--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Monday, March 1st. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Shemitah Basu is taking the day 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: New York's governor is now the latest high-profile politician accused of sexual misconduct. Over the weekend, a second former aide accused Andrew Cuomo of sexually harassing her. And with the pressure mounting, the state attorney general is now hiring an outside law firm to do a full review.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These accusations are coming at the same time the governor's office is under fire for withholding data about COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes. The New York Times broke this story by publishing an interview with Charlotte Bennett. She tells the Times, last June, while she was working for the governor, he asked her if she, quote, had ever been with an older man.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Bennett is also alleging Cuomo told her he was open to having relationships with women in their 20s. Bennett was 25 years old at the time. According to Bennett, days after she reported what happened to Cuomo's chief of staff, she was given a new job within the administration.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She tells the Times that she didn't seek an investigation because she was initially happy with the transfer and wanted to move on, though she ended up leaving the Cuomo administration towards the end of last year. And she says even though she wasn't working with Cuomo directly, his presence was suffocating.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Bennett is the second former aide in days to accuse the governor of sexual harassment. The first was Lindsey Boylan. She was a New York economic development official. In a post on Medium, she writes, while they were on an airplane together, Cuomo suggested they play strip poker.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And at another time, she claims he kissed her on the lips without her consent. Since these allegations came to light, the governor appears to have changed how he publicly communicates. Once known for these long press conferences, the governor is now talking mostly through written statements.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He released one yesterday saying quote I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal He added some of the things I said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Cuomo says he's going to be cooperating with this investigation. A police officer or someone in the military might go through a training like this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my red dot on one. Understand? And I'll burn through, you know, three, four magazines doing a drill like that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And that's a decent little shooting on the move drill. Shooter one will be providing cover fire while shooter two picks up the victim and fireman carries him to the next station. More and more civilians, everyday people, are now taking part in these tactical training sessions.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Essentially, multiple-day courses where you learn how to shoot to kill. Journalist Rachel Monroe recently took some of these courses and wrote about it for Wired. Training exercises like this are taking place all over the U.S.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As Monroe details, there's this one resort in Texas where you can take part in a combat scenario inspired by the Iraq War. And at a facility in Florida, you can simulate taking down a mass shooter. A lot of the coaches and instructors are special ops veterans, former military personnel.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Who are looking to make a living off of their wartime experience This type of training is becoming increasingly popular at the same time that paramilitary culture in America is spreading fast All while the number of U.S. gun owners is growing Up by an estimated 8.4 million in 2020 alone.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Monroe started her training at a popular site in Arizona Which describes itself as quote, Disneyland for gun lovers. In these courses, Monroe and her classmates ran drill after drill, learning to aim for a person's chest, then their head.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She says she squeezed the trigger so many times her forearms started twitching Near the end of her training Monroe got really upset and started crying She writes she worried all this preparation for combat might make her classmates more likely to see opportunities to use their training
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And she sums up her fears in a phrase, quote, that by rehearsing for a situation, we were, in a small way, calling it into being.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Imagine being a doctor, spending long hours fighting the coronavirus in your hospital, and then going home to fight some more, only this time against misinformation about the disease that's circulating on the net.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A lot of U.S. health care workers aren't just working to treat COVID-19, they're also working to stop online misinformation about the virus. The Washington Post reports on this one doctor in Los Angeles, he'd been working for 12 straight days.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He got home after his shift and saw the news that anti-vaccine protesters had blocked access to a major COVID-19 vaccination site. He wasn't a big social media person before this, but something was changing.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He decided to step up. He tweeted that the protest was, quote, outrageous, treacherous, and an act of harm to the public. At this point, he and many doctors effectively have a side job, trying to stop people from spreading untrue information about the virus.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One doctor who works in a small town in rural Kansas told The Post, the misinformation is almost worse than the virus itself. When you're a doctor, you diagnose the problem and you treat it. But when it comes to untruths, what are you supposed to do with that?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: How do you convince people who really believe COVID is a hoax or vaccines are bad? That's not covered in med school. Speaking out also invites abuse. These healthcare workers are often getting attacked and harassed.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But these docs are not letting online abuse stop them from spreading the truth. As one said, if not us, then who?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A world without email After a long day at work you may want this By the way this is the title of a new book by computer scientist Cal Newport The New Yorker has an excerpt which looks at what scientific research says about how email can make you miserable and how to change that for the better.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Email taps into something primal. Think about how you feel when you hear this sound. You absolutely need to look. You gotta see who's emailing you. Blame it on evolution. Thousands of years have apparently wired us to crave connections.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's a powerful feeling, sort of like hunger. And it all means we feel real psychological pain if we think we're missing out on a chance to connect. This is why when you hear that alert for an email, a message, or a phone call, your brain wants to answer it right away.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's this one experiment where The researchers rigged it so people would be away from their phones but could still hear them ring. The rules were they couldn't get up to answer them and it was agony.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The study showed blood pressure and heart rate went berserk when people couldn't answer their ringing phones. Email has a similar effect. We can get so many emails that it makes us feel anxious to the point where our work can suffer.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One experiment used language analysis and found people under this type of stress and anxiety also write angrier replies. The author looks at attempts to reform things like company policies that block employees from getting email while on vacation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And Newport says, if we really want to solve our email crisis, we may need to write less and talk more. He's found people are happier and more productive when conversations happen in short team meetings instead of email.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Everyone gets their questions answered at once and knows where things are at. It's easier and more pleasant than those endless message threads.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories, including that Wired story about paramilitary training. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
