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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Monday, August 1st. I'm Shumita 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.
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A raging wildfire in Northern California is now the state's biggest one this year. It's tearing through a region that's been hit hard by drought, creating dangerous conditions for it to get bigger.
This comes as the death toll keeps going up from the flooding in Kentucky. Dozens of people have been killed, and officials say that number will rise, since it'll take weeks to get through the debris. Rescue efforts are slow going because more rain has fallen since last week. Governor Andy Beshear was on "Meet the Press" yesterday, calling for more federal money to help communities prepare for future disasters.
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Andy Beshear: It's tough. This is one of the most devastating, deadly floods that we have seen in our history. It wiped out areas where people didn't have that much to begin with.
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Human-caused climate change is making severe weather more common and more intense. "WIRED" spoke to climate researchers, who say this year could have more dangerous weather in store. Recent examples include flooding in Yellowstone National Park, and unusually early heat waves in the U.S., South Asia, and Europe. We know that heat can be deadly. Excessive heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States.
Sometimes we now see a cascading effect, where one bad weather event makes another one worse. Scientists are looking into whether the Yellowstone flooding was because a longer winter packed the mountains with more snow than usual, followed by an early blast of heat in May.
Climate scientists are also watching La Niña, a weather cycle that changes ocean temperatures, which has a global ripple effect. It's normally something that comes and goes, but the current La Niña has stretched over two winters now and may even go into next year, which would make it the longest one since 1950.
Unless we get a handle on climate change, forecasters are warning that we should expect even nastier floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and heat waves.
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In 2018, voters in Florida overwhelmingly passed an amendment that restored the right to vote for most residents with felony convictions.
At the time, that change in the law was seen as monumental. It would impact an estimated 5% of Florida's population, over one million people. But Republican state lawmakers added a requirement to the law. It said people convicted of felonies could only vote if they paid off any fines related to their crime.
That requirement is why a man named Kelvin Bolton ended up back in Alachua County Jail.
Bianca Fortis: He had actually finished his prison sentence and was about to be released, but never actually was released because there was a warrant out for his arrest in Alachua.
That's Bianca Fortis at "ProPublica." She says the reason there was a warrant out for Bolton's arrest was because he voted and he thought he did it totally legally, that he followed all the rules. In fact, the person who helped Bolton register to vote was a county election official who went out to the jail to register Bolton and others.
Fortis: So basically a lot of people signed up to vote, even though they were technically ineligible. They thought they were eligible, and they said that they had no idea about the new law and the requirements.
In total, Fortis confirmed ten cases where inmates at the jail got help from this county election official to register to vote and then were later charged with voter fraud because they were deemed ineligible. In Bolton's case, he says no one told him he had to pay off his debts before voting. In at least four of the other cases, the people have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to up to three years in prison.
Now, it's important to note, it's not easy in Florida for people with felony convictions to know how much they might owe in fines or to pay them off. There's no centralized database between various court systems, so a person with multiple convictions would have to track down a lot of county clerks to figure out what they owe. And if you can't pay off the money…
Fortis: Then you have no say in the political process, you can't really change anything from where you're sitting, and so it just creates this much larger political problem.
A political problem that ultimately disenfranchises mostly Black people. A state investigation into the ten people charged with voter fraud found the election officials who visited the jail were "haphazard" in their registration of inmates, but ultimately did not bring charges against the officials. County election officials declined to comment to "ProPublica," but in a statement, the supervisor denied wrongdoing.
As for Bolton, the story says he's been sitting in the county jail since April, waiting for his case to move ahead.
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For the first time this century, a woman cyclist crossed the finish line wearing one of the most iconic garments in sports, the yellow jersey of the Tour de France. Here's Annemiek van Vleuten after her victory on Sunday.
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Annemiek van Vleuten: That's actually a dream that comes true. Winning in yellow on the top, wow.
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If you're thinking "Wait, since when can women race in the Tour de France?" You're not wrong. For the most part, women have been excluded for decades.
But that changed this year with the Tour De France Femmes. CNN looks at how big a deal this is for women's cycling.
Women in the sport spent years organizing and fighting to ride in the Tour. Still, the women's event was always much shorter than the men's contest, and the difference in prize money is stark. The total for the women's tournament is 250,000 euros, but the men's prize pot is 2.2 million euros. Now, creating the race is a big step forward, but the fight for equity with men continues.
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Basu: You may have noticed over the weekend that social media was celebrating the birthday of a particular cartoon character. He had his own theme song.
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That's right, George Jetson of the futuristic cartoon family "The Jetsons" was supposedly born on Sunday, July 31 of 2022. Or at least this is "internet true," there's really no way to prove it. The show takes place when George is an adult, so in the 2060s. We still have a couple of decades of technological advances to get there.
But the "New York Post" did a fun round-up, assessing how we're doing on catching up to the future as depicted in "The Jetsons." For example, videocalls were a wild idea in the 1960s when "The Jetsons" cartoon came out, but for better or worse, talking to people on screens is now a very big and very real part of our lives.
"The Jetsons" also had all kinds of gadgets to help with housework, like a sassy robot maid. The closest thing we have to that are maybe Roombas, which famously don't have much of a personality at all. There's the magic oven in "The Jetsons," where Jane Jetson presses a button and dinner appears instantly. Of course, that's not a thing yet, but there is 3D printed food, and also smart ovens that can sense what you're cooking.
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And remember, even with all the stuff that the Jetsons have that are supposed to make life easier, they have all the frustrations of a 1960s sitcom family. As one historian put it, "as human beings, we'll always have something to complain about."
You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, and there are some great remembrances of people who died over the weekend: NBA legend Bill Russell, and Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on "Star Trek." We've got articles that look at their careers, and their impact on civil rights. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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