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The deadly consequences of extreme heat waves · Apple News Today

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  Gideon Resnick, Narrating: Good morning! It's Tuesday, September 6th. I'm Gideon Resnick in for 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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  Let's start today by catching you up on some news you might have missed over the long weekend.
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  A federal judge in Florida approved Donald Trump's request on Monday for a special master to be appointed. That's in the investigation into his handling of classified government records.
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  Trump has long been calling for a master, essentially an independent arbiter who would step in and review the trove of documents seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago estate last month.
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  The move halts the DOJ's ability to look at these documents while they are being reviewed by the Special Master.
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  Liz Truss will replace Boris Johnson to become Britain's new prime minister today. She takes over as the country is facing a serious economic crisis from double-digit inflation, rising energy bills, and growing fears that a recession is coming. Truss is the leader of the Conservative Party. She's a free-market champion and a believer in small government and, over the weekend, she vowed to cut taxes substantially.
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  Liz Truss: I know that our beliefs resonate with the British people, our beliefs in freedom, in the ability to control your own life, in low taxes, in personal responsibility.
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  Truss is Britain's fourth prime minister in six years, and the nation's third female leader. She once called for the British monarchy to be abolished, a view that she no longer holds. It's part of her broader political transformation from the left to the right over the years.
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  And finally, one suspect is dead and another is still on the run after a stabbing rampage in Saskatchewan, Canada. There's been a manhunt across three provinces. The stabbings left ten people dead and 18 wounded. It's one of the worst mass killings in Canada's history.
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  Let's pivot now to one of the weekend's other big stories: extreme heat. On the West Coast, some 45 million people are under excessive heat warnings. In California, half a dozen active wildfires have been raging, burning thousands of acres and leading to the deaths of at least two people.
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  Multiple cities recorded record temperatures this weekend, and state officials said that the electrical load today could hit the highest California has ever seen, with major risks of blackouts.
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  This comes after weeks and weeks of unrelenting heat waves hitting millions of people across the globe.
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  Unidentified Speaker: In China, authorities are battling one of the worst droughts seen in more than 50 years.
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  Unidentified Speaker 2: Europe is suffering through its own heat wave while wildfires are raging in several countries amid historic high temperatures.
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  Unidentified Speaker 3: In the Western U.S. it has been a hot one, and those high temperatures are expected to continue.
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  Heat has become so bad and so extreme that we want to spend the rest of our show today focused on some of the consequences and potential solutions.
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  Let's start with an issue that affects us all: rising energy bills.
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  "Bloomberg News" reports that about one in six U.S. homes are behind on utility bills. A "tsunami of shutoffs" could follow, and this is especially concerning as summers get hotter and people rely on things like AC for survival.
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  "Bloomberg" energy reporter Will Wade explains the health risks when people lose power.
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  Will Wade: A lot of people do suffer significantly when the power gets cut off. You lose food, you lose air conditioning. It's really hot in the summer, there's places where people can die if they lose electricity.
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  In America, there have been nearly 200 annual heat-related deaths on average in recent years. That's more than double the rate from before 2017. Historically, lawmakers have focused on protecting people from extreme cold. Forty-one states have protections in place against power shutoffs in the winter. About half that number have protections during summer.
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  Wade told us the story of Adrienne Nice who got severely behind on her bills…
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  Wade: She's a 45-year-old house cleaner in Minneapolis and in 2020, when the pandemic started, her work pretty much fell off a cliff immediately. Her work has started to pick up again this year, but in the meantime, she really didn't have the money to pay her utility bill so her balance had climbed to more than $3,000. So it's not too surprising that the utility eventually shut her off.
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  So Nice got creative. She ran extension cords from a public space to the unit in her building. That kept important appliances, like her refrigerator, running. And she was ultimately able to get her power turned back on in about three days. But her story is just one example of the state of crisis so many households are in. Wade says there's roughly $16 billion in overdue utility bills. That works out to about $800 per household. The main reason why it's gotten so bad…
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  Wade: The main driver here is natural gas. There's literally a global shortage of natural gas, which, in the U.S., generates about 37% of electricity. Prices for gas have pretty much tripled since the middle of last year, and a lot of people get higher bills from the utilities and they see the big numbers and they think "Oh man, the utility's really trying to gouge me here," but that's not actually the case. For utilities, the cost of gas is a straight pass through. They don't make money off of that, they just have to pass it on. That's actually by law.
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  Consumer advocates told Wade electricity is becoming something that a whole segment of the population can no longer afford.
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  The issue of extreme heat isn't just affecting people inside their home, it's affecting people on the job too. For people who work outside, it can sometimes be deadly.
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  Unidentified Speaker 4: People pass away from this heat, you know? That's what they need to understand, that this heat ain't no joke.
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  That was the voice of a California farmworker featured in a U.C. Davis video on the topic. On average, 40 workers die each year from heat exposure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2020, that number was 56. Farm and construction workers have the highest rate of heat-related deaths, and the report says the total deaths due to heat are undercounted.
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  The United States doesn't have a law on the books that requires employers to give workers water, shade, and rest breaks. In fact, only four states have heat protections, and they're limited in scope. California is one of them, but experts say it's not working. Here's how Jacob Margolis, a reporter for public radio station KPCC, explained it last year following last summer's heatwave…
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  Jacob Margolis: The laws around heat mandate workers get things like shade, water, rest, as well as education so that they can identify what heat illness might feel like. There are a few problems. One is that people like farm workers often get paid by how much product they pick, so they're incentivized to not stop working, even if they feel sick. Another problem is the California agency Cal/OSHA, which investigates workplace issues and heat violations, is severely understaffed. And the third problem is that we have no maximum temperature at which workers need to stop working.
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  Joint reporting from the investigative unit at Columbia University, NPR, and KPCC last year found that since California's law went into effect in 2005, at least 75 workers have died of heat, and experts say that number could be a lot higher. We also know that heat contributes greatly to workplace injuries. Here's Margolis again speaking to PBS…
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  Jacob Margolis: An economist at UCLA looked at workers comp cases and factored in how hot it was when people were injured, and the report found heat played a role in some 15 to 25,000 injuries annually in California.
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  "The Washington Post" recently reported on a meeting of an immigrant rights organization in the Miami-Dade area. A 73-year-old sweet potato farmer said that he had been hospitalized with heat stroke twice in the last five years. A construction worker said that he had seen men with heat illnesses fall from roofs on various sites. The group is pushing for a state-wide standard to protect these workers, but as the "Post" notes, industries and businesses are fighting back, calling heat rules unreasonable and unnecessary.
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  The average American farmworker experiences dangerous levels of heat for 21 days per season, that's according to a study from 2020. If the planet warms by two degrees Celsius, that number could double.
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  Finally, let's round out today's episode with some of the more innovative ideas cities are coming up with to combat the heat, things that we've collectively forced ourselves to rely on in the face of greater failure to address climate change. CNN has an article that highlights some thoughtful designs cities have used to help keep things cool where they can.
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  For example, temperatures in Abu Dhabi can reach more than 120 degrees. Air conditioners are considered essential there, but the United Arab Emirates also relies on an ancient Islamic architecture to keep the city cool. It's a design technique called "mashrabiya," which are ornate, latticed screens that can cover balconies or divide spaces. They diffuse sunlight, cool down buildings, and help create a breeze.
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  In Paris, there's a registry system where officials check in with vulnerable citizens during periods of intense heat, also an app that can guide people on a temperature-friendly route to one of the city's 800 designated cool spots. These are places like parks, museums, or water fountains, and the city aims to make people walk no longer than seven minutes to reach one.
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  And let's head Stateside, back to Miami-Dade County. City officials realized bus stops were dangerous during heat waves, so they started planting trees to make them safer. Then they paid it forward. Miami put together a playbook for other communities to replicate: which trees worked the best, where to plant them. And now CNN says there are 71 green bus stops around the country.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, and when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. Shumita will be back with the news tomorrow.
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