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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, August 12th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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: In states across the U.S., COVID shots are expiring and being thrown away. I'm talking about potentially millions of them being trashed. Meanwhile, only about 1% of all manufactured doses have gone to low-income countries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of people are asking, why doesn't the United States send unused shots to other countries? NPR explains it's just not that easy to do.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are a few different obstacles in the way. First, a state can't just send leftover doses directly to another country. They need federal permission.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we've talked a lot about how tricky it is to transport these vaccines, to store them and keep them at the right temperature.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One expert NPR spoke with worries pulling doses back from states comes with all sorts of new risks. There are also legal concerns. Some drug makers worry about international liability issues.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Those issues are real, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating when states throw away unused vaccines.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In North Carolina, more than 500,000 doses could expire at the end of this month. Alabama recently threw away 65,000 shots.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The health secretary of Arkansas told NPR, after all the work that went into getting these vaccines made, it's disappointing to see many people in this country not accepting them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's why one law professor NPR spoke to is arguing federal officials need to work with states to get unused doses that are likely to be trashed to countries that need them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says it may be complicated, but cutting through red tape can save lives.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Pandemic working from home introduced us to the concept of the Zoom town. These are places where people who could work remotely moved during lockdowns.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When workers didn't have to commute to offices in San Francisco or New York, the ones who could afford to made new lives in places with scenery and fresh air.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Urban arrivals, they marveled at how much space they could get for their money in smaller towns.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But the folks who had already been living there year-round, they got worried about how the newcomers with their bigger budgets might impact housing prices.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post looks at this darker side of the pandemic real estate boom.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It takes us to Truckee, California, on the shore of Lake Tahoe. It's a popular vacation spot, and a lot of well-off people in the Bay Area have a second home there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last year, the median home price topped a million dollars. Property owners saw a good opportunity, and they sold.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And that sent longtime renters scrambling to find somewhere to live.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Flor Andrade lived in the area for 10 years. After the house she rented, sold. They found themselves trying to find housing in a brutal market.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They looked for two months, but couldn't find anything affordable. So they gave up and moved out of state.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I felt like I'm being squeezed out, like you're in the bottom of the barrel and you're being dumped.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As longtime residents leave Truckee, those remaining worry about the town's character.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post talks to a former mayor who hopes that this boom can settle into something more balanced.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Newcomers could create a healthier year-round economy, one that's not so dependent on ski season or summer tourism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But without more housing, people like Flor will have to think of Zoom towns as places to visit, not places to live.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Members of the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington state have lived at sea level for thousands of years.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But that's all changing. The Seattle Times explains how climate change is forcing them to move to higher ground.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last winter, ocean waves breached the seawall. Dozens of buildings in the village were flooded.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We spoke with reporter Linda Mapes about the impact.
--:-- Linda Mapes: The emotional toll is, I think, something that would be hard for a non-Indigenous person to even understand.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When you're talking about people whose family ties to a place go back for generations, uncounted, you are part of that landscape in a very real way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet Secretary, spoke to tribal leaders in the village about government efforts to help deal with the effects of climate change.
--:-- Linda Mapes: The infrastructure bill moving through Congress includes more than $200 million for indigenous people to make changes or relocate.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But being displaced from the land where your family has lived for generations is a tough pill to swallow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You're gathering places, you're hunting places, burying grounds, and those places were reserved for them and by them through courageous acts under the worst kind of duress and violence by their ancestors in the treaties.
--:-- Linda Mapes: So to now being literally chased out of those places, This time not by the cavalry, not by the U.S. Army, not by the settlers, but by a changing climate that's changing because of economic activity from which many of these tribes never benefited.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It is just yet another cruel twist in history in this country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not just about rising sea levels. There are other tribal communities on the coast of Washington, the Quileute, the Ho, the Macaw, that are also facing acute changes because of rising seas, storm surge, increasing rain, melting glaciers, loss of salmon.
--:-- Linda Mapes: Inland, we have tribes in Washington state that are losing forest land, that's burning up in uncontrolled wildfires such as we've never seen.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They're losing medicinal plants. They're losing berries. They're losing roots.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These are not luxuries. These are the things that Indian people need to live as Indian people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read more about this story and find other great reporting in the Read Local feature in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's where we highlight standout stories from local news outlets across the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When was the last time you heard natural silence? No man-made noises just the sound of nature?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, it's been a while for me too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Take a nice long listen to this recording. It was captured deep in a national park in Taiwan.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You hear the insects? Birds? Natural silence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It has a calming effect, and it's increasingly hard to find.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: CNN introduces us to an organization called Quiet Parks International.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Their goal is to identify and advocate for the last true quiet places on the planet.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It all starts with traveling to these places and recording.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It turns out, even when you go to remote corners of wilderness or deep in the oceans, it's hard to escape the rumblings of human activity.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Quiet is important because it's a natural resource.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Matt Mickelson. He records these places for quiet parks.
--:-- Matt Mickelson: For humans, we know that exposure to excessive noise is linked to all sorts of higher blood pressure, higher levels of stress hormone, higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the antidote to all that bad stuff is quiet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN was with Mickelson in Boundary Waters. That's in Minnesota. No cars or boats are allowed in this area.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's huge. Imagine a million acres.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But later, in his studio, when he went through the audio, he still found interference.
--:-- Matt Mickelson: You can see this kind of low-frequency buildup. And it sounds pretty subtle, but then it's a commercial jet probably flying really far away.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And then down here, these thumps are the sound of a grouse drumming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When an airplane flies over and the grouse is trying to call, they're competing for space on the frequency spectrum.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If it's too noisy, boundary waters might not qualify as a quiet park.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So far, this organization has certified three parks, and it's studying hundreds more.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The hope is to encourage preservation and appreciation for natural silence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Goodbye for now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Goodbye.
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