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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Wednesday, October 20th. 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: Today, New York's mayor is announcing all city employees, including police officers, must be vaccinated against COVID-19. In New York and other places across America, some cops and their union leaders have pushed back on vaccine mandates. So what do you do when the people whose job it is to enforce the law don't follow vaccine rules themselves?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Millions of us are in this situation right now because while cities and counties around the country have vaccine mandates, some police officers are saying, "I'm not getting that shot." Dr. Anthony Fauci talked about this on Fox News Sunday. More police officers die of COVID than they do in other causes of death. So it doesn't make any sense to not try to protect yourself as well as the colleagues that you work with.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: USA Today is reporting in Chicago, the police union and mayor are publicly feuding over a mandate. City employees are required to report their vaccination status, but the police union president told officers not to do it. As of yesterday, the police superintendent says one-third of the Chicago PD hadn't reported their status. The leader of the Baltimore Police Union also told officers not to disclose their status. And then there are the cops in Oregon, Seattle, and Massachusetts where officers are resigning and where legal fights over vaccine mandates are already underway.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This tension it putting community leaders in a tough position. The Lake County Sheriff says he's not going to force deputies to get vaccinated. He's worried that might cause him to lose 10 percent of his workforce overnight.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Negotiators are working to free the 16 Americans and one Canadian being held hostage in Haiti. This group includes five children. The kidnappers are demanding a million dollars per hostage. Jacqueline Charles covers Haiti and the Caribbean for the Miami Herald.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: Well, there's been a surge in kidnappings in Haiti for several years now. But what we are seeing here is since the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise in July, the number of cases are now starting to skyrocket.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: Charles explains this country is being overrun by gangs who are terrorizing people. It's gotten so bad, foreign aid is being blocked. Since June, you have at least 19,000 Haitians, men, women, children, who have been forcefully displaced from their homes at the southern edge of Port-au-Prince. And the United Nations has gone on record as saying that the violence is preventing aid trucks from being able to get through.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: Charles says what's happening there is just not sustainable. If violence continues, Haiti could devolve into a rogue state, a country run by gangs. And, you know, while the kidnapping of Americans is making headlines, Charles points out Haitians deal with this danger on a daily basis. Hundreds of Haitians have fallen victim to kidnapping including Haitian Americans who are citizens of the U.S.
--:-- Jacqueline Charles: It hasn't really garnered the attention it deserves. So, you know, really the hope is that once these individuals are released, what next? Do you sit and wait for the next incident of kidnapping or will there be more of a proactive stance in terms of trying to assist this country that is just 700 miles off the coast of Florida?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Surgeons attached a pig's kidney to a human patient, and the organ worked. This is a major medical achievement. It's an early step that could eventually lead to using animal organs to save human lives. USA Today takes us inside this operation, which scientists and doctors at NYU Langone had been working up to for years.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The patient was a woman who had been declared brain dead. She wanted to donate her organs, but didn't qualify. Her family agreed taking part in this study would be a way that her passing could possibly help other people. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are on the organ transplant waiting list. Most need kidneys, and thousands die every year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Animal organs offer hope, but there are risks. One concern is disease transmission, so the hospital took special precautions. A big question for the operation was, would the woman's body reject the organ? Researchers tried to get around this by using a special pig. Scientists genetically engineered it to make it less likely that its organ would trigger a dangerous immune reaction in a human.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The kidney managed to filter the woman's blood, and it didn't trigger a reaction. The surgical team leader said results were better than expected. Animal transplants are a very long way off from widespread use, but this breakthrough operation could give hope to the many people waiting for transplants.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: An unusual rescue mission is in the works for dogs trapped by a volcano. They're stranded in Spain's Canary Islands. The hot gas makes it too dangerous for helicopters to fly over the area. So now, rescuers are sending in drones. They've already used drones to drop food to keep the dogs alive and check on them via cameras.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But for weeks, nobody's found a way to get them out. Now a drone company has the green light from authorities to try something different. It's rigged a big, customized drone with a net. CNN explains why this mission is so hard.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They'll need to trap each dog and then fly it out. Battery life is a huge issue here. The drone cannot run out of juice while flying a dog over hot lava, so the pressure is on. The drone operator only has four minutes to trap a dog, then another four minutes to fly it out.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Test missions are already happening, and after weeks of being alone, the dogs are scared and hungry. Rescuers are hoping the dogs will see the drone as a friend and accept a lift out of the hot zone.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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. I'll talk to you again tomorrow.
