--:-- Mark Garrison: Good morning. It's Monday, February 19th, President's Day. I'm Mark Garrison in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Coming up, what's next after the death of Vladimir Putin's fiercest critic, how AI could interfere with the U.S. election, and the glitch threatening one of NASA's longest-running missions. But first, let's take a quick look at some other stories in the news.
--:-- Mark Garrison: A member of Israel's war cabinet warns that a major ground offensive will start in Rafah on March 10th, the beginning of Ramadan, if Hamas doesn't release hostages. Some 1.5 million civilians are sheltering there, having fled Israeli attacks elsewhere in Gaza. One of the hardest-hit areas is Han Yunus. The UN says the hospital there is effectively out of commission. It's the second largest hospital in Gaza.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Back in Israel, new protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have broken out. Demonstrators, angry with his handling of the war, took to the streets to call for him to resign. His administration is also under increasing global pressure. Today, the UN's top court is holding hearings on the legality of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory. Israel is not scheduled to speak at the hearings, providing a written argument instead.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In the U.S., Donald Trump is promising to appeal the $355 million judgment against him in the New York civil fraud case. It focused on misleading financial statements used to secure loans. Reuters looks into how his legal team may fight the case from here. One path may be to claim that there were no victims of fraud.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The case was brought under a law that usually aims to protect consumers. New York's attorney general has argued that the law doesn't require victims, and in any case, the bankers who loaned the Trump business's money, were harmed. Elsewhere over the weekend, Russian forces took over Avdivka in eastern Ukraine. It's one of the most significant Russian advances in a while.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Cedric Layton talked to CNN about what it means for Russians to control that city. That very fact is a bit of a setback to the Ukrainians, and it's going to be hard for them to recover. This area and all of these areas in the Donbas region, as well as on the path to Crimea. If the Ukrainians can keep Avdivka or Bakhmut or any of these areas they risk losing momentum.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And war is often about momentum Russia is taking advantage of perceived weakness in Ukraine forces as the country calls on the U.S. and other Western allies to send more aid to replenish its weaponry. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on allies at the Munich Security Conference to do more.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Dear friends, unfortunately, I'm keeping Ukraine in the artificial deficits of weapons, particularly in deficit of artillery and long-range capabilities allows Putin to adapt to the current intensity of the war.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Russian supporters of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny are paying tribute, and some are paying a price. A human rights group says hundreds of people have been arrested. The Kremlin critic died in an Arctic Circle prison. Navalny's death is widely blamed on Vladimir Putin despite Kremlin denials.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Time magazine senior correspondent Simon Schuster exchanged letters with Navalny while he was in prison. He felt very certain that all decisions related to his health, his well-being, even the kind of socks he was given to live through the wintertime in prison, all of these decisions were made in the Kremlin because he is such a prominent threat to Putin.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And the more important decisions related to his life or death would certainly be made by Putin at the very top. Schuster talked to us about why Navalny was such a threat to Putin's power. He could inspire people to risk themselves, risk prison time in standing up to the regime.
--:-- Mark Garrison: He was one of the very few figures, if not the only one, who could really call up a demonstration, could really bring people out into the streets. He was the main threat to Putin's rule. So Putin had very good reason to be afraid of Navalny, yes.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Next month, Putin is up for re-election and there is no expectation he'll lose. Activists will try to carry on Navalny's movement. Some, Schuster says, may write Navalny's name on the ballot as a protest. But he sees a tough road ahead for Russians who oppose Putin.
--:-- Mark Garrison: It's somehow difficult to imagine the opposition movement in Russia without him. I think in any case he will be remembered as a very courageous figure in his decision to return to Russia immediately after recovering from an assassination attempt by the Russian regime to return into the hands of the very regime that had just tried to kill him and to tell that regime, I'm not scared of you, even if you imprison me, even if you lock me up north of the Arctic Circle, I'm still going to face you down.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And I'm still going to try to resist the oppression that you impose, not only on Navalny and his movement, but on all of Russian society. I think that is his legacy, and it's very tragic that it ended this way.
--:-- Mark Garrison: AI technology is getting stronger and stronger, driving new concern about how it could be used in this crucial election year. One issue is deepfakes, AI-generated clips that hijack someone's face and voice with the intent to mislead.
--:-- Mark Garrison: That's why a group of tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, just signed a new agreement on preventing artificial intelligence technology from interfering with the election.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Wall Street Journal reporter Bob McMillan looked into the larger issue recently. When we were working on this story, I called it the all of the problems story. And we actually had a hard time figuring out which problem was the most concerning with respect to like bad information and the election this year.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Misinformation has been a huge problem for a long time, but new AI tools make it much easier to produce convincing images, audio and video, and circulate disinformation quickly. We're already seeing it.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Well, I mean, the most obvious example is what appears to be the first example of fake information in the 2024 election cycle, which is this phone call that went out in New Hampshire right ahead of the primary that sounded like it was Joe Biden talking, but was telling Democrats and independents not to go to the polls.
--:-- Mark Garrison: It was fake. It was completely fake. It's not clear how tech platforms plan to combat misleading AI-generated content. And Macmillan says it's also not clear how much impact policing it could have.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In 2020 and 2016, fake content circulated even without these AI technologies, right? Like there are a lot of people who genuinely believe in QAnon and that didn't was not dependent on AI in any way.
--:-- Mark Garrison: So you could kind of argue that like it not really a game changer Like we already so primed to believe garbage that yeah okay we can make more convincing garbage but like is that really going to change everything
--:-- Mark Garrison: And finally, NASA is working to save one of its most groundbreaking and long-running missions, Voyager 1. When NASA launched it back in 1977, it only had a five-year mission, including getting pictures of Jupiter and Saturn.
--:-- Mark Garrison: NASA engineers had so much hope for this spacecraft, they even included a golden record. It was an audio time capsule of sorts with music and sounds from our planet. There were also recorded greetings for whoever might find it.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Hello from the children of planet Earth. There were messages in 55 languages, like this one in Arabic. It says, greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Popular Mechanics reports on how Voyager 1 has been trucking along for nearly half a century. It got those images of Jupiter and Saturn and kept going, sending back discoveries for decades.
--:-- Mark Garrison: No human-made object ever traveled so far away from Earth. The problem is, a few months back, in November, NASA started having trouble communicating with Voyager 1. It's still in touch, but the spacecraft has been sending back gibberish.
--:-- Mark Garrison: So NASA knows it's still functioning, somewhat, but it's not able to send back usable data. Fixing a decades-old system from 15 billion miles away is tough, especially when it's outlived so many of the engineers who made it.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Still, NASA says it's not giving up, and no matter what happens, Voyager 1 accomplished its mission and much, much more.
--:-- Mark Garrison: 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.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Esquire went on the road with the civil rights activist Al Sharpton and looked at his decades-long career. If you're listening in the podcast's app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story and I'll be back with the news tomorrow. Peace.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Thanks for listening to Apple News Today.
