--:-- Yasmin Khan: Good morning. It's Tuesday, March 12th. I'm Yasmin Khan in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: On today's show, many parents and children separated at the border are still not back together. The work of a famous author gets published against his wishes. And why there's still so much progress to be made on equal pay around the world. But first, let's take a quick look at some other stories in the news, starting in Haiti, where Prime Minister Ariel Henry is preparing to resign.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Armed gangs have threatened to start a civil war if he does not. And in recent weeks, they've tightened their grip on the capital of Port-au-Prince, attacking the airport, main seaport, and other public buildings. Haiti has not had a president since 2021, and its National Assembly has been empty since lawmakers' terms expired last year.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Officials in the U.S. have pressed Henri to hold elections, but a senior official with the State Department told The Washington Post last week that Henri was showing a quote unwillingness to cede real power. Now, Henri says he will step down after the creation of a transitional council to select a new interim leader. And the U.S. announced yesterday that it will double its defense spending on a multinational security force in Haiti led by Kenya.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Now to a developing story in air travel. At least 50 people were injured on a Boeing 787 aircraft traveling from Sydney to Auckland when it suddenly dropped altitude mid-flight.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: A passenger on the flight described the moment for the BBC. It woke me up instantly, and I looked up towards the ceiling. My head was back, and my person sitting next to me was glued to the ceiling. And then I thought I was dreaming for a second. I thought, am I having a nightmare or something? And then he fell from the ceiling straight down on his face, three meters down to the floor.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The flight, operated by Latam Airlines, had more than 270 people on board. At least one person is in serious condition. There's an investigation underway, and Boeing says it's working to gather more information. Since the aircraft was made in the U.S., the head of the FAA says they'll be monitoring the situation closely as well.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And in related news, the Justice Department recently announced that it's opened a separate investigation into Boeing that's related to an incident from January when a panel on the side of a MAX 9 jet blew out in the middle of a flight.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And in Washington, President Biden has laid out his proposal for federal spending for the next fiscal year. The proposed trillion budget includes lower consumer costs for health care, child care, and housing, plus new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations to pay for those proposals.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Dr. Shalonda Young from the Office of Management and Budget spoke with NPR about Biden's plan ahead of its release.
--:-- Dr. Shalonda Young: This president has made very clear that he will not support extending tax cuts for those that make over $400,000. The top one and two percent should pay their fair share. And that way, that will pay for tax cuts for those that make under $400,000.
--:-- Dr. Shalonda Young: Biden's plan would cut $3 trillion from the national debt over the next decade. With Republicans in control of the House, the odds of it passing are low. So this budget proposal is more like Biden's economic pitch to voters on why he should be reelected in November and what he'd want to do if that happened.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: It's been several years since approximately 5,000 migrant children were separated from their parents under the Trump administration. And still today, as many as 2,000 are still not reunited.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: New York Magazine takes a close look at the slow and often painstaking work of finding kids still in the U.S. and then tracking down their parents who were deported to their home countries. Piper French wrote this story.
--:-- Piper French: The more you delve into this process, the more you realize just how much work it is to undo something that was done so quickly and carelessly.
--:-- Piper French: One big problem, I've found, has been record keeping. I mean, there's a few different aspects with regards to record keeping that made this really complicated. One was that there are a bunch of different agencies involved in separation and detention, and they didn't communicate with each other.
--:-- Piper French: They didn't have online systems that shared information. So the Biden administration created something called the Family Reunification Task Force in 2021 to set up some kind of system for finding families.
--:-- Piper French: To be clear, the government was compelled to reunify families by the courts. I've spoken to lawyers and advocates who've been working on this, and they say the success of this task force rests with individual lawyers and advocates, people who are willing to work for weeks or months to reunify a family, often based on flimsy information.
--:-- Piper French: Advocates here in the U.S. sometimes have to team up with people on the ground in Central and South America to find parents. For years, they were getting names. Sometimes it was only a name. They would try to track down a birth certificate, and then based on whatever information was available on the birth certificate, they'd just start calling and then start driving and drive hundreds of miles in some cases, going to often pretty remote villages, places where they didn't know anyone.
--:-- Piper French: And they would have to sort of do this diplomatic work of getting in touch with the community leader and explaining their intentions.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Under a court settlement, the government is allowing eligible parents to reunite with their children in the U.S. with permission to stay for three years under something called humanitarian parole.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: In her reporting, Piper heard from lawyers and advocates that the intensive search of finding kids and eventually tracking down parents was not even the hardest part of their job. Sometimes it was watching the actual reunion, because so many years have passed since families were together.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Reunifications are supposed to be this joyful thing, right? And in some cases, they really are. The Amadores who I profile in the piece, I watch a video of their reunification, and it's totally beautiful and happy, and they're all just hugging each other and won't let each other go.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: But that's just not always the case, because the trauma of the separation is very present. She says in some cases, children do not recognize their parents, and others are angry, believing it was their parents' choice to leave them.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Today, a new novel by the late writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be published in English. The book, called Until August, is highly anticipated. It's also highly controversial.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: NPR has the story.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: Towards the end of his life, my father was attempting to finish writing what would be his final novel about a married middle-aged woman and her secret sex life.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: He suffered at the time with debilitating dementia and was struggling to make the novel work. He apparently attempted multiple versions before he finally gave up and declared that he never wanted the book to be published.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: In fact, he instructed his sons to destroy it. Shortly after, in 2014, he died. Now, 10 years later, his sons have gone against their father's wishes and published the book.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: We concluded that the book, though unfinished, made a lot of sense and was very moving.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: That's one of his sons, Rodrigo, speaking with NPR last week. Rodrigo described how Alzheimer's robbed his father of the ability to assess the quality of his work or even recognize it.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: Often he would sit down to read one of his own books and couldn't make a sense of it. And it wasn't until he reached the last page and saw his picture in the back cover that he realized, oh, this is one of my books. And then he started to read it again.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Friends of Garcia Marquez and the publishing community have been divided over whether his sons made the right decision.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Fellow Nobel laureate Salman Rushdie raised concerns about the implications of publishing new work from an author without their consent.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: I'm really worried that something has been authorized which should not have been authorized.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: The book editor Cristobal Pera argued that the strong female protagonist from Until August makes it a good addition to his late friend's catalog which includes books like 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: Garcia Marquez's son, Rodrigo, says he and his brother understand that people may feel uncomfortable with their choice, but they believe they made the right decision.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: We are speaking for our father because he gave us permission to speak for him. Is there some betrayal? Yes, of course. This is not the last wish of an aging writer.
--:-- Rodrigo Garcia Marquez: But he says he hopes this final book will delight readers so much that their father will forgive them, even if they made the wrong call.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Finally, today is Equal Pay Day, one of the more sobering days on the calendar, because it's a reminder of how much longer women must work to earn what men do.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And places around the world still have a ways to go to close the pay gap, according to a recently released global study.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The World Bank found that not a single country offers women the same opportunities as men in the workforce, and that the gender gap is even wider than previously thought.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: So is the legal protection gap. For the first time, this report measured the impacts of workplace child care and safety policies on men and women, and researchers found, on average, that women had far fewer legal protections in the workplace than men.
--:-- Taya Trumbich: One of the things that we're trying to really emphasize is that it's important to write strong laws that legislate towards gender equality, but it's also important to invest in the institutions and systems that implement those laws.
--:-- Taya Trumbich: And then to also understand, are those outcomes being achieved that the law is intended to achieve?
--:-- Taya Trumbich: Globally, women earned just 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Many will argue there's a moral imperative to making equal pay for equal work a reality, but there are also real financial incentives to do so.
--:-- Taya Trumbich: According to the report, closing the gap could raise the global GDP by more than 20%.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around. We have a narrated version of the New York Magazine article on family separations that we talked about.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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--:-- Yasmin Khan: Music.
