--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Tuesday, November 2nd. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And 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: It's Election Day, and today, people in Minneapolis vote on the future of their police department. Ever since Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, this city has been the epicenter of the police reform movement. It's where calls to defund the police got so loud, it entered the national discussion.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 538 breaks down what's on the ballot in Minneapolis. If the measure is passed, the city's police department would be replaced by a new institution that goes beyond law enforcement, a department of public safety. Police would be a part of that institution, but this new department could also be responsible for dispatching mental health workers or social workers to some of the problems that police currently handle.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Minneapolis voters appear to be split on this issue. FiveThirtyEight cites polling from September that shows 49% of likely voters supported replacing the police department and 41% opposed it. But if you specifically look at Black voters, you're going to see more of them were opposed to replacing the police department.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Among the people FiveThirtyEight interviewed for this article are two black women, both leaders in their community. One plans to vote yes and the other no. While they both agree police misconduct and an uptick in gun violence are serious dangers to the community, they disagree about whether the ballot measure is the right way to bring about reform.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is going to be a closely watched vote. Questions about policing, public safety, and a rise in violent crime are being debated not only in Minneapolis, but across the country. The Washington Post explains how these debates are now key issues in city races all over the U even in liberal strongholds From city to city mayoral candidates are emphasizing law and order And according to a recent Pew poll, 47 percent of Americans want to increase funding for police. Just 15 percent want funding to be cut.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: President Biden is at the Climate Change Summit in Glasgow. Today, he's rolling out new rules to cut methane emissions. And global leaders are also pledging to end deforestation by 2030. Lots of the agreements being discussed at the summit are about setting goals for the future. But outside the conference, regular people all over the world are dealing with the reality of climate change right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The New Yorker takes us inside the world of the men and women who do the difficult work of cleaning up the mess left by climate change. A lot of rebuilding and cleanup is required after a flood, wildfire or hurricane tears through a community. Natural disasters, they're so frequent and intense these days that for big corporations, this work is now a multi-billion dollar business.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But when you zoom into the hands that are actually doing these critical and sometimes dangerous jobs, often you're going to find migrants with few worker protections. This article profiles one woman. Her name is Bayeliz Gonzalez. She's a 54-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker. She lived in Miami, but for years, she worked for big national cleanup companies that have sent her to places like Michigan in 2020, where she scrubbed mildew and hauled debris after flooding from Tropical Storm Arthur.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She was on the front lines of the cleanup after Hurricane Michael hit Florida in 2019. She remembers tearing out insulation without protective gear pieces of fiberglass getting cut into her skin This article highlights a pattern for these workers They say they mistreated bosses don pay them what they owed they're physically and emotionally abused, and because so many are undocumented, they say employers take advantage, threaten to report them to ICE if they complain.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Gonzalez is now working with an advocacy group called Resilience Force. They're fighting for fair pay and safe working conditions. And at the national level, they're pushing for a pathway to citizenship for workers who risk their health to get things back to normal after climate disasters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over the past few decades in America, the percentage of women who keep their last name after they get married has gone up. But for almost all heterosexual married couples who have kids, they give those kids their father's last name. The Atlantic has this interesting new look at how this came to be the norm in America, how it's not the case globally, and whether this might be changing.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Patrilineal surnames are actually a relatively new thing in the English-speaking world. In 15th century England, plenty of children were given their mom's or grandmother's last name. But that changed around the 18th century when laws effectively considered women the legal property of their husbands. That mentality carried over to the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But that's not a universal thing today. In Puerto Rico, Spain and Mexico, children usually receive both parents' last names. Icelanders' names don't work the way ours do. If you meet a guy in Reykjavik with the surname Helgeson, that means he is the son of a woman named Helga.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We could see things starting to change in America. While patrilineal last names are common in heterosexual marriages, same-gender couples are far more likely to give their kids both last names. And research has found these couples talked about this decision much more than heterosexual couples Things can change Data shows more Chinese women are passing their names on to their children The Atlantic points out the way things are in America might be more about inertia. People doing things the way their parents and their grandparents did.
--:-- Shamita Basu: No one's saying it's wrong to pass down the father's last name. But as more couples have these conversations, it might shift the country's norms.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So two icons of London streets are the red double-decker buses and those stately black cabs. And right now, the people who drive those black cabs may hold clues to understanding Alzheimer's. The Washington Post has this story. You've heard about the famous London cabbie exam, right? Since 1865, taxi drivers in London have had to pass an intense memory test to get fully licensed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They have to prove they can find the fastest route without a GPS through 26,000 streets in central London. There's this UK university that has a project called Taxi Brains. They scan the brains of drivers as they map out routes. Research shows the region of the brain involved in learning and memory appears to get bigger the longer drivers are on the job. And that same region shrinks in people with Alzheimer's disease.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One researcher says London cabbies have remarkable brains, and studying them can help develop better diagnostics to detect dementia earlier and treat people sooner.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
