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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, January 20th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Democrats' voting rights bill is currently dead after a move to change the filibuster failed. The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the January 6th committee to get its hands on Trump's records. And that was just yesterday in Washington.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is a lot going on domestically, and we'll come back to the voting rights bill in just a minute. But President Biden's biggest problem in the next couple of days may be abroad. And this involves U.S.-Russian relations.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting his Russian counterpart tomorrow for high-stakes talks. Russia right now has about 100,000 troops near Ukraine's border. Biden was asked if he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin is going to invade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: My guess is he will move in. He has to do something. Biden is promising consequences if Russia tries to test the West. He'll pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn't think now will cost him what it's going to cost him. And I think he'll regret having done it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Reuters breaks down how the U.S. and its allies might go after Russia by targeting its wallet. And it starts with one of the harshest possible moves, cutting Russia out of the global banking system. This would involve disconnecting the country from SWIFT. That's the system financial institutions use to move money around the globe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This would be a major move and a rare one. But it has happened before with Iran, and the impact on the economy there was painful. Another way to punish Russia would be to make it harder for the country to borrow the money it needs. This is done by restricting trading of Russian bonds. Some restrictions, they're already in place. Tightening them further could strangle Russia's economy.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There is another development related to Russia unfolding now. Remember the suspicion around whether Russia was behind what's called Havana syndrome, the mysterious illness affecting American personnel abroad? Now, a new CIA report says it's unlikely that Russia, or any foreign power, is mounting a global campaign that caused these symptoms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read more about what's in this report in the Apple News app. Now, back to voting rights and Biden. We all saw this collapse coming. Last night, the Democrats' bill died in the Senate. Two moderate Democrats refused to change the rules to work around a Republican filibuster.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is a bumpy bookend to Biden's first year in office. For a broader perspective on this, check out Russell Berman's analysis in The Atlantic. If you've got filibuster fatigue, Berman seems to get it. He argues to really understand what happened with voting rights and also on Biden's spending bill, focus on the Democrats' slim majority.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Emphasis on slim. And for that, you need to go back more than a year to when the party won both Senate seats in Georgia. That gave Democrats Senate control. But as Berman argues, it also kind of doomed them. Expectations were suddenly sky high. But as we saw last night, they didn't have enough muscle to actually pass sweeping bills.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Berman runs through a few different what-if scenarios that critics have been talking about. Some on the left are asking, what if Biden pursued voting rights reform earlier? And Berman points out that might have gotten in the way of passing the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some centrists wonder if Biden might have gotten better results if he'd done more outreach to Republicans. But Berman doubts they would have gotten on board with Biden's main goals. And ultimately, Berman comes to this conclusion. The results Democrats got are basically what expected from a razor-thin majority.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And yet Berman writes given the alternatives Biden had to try...
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been six years since Californians voted to legalize recreational marijuana use. That was supposed to start a process to clear past marijuana-related convictions or reduce them to lesser charges. That was a big deal because the so-called war on drugs laid the groundwork for laws that disproportionately target low-income people and people of color.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Today, there's still tens of thousands of people in California waiting for their names to be cleared. The criminal history record system in the state of California is a mess. That's Kira Feldman. She's an investigative reporter with the LA Times.
--:-- Kira Feldman: The state was supposed to go into the records and figure out who was eligible for this relief to get the records cleared. Now, that's not going very well. Or rather, we should say it's a mixed bag. A mixed bag because there are some counties that are aggressively clearing records, and then there are others that haven't processed a single case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Feldman tells the story of this one person in a county that's been slow to move. She recently graduated from UCLA with a master's in social work. And Sarah Rodriguez still has a felony on her record. She was convicted nearly two decades ago in San Bernardino for felony marijuana possession. And she eventually served more than two years in jail for that conviction.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: San Bernardino County has 5,400 cases that are essentially gathering dust. Sarah's is one of those cases. Which means when an employer or a loan officer or even a landlord runs a background check on Rodriguez, her record will still show a two-decade-old felony conviction.
--:-- Kira Feldman: And she says it's damaging her job prospects. One attorney named Vanya Cuarlez told me it creates a permanent underclass by not purging marijuana records. We're helping to foster poverty for black and brown people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as she explained the types of jobs that are available to people with felony convictions are not as good as the types of jobs that are available to people without them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In August, before the LA Times first began investigating the story, there were around 70,000 unprocessed cases. Since then, the courts have gotten to work. Roughly half those cases have been taken care of. Officials blame the backlog on various factors, COVID, staffing shortages, and old records that require manual review.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're getting into Girl Scout cookie season. It's that time of year when you can justify indulging on sweets because the money, well, it's going to a good cause. And this year, there's even a new type of cookie called Adventurefuls.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But this new variety, it's been hard to get. Yeah, Girl Scout cookie bakers have run into the same complex supply chain issues that's hitting other products. Yeah, it's apparently a combination of high demand and labor shortages in the bakeries that make these cookies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post got the details from the Girl Scouts in its area. And there seemed to be enough boxes of Adventurefuls to deliver to customers who bought them in advance. But, you know, the booths that the Girl Scouts set up, if you're trying to be spontaneous and cute and buy some of these, they may not be carrying them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Don't worry, though. They have the classics. Thin Mints, Samoas, those are all fine. Now, if you're wondering if adventurefuls are worth it, the post writer says, yes, they are. The post writer got some and said they were crispier than expected. The chocolate part reminded her of Thin Mints, and she said the caramel topping gave it a nice butterscotch flavor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our news plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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