--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, September 9th. 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: As we reflect this week on the 20 years since 9-11, here's one thing to think about. Military spending. Before the terror attacks, the U.S. had been cutting back for nearly a decade. 9-11 changed all that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The government's defense budget doubled in this time period from about $300-ish billion a year to about $700 billion. It dramatically increased as a percentage of GDP, going up to almost 5% at the peak of the wars, which was 2011.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Byron Tao. He's a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. And he's out with an article that looks at how all this money changed the private sector and the way many Americans think about their own government.
--:-- Byron Tao: For the first time, the U.S. took a huge role in vetting passengers and cargo. It started doing background checks and risk assessments on passengers. And in a lot of cases, it had to collect data about Americans in limited cases. And many of those controversies have played out in the years since.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're talking about the warrantless wiretapping program that was revealed under the Bush administration, a lot of the revelations by intelligence community contractor Edward Snowden.
--:-- Byron Tao: This surge in spending, it transformed the national security industry. Private sector companies went after lucrative contracts with the defense and homeland security departments. In order to fight the war on terror, contractors had to work on identifying so terrorist patterns.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Government authorities also invested in drone technology to surveil small groups. Demand for logistics and security support increased even more with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
--:-- Byron Tao: A lot of the money flowed to very traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and others that do aerospace and defense. And then there were also some specialty contractors, for example, CACI International, or CACI, it was kind of a medium-sized government contractor around the time of the 9-11 attacks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today it's a multi-billion dollar company. It's publicly traded. And much of that growth, in fact, nearly all of their exponential growth, happened after the 9-11 attacks.
--:-- Byron Tao: The journal spoke to a longtime intelligence official about just how much has changed in such a short time. He said during the Cold War, the job was staring at one country, the Soviet Union. After 9-11, the targets got smaller and smaller, scattered in more places.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Everything about watching them changed. And lots of companies cashed in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, they're fighting a legal request by a gun manufacturer. Remington's lawyers are asking for school records of students and educators who were killed that day.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The News Times of Connecticut has this story. This legal challenge is considered one of the highest profile lawsuits of its kind.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The families claim Remington recklessly marketed the AR style rifle that was used in the shooting.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Read Local feature on the Apple News app Every Thursday, we highlight standout stories from local news outlets across the U.S.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're into politics and you follow it closely, you've probably logged some serious hours looking at 538's predictions, especially during election season. But this time of year, 538 is the destination for football fans who are trying to see the future.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's 538 senior writer Neil Payne. Tonight, the NFL season kicks off. Tom Brady and the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Bucs play the Dallas Cowboys.
--:-- Neil Payne: We asked him what FiveThirtyEight's modeling says about what's ahead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the top line takeaways are that the Super Bowl team from last year, the Buccaneers and the Chiefs, are still the favorites, which is maybe a little boring but also not overly surprising.
--:-- Neil Payne: Both of those teams are really loaded with talent, and they both have really great quarterbacks. It's all based on a system called ELO. It's named after a physicist who originally designed it to rate chess players.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So when two teams play each other, you can use the ELO ratings to get a probability of each team winning. And then based on what happens in that game, the two teams actually kind of exchange points. So rating points.
--:-- Neil Payne: So if a team that's a heavy favorite loses, they actually give a lot of their rating points to the underdog that just beat them because the system is self-updating.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it sort of updates itself after each result and does that for every game of the season.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you're interested in how FiveThirtyEight thinks your team is going to do, just tap the notification we send midway through the show to check out the full story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ever see somebody schmoozing with the leaves? Many gardeners like to talk to their plants. They think it might encourage them to grow. But what if that communication were a two-way street?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some scientists think plants might be able to hear you. They might even be trying to talk back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The BBC brings us this story. And just to be clear, there is a lot of skepticism about these claims in the scientific community.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Back in 2012, a team of researchers reported lasers detected clicking sounds from plant roots. One researcher said these clicks are evidence that plants use sound to communicate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Others think that's a pretty big leap. More recent research suggests plants do appear to respond to sounds.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One study found when they hear bees buzzing, plants increase sugar in their nectar.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many scientists warn against comparing this plant behavior to the communication we see in the animal world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But it opens up bigger philosophical questions about what makes a living thing intelligent or not.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One professor argues you can't say a plant is not intelligent. If a species exists, it's already proven itself smart enough to survive.
--:-- 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you.
