--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, December 3rd. 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: When presidents are at the end of their term, it's pretty common to see a slew of presidential pardons. Since Donald Trump lost the race for the White House, he's only issued a single pardon, which was for his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn. Flynn pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI. So now that Trump is a lame duck, there's growing speculation about who might be next in line for a pardon and about what Trump can and cannot do.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Time magazine answers some questions about how President Trump can use this power. But first, a little bit on how pardons work.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A pardon completely eliminates past criminal convictions. It wipes a crime from a person's record and exempts that person from punishment. But it applies to federal crimes, not state crimes. And it's not like a pardon gives you immunity for life. It's not a get out of jail free card that you always carry around in your pocket. You can still be charged on the state level or for any future federal crimes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So now question two, can Trump pardon himself? That's unclear. No president has ever done it. But back in 1974, the Office of Legal Counsel under President Richard Nixon wrote a memo saying, a self-pardon violates a basic principle that no one can be a judge in his or her own case. But the memo did mention a loophole. A president could invoke the 25th Amendment, temporarily step down from his position, and here's the get-around. The VP, who would be the acting president, could issue the pardon.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Back when the memo was written, this didn't end up happening, though. Instead, Nixon resigned and his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. Right. And an important detail here, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon before Nixon had been charged with any crimes. And that's another one of Trump's options. It's what's called a preemptive pardon. Presidents have the power to pardon people who've committed a crime but have not been formally charged with violating the law.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And this type of broad preemptive pardon is pretty unusual. Usually a pardon is issued for a specific criminal action.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Finally, question three: Can Trump pardon his children? The answer is yes. A president has pardoned a family member before. In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother for cocaine possession.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And here's a bonus question, one that you might not have been asking yourself. Can Trump issue a secret pardon? And Time says, in a way, he can. Presidents are not required to publicly announce a pardon.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Total daily coronavirus deaths broke a new record yesterday. The number of COVID-positive people admitted to hospitals hit an all-time high. This new data is increasing the pressure to get a vaccine to market. In the U.S., the FDA could approve COVID-19 vaccines as early as next week.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But getting our lives back to normal is about more than effective distribution. Another challenge is making sure enough people in the U.S. choose to get the vaccine, particularly people who don't have reliable access to medical care, who are low-income earners, or who are skeptical about the vaccines.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's why right now, policymakers and academics are debating ways to incentivize you to get the vaccine. John Delaney, who is the former Maryland representative and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. And he makes this suggestion. We should pay people $1,500 to get vaccinated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The way he sees it working is the payments would double as a vaccine incentive and a stimulus check and the economy could reopen faster.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NBC cites a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and it argues paying you to get the vaccine would not only be ethically better, but also cheaper. To understand why, consider the cost of missing work, lost wages for people who are COVID positive. Paying people to get the shot would keep more people working.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NBC also points out, we pay people to take part in medical studies, to give plasma. Many companies also offer financial incentives for employees who join a gym or go to preventative care appointments.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But others don't like the idea of money changing hands over the vaccine. They say it's unethical.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Arthur Kaplan is the founder of the Medical Ethics Division at NYU School of Medicine, and he told NBC Today Show that paying people to get a vaccine implies it's not safe, that payments would actually undermine public trust in a vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And to be clear, so far, no major safety issues have been reported for either of the leading vaccine candidates, the one from Pfizer or Moderna, and both say that their vaccines are over 90% effective.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 25 years ago, an Ivy League academic started referring to young men and boys of color in the U.S. by an insidious term that shaped years of criminal justice policy. A super predator is a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim without giving it a second thought.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Princeton University researcher John DiIulio Jr. explaining the term super predator on CBS. He was first quoted using that word a few months earlier, in November of 1995, in a cover story that he wrote for the Weekly Standard.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: His theory was, by the year 2000, tens of thousands of young criminals would be roaming America's streets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Marshall Project looks at this term's long-lasting impact on American criminal policy and politics. By the way, you can also listen to a narrated version of this story by visiting the audio tab of the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Kim Taylor Thompson is a law professor at NYU, and she tells the Marshall Project, Super Predator, that term allowed people to, quote, suspend their feelings of empathy towards young people of color.
--:-- Shamita Basu: See, in the early 1990s, juvenile murders were up in the U.S., but criminologists at the time said, it's not because there were more violent teens. It was because guns were more readily available. This meant street fights and gang rivalries were much more lethal than before.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But by the time DiIulio came up with this super-predators term, juvenile crime stats were already on the downturn. Still, this loaded word quickly seeped into the national consciousness, and the media played a big role in this.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Marshall Project reviewed articles from 40 major news outlets published in the five years after DiIulio's article came out, and the term super predator shows up hundreds of times.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It also became part of the political lexicon. Some lawmakers use the concept of the super predator as justification for prosecuting teenagers more severely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And according to the Marshall Project's analysis, by the end of the 1990s, virtually every state had toughened its laws on juveniles, everything from sending more young people to adult prisons to imposing mandatory minimums and life sentences without parole.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In 2001, DiIulio admitted his theory turned out to be wrong. Just a few years ago, he signed on to a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to limit life sentences without parole for juveniles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He declined to comment for this Marshall Project story.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Okay, Duarte, this next story from the Washington Post is such a weird who would have thought result of the pandemic. Sometime this holiday season, you might end up getting the classic I didn't know what to get you gift a scented candle.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, it turns out our candle buying habits might tell us something about the spread of COVID-19. The Washington Post looks at how during the pandemic, scented candles have been getting some harsh reviews online.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Things like horrible candles, no scent at all, or I literally had to bring my nose to the rim of the jar to notice any scent. Loss of smell is a COVID-19 symptom.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And social science researcher Kate Petrova noticed that people were tweeting about negative reviews for candles, and she decided to look into it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So she went through 20,000 candle reviews, and she found top scented candles lost a full star rating this year. Complaints about candles having no smell tripled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And meanwhile, ratings of non-scented candles, they mostly stayed the same.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, Petrova was quick to say this was not a peer-reviewed study, so we can't read too much into it. But if the connection were true, that's a pandemic impact that we definitely were not expecting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of this week's audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
