--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, July 27th. 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.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: New reporting from The Washington Post says the Justice Department is asking very specific questions about Trump's actions around January 6th. And it seized phone records of senior aides to Trump. Other news outlets are also reporting on this. Together, it's a sign that DOJ's investigation into the Capitol attack is getting more serious and potentially getting closer to Trump himself.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sources familiar with the Justice Department's January 6th investigation tell The Post that prosecutors have asked former top staffers for Mike Pence about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others close to him. Some questions reportedly focus on the Trump campaign's plan to try to steal the election by using fake pro-Trump electors to undermine the results in states Biden won. That could be considered fraud.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post explains that another track of the investigation involves potential seditious conspiracy, that is, planning to overthrow the government. It's important to understand that asking about the president's actions is not the same as opening a criminal investigation into him personally. That would be an explosive move.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After the Washington Post story came out, there was new focus on an earlier interview that NBC's Lester Holt did with Attorney General Merrick Garland. When asked about a potential indictment of Trump, Garland didn't rule it out.
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--:-- Merrick Garland: We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6th, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another accountable. That's what we do. We don't pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So if Donald Trump were to become a candidate for president, it again that would not change your schedule or how you move forward or how you move forward.
--:-- Merrick Garland: Say again that we will hold accountable anyone who is criminally responsible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Spokespeople for the Justice Department and Trump did not comment to the Post about the story. But Trump himself wasn't totally quiet yesterday. He made his first speech in Washington since leaving office last year. And he stuck two familiar themes: false claims of fraud in the election he lost, and not-so-subtle hints that he'll run again in 2024.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a big week for economic news. Today, the Fed is expected to deliver another major interest rate hike. And tomorrow, we'll get a number that plays a leading role in the way that we talk about the state of the U.S. economy, GDP, gross domestic product. It tells us whether America's economy is growing or shrinking. It has enormous influence on Wall Street trading and Washington policymaking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But some economists worry that it has too much influence. NPR's Planet Money explains the danger of expecting one number to tell the story of the entire economy.
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--:-- Planet Money: In fact, the economist who basically invented GDP, Simon Kuznets, he worried about this exact thing. Historian Zachary Karabell explains.
--:-- Zachary Karabell: Kuznets himself said, look, the fetishization of numbers and the use of this number as a proxy for everything is what politicians do. It's what people do. I would never have recommended that. And it's the easy way out, avoiding hard discussions, and it can be easily abused.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kuznets worried that too much focus on the GDP would overshadow something that was equally important to understand, inequality. Who is benefiting from economic growth and who's missing out?
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--:-- Zachary Karabell: So now a new generation of economists is trying to fix that blind spot in GDP. They're out with a new tool that tracks inequality in real time. They've run it on pandemic recession data, and they found that the bottom half of income earners in America took about twice as long as the top half to get back to their pre-pandemic income.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But in recent months, lower-income Americans have made gains as a tight labor market made it easier to get a raise. These economists hope that when GDP numbers make headlines that more people will stop to think about the humans behind those numbers and who actually winning or losing as the economy changes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After decades of declines, the homicide rate in the United States rose in 2020 and 2021. There's no single clear reason why, but criminologists have several possible explanations. Gun sales surged during the pandemic. Daily life as we knew it was disrupted. Social services were paused.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ProPublica's Alec McGillis is covering this in collaboration with The Atlantic, and his reporting points to another critical factor at play. The criminal justice system slowed down, And the delays from pandemic lockdowns means that many courts are still not operating at full capacity.
--:-- [Audio clip of Alec McGillis plays]
--:-- Alec McGillis: Basically, as courts close and you end up with these huge backlogs in various districts, various cities, you have prosecutors who perhaps become less likely to charge certain cases because they just know that everything is so backed up already. And perhaps in some of those cases, some of the people who they've chosen not to charge end up committing more serious crimes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Serious crimes, including murder. And the longer these cases take to work their way through the courts, the harder it is to prosecute them. You have witnesses and victims who become less willing to testify. That's an issue in a lot of cities, of course, that people are often unwilling to testify. And the longer things drag out, that dynamic sort of only increases. Or they simply forget things, too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: McGillis explains an important concept in criminal justice. The system deters crimes when the consequences are swift, certain, and fair. The pandemic delays meant that criminals didn't think that they would actually pay the price. So, the theory goes, that may have pushed more people toward crime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We were drawn to this piece because it illustrates the real-world consequences of delayed justice. McGillis tells the story of a man in Albuquerque, Leon Casacchito. He spent months in jail waiting for trial because the courts were backed up. But Leon day in court never came.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Things are really just kind of getting out of control in the jail And people are in constant lockdown in their cells not able to leave their cells He stuck in a cell with a younger man who suffered from schizophrenia And one day this younger man just completely snaps and beats Leon, the 40-year-old, to death.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it was just this very kind of bleak, direct result of things having gotten just so completely shut down. This piece also looks at another city that took a different approach. Wichita pushed to reopen courts quickly, figuring out ways to keep things moving while minimizing the spread of COVID. And it did get things on track.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As a judge put it, it's important for the community to see the courts functioning. There have been a couple of recent shark attacks in New York. Now, it's easy to hear these stories and feel kind of worried about going to the beach. So we appreciated this story from Curbed, because it gives you the reassurance that you maybe already know, but sometimes it's nice to hear someone else say it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it also talks to a marine life expert who explains how the news about sharks right now, it's actually good news. First, the context. The chance of being killed by a shark is 1 in 4.3 million. Car crash fatalities are literally millions of times more likely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that shark expert, he says, all of the reports of more shark activity mean conservation efforts are working. Shark populations are in decline globally. But in waters around New York, rules against fishing for sharks and work to support the fish that sharks eat are succeeding.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's something the expert said that's supposed to be reassuring. If sharks wanted to eat us humans, they would attack more often. The shark expert says he still goes to the beach. And the article has some common sense tips from him if you want to feel safer next time you swim.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read the full piece, along with all the stories that we mentioned, 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: I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
