--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, October 21st. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Shemitah Basu is off. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them. Today, Congress is going to turn to a legal maneuver that nobody has pulled off in decades. The House is expected to vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: I've been covering Congress for Politico, and I've seen a lot of different corners of Washington. The reason they want to talk to Steve Bannon is they believe he has a firsthand insight into President Trump's thinking leading into January 6th.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He spoke to the president in the weeks and days before January 6th and was actually one of the people encouraging Trump to focus on that day and make it a big kind of last stand moment. He said some pretty incendiary things on his podcast about that being sort of the day for a revolution.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: Bannon is claiming executive privilege protects his conversations with the president. His claim of privilege is extremely weak. He was not part of the executive branch on January 6th or any time close to before that. He is not someone who regularly advised President Trump. And those are the categories of people that typically have some sort of executive privilege.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If the House, as expected, holds Bannon in contempt, the case will go to Attorney General Merrick Garland. He'll have to decide whether to prosecute. The stakes are high. If we want to know the truth about what Donald Trump was up to in the run-up to January 6th, what was his degree of awareness that the rally he helped organize might turn violent and turn into what amounted to an insurrection on the Capitol, this is the chance.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: There's no other body that's fully investigating that aspect of this story. You know, Bannon has some key pieces of that puzzle, and this is the one chance to understand that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's this new report on climate change, and it's standing out because it's not about the impact on polar bears, redwood trees, or other parts of our planet that are not really part of our everyday lives. What's striking is the report's laser focus on what climate change is doing to us, to humans, it's killing us and making us sicker.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This report is from The Lancet. That medical journal says, we're in a code red emergency for human health. CNN has a good summary of the key takeaways. The report looks at the deadly impact of severe weather, heat waves, floods, and storms, and how they are killing people. Droughts are making it harder for many places to grow enough food. People are starving.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: And as severe weather gets more dangerous and more common, Health care systems are being pushed beyond their limits, and rising temperatures are increasing the spread of dangerous diseases. Malaria, cholera, dengue, Zika, they can spread faster and farther in the heat.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One co-author is an emergency physician in Washington state. He talked about what he saw in the Pacific Northwest heat wave last summer. He said, paramedics had burns on their knees. Their skin was seared where they kneeled on hot asphalt to care for patients.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: He remembers seeing far too many people die of heat exposure. This is another clear call for action ahead of the major global climate conference taking place in Scotland. The Lancet compares climate change to COVID. Both problems cross national borders. The report authors say addressing the dangers of climate change to human health requires a global approach.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All that time in isolation during the pandemic, it got a lot of people looking for love online. But instead of a lasting connection, many of them got scammed. This is called romance fraud. And last year, the Federal Trade Commission said people were swindled out of more than $300 million. That's a record.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: This type of scam is up about 50% from the year before. And that's only what was reported to authorities. Many of the victims were 60 and older. The Washington Post explains how con artists target people on dating sites and social media.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These fraudsters make a connection, and they spin all these stories about needing to pay debt or to cover the cost of travel. The end goal is getting victims to send them money via gift cards or wire transfers. Before the pandemic, if a person never wanted to meet in the real world, that was a huge red flag. But during COVID, dating was a socially distant affair, and that gave scammers the perfect excuse for never agreeing to meet.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: The director of AARP Fraud Prevention Programs told The Post, victims include the recently widowed. They're lonely and grieving, potentially more vulnerable to these criminals. The scams can go on for years and leave people penniless. In some cases, victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Post says, this is not a story about people being gullible. The scammers are often organized and sophisticated. Some run international operations. The post has some resources and tips on what to watch out for.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: You can read the whole story on the Apple News app. Just tap the notification we send you halfway through the show.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Remember a few years back when Wu-Tang Clan produced one copy of their album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. The move was a mix of art, business, and protest, and the effect was creating a unique luxury good. A Wu-Tang album only you could hear. That exclusivity made it worth millions.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: The first owner would become one of America's most hated men, the so-called "Pharma Bro," Martin Shkreli. After him, the album's journey got weirder, and what happened next was a mystery until now. Rolling Stone has this story.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, sent to prison, and had to pay millions in fines. When this happens, the Fed typically seizes the criminal's assets to pay the bills. In this case, that included the secret Wu-Tang album. Think about that. A piece of hip-hop history locked up in a government vault.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: Then, back in July, an anonymous buyer paid $4 million for it. Nobody knew where it was until this week, when the buyers came out of the shadows. The new owner is a collective called PleaserDAO.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This group, it's kind of hard to define. Some of its folks are heavily into cryptocurrency and collecting digital art. The Wu-Tang album, with its strange history, felt like something they wanted. But you still can't hear it. Wu-Tang put strict conditions on it. No commercial release for 88 years. No streaming, not even playing it at large parties.
--:-- Kyle Cheney: Still, this collective wants to figure out a way to return Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to the people, as they say. Rolling Stone speaks to a Wu-Tang advisor who helped put the album together, including the rules keeping it a secret. He says, if the collective has a good idea, the issue could be open for discussion.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our news plus partners. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
