--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, January 11th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, how Biden and Trump's classified documents cases differ. A new study shows us we've been underestimating the T-Rex and Golden Globe winner Michelle Yeoh fighting her way to Hollywood history. But first, at least 17 people are dead in California, where powerful winter storms have brought severe flooding, extreme wind, and mudslides.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In some areas, the danger of overflowing sewage also ups the risk of spreading disease. More than half of the state's counties were under disaster declarations yesterday. And there's also a federal emergency declaration in effect. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes. Those who've been able to stay have been stuck in the dark and cold.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Santa Cruz County resident Summer Mangrum spoke to CBS. We've been out of power, just got it back on for only one day to lose it again.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Forecasters expect damage from these storms could total over a billion dollars. It's in line with a trend of costly destruction from severe weather fueled by climate change. This week, new data shows extreme weather did around $165 billion in damage across America last year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NASA climate scientist Kimberly Miner explained to NBC how events like what we're seeing in California connect with what's happening to the planet.
--:-- Kimberly Miner: Climate change is warming the whole planet. That includes the atmosphere and the oceans. What that means for us is that the atmosphere is able to hold more moisture. So these storms can be bigger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tuesday's storm was the sixth in the series. Forecasters say there could be as many as three more in the days ahead. Just a heads up if you supposed to catch a flight today, you might want to check the status. Early this morning a computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, caused lots of disruptions. It grounded all domestic flights until 9 a.m. Eastern, while the FAA worked to restore the system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can check the Apple News app for the latest on this developing story. Republicans are vowing to investigate after it was revealed earlier this week that a small number of classified documents were found in an office used by Joe Biden before his presidency.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Biden said yesterday he was surprised to learn about the documents and that his team is fully cooperating with a review into what happened. And to help break down what we know so far, I've got Apple News editor Gideon Resnick here with me.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hey, Shamita.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So first, tell us what we know about these documents. When are they from? Where were they found?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah, there's a lot of timeline sorting out we've had to do in the last 24 hours or so. So we're told these documents date back to when Joe Biden was vice president. The White House says they were found by his personal lawyers on November 2nd, when they were packing things up in the Penn-Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That's a think tank where Biden had this office after he left the vice presidency. The White House says they notified the National Archives and Records Administration the very same day these documents were found, and that they were delivered to the archives and records the next day.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The amount was described as, quote, a small number. So we're hearing a lot of comparisons being drawn to the documents that were taken by President Trump after he left office and that were later found at Mar-a-Lago. But these are very different scenarios.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: For now, at least I would caution people from drawing too many comparisons to the two. I think for a number of reasons. So first is the scale we're talking about. In the case of Trump, we were talking about hundreds of classified documents. It seems at least from the initial reporting that we have that the scale is much smaller in the Biden case.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And second really is the level of cooperation. So as we mentioned here the White House says they are fully cooperating with the National Archives and the Justice Department. From the reporting that we have so far, Biden also says that he wasn't notified that he was in possession of the records or even asked to return them.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That's also a pretty big difference from the Trump case, where in 2021, he was repeatedly asked by the archives to return this trove of documents, did not comply for months, finally ended up returning 15 boxes of materials only to later learn that Trump actually had more.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So there was a way longer process there. Ultimately, the DOJ got a grand jury subpoena. A lawyer for Trump turned over more documents and said they had no more. And then in August, the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home and found 103 more documents that were marked classified and thousands of other official records.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We learned yesterday that Attorney General Merrick Garland has already appointed someone to review what's going on with these Biden documents. That's usually seen as a precursor to potentially bringing in a special counsel.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Meanwhile, House Republicans were already looking to investigate Biden and have jumped on this. So where could this go next? I guess it's fair to say for now we don't quite know.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But no matter what the differences are in these stories at the moment, there is that political reality you're alluding to here, which is that Republicans are very eager to go after Democrats in really the same way they feel Democrats have, in their view, unfairly gone after Trump.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They were talking about this long before they even took control of the House, long before this story even broke. Recently, we had Congressman James Comer, the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, saying Monday night after this story came out that his committee plans to investigate.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You have Trump, of course, also seizing on it, asking on his social media platform when the FBI will raid Joe Biden's houses. Democrats, meanwhile, are downplaying this, saying it's apples to oranges and simply not the same to compare these two cases.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So the politics of this whole situation aside, there are some key questions the Biden White House will likely have to answer. One is how and why did these documents end up there in the first place? Two is why wasn't this disclosed earlier if we're told the documents were discovered months ago?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hopefully we'll have more answers to all of that soon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gideon Resnick, Apple News editor, thank you so much.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Tyrannosaurus Rex has a long and well-earned reputation for being totally ferocious. You might remember the Jurassic Park scene where the T-Rex bats around a jeep. You kind of get the impression from watching that that T-Rexes were maybe not the smartest, but definitely powerful and deadly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And until recently, that was about as much credit as they got. All brawn, very little brain. But a new study pushes back on those assumptions and says the T-Rex was maybe a lot smarter than we think.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post reports on these new findings, which suggests that the T. rex was capable of problem-solving and working in packs. They were the primates of their time, with a level of brain cells comparable to a baboon's, according to the author of this study.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That means that these giant dinosaurs, if they hadn't been wiped out by an asteroid, might have been capable of using tools and passing down knowledge to future generations. And now that paleontologists better understand what the T. rex was capable of, the author of the study says they can dig deeper into the potentially rich social lives of this species.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's just hope no one gets any smart ideas about bringing them back to life. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, including coverage of last night's Golden Globes, Michelle Yeoh's win for her performance in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, is adding to buzz that she could become the first Asian winner of the Best Actress Oscar.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In her acceptance speech at the Globes, she talked about discrimination that she faced when she first came to Hollywood. And this is also for all the shoulders that I stand on, all who came before me who looks like me, and all who are going on this journey with me forward.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So thank you for believing in us. Thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated profile of Michelle Yeoh from Town & Country magazine coming up next. So enjoy listening to that, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
