentage point.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It peaked at 21% during the pandemic. In the past few months, that number dipped a bit. Still, it's well above the pre-pandemic norm. And The Atlantic explains how it looks like there's a big change in how we're treating delivery workers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Each reporter crunched data with a Cornell professor who's an expert on tipping. The numbers suggest before the pandemic, people only tipped for food delivery about half the time. But this year, that number got near 85%.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So how long is this generosity going to last? Well, the tipping expert says once tipping habits rise, they tend to stick. There's pressure on customers to keep up with the national trend. But the pandemic makes things so much harder to predict.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People could go back to their old habits as dining out becomes, you know, less novel. So for the first time ever, you can be anywhere in the world and listen to elephants rumbling out loud in African forests. Those sounds were recorded in the Republic of the Congo.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They just been made publicly available by Cornell Elephant Listening Project. National Geographic explains that this is part of an ongoing study to better understand how elephants behave and communicate in the wilderness.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These researchers have been recording the sounds of the rainforest in some places 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they say the released recordings are only a fraction of the more than one million hours of captured sound.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Elephant Listening Project also uses these recordings to keep track of poaching. It's pretty hard to mistake the sound of gunshots in the wild. Keeping an ear out for poaching activity in this Congolese national park helps enforcement teams adjust their strategies.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When the audio recordings revealed gunshots ringing out deeper in the park than rangers thought, they changed their patrol patterns. Years of audio recordings prove anti-poaching efforts really did deter criminals.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The director of the project tells Nat Geo for years now, he's been wanting to make these recordings more accessible to other people and researchers. The recordings let you hear not just elephants, but everything that lives in this rainforest from frogs to birds to chimpanzees.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And you can listen to the recordings for yourself. Links to this story and others that we mentioned today, they're in our show notes page. And don't forget to check out our new interview show, In Conversation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It airs tomorrow, this week. Shamita chats with Alison P. Davis. She profiled the writer Zola for New York Magazine. Zola got a lot of attention in 2015 from her viral Twitter thread. It's actually a very dark story, but the way that Zola presented it was one that was like darkly comedic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Zola's story is out as a movie this week, but Davis talks about how it almost didn't happen. Enjoy the holiday weekend. We'll be back with the news on Tuesday. If you have not heard,
