--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, February 16th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, how one town in Turkey avoided death and collapsed buildings. How chat GPT and other AI could transform white-collar work. And the new head coach of a storied college team who's only 22 years old. But first, a quick look at a few developments in stories that we're watching.
--:-- [Sound of news theme music fades out]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Outrage is growing in East Palestine, Ohio, after a train derailment and fire put toxic chemicals into the community. Last night, hundreds of residents lined up and packed a high school gym to talk to officials. State health officials continue to say that the area is safe, but locals say they're getting headaches and irritated eyes and farm animals, fish and wildlife are dying.
--:-- [Sound of news clip plays]
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Pittsburgh CBS station says the scene at the meeting was tense. Just listen to how unhappy residents sound when an official asks if everyone is satisfied with what they're hearing.
--:-- [Sound of news clip continues]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Is everybody satisfied with my answer? Listen, I can't go, but that's what we have to go by.
--:-- [Sound of news clip ends]
--:-- Shamita Basu: The rail operator Norfolk Southern was not at the meeting, saying it feared violent threats to its employees. Rail worker union officials say that train safety has been hurt by company cost cutting. Norfolk Southern says its safety record has improved recently. Federal investigators are looking into what caused the derailment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to some big news from Washington, where there are new details about when the U.S. government could default on its debt. A new estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says a default could happen as soon as July if lawmakers don't make a deal to raise the debt ceiling. The government has already technically hit the debt ceiling. For now, the Treasury is keeping the money flowing with some accounting moves, but time is running out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also in Washington, the acting FAA administrator faced some tough questions at a congressional hearing yesterday. Lawmakers asked Billy Nolan about recent incidents where planes narrowly avoided serious accidents as well as the technology outage that halted flights for about 90 minutes in early January.
--:-- Billy Nolan: We are experiencing the safest period in aviation history, but we do not take that for granted. Recent events remind us that we cannot and must not become complacent and must continually invest in our aviation system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nolan says the FAA is modernizing computer systems and improving backups to prevent another outage.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Turkey, survivors of last week's earthquakes, which killed more than 41,000 people there and in Syria, are now demanding accountability from the government. Many see the tens of thousands of collapsed buildings as preventable destruction. Now, the Turkish government's enforcement of construction codes is under scrutiny, all the way up to the president.
--:-- Shamita Basu: See, Turkey sits on two major fault lines and has always been vulnerable to strong earthquakes. These natural disasters can't be predicted, but they can be prepared for. After a deadly earthquake in 1999, Turkey did pass stricter building codes, but they haven't been consistently enforced.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Dozens of people involved in construction are now under investigation by Turkey's justice ministry. But as Vox explains, the blame spreads much further than contractors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As one expert on Turkish government puts it, cronyism, politics, and construction are all intertwined. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party has been in power for almost 20 years. His regime controlled access to lucrative government-building contracts. At the same time, he consolidated control over the courts, civil service, and the press. So there was a lack of forces to hold unethical contractors and their political allies accountable.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Amnesty policies in Turkey have also allowed developers to sidestep some safety requirements and move ahead with construction if they paid a fine. Some of these policies predate Erdogan but he continued them and even praised them for speeding up building.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Turkey's building safety problem wasn't just contractors cutting corners. It was also regulators looking the other way. If you look elsewhere in Turkey, it's clear that following safety and code requirements in construction makes a difference.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NBC reports on the small town of Erzin, about 70 miles from the quake's epicenter, where there are no reports of deaths or building collapses. Residents there credit the mayor and predecessors for refusing to allow construction that violated safety codes. They also took down buildings that were built illegally.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One city worker estimates that in the last few days, 20,000 people have come there from elsewhere in Turkey looking for a safe place to stay.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We've talked on this show before about ChatGPT, the AI tool that can write convincingly well. So this recent story in The Atlantic caught our eye because it cuts through the hype and gets right to the question of what the impact could be on the labor market.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New technology often changes work and can eliminate jobs. But across history, it's mostly changed blue-collar jobs in factories, mines, shipyards. In this piece, Annie Lowry argues that this kind of technology could have a different impact. It could threaten white-collar jobs. The jobs of humans who write legal briefs, textbooks, software code, and more.
--:-- Annie Lowry: I think why people are really, really nervous about this is this feels like the first one where, oh my goodness, is this going to turn Silicon Valley into the Rust Belt?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lowry says when you think about science fiction examples of AI, there's sort of two versions that come to mind. There's the friendly version. Think Star Trek. AI handles all the heavy stuff and we're free to explore the galaxy. But then there's the not version, the one where AI takes your job and leaves you in the lurch.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can imagine a dystopic version of that in which there isn't enough work for people and everybody kind of on the government dole and this leads to all sorts of social unrest.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So I think that the other thing is that we have all of these kind of like science fictional ideas in our heads and we're kind of like, well, which one's going to come to pass?
--:-- Shamita Basu: As Lowry and others point out, it's not a question of whether AI will change our working lives. Only how fast that change will happen.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The new coach tapped to lead the University of North Carolina's field hockey team knows what it takes to win. And that's because she was on the team just three months ago. Sports Illustrated celebrates the story of 22-year-old Erin Mattson and why, despite her young age, she was such an obvious choice to be named head coach.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Mattson's playing resume is seriously impressive. She won four national titles in five seasons at UNC. She's been called the Michael Jordan of her sport. And when it came time for her to graduate, and the team's legendary coach was retiring, the athletic director didn't want to lose Mattson. Another school would have hired her, at least as an assistant coach.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For Mattson, all of this has been a whirlwind. The team won the national title in November. She graduated in December, and then she was named head coach this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She recently talked about coaching players who used to be her peers on the Carolina Insider podcast.
--:-- Erin Mattson: There's no doubt that this is going to be something super special. It's just, yeah, navigating this very unique situation and executing it well. But yeah, I'm super excited to coach and help and everything, and I think the girls are too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read more about Mattson and all of the day's news in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around for another sports story. We've got a narrated article coming up next from GQ. It's about a new Netflix series about golf that turned into something very different as a new Saudi-backed league emerged to challenge the PGA. So sit back, enjoy listening to that, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
