--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Wednesday, May 19th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A New York State investigation into the Trump Organization is now a criminal probe. The Attorney General's office told CNN it informed Donald Trump's company. Its investigation is no longer strictly a civil case. The AG's office is looking into whether Trump's businesses inflated assets to secure loans and tax benefits, as well as how employees were being paid. The criminal element to the case adds a new level of legal risk for the former president. The AG's office is working with the Manhattan District Attorney. The DA has already been examining millions of pages of documents, including Trump's tax returns. A Trump Organization lawyer declined to comment to CNN.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's been over six months since Election Day, and one state is still auditing votes. Arizona. Now, top Republican officials in Arizona's largest county are saying enough is enough. They sent a strongly worded letter to the state Senate detailing their opposition to the big lie. Big lie is what Trump's critics call false claims of a stolen election. What's going on in Arizona has national significance.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post's Rosalind Helderman has been closely following this story. It all started in late April. That's when the Arizona State Senate brought in a company called Cyber Ninjas to audit election results. The state handed this Florida-based company 2.1 million ballots and Maricopa County's voting machines. Now, even though the state's Republican governor certified the election results, and both state and federal courts have rejected fraud claims, this audit process is still going on. Many election experts have raised red flags about how the audit process is being run. They say the procedures have been sloppy and inconsistent and that the company has been using questionable techniques like analyzing ballots using UV lights and microscopes.
--:-- Rosalind Helderman: Even though some Arizona Republicans have spoken out, many others support the recount. And Vox recently pointed out nationally, Republicans who have pushed back against Trump's false claims have been punished. Just look at Representative Liz Cheney or Georgia Secretary of State Brad Roffensperger. Meanwhile, Republicans who have embraced falsehoods, they've been reelected and voted into leadership roles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At this point, many congressional Republicans are fighting to block the creation of an independent committee that's tasked with investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. A recent Reuters-Ipsos poll found 60% of people who identify as Republicans agreed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Vox writes, if Republicans who push back on Trump's false claims are marginalized, the big lie will keep shaping the party into the foreseeable future.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Gasoline is flowing again through the colonial pipeline as the company works through this month's cyber attack and various technical problems. Long lines at gas stations are starting to ease. But Zeynep Tufekci writes that pain drivers felt may be just the beginning of a wave of digital crime. Her latest piece in The Atlantic is a classic Zeynep Tufekci piece in that it's an unexpected mix of ideas. She brings in sociology, economics, biology, and computer science. She's arguing the colonial pipeline hack. It needs to be a wake-up call to fix major security problems in the code that runs our infrastructure.
--:-- Zeynep Tufekci: Now, if you're a software engineer, you know the concept of technical debt. So hang tight while we oversimplify it for non-engineers. If you think of code like a house, when you try to fix a hole in your wall and you find popsicle sticks where there should have been plywood, it's technical debt. A quick solution that works okay for a while but creates bigger problems down the road. Now, as I explain, there are tons of technical debt in our infrastructure, basically digital duct tape in the code that runs the literal pipes that bring us gas, heat, and water. These are old systems. They're not built for dangerous new cybersecurity threats. And fixing them requires deep and extensive engineering, which is expensive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's arguing the government needs to change its priorities around cybersecurity. She wants to see support for redesigning digital infrastructure and audits that ensure hard work gets done and maintained. Here she comes back to the pandemic. Ebola, SARS, and other outbreaks should have shown us that we weren't ready for something like COVID-19, a pandemic on this scale. But we missed the signs. To fetch is hoping we don't ignore similar signals about our critical infrastructure.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What if every three and four year old in the country had a free spot in preschool? That's what President Biden is proposing. He wants to set aside $200 billion to fund universal pre-K. NPR's Planet Money reports on the growing body of research into the benefits of pre-K. And it's not just about getting a jumpstart on your ABCs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One recent study goes back to the 1990s in Boston. At the time, the city was moving its budget around and decided it would only fund preschool for a limited number of kids. So officials used a lottery system to randomly choose who got to go to preschool. 20 years later, a group of economists saw it as an opportunity, a perfect real-life experiment. They decided to compare these two groups of kids, and they found that the kids who went to preschool were less likely to get suspended, skip class, or end up in juvenile detention. They also had higher high school graduation rates and were more likely to go to college. The economists also discovered something else. Kids who attended preschool had better standardized test scores.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the study authors explains these results could mean preschool is so valuable because it helps kids develop non-cognitive skills. Things like emotional and social intelligence, perseverance and teamwork, all of which drive future success. A large portion of American kids don't go to preschool, mostly because parents can't afford it. If Washington goes big on educating kids earlier, Economists will watch to see whether these positive outcomes emerge on a bigger scale.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Remember during the early weeks of the pandemic when rush hour traffic practically disappeared? Well, now we're at a stage of the pandemic where rush hour is reappearing and it's hitting us when we least expected, the afternoons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, this is one of those trend pieces that confirms something you kind of noticed, but maybe didn't think other people were experiencing too. The Wall Street Journal cites data from transportation analytics company Inrix, and it shows in 40 percent of the biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S., roads are more congested on weekday afternoons than they were before the pandemic. So why is this happening? Transport experts tell the Journal a lot of people are still working from home. They seem to be staying local, clogging up suburban roads. And as local stores and businesses reopen, people are running midday errands more often. You know, popping into a store, picking up a coffee. And there's been an uptick in leisure trips, too. You can see that in beach communities where car traffic is shot up.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So now that you know the afternoon rush hour is a real thing, Maybe you can try to beat the traffic by doing your errands in the mornings or the evenings, which is just regular rush hour. Sorry, there's no escaping it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow. Thank you.
