--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Wednesday, July 28th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post is reporting President Biden is expected to announce all federal employees must get a COVID-19 vaccine or face regular testing. The actual announcement is set for tomorrow. It's possible details could change before then. If this COVID policy is implemented, it could impact more than 4 million federal workers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What you're seeing here is how governments and businesses are getting tougher about vaccinations as the Delta variant spreads. Already this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to require vaccines for frontline health care workers. California and New York City are also mandating vaccinations or repeated testing for employees. Many hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic, are making vaccines mandatory for their workers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think this week was absolutely a tipping point. That's Dan Diamond. He's a health reporter for The Post. We talked with him about why this push didn't happen sooner.
--:-- Dan Diamond: These vaccines had only been authorized through an emergency process by the FDA. That means that there was more evidence than not that the vaccines worked to fight the COVID pandemic. But there were still questions about their long-term efficacy, still more data to be collected about how they responded in various populations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A second issue is that we know how politicized the entire COVID response has been. So to come out of the gate with a mandate might not have been effective, might likely have backfired. And then I think the last factor has been the legality of this. There is precedent in the courts for mandates around public health, mandated vaccines. But because of the emergency use authorization for these coronavirus vaccines, the case law wasn't settled.
--:-- Dan Diamond: We now know there have been several federal judges who have upheld early vaccination mandates. That's further empowering those who are on the fence to come out and support them. And Diamond says earlier mandates ultimately achieved what they were trying to do, get more shots in arms. There's a hospital named Houston Methodist down in Texas. It put on a vaccination mandate this spring. By the deadline that they had set this summer, 97% of staff complied, got vaccinated. 2% of staff went and got various exemptions, maybe for medical reasons. However, about 150 people very loudly and notably said they did not want to get vaccinated. They resigned, they were fired, some sued.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So there is going to be some loud dissent for sure. But with confirmed infections across the country quadrupling in July, Diamond reports we may be on the verge of a nationwide pivot on whether to mandate vaccines.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Restorative justice is a form of conflict resolution. It gets offenders and survivors to face each other. And the goal of these meetings is to repair harm rather than punishing the person who may have caused it. It aims to address issues that prison sentences alone don't typically resolve, like how to confront pain and move past it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, with cases involving domestic and sexual violence, there are only a handful of programs across the country that have tried this approach. New York Magazine brings us the story of Cheryl and Troy. They didn't know each other before they agreed to a restorative justice method. See, both of them had been in abusive relationships. Troy as an abuser and Cheryl as a survivor. And they both found themselves repeating painful patterns that they'd spent decades trying to break away from.
--:-- Amelia Schombeck: Cheryl is somebody who grew up in a context with a father who was abusive and in her own life went on to have a number of relationships where she was severely abused by her partners. And Troy was somebody who from a young age had problems with alcohol use and was in relationships that he defines as abusive where he was abusing his partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And both of them wanted very badly to live their lives out differently and had tried many different things. Cheryl had been to therapy, but just found that it was kind of like a lonely road for her. And Troy had actually been in prison after choking an ex-girlfriend. And once he was there, started doing Alcoholics Anonymous type work. But still, like, staying in recovery was a real struggle for him.
--:-- Amelia Schombeck: So they both got connected with an organization in Oregon called Domestic Violence Safe Dialogue. And that organization facilitates different kinds of restorative justice, one of which is called a Surrogate Victim Offender Dialogue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What is success in terms of these dialogues? I spent a lot of time on the phone with the founder of this program, whose name is Carrie Banks. And she talked a lot about how, like, you can never fully have justice in, you know, in any case because something has been broken or something has been sort of taken. And the goal for the program was to try and just find what justice meant to each individual survivor who was taking part.
--:-- Amelia Schombeck: So she talked about people who really found it important to have something that she called financial justice. So like maybe they needed their ex to pay child support. Maybe they needed their ex to pay for therapy. Like that could be part of the consequences that were determined.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other cases, she talked about how going into these dialogues, survivors would have very clear ideas of what they wanted. Sometimes they just wanted to be able to go in there and have a conversation and know that somebody was able to change, like know that somebody was able to take responsibility and change. Other times they wanted to be able to go in there and ask certain questions.
--:-- Amelia Schombeck: That was very much the case for Cheryl, who I wrote about. She had had questions about whether the abuse she had experienced was her fault. And those questions had been circling in her head for decades. And she wanted to go in there and be able to ask somebody those questions and get answers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What was the answer to Cheryl's question? The question she really wanted to ask Troy was, when you were harming someone, what were you thinking about her? And Troy was sort of able to tell her, I actually wasn't thinking about her. I was just thinking about how angry I was. He talked about how it was actually his own alcoholism and his own issues that were kind of overwhelming him in that moment. And for her, it just clicked like, oh, it didn't have to do with me, actually.
--:-- Amelia Schombeck: For Troy himself, he really, it was very important for him to feel like his debt to society had been paid. He used those words, actually. He, you know, he felt like he had been living with this thing that he wanted to make peace with. And when he was sort of involved in the legal system, he felt like it was in his best interest to sort of evade responsibility, right? Like that wasn't really allowing him to move forward.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Amelia Schambeck is a reporter at New York Magazine. Amelia, thank you so much for your time.
--:-- Amelia Schambeck: Thank you so much.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Her story in New York Magazine is available to News Plus subscribers as a narrated article. You can find it on the Apple News app. Just tap the headphones at the bottom to find our audio stories.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Arab Spring protests a decade ago began in Tunisia. And right now, the North African democracy is on shaky ground. Vox helps us understand the importance of what's happening.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: President Kayas Saeed has fired the prime minister and suspended parliament. His critics are calling it an attempt at a coup. But some of his supporters have taken to the streets to celebrate.
--:-- Sarah Yerkes: Vox explains how a key problem is all the different governments that have been in power since the Arab Spring. They largely failed to deliver significant economic change. And remember, income inequality and a lack of economic opportunities were at the heart of the original protests.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tunisians are also critical of how their government, and specifically the prime minister, handled COVID-19. The pandemic? It made the country's economic troubles even worse.
--:-- Sarah Yerkes: Vox spoke with Sarah Yerkes, a former State Department and Pentagon official who focuses on Tunisia. And she says we shouldn't write off the democratic experiment there just yet. There are many questions about how things will play out, of course, but she's not quite ready to lose hope for a democratic future in the cradle of the Arab Spring.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Simone Biles is not competing to defend her all title at the Olympics in Tokyo. USA Gymnastics said she pulled out of the event to focus on her mental health. The team says Biles may decide to participate in next week's individual events.
--:-- Jordan Childs: This comes after she pulled out of the team competition. The American women went on to win a silver medal in the team event. When Biles pulled out, I took her place in several events.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I asked her this morning, what was it like to have to step in for the best gymnast in the world?
--:-- Jordan Childs: It was definitely a little overwhelming considering that I was only supposed to do two events at the beginning. But, you know, I knew I had to do a job when it came to a situation like this because anything could be thrown at you in any circumstance.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I just had to put my feet into her big shoes and hope for the best. And, you know, I was just very excited. I was able to help out with the team and that I was prepared.
--:-- Jordan Childs: A while back, she actually gave me a little pep talk. She helped me through a lot of things that I was going through and she's like a big sister to me. And so I wanted to do the same with her. I wanted to return her favor and hope that I was going to make her proud.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Jordan, what are you guys doing to help Simone right now? I mean, there's only so much that we can do.
--:-- Jordan Childs: All we can do right now is just support her. I mean, this is her story to tell. And, you know, we love her. She's just going to take day by day. And, you know, we hope for the best.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there's only little things that we can do. I mean, we can give her talks. We can draw with her. We can watch movies with her. We can do whatever. But, you know, it's all about her journey and we'll just support her.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And she's quoted in a couple of publications as saying she pulled out in order for the team to shine.
--:-- Jordan Childs: What does that mean for you? I mean, when she meant by that is she just believed in us. She knew that we had the ability to pull through considering that, yes, she is like the leader of our team. And, you know, she had confidence in us. And that's a huge thing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's like our idol and she's like somebody that we look up to. So getting that information back and being able to actually succeed in something that we might not have thought we could have done. Like, yes, we might have had a little doubt in ourselves because we were just like, oh, my gosh, like we lost one. But, you know, she believed in us so much that we believed in ourselves even more.
--:-- Jordan Childs: And that's what she meant by that she wanted us to shine. And I feel like that's what we did. It was all for her. It was all dedicated to her because, you know, she's still part of the team. She's one of us.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you so much. Thank you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, be sure to check out some of our local journalism. We're rolling out brand new curated collections of stories from top news outlets in San Antonio, San Diego, and Sacramento. This expands what we're already doing in New York, Houston, L.A., San Francisco, and the Bay Area.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You
