--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Tuesday, October 19th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Shemitah Basu is off. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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: The clock is ticking to deal with climate change. President Biden has talked about this before. Global warming is an existential threat to humanity. We have a moral obligation to deal with it. And we're told by all the leading scientists in the world, we don't have much time.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That was on the campaign trail. One year later, political time may also be running out. Democrats have a clean electricity program in their spending plans, but it's struggling because Senator Joe Manchin is reportedly not on board.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In this 50-50 Senate, he could single-handedly derail this key part of Biden's climate agenda.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: You see, the proposed clean electricity program would use payments and penalties to get utility companies to phase out fossil fuels.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: Meyer says, without either this program or a carbon tax, Biden can't declare victory on climate change. If one of these policies doesn't pass, Meyer doesn't see a way Biden can meet his goal on reducing pollution or generating more zero carbon energy.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: Polls show broad American support for strong action on climate change. And the environment is warning us about what could happen if we do nothing.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: It's the stuff we've been living through for years now. Heat waves, floods, wildfires, people's homes and communities destroyed. This is a global problem and other countries need to reduce emissions, too.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: The Guardian looks at how what happens in America could influence what other big energy users do or don't do. We just a few days out from a major global climate summit in Scotland. If the U.S. arrives without a new climate plan in place, it could be hard to convince other big emitters like China to do more in their own countries.
--:-- Robinson Meyer: Climate activists and scientists are looking at their watches, increasingly worried the U.S. is going to arrive at that summit empty-handed.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Myrtle McKinney waited a long time to get her own apartment in New York City. It was in a public housing complex for seniors. She loved living there at first. Then things started to change.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There were concerns about safety, strangers hanging out in the building. In 2015, her home health aide found her dead on her kitchen floor.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: New York Magazine has this disturbing story. Her family had a tough time getting authorities to take her death seriously. At first, the death certificate said she died of natural causes. There was initially no autopsy, no detectives on the scene, but her daughter had a feeling something wasn't adding up.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As the body was being prepared for burial, a funeral director discovered what looked like a stab wound to McKinney's neck. Finally, an autopsy determined she hadn't died of natural causes. It was murder.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A few years later, there was another victim in the building, Jekolia James. New York Magazine reporter Greg Donahue explains what happened.
--:-- Greg Donahue: Jekolia was found strangled, and her death was a clear homicide and was considered as such by the police who investigated that night.
--:-- Greg Donahue: The grandson who discovered her body had previously identified a man trying to get into her apartment. The description matched Kevin Gavin, the building's unofficial handyman.
--:-- Greg Donahue: People who lived there were terrified. They wanted to see law enforcement take action, but police didn't bring Gavin in for questioning.
--:-- Greg Donahue: Residents started taking their safety into their own hands. One woman started leaving a two by her door. Some stayed in their apartments. Finally, the city agreed to install cameras, but those eyes, they weren't installed soon enough to help Juanita Caballero.
--:-- Greg Donahue: In January of this year, a third woman, Juanita Caballero, was found dead by her son in her apartment. And her death created both a new sense of tension and anxiety, a new level of fear in the building.
--:-- Greg Donahue: But it also put an incredible amount of pressure on the police to finally act. And they finally did act. Kevin Gavin was arrested.
--:-- Greg Donahue: Prosecutors say he confessed to the three killings. He's since pleaded not guilty to one count of first-degree murder in the death of Caballero and three counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Caballero, James, and McKinney.
--:-- Greg Donahue: This story shows how hard it is for older, vulnerable people to get justice. They were out there demanding the change. They recognized the changes that they needed, that they wanted. They knew what would make their building safer as the residents of that building. And those concerns weren't being heard.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can read or listen to a narrated version of this story titled The Murders Down the Hall on the Apple News app. Just tap the notification we send midway through the show.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Earlier this year, hackers took down the Colonial Fuel Pipeline. That ransomware attack is just one example of the sophisticated cyber threats U.S. officials are fighting.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Washington Post reports on a new effort that's inspired by the world of competitive video gaming. The U.S. is now fielding a team of hackers. They'll compete against other countries at the International Cybersecurity Challenge.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's happening next year in Greece. Most of the team members are between the ages of 18 and 26 years old. And the hope is by appealing to a generation of gamers on their own terms the government might find fresh talent to work on cybersecurity.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This event is going to be set up like an e-sports event, the kind that draws professional gamers. Teams will either try to break into a network or defend it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is a pretty big departure from the way the U.S. has traditionally recruited cybersecurity professionals. It used to be that most of the key jobs went to folks who came up in the armed forces.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The industry is hoping this competition is going to attract a broader range of candidates.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So Colombia is putting its hippos on birth control. Yes, this is the latest move to solve an unexpected problem that was created by the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You see, he brought a handful of exotic animals to Colombia for his private zoo decades ago. They multiplied. There are now around 80 of them in the country.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: CNN explains how the invasive animals are causing all sorts of problems, threatening people and crops.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The government had tried to sterilize them, but come on, doing that surgery on animals that can get up to 9,000 pounds? It's not easy.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now the regional environmental agency is changing tactics. It has these darts loaded with a contraceptive, and they're shooting these animals from a distance.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The hope is this is going to be cheaper and easier, and that this bizarre legacy of a drug trafficker can be controlled.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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: I'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you.
