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Mark Garrison, Narrating: Good morning! It’s Tuesday, September 26th. I’m Mark Garrison in for Shumita Basu. This is “Apple News Today.” On today’s show… on-the-ground reporting from the aftermath of Libya’s catastrophic floods, why U.S. animal shelters are in a state of crisis, and science takes a big step toward bringing an extinct tiger back to life.
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But first, President Biden is visiting striking auto workers in Michigan today. He’ll be the first sitting president to walk a picket line. Tomorrow, former president Trump will meet with auto employees as well. The United Auto Workers strike has expanded as the union pushes companies for more money.
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Shawn Fain: Our members are working 60, 70, even 80 hours a week just to make ends meet. That's not a living. That's barely surviving and it needs to stop.”
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That’s U.A.W. president Shawn Fain. One of his demands is that union members get 40 hours of pay for 32 hours of work. He’s become a big champion of a shorter workweek. And the auto industry has transformed the American work week before.
“NPR” talked to a labor historian who explained how 100-hour weeks were something many Americans had to deal with a century ago. But labor unions bargained for a shorter work week. In 1940, the 40-hour work week became the law of the land. But Ford employees had that several years before. They were among the first to have a five-day, 40-hour workweek, in 1926. That’s been the standard for generations.
Now, union workers want to shorten that to a four-day workweek. And there’s a lot of momentum for that idea these days. Recent global trials of four-day workweeks have gone well. But nearly all have been with office employees, not manufacturing workers. Still, advocates for shorter weeks say they can work for people on an assembly line, not just people working behind desks.
“NPR” spoke with Jerry Coleman, who works at a Jeep plant in Ohio. He says long hours take an enormous toll on his family.
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Jerry Coleman: I signed up for six days, but they forced us to work seven days, ten hours a day. I missed my daughter’s graduation from kindergarten.
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Union talks with automakers may not lead to a four-day work week. But Coleman and others are hoping they’ll come away with a new deal that gives them better pay and benefits, without having to work all the overtime.
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Let’s check in now on the aftermath of the flooding in Libya. Thousands of people are dead with thousands more still missing.
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“CNN’s” Joamana Karadsheh is one of only a handful of correspondents from Western media who've seen the worst of the devastation. She told us that the port city of Derna looked like “a ghost town.”
Joamana Karadsheh: I don't think anything could have prepared us, our team, and we are a team that has covered, wars and natural disasters for decades.
She said it was like nothing she'd seen in all those years.
Karadsheh: It was apocalyptic scenes everywhere you looked in the city. You had these mangled cars that were piled up on top of each other, some even wedged into buildings. And you had pieces of people's lives. Clothes, shoes, teddy bears, toys, furniture, just strewn across the city. And also, across Derna's shore. And it would stretch for miles and miles.
Karadsheh told us about a woman she met in a make-shift shelter, a mother of four.
Karadsheh: Salma lost her entire family. She doesn't know what happened to them, her mother, her father, her brothers. She doesn't know what she's going to do with her children. She doesn't know what she's going to do with her life. She has no home right now. And she said, "We used to watch refugee camps and what people in other countries would go through on the news. We never thought it would happen to us here." And this is something we heard from so many people.
“CNN” reports that grief is turning into anger as survivors want answers as to why two dams collapsed. Citizens are protesting, calling for local leaders to be removed. Dams, roads, and other infrastructure crumbled through years of mismanagement and war. The floodwaters revealed that reality with deadly consequences. Now residents are homeless, grieving, sick, and hungry, but still, working to rebuild.
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Animal shelters in the United States are struggling right now. That’s because more people are abandoning their pets. This is a big reversal from the pandemic, when people were eager to adopt, and many shelters emptied out.
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“Vox” writer Kenny Torrella told us about the factors that are filling them up again.
Kenny Torrella: You know, if you pair high inflation, such as higher prices for pet food, pet supplies, and especially veterinary care, with rising eviction rates and homelessness rates, it's led to what animal shelters are calling a crisis.
Beyond the economic factors leading people to give up their pets, there may also be more animals around. When vets’ offices were locked down during the pandemic, many had to stop spaying and neutering. That set back efforts to control populations.
This crisis is especially bad for dogs. Lots of landlords ban them, one of the reasons they’re less likely to be adopted than cats. Torrella points out a long-running issue. Every year, way more dogs are bought from pet stores or breeders than euthanized in shelters.
Torrella: I mean, theoretically, we could adopt our way out of this crisis tomorrow if people suddenly decided to start adopting animals rather than buying them. So, if we can shift some of that demand from buying animals to adopting, we could bring the euthanasia rate down theoretically to zero.
Adopting an animal can be too big a commitment for some people. Another way to help during this tough time for shelters is by fostering animals for a little while. You can also help by volunteering your time, or sending a donation.
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A scientific first, could put researchers closer to bringing an extinct animal back from the dead.
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The Tasmanian tiger has been gone for nearly a century. But researchers have managed to extract RNA from an old museum specimen. This has never been done with an extinct animal before.
You might need a little refresher from high school biology to understand why this is such a big deal. DNA stores genetic information, and RNA carries out the instructions. It’s kind of like DNA designs a house and RNA builds it.
So, getting the Tasmanian tiger’s RNA gives researchers critical information on the extinct animal. Actually creating a new Tasmanian tiger from RNA is something that’s a long way off. But now that scientists know they can recover RNA this way, there is hope for other creatures who now only exist in museum displays.
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Generations ago, human hunters wiped the Tasmanian tiger off the Earth. But generations from now, human scientists just might be able to bring it back.
You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you’re already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next from “GQ.” It follows German detectives with an unusual specialty. Hunting down the last living Nazi war criminals.
That’s cued up to play for you next, and I’ll be back with the news tomorrow.
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