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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Wednesday, March 17th. 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: For life to get closer to normal, a key group of Americans still needs to get the COVID-19 vaccine. I'm talking about children. And that testing is underway.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The FDA requires separate trials when developing vaccines for kids. And that's because they have immune systems that are still developing and they might respond differently than adults.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the past few months, kids 12 and up have been participating in Pfizer and Moderna trials. And this week, Moderna started trials for kids 11 and younger.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Hearing about testing vaccines on kids may have you thinking about how safe these tests are for children. National Geographic explains...
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--:-- Meghan Egbert: ...my daughters told the Idaho TV station KTVB that they're doing this because they just want life to get back to normal. If us helping them figure out if this vaccine will work can speed up the process, then yeah.
--:-- Zoe Campbell: 15-year-old Zoe Campbell feels the same way. She and her 12-year-old sister are also taking part in a Moderna trial. Zoe spoke to Boston's WGBH.
--:-- Zoe Campbell: With the pandemic, a lot of things feel out of our control. So to be part of that process of making the vaccine available for kids, I thought was really, really cool.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal reports federal health officials have signaled that if these studies show positive results, middle and high school-aged kids could start getting shots as soon as this fall with elementary children following early next year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Law enforcement officials said today the suspect in the killing of eight people at massage parlors in the Atlanta area has confessed to the shooting. Authorities say this man claims he had issues with sexual addiction and that he's denying the shootings were racially motivated.
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--:-- Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant: We are still early in this investigation, so we cannot make that determination at this moment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Even though investigators are not calling it a racially motivated crime, the shootings are adding to existing anxieties in Asian American communities because of a spike in violent anti-Asian incidents during the pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Overnight, the group Stop AAPI Hate said regardless of the motivation behind these shootings, there's a lot of fear and pain being felt by the Asian American community.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As the news of the killings spread last night, law enforcement around the country took action. In Georgia, police stepped up patrols around businesses like those attacked. The New York Police Department counterterrorism unit says it's deploying more officers in Asian American communities too.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The new cover of Bloomberg Businessweek has one question on it. Is America's tax code racist?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The cover story profiles the work of Dorothy Brown. She's a law professor at Emory University, and years ago she was a tax attorney. She also worked on Wall Street and in the first Bush administration.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: And like a lot of her colleagues at that time, she thought of the tax code as something that was colorblind. But in practice, she kept seeing examples of where things just didn't work out that way.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: Brown's research looks at how the tax code fosters racial inequality. Take homeowners, for example. The existing tax code gives them so many advantages. Mortgage interest is deductible. Gains on a home sale can be largely tax-free. Renters don't get these benefits.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: And when you consider that renters are disproportionately Black, the effect is a tax code working against Black families. Black Americans are less likely to own homes, and they're more likely to take on more student debt.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But that kind of borrowing doesn't get much help from the tax code. Most interest on home loans is tax deductible, but hardly any interest on student loans gets the same treatment.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: There's also the impact of what Brown calls occupational segregation. Black workers are less likely to have jobs with 401ks, so they miss out on tax breaks for retirement savings. And the rise of gig and contract workers seems to be making that disparity even worse.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: Brown has spent a lot of time thinking about how to close this gap. One thing she wants is for politicians to change the tax code to cut out exemptions for gifts, inheritance, and property sales. Those things tend to favor white families who have more legacy wealth to pass on.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: And she'd like to see an annual tax credit for all families whose wealth falls below the median.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This story is such a sharp reminder of the difference between income and wealth. Yeah, they are related, but not the same thing.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In recent decades, Black families have made strong income gains, but the typical white family is still eight times wealthier. That's the same size gap as in 1983.
--:-- Dorothy Brown: According to Brown's work, the tax code is a big reason why.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Back in the 1960s during the Cold War, the United States embarked on a covert mission to build an underground base on Greenland. The idea was it would be a place to house nuclear warheads within striking distance of the Soviet Union. It was called Project Iceworm.
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--:-- Walter Cronkite: Men will stay behind here, in their city under the ice, to continue man's battle against nature, against one of the elements that in large part is still a mystery to him. He has brought his greatest scientific achievement, power from the atom to the very top of the world. But can he live here? Can he stop the crushing force of the ageless ice?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The answer turned out to be nope. The ice shifted, tunnels collapsed, and the government abandoned its camp. But all these years later, Project Iceworm may be contributing to a pretty huge scientific breakthrough.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post explains, frozen soil collected during the military operation was recently analyzed. They were remains of ancient plants from a million years ago, which, in geologic terms, is the not-so-distant past.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The soil fragments suggest there was a time when ice did not cover Greenland. This is really significant, because if the ice melted before, it could do so again.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, this could have major implications for how we think about man-made climate change. It means Greenland's ice sheet, which is the biggest reservoir of ice in the Northern Hemisphere, could melt significantly with even a small increase in global temperature.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Scientists' current projections indicate we're already on track for melting ice to raise sea levels by three feet by the end of the century. As one researcher put it, we now understand where Greenland's threshold is, and humanity is pushing it.
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--:-- 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, including that Bloomberg Businessweek story about racial bias in the tax code. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.
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