--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Friday, December 3rd. 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: We're hearing a lot lately about the new Omicron variant, including new measures that President Biden is rolling out. This new variant is cause for concern, but not panic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We knew there'd be cases of Omicron here in the United States, and it's here. But we have the best tools, the best vaccines in the world, and the best medicine, and the best scientists in the world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are still a lot of unanswered questions about Omicron, and scientists are working to answer them. But it could be helpful to think about the way our understanding of the Delta variant has evolved as a point of comparison.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post looks at how Delta was once the frightening new variant identified abroad. Now it's the dominant variant in the U.S.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Post speaks to scientists who say, while we wait for more clarity on Omicron, we have to be proactive about dealing with Delta. Their warning is Delta can still do a lot of damage.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And despite what we know about how easily it spreads, hospitals are saying they're under strain. The Post reports on a Minnesota hospital that's overwhelmed by the battle with the Delta variant.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Beds have been full of mostly unvaccinated patients for nearly two months now. Even if Omicron turns out to be less dangerous than feared, disease experts say we could still see a surge in COVID infections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Holiday travel and indoor gatherings during cold weather could help coronavirus spread. Vaccination boosters are just getting started, and tens of millions of Americans still have not gotten their first shot.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One health commissioner said, Omicron could be a good wake-up call, but health experts say, whether it's Delta, Omicron, or some future variant, long-standing advice is still the way to fight back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vaccines, masks in crowded indoor settings, and testing before big gatherings.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Prisons in Alabama are so crowded so dangerous the Department of Justice says the constitutional rights of people being held at these facilities are being violated every single day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's so bad, there could be a federal takeover of the state's prisons. Recent numbers show, this year, 10 people have been killed, 13 died in drug-related deaths, and 6 people died by suicide.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Liz Crampton is covering this story for Politico. She told us about the kind of violence investigators uncovered.
--:-- Liz Crampton: They reported that a prisoner was awoken by two men beating him with a sock filled with metal locks. Another was stabbed by another prisoner with makeshift weapons.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Correctional officers are threatened by some incarcerated people with knives. We're seeing arson, sexual assaults, overdoses on drugs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: State lawmakers are hoping to avoid a federal takeover by using hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus funds to create new prisons. But critics say building more facilities probably is not the right answer.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They point to the need for better maintenance, better staffing. There's also concern that new prisons will quickly fill to capacity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Alabama, there's this eye-for-an-eye attitude among politicians and the public. And that tough on crime attitude really has prevented comprehensive criminal justice reform from being implemented in the state.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Politico reached out to Alabama's governor for comment, along with the state's Department of Corrections and its Board of Pardons and Paroles. None of them offered a statement.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One Republican state lawmaker tells Politico it's going to take years to fix the overcrowding and staffing problems at Alabama's prisons.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: America is stuck in an ongoing child care crisis. It's something that costs the average two-parent family in the U.S. about 13 percent of their income. For single parents, it's more than a third.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But even though the pandemic exacerbated this problem, it's one that's been with us for a long time. I mean the story of America need for child care is the story of American women going to work.
--:-- Claire Suddath: I'm Claire Suddath, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. And she told me the lack of affordable child care has plagued working families for generations.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And oftentimes when we think about that, we think about the 1960s and 70s of millions of women entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the reality is that women have been working and holding jobs for as long as we have had jobs exist.
--:-- Claire Suddath: This problem hit hard during World War II when men left the country to fight overseas. 1.5 million moms of young kids entered the workforce.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: At first, there were some troubling solutions that they tried. There are plenty of historical accounts of what women did to come up with child care, but there was this one movie theater in Muncie, Indiana, that the proprietor of the movie theater kept complaining because women would drop their kids off to watch movies and then just leave them there all day or evening as they went to work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there was a factory in California where women had to come up with the solution of leaving their kids in their cars. And then they would park their cars under the factory windows so that they could lean out and look and check on their kids.
--:-- Claire Suddath: The federal government got involved, funding over 3,000 child care centers across the country. It, you know, fundamentally changed the concept of child care in America.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It was federally subsidized and federally run daycares for children. These types of centers didn't last.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the years that followed, the government made a deliberate choice to discourage women from working. In 1958, President Eisenhower criticized working moms.
--:-- Claire Suddath: And he said those women should reconsider how they were harming their children by not focusing on motherhood.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And so, you know, even though back then the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner laid out the facts and said, you know, women are entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They're not disappearing. This is a permanent feature of the American economy.
--:-- Claire Suddath: And he said, you know, unless something is done about this, we're going to have a serious child care shortage on our hands.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can hear more of my conversation with Claire Suddath on our interview podcast. In conversation, be sure to check it out by searching for the Apple News Today channel in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Major League Baseball players are locked out right now. Owners and players are far apart on issues of pay.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But there's an unusual wrench that's been thrown into the labor disputes. Listen to what New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonzo said back in June.
--:-- Pete Alonzo: I think that the biggest concern is that Major League Baseball manipulates the baseballs year in and year out, depending on the free agency class.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Alonzo was saying the league's been messing with the baseballs, and that could have all kinds of implications for players' stats.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, at the time, the Mets general manager laughed it off, saying Alonzo was getting sucked into conspiracy theories.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But it turns out he was onto something. Business Insider had this reporting earlier this week.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The league had announced ahead of the 2021 season that they were making balls lighter at their core to cut down on home runs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But one astrophysicist decided to do her own research throughout the season. She collected baseballs at different stadiums and took them apart and analyzed them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And what she found was evidence that there were two different baseballs floating around last season. Some had that lighter core with a little less bounce.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Others were heavier in the center and could be hit farther. Many players say they were not told about it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The league has since acknowledged. Throughout the season, it did use two different balls. It blamed the differences on production snags during the pandemic, saying it was short on inventory and needed to use some of the old baseballs, the ones with heavier cores.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These revelations come right when labor disputes are at a boiling point. And NPR has some good analysis on what this all means for negotiations.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: After all, changing the balls affects players' stats, which affects their pay. Players and owners have two months to reach a deal before the lockout would mess with spring training, which starts in February.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk with you again on Monday.
