--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning and welcome back. It's Monday, January 4th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them. It's 2021, Duarte. Time to write 2021 on everything. Happy New Year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's nice to be back with you. So nice to be back with you. I had a wonderful break, focus, and now 2021. Yeah, and it's coming in fast.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We have a very big week ahead of us in politics. So you know what, let's just jump right in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is a high stakes election in Georgia. A new Congress was just sworn in. And now we have this extraordinary recording of a phone call that the president made over the weekend. President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He's a Republican. Now, they spoke for about an hour, and the call was recorded. The Washington Post got a hold of the tape.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: During the call, Trump berates, flatters, and threatens Raffensperger, trying to change the results of the presidential election in Georgia. And at one point, you hear Trump talk about how to, quote, find enough votes to give him a victory in the state.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Democrats responded quickly and critically to this recording. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris called it a bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the president.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Congressman Adam Schiff, who led the impeachment proceedings, called it among the most despicable abuses of power and a danger to our democracy.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Politico spoke with legal experts who say what Trump said on this phone call could be illegal, a violation of federal and state statutes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Republicans didn't say much. And in fact, a dozen GOP senators are now supporting Trump's effort to undermine the election.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: On Wednesday, members of Congress will vote to certify election results. It's their constitutional duty. But Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are leading that group of a dozen senators who say they're going to object.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They're calling for a, quote, 10-day audit of the election results. Now, the facts here remain the same. The president's argument is grounded in unproven claims of election fraud.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: His cases have been heard and rejected in courts across the country. And it's pretty much a guarantee that what these 12 Republicans are doing will not change the results of the election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But still don't underestimate the significance of this move. The Washington Post calls it an open rebellion against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who pleaded with his Republican colleagues last month to stop debating the legitimacy of the election.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And just yesterday, all 10 living former defense secretaries published a joint op-ed in The Washington Post, saying the time for questioning the results of the election has passed and the military should not be used to solve election disputes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So let's keep the focus on Georgia, because the other big story playing out there this week is tomorrow's runoff elections for two Senate seats. And as you know, these races will determine who controls the U.S. Senate.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The New Yorker explains, turnout in Georgia typically falls during runoff elections, especially for Democrats. By some estimates, turnout during these types of elections falls by 40 percent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But The New Yorker points to three signs that turnout has been good so far for Democrats. First, more than three million Georgians already cast their ballots during early voting, and the data suggests that those ballots favor Democrats.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Second, so far, there have been a lot of first-time voters and a high percentage of Black voters. And third, early voting is down in Republican-leaning parts of Georgia, which is not very surprising.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Democrats tend to vote early and Republicans tend to vote on Election Day. We saw this play out in the presidential election, too. And Republicans are still hopeful that their base will come out in big numbers tomorrow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But President Trump could complicate matters. He's scheduled to hold a huge rally in Georgia tonight. And going back to that recorded call from the weekend, at one point, you can hear Trump suggest if state Republicans did not help him overturn the election, He could use his influence with the base to depress turnout.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You have a big election coming up, and because of what you've done to the president, you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. And because of what you've done to the president, a lot of people aren't going out to vote. And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. Okay? They hate it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So if you're hoping the pandemic will be over by the spring, just because we now have approved COVID vaccines, think again. The U.S. vaccine rollout has been slow and disorganized.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to New York Magazine, at the rate doses are being distributed, it's going to take seven years to reach herd immunity. Now the hope is it doesn't end up taking that long. Things should start picking up.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But that's just a sense of how far behind the country currently is. The goal was and this is what HHS Secretary Alex Azar said, to vaccinate 20 million people in America by the end of 2020.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In reality, we've only administered a little over 4 million doses so far. The Wall Street Journal reports people in Florida are waiting in lines for hours on a first-come, first-served basis for a vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In West Virginia, 42 people thought they were getting a vaccine, but instead got a COVID-19 treatment. One medical practice in Texas got 1,000 doses for its workers, but only two people signed up to get the shot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, three hospitals in Indiana didn't get any vaccines at all, so its health care workers had to travel to other facilities to get shots.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You know, my dad in New Jersey got a text message asking him to sign up for some kind of honor code system. And I was like, don't respond. That must be a spam text.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But that's literally how they're doing it in New Jersey. Yeah, I know.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As New York Magazine explains, this dysfunction is a straight through line in the story of how America has handled the pandemic. At every step, the federal government puts states in charge of figuring out what to do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And now we're watching states create vaccine distribution plans at the same time that they are implementing them. In some cases, states are turning to hospitals or even pharmacies and saying, you sort it out.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But it doesn't have to be this way. The United States has a really strong track record with vaccine administration programs. In 1947, New York City vaccinated 5 million people against smallpox in just two weeks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not like we haven't had months and months to plan for this moment. Look at Israel, because they're prepared and organized. That country is inoculating roughly 1% of its population every day.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And at that rate, Israel will have all of its people vaccinated against COVID-19 by March. The CDC said, don't do it, don't do it. But millions of people in the United States boarded planes over the holidays anyway.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And at least some of those travelers behaved badly. Yeah, the story is really upsetting. The Washington Post reports some passengers have been giving flight attendants a really hard time for trying to enforce mask wearing on planes.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Passengers are reportedly cursing them out, berating them, taunting them. These incidents were documented in 150 aviation safety reports filed with the federal government since the pandemic started.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In one report a passenger sneezed seemingly on purpose into a flight attendant's face when they weren't wearing a mask. Meanwhile, the LA Times reports some passengers boarded planes even though they appeared to be sick.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They might have been coughing, sneezing, even vomiting, but weren't necessarily kept off flights. Now, for a lot of airlines, you're supposed to report any symptoms before you board.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But there's no real enforcement here. It's just an honor system. Flight attendant unions and passenger rights advocates say that the problem here is that the federal government still hasn't issued uniform standards for airline safety during the pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There isn't even a federal mask requirement for airline travel or for any other forms of transportation. President-elect Biden says on his first day in office, he plans to sign an order mandating masks on planes, trains, and buses that travel across state lines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But for now, at least, it's up to individual airlines to set their own rules and the folks who work for those airlines to enforce them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Okay, I wanted to end today with a story that I read over the break and really enjoyed. You know how in the early months of the pandemic, pasta was one of those things that was really flying off the shelves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's like toilet paper, pasta, everything else was way below third on the line of things that we need to survive. So this one journalist at the publication Grub Street, Rachel Handler, pointed out pasta is more or less back in stock right now.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But one shape never really made a full recovery. And that's bucatini. So bucatini is this pasta that looks like a little pipe with a little hole in it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah. And if you think about how a pipe gets clogged, the sauce clogs the bucatini and it tastes so good. It's key. That clogging is key, right?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So Handler says it is clearly the superior pasta shape. So she spends 4,000 words trying to figure out what's going on with the bucatini shortage.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And look, she doesn't find answers to all her questions, but she does learn that, yeah, there is really a bucatini shortage. Yeah, I just really enjoyed reading this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The article takes this shared observation and like really seriously runs with it. It treats it like a mystery worth solving. It's a fun read and you might learn something about the global pasta supply while you're at it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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. We'll talk with you again tomorrow. Thank you.
