--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, November 11th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, President Biden travels to Egypt for the big climate conference. What's behind this week's cryptocurrency meltdown? And a look at who wins and who loses when we play the lottery. But first, more and more races are being called as votes are counted.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Democrat Tina Kotek won the race for governor in Oregon. The three-way contest was tighter than expected in a state where Democrats have held the governor's mansion for a long time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Senate control still depends on the big three races in Arizona, Nevada, where votes are being counted, and in Georgia, where a runoff is coming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A few days out, we're starting to see some interesting patterns as analysts dig into the voting data and exit polling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's new analysis of the impact of the youth vote by Tufts University researchers. Forbes looked at the numbers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tufts estimates that youth turnout was strong. The second highest for a midterm in the past 30 years, the highest being in 2018.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Exit polling shows that voters aged 18 to 29 chose Democrats by strong margins, so they may have tipped the scales in close contests.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And young people are also getting elected. 25-year-old Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost talked to CBS about his historic win.
--:-- Maxwell Frost: Being the first Gen Z member of Congress isn't the reason I decided to run. I really wanted to run to represent my district.
--:-- Maxwell Frost: But it's a huge part of the story. You know, Gen Z and millennials make up about a third of the country, but we're nowhere near a third of the government.
--:-- Maxwell Frost: And I think we need a government that needs to look like the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Frost has also spoken about how school shootings and gun legislation were big motivating factors for him to get into politics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Other big issues for young voters? Abortion, student debt, and LGBTQ plus rights.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One Harvard political scientist says that recent election cycles show younger voters are emerging as a serious political force that's deeply engaged.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says both parties need to pay more attention to them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Another top issue motivating young voters Climate change They inherit the consequences of the decisions we make today
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Biden is in Egypt for the U.N.'s Climate Change Conference, COP27.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's expected to highlight the hundreds of billions of dollars in new climate investments he got passed into law.
--:-- Sarah Kaplan: It was packed with global delegates ahead of Biden's arrival.
--:-- Sarah Kaplan: So they say the U.S. needs to go above and beyond the average, right? They can't just set the same target as what the overall world needs to meet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There were expectations that Biden's trip abroad would be a sort of foreign policy escape hatch after his party took a beating in the midterm elections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It turns out Democrats did better than expected.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But as we've talked about, Republicans are likely to control the House when all the votes are counted.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that raises questions about whether Biden can get Congress to take further climate action.
--:-- Sarah Kaplan: President Biden pledged last year to increase the U.S.'s climate finance to more than $11 billion, but only $1 billion has been approved and appropriated by Congress.
--:-- Sarah Kaplan: So, you know, that's sort of an outstanding question of whether the U.S. can actually deliver what developing countries say they need.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After Egypt, Biden will meet with world leaders at summits in Cambodia and Indonesia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That second summit is where he'll have his first face-to-face meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping since Biden took office.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Even if you don't pay close attention to cryptocurrency, you probably heard about the meltdown in prices recently.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bitcoin investors took huge losses in recent days.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It was the latest blow in what's been a rough year, where the larger cryptocurrency market has fallen by about two-thirds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're talking trillions in losses.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Things got wilder in the last few days when a popular crypto exchange experienced the digital equivalent of a bank run
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it been quite a road from glory to bankruptcy
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the center of this story is FTX which ran one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world
--:-- Shamita Basu: In January it was valued at $32 billion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At one point, Forbes said its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the richest person in the world under 30.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's an old saying on Wall Street. In a gold rush, gold miners eventually go broke, but the people who sell them picks and shovels get rich.
--:-- Shamita Basu: FTX could have just been that, an exchange where people could buy and sell crypto, making money charging fees, whether digital currencies themselves were up or down.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But there was also a related company, a hedge fund trading cryptocurrency.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal and Reuters report that FTX transferred billions in customer money to the hedge fund, where it could be used to place risky bets on crypto.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other words, it's almost like a banker borrowed money from people's personal savings accounts to make their own investments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: FTX did not comment to the journal or Reuters on their reporting on customer money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As word got out that FTX was in trouble, customers started to pull their money out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the exchange struggled to come up with the funds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It had to scramble to find an emergency investor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A rival exchange called Binance was set to buy FTX, but it pulled out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It said FTX's problems were too bad for it to save.
--:-- Shamita Basu: FTX said this morning it's filing for bankruptcy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bankman Freed resigned as CEO.
--:-- Shamita Basu: U.S. regulators are reportedly looking into FTX's implosion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some FTX customers could lose a whole lot of what they put in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We just gave you the real simplified version of the story. If you want to get into the details, check out the reporting from the Journal and Reuters in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, we learned that someone out there has the winning ticket for the record-breaking $2 billion Powerball jackpot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We still don't know who they are, but what if I told you there are two other big winners in this story?
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's the guy who sold the winning ticket, 75-year-old Joseph Shahayed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: California's Powerball rules say that the retailer gets a cut of the jackpot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So Shahyed will get a million prize
--:-- Shamita Basu: The LA Times has this write about him that have you smiling because everyone just has the nicest things to say about this man
--:-- Shamita Basu: He owns a gas station in Southern California
--:-- Shamita Basu: He known by customers as Papa Joe because he treats everyone like family.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They say no one deserves this money more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Shahayed immigrated from Syria to Los Angeles in 1980 to build a better life for his family.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Along the way, he became a beloved figure in his neighborhood.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says he plans to share his winnings with his family, who help him run the store.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The other winner, State Schools in California.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They'll receive over $150 million from the Powerball drawing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, lots of people who buy lottery tickets say, hey, at least the money goes to a good place, like an education fund.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But it's worth understanding how state-run lotteries work and seriously questioning whether gambling is a good way of raising money for government services.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's the focus of this weekend's episode of Apple News In Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I spoke with historian Jonathan D. Cohen, who wrote a book called For a Dollar and a Dream, State Lotteries in Modern America.
--:-- Jonathan D. Cohen: You would never, ever see a state promoting cigarettes and advertising them so that they could get the tax revenue.
--:-- Jonathan D. Cohen: But that's exactly what we have with state lottery tickets, where states have entire agencies and officials whose job it is to increase lottery sales and to entice people to gamble.
--:-- Jonathan D. Cohen: Cohen says the fact that the lottery is so popular says something about the state of the American economy and the American dream.
--:-- Jonathan D. Cohen: It is not inevitable that we get $91.4 billion in lottery sales every year.
--:-- Jonathan D. Cohen: That is only the product of an economy that is not working for enough people and that is not providing enough people the chance through the traditional economy, through their work, through entrepreneurship to get ahead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can hear the full interview by searching for Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app or in the podcast app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the news app, stick around.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We've got a narrated article coming up next from The New Yorker.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It looks at the phenomenon of performative Twitter apologies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So sit back, enjoy listening to that, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
