--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Monday, March 21st. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Ukraine is refusing to surrender the city of Mariupol. This comes after a weekend of intense attacks. Ukrainian officials accused Russia of bombing an art school where hundreds of people were sheltering.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the city with little food, water and power. As the United States and other countries in the West impose sanctions on Russia, we're hearing a lot about Russian oligarchs and how cracking down on their fortunes could apply pressure on Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But we've heard very little from the oligarchs themselves, which is why this new story in Bloomberg Businessweek stuck out to us. It has a rare and exclusive interview with a Russian oligarch.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Senior writer Stephanie Baker spoke with Mikhail Friedman. He was one of the seven original oligarchs, people who rose to power after the Soviet Union collapsed before Putin was in office.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: Friedman made billions in banking and private equity. But as I explain, because of sanctions, a lot of it is essentially only paper wealth now. He has no access to any of his accounts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So I really wanted to figure out, what do you do when you're a billionaire with no cash?
--:-- Stephanie Baker: Friedman has said he is against the war. In fact, he was born in Ukraine and he says he's sympathetic to the suffering that's taking place there. But he says sanctions against him and other oligarchs won't influence Putin.
--:-- Mikhail Friedman: His argument is basically that the way Putin's Russia operates is the oligarchs don't dictate what the Kremlin should do. It's the Kremlin that's dictating what the oligarchs should do. So it's unrealistic and naive to think that the oligarchs can turn around and put pressure on Putin to stop the war.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Easy to say if you're an oligarch, right?
--:-- Stephanie Baker: Baker points out what a self argument that is. And yet some of what Friedman says tracks with history. I covered oligarchs over the years and explains how Putin changed things.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: In the 1990s the oligarchs backed President Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign and they did have sway over the Kremlin. And when Putin came into power in 2000, he turned that whole system on its head and basically told the leading businessmen, if you want to keep your businesses, you need to stay out of politics.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: And anyone who violated that implicit deal was basically run out of the country or put in jail. Friedman thrived under that system. Now he's cut off from his money because of Putin's war.
--:-- Mikhail Friedman: He told Bloomberg, if the people who are in charge of the EU believe that sanctioning oligarchs will embolden them to tell Putin to stop the war, that means they have no understanding of how Russia works. And we're all in big trouble.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The world right now is focused on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. But a lot of other people in different areas are also suffering. Aid agencies are struggling to get the funds they need to help these places.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: The Guardian looks at the situations in Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. The UN says donations are billions of dollars short of what's needed to deliver enough food.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As the CEO of the World Food Program puts it, we have no choice but to take food from the hungry to feed the starving.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: National Geographic zooms in on Afghanistan. The situation there has gotten worse, with sharp drops in Western aid after the Taliban takeover.
--:-- Nena Moose-Stefensen: Nearly 9 million people there face emergency-level food insecurity. Everything from maternity clinics to local district clinics like Far Far in the countryside, they lost their funding, which means not only that the doctors, the midwives, the nurses have not been paid for months, but also of course that they really struggle to pay for medicine to pay for very basic supplies.
--:-- Nena Moose-Stefensen: To fill the void left by the loss of global aid, she says a lot of young Afghans are stepping up to help. They never imagined that they would be aid workers but actually many of them always aspired to do something for their country and for their countrymen.
--:-- Nena Moose-Stefensen: They always wanted to help build a better Afghanistan, but they imagined it in different ways as lawyers, as doctors. And now what they're doing is really the most basic work, handing out food and helping, handing out medicine and things like this.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: One of them is 24-year-old health care worker Navid Amini. He's just been seeing this stream of patients coming in, and they're not only suffering from whatever diseases they have, but they're just so poor and they need everything from medication and treatment to food and money and, school for their children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This National Geographic story is also full of excellent photos that show the people affected by the scarcity of global aid and those working to change things. You can see these pics for yourself in the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Oil and gas prices are in the headlines because of jumps tied to Russia's attack on Ukraine. But maybe you haven't heard how wild the nickel market has gotten since the invasion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Atlantic explains what's going on here. Russia supplies 20% of the world's high-quality nickel. And it's not just for pocket change. Nickel goes into all kinds of stuff that we use, from pipes to electric car batteries.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: Since the war started, the price of this metal has been on a wild ride of ups and downs. At one point, it rose 250% in 24 hours. The London Metal Exchange halted trading for the first time in decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A nickel is worth five cents, of course. But lately, the raw material it's made of has been worth more. That's what's called the melt value. At one point this month, the stuff that makes up a single nickel was actually worth 16 cents.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Oh and by the way, nickels are mostly not made of nickel. The coins are 75 copper.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: The Atlantic looks at how among a small set of doomsday prepper types nickel hoarding is now trendy. You might consider this a heavy bet against runaway inflation literally heavy. $100 in nickels weighs more than 20 pounds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The idea is, if the U.S. dollar totally collapses, the metal inside nickels will be valuable in a way that paper and paper money won't.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: It's not like there's a lot of people who are doing this. Most of them are small timers. But there is one hedge fund manager who has $1 million in nickels stashed away in a Dallas vault.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A finance professor tells The Atlantic he doesn't recommend hoarding nickels, but he says it's not the most irrational investment he's seen people make.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Worst case, they'll still be worth five cents.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's more insight and analysis on the war in Ukraine in the Apple News app. We've also got other stories there, including the crash of a Boeing 737-800 today in southern China.
--:-- Shamita Basu: State media report the China Eastern Airlines flight had 132 people on board. We're also following two developments affecting the Supreme Court.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Justice Clarence Thomas is hospitalized with an infection. The court says the longest serving member expects to be released early this week.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And confirmation hearings are today for Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown-Jackson. If confirmed, she would be the first black woman on the highest court.
--:-- Stephanie Baker: NPR has a story on what you can expect from this week's hearings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We've also got coverage of March Madness, including a story about the men of St. Peter's University. The number 15 seed shocked Powerhouse Kentucky in the first round. Then the tiny New Jersey school pulled off another upset to reach the Sweet 16 for the first time in school history.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In the women's tournament, check out the story of Lauren Jensen. She transferred from Iowa to Creighton, and this weekend, she was the one that hit the game-winning three-pointer to beat Iowa.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Like we said, all of that's in the Apple News app. And when you're there, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
