Defense in Ahmaud Arbery death trial begins, Tiger King 2 arrives: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Defense in trial of men who killed Ahmaud Arbery begins

The prosecution rested its case after a medical examiner described how Arbery died. Plus, a detained American journalist has been freed from Myanmar, national correspondent Romina Ruiz-Goiriena talks to a doctor fighting the HIV crisis in Florida, Washington correspondent Ledyard King explains a proposal that would offer jobs to young people to fight climate change and 'Tiger King' gets a sequel.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know, Wednesday, the 17th of November, 2021. Today, the defense begins its arguments in the trial of the men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Plus a detained American journalist has been freed from Myanmar, and more.

Here are some of the top headlines.

1. Jurors in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial will continue deliberations today. They're trying to determine whether the teenager should be held responsible for killing two people and injuring a third during police brutality protests in 2020.
2. China and the US have agreed to ease restrictions on each other's journalists. The move includes better visa access and what could signal a slight relaxation of tensions between the two countries.
3. And COVID-19 vaccine booster shots may soon be available to all American adults. An expert panel that advises the CDC has scheduled an emergency meeting for Friday.

Taylor Wilson:

Prosecutors rested their case yesterday in the trial of three white men charged with chasing and killing Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, in Georgia in 2020. The jury yesterday heard graphic descriptions and saw photos of Arbery's wounds. Georgia Bureau of Investigation medical examiner, Dr. Edmund Donoghue, testified, offering his explanation for how Arbery died.

Dr. Edmund Donoghue:

His cause of death was multiple shotgun wounds. It was my opinion that the shot to the center of the chest and the grazing gunshot wound of the wrist occurred at the same time, meaning that the hand was in front of the chest and was struck first, and then it entered the body. It was my opinion that the second shot was a complete miss and did not enter any part of the body. And that the third shot involved the left chest and XL.

Taylor Wilson:

Donahue was among the last of the prosecution's 23 witnesses over eight days. The trial today will shift to the defense's arguments and witnesses. Father and son, Gregory and Travis McMichael, along with their neighbor, Roddie Bryan, are on trial for Arbery's murder and other crimes. They were not arrested until two months after Arbery was killed near Brunswick, Georgia, on February 23rd, 2020. The men have said they thought Arbery was a burglar, and defense attorneys will likely argue that Travis McMichael shot him in self defense. Prosecutors, though, say the men attacked Arbery with no way of knowing whether he had actually committed a crime.

American journalist Danny Fenster has been freed from Myanmar. He was recently sentenced to 11 years of hard labor after spending nearly six months in jail in the military-ruled country. Fenster is the managing editor of the online magazine Frontier Myanmar. He was convicted last week of spreading false or inflammatory information, contacting illegal organizations, and violating visa regulations. And his sentence was the harshest yet among seven journalists who were convicted since the military took over the country through a coup in February. And at least 126 journalists, media officials, or publishers have been detained by the military since the takeover, according to the United Nations. As for Fenster, he says his work on Myanmar issues is not done.

Danny Fenster:

Any bitter ill will, regret, anger kind of spilled out onto the tarmac when I got on that plane and it just stayed there. I'm just in incredibly grateful now. Yeah, I'm not finished. I need to slowly break it to my mother that I'm not finished. The job isn't done. I mentioned in the meeting, I need to communicate with Frontier. I want to reconnect with all those people. I still have a lot of friends that are there, friends that have relocated to the other side of the border around there. We're all trying to figure out what happens next.

I'm not going back into Myanmar. I don't have any plan to do that right now. And that's a thing that I think I knew but didn't think enough about, is that every one of these decisions that I make has a lot of impact on the people that I love, my parents and my brother and everybody. And I obviously need to really, really think about every decision that I make. But we all have to find a way to make meaning in our lives, and I don't think that they would want me to not continue to do that.

Taylor Wilson:

Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico and ambassador to the United Nations, helped secure the release through negotiations with senior general Min Aung Hlaing, the country's ruler. Richardson has previously worked with a number of countries that Washington has poor relations with including North Korea and Venezuela to free detained Americans.

Florida is the epicenter of the country's HIV and opioid crises, but one doctor is working to change that. Dr. Hansel Tookes is the founder of the IDEA Exchange. It's the first legal syringe exchange program in Florida and first opened its doors in 2016 on World AIDS Day. But it wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic that Tookes' program got national attention. In less than 20 months, his hybrid needle exchange, telehealth, and HIV medication outreach program has become the most successful HIV suppression campaign in the country. Out of 35 patients treated as part of the pilot, 78.1% were undetectable within six months. That means patients cannot transmit the virus to others and the virus doesn't appear in routine blood work. That's now being expanded to 240 others, after the national Institute on drug abuse awarded him more than $2 million for a clinical trial in Miami and Tampa. Many of his patients are people of color and those experiencing homelessness. Miami-based national correspondent, Romina Ruiz-Goiriena recently caught up with him.

Romina Ruiz-Goiriena:

Well, you've certainly come a long way, Dr. Tookes. I mean, you and I, we met over a year ago in the middle of the pandemic that had these feuding public health crises, right? We had COVID sending people into isolation, which is completely counterintuitive to treating people with substance use disorders. Tell me a little bit about how IDEA Exchange decided to come up with this telehealth model, but this really precise and kind of in... kind of a meet people where they're at model. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Hansel Tookes:

Miami has had the highest rate of new HIV infections in the country for many years. And that was because we were operating in an absence of evidence-based public health measures. We've known since the '80s that syringe services programs or needle exchange work in preventing HIV infections. However, they were prohibited by law. The substance use and HIV epidemics are so intertwined, and the only way to truly make an impact due to the stigmatization that these people have felt in society and, unfortunately, in the healthcare system, is to bring the healthcare to the people where they are. We have to meet them where they are both physically and mentally, and we have to be sure to respect their autonomy and treat them with the dignity that they deserve. And a lot of that is treating them in a destigmatizing environment, such as a syringe services program or needle exchange.

Romina Ruiz-Goiriena:

It's also important to highlight that yes, people are living longer with HIV because of medical advancements, but unhoused people and those with substance use disorders have historically not benefited from these advancements. The HIV/AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s killed more than 700,000 people in the United States. 13,000 still die every year. And people of color also represent the majority of new HIV diagnoses and deaths among people with HIV, according to a report by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation in San Francisco. I also wanted to hear about the challenges and what Tookes thinks makes the program so successful.

Dr. Hansel Tookes:

Our patients at IDEA trust us because we trust them. They respect us because we respect them. And pre-COVID, they smiled at us because we smiled at them. That's what's been so hard about the pandemic, as we had to close our doors and adopt a very Miami cafecito window approach. It's been harder not to have all of the smiles and the hugs that were central to our connection with our participants.

Romina Ruiz-Goiriena:

In the end, Tookes has four words to describe why harm reduction works: harm reduction is love.

Taylor Wilson:

You can read Romina's full piece by clicking a link in our episode description. And if you don't have access to the article, you can subscribe to Paste BN as part of our special Black Friday sale. Sign up today for just a dollar a week. You can also find Romina on Twitter, @RominaAdi.

President Joe Biden's proposed Build Back Better plan would include an old but new idea to fight climate change, hire young people. A program called the Civilian Climate Corps is loosely modeled after President Franklin D Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave millions of out-of-work, young men jobs building parks and improving communities during the Great Depression. Washington correspondent Ledyard King has more.

Ledyard King:

This would be different in the sense that it would be obviously men and women. It would emphasize people of diverse backgrounds. It would include people from all over the country, probably mainly young. It would help teach them a skill, all in the advance of trying to either prevent climate change or deal with climate change or repair stuff after a natural disaster that's been made worse by climate change.

It was initially envisioned as something much larger than it probably will end up being in the bill. The whole bill has been reduced because of its cost and its size and the fact that it wasn't going to get full approval in Congress. Democrats hold a very narrow majority, so they can only do so much. So it's smaller than it was initially envisioned, but it could be about $30 billion over five years and employ something like two to 300,000 people. This is a big emphasis of the people who are behind the Civilian Climate Corps and the Green New Deal, for that matter. They want to make sure that a lot of communities that are disadvantaged, low-income, communities of color, those ones that are often on the front lines of climate disasters, that they're well represented in the ranks of these... of whatever the Civilian Climate Corps becomes.

Taylor Wilson:

You can read Ledyard's full story by searching climate on USATODAY.com.

Well, it was the sensation from the early days of the pandemic. Tiger King took the country and the world by storm when it hit Netflix in early 2020. The show followed the story of Joe Exotic and his tigers and other big cats at Tiger King Park in Oklahoma. It also followed his being sentenced to 22 years in prison after being convicted of trying to hire someone to kill another exotic animal park owner named Carol Baskin. Now, it's time for season two.

Tiger King 2 Trailer:

You think you've seen it all. You haven't quite seen it all. You have a prepaid call from Joe Exotic. There's an innocent man in prison. Everybody from the zoo is out there making money, and I'm paying the price for every one of them people.

Taylor Wilson:

You can catch the new season streaming now on Netflix.

And you can find 5 Things wherever you're listening right now, seven mornings a week. A thanks as always to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show. And I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from Paste BN.