--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, October 7th. 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: We have our 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winners. The prize is going to multiple civil rights activists focusing on Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Two winners are human rights organizations, the Center for Civil Liberties, which is Ukrainian, and a Russian group called Memorial, which compiles information on human rights abuses and political prisoners in Russia. The Belarusian activist Aleis Bilyotsky also won the prize. He spent decades pushing back against the country's authoritarian leadership and supporting anti-government protesters. He's been detained without trial since 2020. The Nobel Committee says it selected these winners for their work protecting citizens' fundamental rights, including the right to criticize power.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's move now to the White House, where there are three big stories unfolding this morning. First, President Biden says the world is as close as it's been to, quote, Armageddon since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. These are the president's most blunt comments yet on the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin may use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war that he's losing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other news, Biden is pardoning thousands of Americans convicted of marijuana possession. He cited racial disparities in conviction rates. It's the president's first major step toward potential decriminalization of the drug. He's also launching a review of how pot is classified under federal law. The federal government currently classifies marijuana as a Schedule I substance, the same as heroin and LSD and more serious than fentanyl.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, there's also news affecting Biden's family. The Washington Post reports that federal agents believe they have enough evidence to charge the president's son Hunter Biden with failing to report all of his income and lying on paperwork to buy a gun. A lawyer for Hunter Biden said he had no contact with any federal agent so any possible leak about the investigation is illegal, inaccurate, and biased. If there is enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden, it's a prosecutor's call whether to do so. It'll be up to the U.S. attorney in Delaware, a Trump appointee.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Did you know, back in the 60s, it was pretty common for airplanes to get hijacked? I'm talking, on average, about once a month. Hijackings were really not that threatening. They weren't there to crash airplanes into buildings. They weren't even there to inflict casualties. Daryl Campbell, a journalist with The Verge, reminds us before 9-11, you could kind of just walk right onto a plane. And those hijackings were mostly activists looking to make a statement.
--:-- Daryl Campbell: Functionally speaking for the airlines, what would happen is, you know, a hijacker would get in there, tell the cockpit, fly this plane to Havana. And the passengers would get, you know, a tropical weekend and then they'd get picked up on Monday. The airplane would be fine. The pilots would be fine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We live in a totally different world now when it comes to airport security. The Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, says its job is to prevent another 9-11 from happening. But after more than 20 years of pat-downs, scans, and barefoot screenings, Campbell says the TSA has basically had no impact on stopping terrorist attacks.
--:-- Daryl Campbell: The things that keep us safe in the air today are the locked and reinforced cockpit doors. And really, Campbell says, it's agencies like the CIA and the FBI that do a lot of the work of disrupting terrorist plots early. Most never make it to the airport in the first place.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We've spent $140 billion since 9-11 budgeting for the TSA. In fact, the TSA's budget is twice what the FBI spends on counterterrorism and counterintelligence. But what do we have to show for it? In this weekend's episode of In Conversation, Daryl Campbell tells us the story of how the TSA managed to make flying more of a hassle and somehow not much safer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can listen by searching for In Conversation in the Apple News app or in the Podcasts app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It seems like every few months a new show or movie comes out that dissects the life, motivation, and demise of a well-known murderer. I think, if we're honest, people are interested in these grisly stories of serial killers. You know, it's a dark fascination that many of us have.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vanity Fair reporter Richard Lawson recently wrote about the number one show on Netflix at the moment about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. After watching this 10-hour long series, Lawson was left with a question. Do we really need more stories about killers?
--:-- Richard Lawson: I wish in some ways that these shows or movies would just own up to the fact that it's just a prurient interest in something terrible that happened to several people. Jeffrey Dahmer targeted queer men in Milwaukee for more than a decade. Most victims were Black. He was convicted of murdering 15 men and boys.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lawson says the Netflix series tries to elevate some of the stories of victims, but some of the victims' families say they were blindsided by the series when it came out. They didn't know about it, and they found it re-traumatizing.
--:-- Richard Lawson: We asked Lawson about the responsibility that creators of these shows have to real-life victims. I mean, technically, they don't owe them anything, but I think the question is a moral one. So they're trying to add that sort of humanist element to it, and I don't really know how you do that without checking with each and every family member you could find, and it really doesn't seem like they did that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lawson says, ultimately, uncomfortably, Dahmer is the star of the story. The message I think we're supposed to take from it felt really misguided. And there's always talk about how to sensitively depict these real-life horrible things. Some would argue you just can't do it. That's impossible. Others would say there is a path through. And I think that Dahmer, to its credit, is trying to find that path. But ultimately, it just feels like another wallow in the horror of a serial murderer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After an eventful baseball season with Aaron Judge and Albert Pujols securing their spots as home run royalty, Major League Baseball heads into the postseason today. And this year a new format and some new faces means that the playoffs are going to look pretty different from years past.
--:-- Shaker Saman: Hey, Shamita, I'm here to tell you more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the matchups are set. We got the 12 teams in the playoffs. For anyone who's just tuning in now, who are the favorites to make it to the World Series this year?
--:-- Shaker Saman: So any conversation about who has a real shot of winning the World Series has to start with the Los Angeles Dodgers. They won two years ago and in the off-seasons, just keep adding the best players in baseball, right? And they won 111 games, something only three other teams in baseball history have won more than. So they're at the forefront.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You have the Houston Astros, another team over the last decade that's been really successful and beat the Dodgers in 2017. And then you have last year's champions, the Atlanta Braves. All three of these teams juggernauts and have a real shot of winning it all.
--:-- Shaker Saman: So let's talk about the new playoff format this year. It means that we're going to have more teams competing for October glory than any other year outside of the COVID season. What are you expecting that to mean?
--:-- Shamita Basu: That means there's a few other teams that typically wouldn't be in that have a shot, namely the Phillies and the Rays, who, you know, the Rays made the World Series a few years ago, lost to the Dodgers. The Phillies are this really weird and interestingly built team that gets a bunch of hits, hits a bunch of home runs, play zero defense, right? And so a very kind of strangely constructed team, but one that can scare you if they're hot.
--:-- Shaker Saman: There's the Blue Jays and the Cardinals and the Padres, all of whom have really top-tier talent. There's a really high chance for some weird games and some weird series and upsets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay. So Shaker, what's your zero money down, absolutely no stakes prediction for who's going to end the year as World Series champions?
--:-- Shaker Saman: I've got the Los Angeles Dodgers. You know, they're stronger than ever. And I've got them over at the Houston Astros in a rematch of 2017's World Series. These teams do not like each other. The stars are aligning here for a really cool World Series.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Chakras Suman, Apple News Sports Editor, thanks a lot. Thanks so much.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And only for those listening in the News app, we have an audio story queued up to play right after this. All you have to do is sit back and listen to this great New Yorker piece about how your personality is formed and why we're often so different than we were as kids. Enjoy that listen, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
