--:-- [Upbeat music fades out. Host Shamita Basu and Host Duarte Giraldino are introduced.]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, January 21st. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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: We talked yesterday on the show about the new CIA report on what's known as Havana Syndrome, a mysterious illness that's affecting American diplomats and other government personnel abroad.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This report says it's unlikely that Russia or another foreign actor is behind a worldwide campaign to target Americans with some kind of weapon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A CIA official told The Washington Post of more than a thousand cases. Most could be attributed to pre-existing medical conditions or environmental or other factors.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: To make sense of this report, we got in touch with Adam Entis. He writes for The New Yorker and has covered this mystery for years.
--:-- Adam Entis: He's been documenting the search for answers and speaking to people who are affected. The cause of their pain may be unclear, but their suffering is very real.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All of them experience what they describe as intense pressure in their head. This is very painful, they say. Sometimes they have serious vertigo. They may be very dizzy and have symptoms like that. And then it abruptly stops. And they're left with the headache. They're left with vision problems, ear problems, balance problems. And in some cases, several of the people that I spoke to, they never really fully recovered.
--:-- Adam Entis: Entis tells a story of this CIA officer who had flown to Cuba in secret back in 2017. She woke up in her hotel room with pressure in her head and heard this low humming noise. She later had trouble with her vision and balance.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, following this incident, the CIA closed its Havana station and the State Department pulled diplomats out of the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There was a theory among some people in the U.S. government that some kind of Russian microwave device might have been making these Americans sick. But others dismissed this. And some were skeptical that Havana syndrome exists.
--:-- Adam Entis: Antas says that was hurtful to many people who were sick. These people were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries. Some cases, they're really debilitated. And so they've had their careers destroyed in a lot of cases. They've had their health destroyed by this. They feel like people don't believe them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And he doesn't think this latest CIA report will be the last word on Havana syndrome. This conclusion is really not much of a conclusion. You know, in some ways, I feel like nothing has really changed. We kind of back where we were when I was working on my first stories on this in 2017 and 2018, which was you had a cluster of very dramatic episodes being described by CIA officers and some State Department officials. And it was a mystery then what happened to them. And it's a mystery now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In many wealthy countries, more than 80% of people are vaccinated against COVID. But you should know that in dozens of low-income countries, vaccination rates are still in the single digits.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NPR takes a global perspective here by looking at some of the countries with the lowest rates. Let's start with the African continent. The problem there is still supply. Wealthier countries bought up more shots than they can even use.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The World Health Organization's COVAX program was supposed to help, but it ran into problems because it relied on voluntary donations. And NPR reports that even when low-income countries do get doses, they often get less popular brands or vaccines that are about to expire.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Then there are other realities on the ground. Take Yemen, for example. The vaccination rate there is below 2%. For a lot of people who live in this country, the COVID vaccine is literally out of reach.
--:-- Shamita Basu: People in the northern part of this country would have to drive 15 to 20 hours through the mountains just to get a dose. Not to mention having to drive through war zones. Yemen's civil war has displaced 4 million people. And when war is ongoing and food and shelter are hard to find, getting vaccinated just doesn't fall into the top priorities.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Conflict and instability also can make vaccination campaigns difficult in places like Afghanistan, Syria, and Haiti. Other reasons vaccination rates are so low involve health systems that struggled even before the pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Storing and distributing COVID vaccines is hard to do without upgraded refrigeration systems and literally enough syringes.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In an opinion piece for NPR, a group of public health experts offer some ideas to improve vaccination rates in these countries. It includes ramped up production, improving logistics, and better communication to people who are hesitant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they argue we already have the resources and the knowledge to do all of this. They say any COVID-related death in 2022 represents the world's moral, economic, and political failure to distribute these resources fairly across the world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You remember when activists started getting a lot of attention for demanding that buildings named for Americans who had enslaved people be renamed. During that time, Washington Post reporter Julie Weil noticed something about the names.
--:-- Julie Weil: Many of them were former congressmen.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So she and her team launched this extensive effort to document just how many members of Congress enslaved people.
--:-- Julie Weil: I started with a list of every member of Congress who was born before 1840, meaning they would have been adults before the Civil War. And that was a list of more than 5,500 congressmen.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And she went through that list and looked at each one of them and researched, usually using U.S. census data, though all sorts of information, and ended up with this total number of more than 1,700 who were slaveholders.
--:-- Julie Weil: And another 600 or so who I just couldn't reach a conclusion about. Since the Washington Post story came out, readers have added more information. They've sent handwritten birth certificates for babies who were born in slavery on a congressman's plantation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They've sent newspaper ads that congressmen placed in the 1830s seeking people who had escaped from slavery. They've sent letters and wills and estate documents, all sorts of materials showing which of these congressmen were slaveholders.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Weill and her team plan to keep updating their database as they get more tips and documents. These records add new dimension to the way we understand some historical figures.
--:-- Julie Weil: One congressman, John Floyd, who ran for president in the early 1800s, is described in historical accounts as an opponent of slavery. He even proposed turning Virginia into a free state while he was the governor.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But this reporting from The Washington Post found Floyd himself enslaved people. In other cases, the Post found members who were personally benefiting from enslaving people and using their elected positions to uphold slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wael told us these lawmakers, they came from across the political spectrum, and many were major players in early U.S. history.
--:-- Julie Weil: The people who had the power to write American laws from the very beginning in 1789 when Congress began all the way into the 20th century, some of those people had the experience of owning other human beings.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And that experience shaped the laws that they crafted in ways that I think we're only beginning to really understand as we explore that history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post's work here is part of a broader movement to uncover parts of American history that have long been ignored.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: On this weekend episode of In Conversation, I speak with the journalist Nicole Hannah Jones. She's the founder of The 1619 Project from the New York Times Magazine and a Pulitzer Prize reporter.
--:-- Nicole Hannah Jones: Hannah-Jones has spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about the impact of slavery on America.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we tend to think of history as this happened on this day, at this time, and this is why. And it's settled. But that's not actually true, right?
--:-- Nicole Hannah Jones: And what the history that most of us learn is a manipulated history. It is a history in service of nationalism. It is a history in service of patriotism.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We have to understand that history as a field and our understanding of history is about interpretation and it's about power. It's about who gets to choose what we remember and who gets to decide what we forget.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can hear the full conversation with Nicole Hannah-Jones this weekend in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's not every day that a song from a kid's movie makes it to the top of the charts. There's a good chance you've been hearing this song recently.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Maybe you've been playing it, your kids are singing it. Maybe you saw someone doing a dance to it on TikTok.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: No, no, no, no. We don't talk about Bruno.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What's not to like about this song? The rhythm, the beat, the characters, all this multicultural life encapsulated in Colombian culture.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The song is We Don't Talk About Bruno from the animated movie Encanto. It's a certified hit, and it recently became the first song from a Walt Disney animated film to hit number one on Billboard's Streaming Songs chart.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, the popularity of the movie is also getting more people interested in Colombian culture and music.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Billboard speaks to the salsa artist Mauro Castillo about his new fans.
--:-- Mauro Castillo: He plays Felix Madrigal in the movie, and he's one of the many voices in the hit song.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of fans have noticed how the animated character in the movie even looks a lot like Castillo.
--:-- Mauro Castillo: Oh, my God. And that smile.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, Castillo says seeing the music become a global hit means a lot to him as a Colombian and as an Afro-Latino artist.
--:-- Mauro Castillo: He points out that the elements of the music come from all over Latin America, not just where he's from.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Plus, there's rap, R&B, pop, all that combined for what he calls this wonderful universe that thrills you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Check out our weekend listen on In Conversation, and we'll be back with the news on Monday.
--:-- [Music fades in as the hosts sign off.]
