--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Thursday, January 27th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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: Who's going to get the job next? In legal and political circles, that's the big question following the news that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer plans to retire.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The 83-year-old justice's exit gives President Biden the chance to make good on his promise to appoint a Black woman.
--:-- Ian Millhiser: I think that Democrats tend to believe that representation matters, that experience matters. There has never been a Black woman on the Supreme Court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vox Supreme Court reporter Ian Millhiser explains nearly all of the recent justices have been federal appeals court judges. There are hundreds of federal appellate judges. Ten are black women. Biden nominated half of them.
--:-- Ian Millhiser: One is 51-year-old Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. She's seen as a possible SCOTUS pick. She's a former public defender.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think she'd be the favorite of criminal justice reformers. She did some very good work when she served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission to make our drug sentences less draconian.
--:-- Ian Millhiser: She's not a fire breather and she's not an extremist, but I think that she fits right in that sort of center of the Democratic Party liberalism that Biden has brought to most of his political decisions throughout his career.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, Biden could also nominate a black woman from outside the federal system. That could be 45-year-old California Supreme Court Justice Leandra Kruger.
--:-- Ian Millhiser: Kruger's reputation is that she is more cautious. She is more conservative, not in the sense that she's necessarily aligned with Republicans, but just that she is very concerned about precedent, very concerned about slow incremental change on the judiciary.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are many other possibilities, but these two are widely seen as the frontrunners. By replacing Breyer neither pick would change the court's conservative majority. But they both are young enough to have long careers ahead of them. So either could have influence on American law for decades.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Cryptocurrency is becoming a flashy talking point among some of America's mayors. From Miami to New York and in smaller cities, too, mayors are trying to brand their cities as crypto hubs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the data right now maybe doesn't support the dream. Prices for cryptocurrencies hit all-time highs in November, but since then, they've seriously cratered. At one point, $1.35 trillion in global value was just wiped out.
--:-- Axios Reporter: Axios has details about how many mayors are talking up crypto and how much of that talk might just be hype.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has been one of the loudest voices. He announced on Twitter that he wanted some of his salary in crypto.
--:-- Axios Reporter: That got New York City Mayor Eric Adams saying he would do the same. And they exchanged a couple of friendly jabs on Twitter.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So yeah, this was a little bit of a stunt. But real talk, this goes beyond pay stubs and Twitter spats. These mayors say cryptocurrency could be a way for cities to raise revenue and bridge the wealth gap.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the specifics on how they plan to do all that and hedge against major losses, that's unclear.
--:-- Axios Reporter: Let's look at what's happening in Suarez's town. It has a cryptocurrency now, MiamiCoin, which is run through a nonprofit where the city gets 30 percent of the revenue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As of November, the Miami Herald reports the coin earned the city more than $21 million. But in the last few months, Miami coin has lost value.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This all goes back to something we talked about recently on this show. Being pro-crypto is something some Democrats and Republicans see as a smart move. It's volatile, yes, but it's also trendy among young voters. And being a champion of this technology, it can attract high earners to your city.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sometimes we make jokes about how slow and tedious government paperwork can be. But when you really need something and the bureaucracy is broken, it suddenly isn't so funny.
--:-- Michelle Hackman: The Wall Street Journal explains this through the struggles of Chantel Wendt, who decided to apply for U.S. citizenship recently.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Really, for Chantel, she decided to take that leap, a couple months into the pandemic. And unbeknownst to her, she fell into this category of people where her immigration file had been sitting long enough that it had been moved to this storage facility that then got locked for COVID.
--:-- Michelle Hackman: Yes, the paperwork required to finish her application was stuck in a government storage facility. And not just any facility, limestone caves underneath Kansas City.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Why caves, you might be asking? Well, the U.S. immigration system relies heavily on paper records, so they need a lot of physical storage.
--:-- Michelle Hackman: When COVID hit, this underground facility mostly closed, and there weren't really plans to fully reopen.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As of this month, there are 350,000 pending requests for immigration histories. Chantel's history is sitting in those caves.
--:-- Michelle Hackman: The holdup, it's costing her time and also money. Sure, she expected some pandemic delays, but not this bad.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What she said to me was, isn't this supposed to be the most advanced country in the world? Why is it that what I'm up against is just a locked door and there's nothing anyone can do?
--:-- Michelle Hackman: Lawmakers are starting to pressure the government to get moving. One wants to know how the record keepers plan to get back to normal, given the fact that other agencies have already gotten back to work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The basic thing you've got to understand about the immigration system is that it doesn't run like most modern systems we know. You know, it runs pretty much entirely on pen and paper. You have to mail everything in.
--:-- Michelle Hackman: They're actually piloting a program where you can pay your fee by credit card. But in order to do that, you have to mail a form in to get permission to use a credit card. So that should paint a picture.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The National Archives and Records Administration told the Journal they kept staffing in the Kansas City facility at 25 percent because it was a high transmission area. They also said they started splitting shifts in two to process more requests.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Australian Open is going on right now. And often in tennis, most of the attention goes to the teenage phenoms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we were really interested in a new 538 story about the sport because it's original in a few ways. It looks at elite wheelchair tennis, where the best players tend to be older.
--:-- Axios Reporter: It looks at elite wheelchair tennis, where the best players tend to be older. OK, so this is a 538 story. So, of course, it's got all these telling numbers. And that data shows, on average, the top 10 players in wheelchair tennis are five years older than the top players who use their legs to compete.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The author is also a disabled person himself. He talks to some of the top players to see what exactly is going on here.
--:-- Axios Reporter: The oldest woman in the wheelchair tennis top 10 is 41, and she started using a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident when she was 21 years old.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She said part of the reason para-athletes are staying in top form at an older age is because many of them started their athletic careers later in life.
--:-- Axios Reporter: And that's often because they came to wheelchair sports after an accident like hers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This year's Open was the last for star wheelchair player Dylan Alcott. Last year, he won all four Grand Slam tournaments plus the Olympic gold medal.
--:-- Axios Reporter: Now he's 31 and says he's retiring. He's an Aussie, as you'll hear in this clip from Channel 9.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in his farewell speech on his home court, he talked about the growing popularity of wheelchair competition.
--:-- Axios Reporter: It's not all around the world when every single locker room we go into, there's wheelchair tennis on. And every single professional player, the top 10 men, women, they're all watching. They all know and they all know now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's because it started on this court right here together. So I'm very thankful. So thanks.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all those 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
