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The extreme weather lashing Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Japan · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Monday, September 19th. 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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  Power is out across Puerto Rico after a major hurricane made landfall on Sunday. Historic levels of rain, and winds reaching 86 miles per hour, caused dangerous flooding, ripped up asphalt from roads, swept away a major bridge, and caused landslides in some areas. There was a total blackout on Sunday, leaving about 3.2 million people without power. Thousands reportedly have no running water. No deaths have been reported as of Sunday evening. It's hard not to think back to 2017, five years ago almost to the day, when Hurricane Maria devastated the island and led to a months-long blackout. Gaby Acevedo, reporting from Ponce for NBC 4 New York, says that storm is at the forefront of peoples' minds…
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  Gaby Acevedo: We have been listening to local radio where there are constant reports from neighbors in those communities across the central mountains describing collapsed bridges, damaged roads, overflowed rivers. It's a repeat for some of these people of what happened five years ago during and after Hurricane Maria.
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  Officials say some parts of Puerto Rico have been reconnected to the power grid, but it'll take several days to restore power to all. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency for the island so authorities can provide disaster relief. More torrential rain is in the forecast for Puerto Rico today, and early this morning, the eye of the hurricane made landfall along the coast of the Dominican Republic, near Punta Cana, with estimated winds of 90 miles per hour. There was quite a lot of extreme weather news over the weekend. In Japan, nearly 8 million people were ordered to evacuate because of a massive typhoon. Parts of the country got more than 15 inches of rain over the course of just 24 hours. And Alaska saw one of its most powerful storms in decades. The rain, winds and storm surge led Governor Mike Dunleavy to declare a state of disaster on Saturday…
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  Gov. Mike Dunleavy: This is an act of God. This is an act of nature. This was widespread over a thousand miles.
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  Photos shared online show cars and communities in Alaska completely submerged. Some homes and buildings were ripped off of their foundations altogether and sent floating away with the floodwaters.
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  President Biden says the pandemic is behind us. Here he is on "60 Minutes" on CBS News on Sunday…
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  President Joe Biden: The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID, we're still doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks, everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.
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  But for plenty of Americans and people around the world, the effects of the pandemic are very much not over. For one, scientists still don't understand why some people have long COVID, that is, lingering symptoms, and that's deeply frustrating to people who have them. Some have trouble thinking clearly, even months later.
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  Ed Yong: One of its most common and most debilitating symptoms is called brain fog.
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  Ed Yong's latest "Atlantic" article focuses on this condition, brain fog, which is very misunderstood, even by some medical professionals.
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  Yong: A lot of people wrongly equate it to just the feeling of being tired or being a bit fuzzy, you know, having a hangover or being stressed. Brain fog is none of those things. What it is is very specifically a disorder of executive function, and that's a term referring to the higher mental abilities that include focusing attention on something, blocking out distractors and holding information in mind.
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  Put simply, the abilities that we need to live our daily lives. And when executive function doesn't work, people find it incredibly hard to do even basic things. Yong spoke to people who couldn't understand text messages, who couldn't drive without forgetting the destination. Now, not all brain fog is that severe. But up to 30% of people who get COVID say they've had it, and that number can be as high as 85% for those with long COVID. For people with severe brain fog, recovery can be hard and slow.
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  Yong: The most important thing I've heard from clinicians and patients alike is you absolutely have to pace yourself if you have this symptom. So you might be able to drive, but you'll need a long rest afterwards. You might be able to work, but now you need to write down every single task in a very detailed way, when previously you might have been able to just do multiple things at the same time.
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  Yong points out brain fog isn't just an issue that long COVID patients face, it's a symptom of other conditions too. And more medical and scientific collaboration may help the people who are suffering.
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  Yong: People running long COVID clinics absolutely need to talk to people who are experts in things like ME/CFS or fibromyalgia, they need to talk to traumatic brain injury experts. There are common biological threads that likely underpin the experience of brain fog across all of these conditions, and treating them as these sort of separate buckets where researchers work on their own without talking to each other is going to be a path towards much slower progress and a lot of reinventing the wheel.
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  Yong told us he got waves of messages after his piece came out. People with brain fog said they felt less alone. His hope is that more of them are seen and heard, so science and medicine can understand their pain better and be able to do more about it.
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  It's been nearly six years since Voters in California said yes to recreational marijuana. The legal cannabis market promised to solve problems with the illegal market in the state.
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  Paige St. John: They would do away with the crime, the environmental damage, the social inequities and create a, you know, de-stigmatized market for a very popular drug.
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  That's "LA Times" reporter Paige St. John. But she says the reality is quite different.
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  St. John: People who had been retirees, hay farmers and basic general rural residents now find themselves living next door to organized criminal operations who are bringing in workers from China, from Mexico and, kind of, taking over their towns.
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  A new investigation from the "LA Times" found that Proposition 64 triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never seen. The "Times" looked at satellite images of the state's biggest cultivation areas and found illegal farms outnumber legal operations by about ten to one. St. John says cheaper land and less police have made rural communities popular targets for illegal operations. And since cannabis is a cash-crop, these farms can attract trouble.
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  St. John: That means that the grows are targets for robberies, home invasions, murders, and ripoffs. People describe now keeping the police radio on at all times so they can understand what's going on around them, the high speed car chases, the bodies that have been dumped.
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  Meanwhile, legal growers told St. John they feel like they're being punished for following the rules.
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  St. John: Every single one I spoke to is suffering, and these are the legacy growers, the people who fought to create a cannabis market in the first place, who developed the strains that are now popular in the commercial markets and who are holding on, they say, you know, just by the skin of their teeth.
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  The "LA Times" put it this way: California failed to anticipate the problems that would arise when they decriminalized the hugely profitable, illegal cannabis industry. And in many places, local law enforcement is too overwhelmed and ill-equipped to take down the illegal players. One sheriff described it as trying to take on a gargantuan army with a pocket knife.
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  What if I made you this offer: you can have that tomato, or you can have this tomato with added nutritional value? You'd probably want the more nutritious one, right? Well, what if I told you the nutritious tomato was purple? Would that make it any more or less appetizing? "Wired" has this story about genetically-modified purple tomatoes that just got the green-light to be grown in the U.S. Plant scientists didn't just want to change the color of these tomatoes, they wanted to engineer a healthier one. So they loaded it with anthocyanin, a pigment found in blackberries and blueberries. It's high in antioxidants and researchers have found it may help prevent cancer, reduce inflammation, and protect against type 2 diabetes. Also, these purple tomatoes have double the shelf life of regular red tomatoes. The question now is whether people will bite into a science experiment. Purple cherry tomatoes will be rolled out in test markets next year. The CEO of the company selling the purple tomato realizes that some shoppers might be turned off by genetic engineering, and these tomatoes will be expensive at first. But he's betting that enough people will see this strange tomato at farmers' markets and give it a try.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, including a recap of last night's WNBA Finals where the Las Vegas Aces beat out the Connecticut Sun and won their first title. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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