--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Wednesday, December 2nd. 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: Before we jump into our main stories today, first, a few updates from a busy day yesterday at the Justice Department. U.S. Attorney General William Barr says there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud despite President Trump's continued and baseless challenge of the election results.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Barr gave an interview to the AP yesterday, and up until then, he'd been absent from public view.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other news, newly unsealed documents show that federal investigators are looking into possible bribes in exchange for presidential pardons. To be clear, there's a lot we don't know about this investigation, including who was involved or if the president knew about the alleged bribes. We'll continue to follow this story as it develops.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Vaccinate health care workers and people who live in nursing homes first. That's what a key COVID-19 advisory panel in the U.S. recommends.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It met yesterday, and distribution could start soon as long as U.S. regulators approve the vaccine. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom just approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. That makes the UK the first Western country to give emergency authorization for a vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The ability to access and distribute a vaccine will be a key factor in whether countries can recover from the health and economic damage of the pandemic. But there are other factors, which Bloomberg has pulled together into what it calls the COVID resilience ranking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New Zealand tops the list. As for the United States, it clocked in at 18th. The UK is 28th, by the way.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The way that Bloomberg measures resilience is based on 10 metrics. Access to a vaccine is one of them. Also, how robust the testing system is, the mortality rate and how severe their government imposed lockdowns are.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the big takeaway here is the countries doing the best are not necessarily the wealthiest ones. They're the ones with strong social trust and cohesion. Bloomberg's top five also include Japan, South Korea and Finland. A common thread, they all places where people tend to trust their government.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What this means is that when the government asks citizens to do things like wear masks or stay at home people actually listen. They follow those guidelines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many of these top countries heavily invested in public health infrastructure, too. This better positioned them to take steps like rolling out quick and widespread testing and contact tracing.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And just compare that to some of the world's biggest democracies. We mentioned earlier the U.S. is pretty far down the list. So are the U.K. and India. Unlike some of those higher-ranked countries, people in these countries may be less willing to listen to health guidance that comes from the government or public health officials.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg points out if it weren't for the Trump administration's focus on funding vaccine development, the U.S. would slip 11 spots lower on its list to 29.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Do you know a kid who's been struggling since the pandemic started? It seems like we all do. Many kids are feeling more unstable, lonely, and isolated right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And according to ongoing research, these experiences could stay with them for life and affect their mental health for years to come. Lisa Miller writes about this for The Cut at New York Magazine. You can also listen to this article, by the way. It's available as a narrated story in the audio tab of the Apple News app.
--:-- Lisa Miller: I spoke with a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon. His name is Philip Fisher. He's been surveying parents to track how their families are coping with lockdowns and disrupted schooling.
--:-- Philip Fisher: There's this idea at the heart of parenting psychology called serve and return. Your baby cries. That's the serve. You pick them up. You feed them. You comfort them. That's the return.
--:-- Lisa Miller: But now, months into the pandemic, parents are just tapped out. And more and more kids are serving, but getting nothing back.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One Arizona parent told Fisher, I'm exhausted. It's hard to get out of bed every day and go to work. I want to yell at my son all the time. And it's not his fault.
--:-- Shamita Basu: People have managed to raise kids in spite of all kinds of disasters and tragedies, storms and wars. Miller writes, it's hard to compare parenting through today's pandemic to other periods in history. But there one through line. If parents are stressed out their children will feel it.
--:-- Lisa Miller: One paper from Harvard found a strong correlation between parents' mental health and their children's mental health during the pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A Harvard researcher says based on studies of how kids responded to tumultuous events in the past like major hurricanes and the September 11th attacks, it's fair to predict about half of today's kids will be fine. Around 20 percent of them are showing symptoms of high distress that'll fade with time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of kids could experience lingering effects of living through the pandemic, like PTSD. And for the most vulnerable kids, the ones without adequate supervision or who are living in abusive homes, the pandemic is making a lot of them unreachable.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The stresses they face today can lead to long-lasting cognitive delays, learning challenges, aggression or numbness.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As Miller writes, this period, like a war, will end. And like a war, its effects will linger too.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A company called DeepMind was already famous for creating the artificial intelligence program that beat human grandmasters in games like chess and Go. But now this research lab is doing more than mastering puzzles. It's tackling a scientific mystery that's eluded researchers for more than half a century.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This story is all about proteins, which are the core building blocks of life. Proteins can fold themselves into complex three-dimensional shapes. The Guardian calls it a form of molecular origami.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I love their characterization. A protein shape determines its function. So understanding how a protein folds lets us begin to understand what it does.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, armed with this information, scientists can, in theory, more quickly develop drugs that target certain proteins and enable your body to fight a disease. Everything from how insulin controls blood sugar to how antibodies fight the coronavirus depends on protein shape.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And scientists have been discovering new shapes one by one through meticulous lab work that usually takes years. And now it looks like AI has cracked the code.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Guardian reports DeepMind developed an AI tool called AlphaFold. And at the Protein Olympics which yes there is a Protein Olympics AlphaFold beat out all the other computer programs to quickly analyze different protein sequences and predict their structures.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That tool is now being rolled out to researchers who are working on developing medicines for malaria, sleeping sickness, and leishmaniasis. And experts are hopeful this is just the beginning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let me tell you what there is to do in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There's the Gilcrease Museum, the city's most historic cultural institution. The Woody Guthrie Center, the singer-songwriter was an Oklahoma native.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And if it's a nice sunny day, maybe you just want to take a walk through Woodward Park. If this all sounds like stuff you want to do, well, the city of Tulsa might just pay you $10,000 to move there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tulsa is one of a growing number of American cities enticing people with all sorts of benefits to get them to relocate there. Other places have tried stuff like this before to help drive economic growth. But now Fox Business reports on how there's a new pandemic twist.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: With so many more people in the U.S. working remotely, more people can move and still keep their careers. And some places are trying to lure them away from big, expensive cities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, the idea is people who move get to enjoy a lower cost of living, maybe trade up from a cramped apartment to a house, and the places they move to get revitalized after new people who are generally highly educated and high earners move in and start paying taxes.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you're looking for something more coastal than Tulsa, Savannah, Georgia will kick in a couple grand for moving expenses. If those places are not quite your speed, Topeka, Kansas is offering $15,000 to new residents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And these programs typically require a time commitment before they pay out. So if you just want to go and return to your current city once COVID-19 is under control, this may not be for you. Don't do that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But the offers are attracting a lot of folks. According to Fox, some programs are so popular, they had to stop taking applications because they're just too full.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of this week's audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
