--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, February 7th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, President Biden gears up for his State of the Union address, arrests in a plot to take out the power supply of an American city, and Salman Rushdie reemerges after last year's near-fatal attack.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But first, search and rescue crews in Turkey and Syria are working around the clock to pull survivors out of the wreckage caused by two massive earthquakes on Monday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More than 5,000 people are dead, and thousands are injured. We're getting more firsthand accounts of the damage, including dramatic footage of the aftermath.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Turkey, where thousands of buildings are destroyed, one collapse happened on live television.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Clouds of thick gray dust fill the air as people run for cover. Other videos show civilians standing in the rubble, huddled in the cold, waiting for help, hoping for news of their missing loved ones.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Cultural landmarks have been lost, including a centuries-old castle dating back to the Roman Empire.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has declared a week of mourning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Syria, videos show packed hospitals with some patients receiving care from makeshift beds on the floor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: People there survived years of war that displaced millions. Much of Aleppo was ruined in the conflict.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now it's been hit again, with a natural disaster destroying what waves of intense bombings did not.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One resident tells the Wall Street Journal that people are afraid to go inside their own homes, fearing collapse.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says it feels like doomsday. The region has faced conflict that led to a refugee crisis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's also under severe economic pressure, where families were already worried about getting enough to eat.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And, of course, this is a bitterly cold time of year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That means people whose homes are destroyed now face the added danger of extreme cold.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But among all the damage, there are some stories of hope.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Syria, you can hear rescuers' excitement when they find a child alive under a pile of rubble.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Teams of rescuers are fanned out across the region trying to find more survivors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are local volunteers alongside disaster relief professionals, and other countries are sending in more teams to help.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The area is prone to earthquakes but these ones stand out for their power magnitudes 7.8 and 7.5.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Only three quakes have hit the area that registered above six in the last half century.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Scientists say aftershocks and seismic activity in the area could continue for months.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The region will need a lot of help for a long time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post has a guide on how to donate in a way where your support gets to the people who need it the most.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can read about that in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Turning now to some big domestic news we're watching today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tonight, President Biden delivers his State of the Union address.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a stage where presidents lay out their agenda, but he now faces a Congress where Republicans hostile to that agenda are in control of the House.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Other challenges include an uncertain economy, the war in Ukraine, and a tense relationship with China following the balloon incident.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you don't watch tonight, I'll have full coverage with the key moments on tomorrow morning's episode.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Another major story is unfolding in Baltimore.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The FBI has two people under arrest in a plot to attack the city's power grid.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Prosecutors say they planned to shoot electrical substations in order to shut down the city.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Investigators learned of the plans through a confidential informant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Federal authorities say the suspects were racially or ethnically motivated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of them leads a neo-Nazi group.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Their attorneys did not comment to NBC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And lastly, we are on watch for a new record in basketball.
--:-- Shamita Basu: L.A. Lakers star LeBron James is just 36 points away from becoming the all-time leading scorer in the NBA.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He would pass another Laker, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who's held the title for decades with 38,387 points.
--:-- Shamita Basu: James reflected on where the record would rank among his accomplishments in a recent ESPN interview.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't know because I have not set out to do that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It wasn't like a goal of mine when I entered the league.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Making an all-star team, being a rookie of the year, being first team on NBA, first team on defense.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Winning a championship, for sure, being the MVP of the league.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Whether it happens tonight or during the Lakers' next game on Thursday, good luck scoring a ticket.
--:-- Shamita Basu: StubHub says prices for these games are sky-high, as fans hope to get a glimpse of history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Salman Rushdie is speaking out for the first time since he was attacked at a literary event last summer stabbed by a man about a dozen times.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Rushdie was there to talk about the U.S. being a safe haven for writers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a topic he has lived with and relied on, because for decades, he's had a target on his back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: put there by Iran's then-Supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who called for Rushdie's execution in the 80s.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Rushdie has spent these months recovering, and he broke his silence to New Yorker editor David Remnick.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I sat down with Remnick the other day to ask him what it was like to catch up with the prolific novelist about his life and his work, including his new book out this week called Victory City.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But first, I asked Remnick for an update on Rushdie's recovery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, as you can imagine, that was my first question when I saw him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think he began by saying, I've been better in a kind of dry, joking way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He was stabbed many, many times.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he's 75 years old.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He was stabbed in the liver.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He lost vision in his right eye, a major nerve in his hand.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So on the other hand, had he been stabbed a little more deeply in the neck, he would have bled right out on that stage.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So he feels lucky to be alive and he's getting better.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, Rushdie was famously forced to lay low for many years when Iran's Ayatollah issued a fatwa, an order of execution against him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That was more than 30 years ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But for the most part, he has made it a point to live openly and fearlessly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So what did he tell you about how this latest attack on him is affecting the way that he thinks about his safety today?
--:-- Shamita Basu: It can't not affect how he thinks about his safety.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think part of the reason he gave me an interview and no one else is because he couldn't go on book tour.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, this is a guy who likes to get out and around.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, he's a social being.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's not Alexander Solzhenitsyn living in isolation in Vermont.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When he was living in the United States, certainly for the last 20 years in New York City, He was really, he was out and about so much that the New York Times even wrote a piece about him, dancing at Moomba, going to this restaurant and that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It was a kind of act of joy and defiance at the same time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So how is he grappling with thinking about writing about the attack?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think with enormous difficulty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says to me that, you know, PTSD is part of the picture of the aftermath of this attack.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm sure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Writing is hard enough in the first place.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Even an inferior writer like me can attest writing is hard.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it trebly hard I would imagine in the wake of something like this.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But he at his desk He going I have absolutely no doubt considering the courage and the will and the storytelling genius of Salman Rushdie that something will emerge from this
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it clear also from your article that you reached out to many younger writers who say that they been shaped by Rushdie people like Zadie Smith Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Ayad Akhtar, and they all seem to be reflecting on what his attack means in a broader sense, for artists, for free speech.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What did they tell you?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, I think Salman Rushdie, who's now 75, was somebody who was liberating in the first place for these writers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Think of Zadie Smith in London and in the London of migrants and the immigration in London and picking up a book like Midnight's Children, which is really, I think, Rushdie's masterpiece in an early novel published in 1981.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that novel became the great novel of India.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so Zadie Smith and all these other writers picked up that book and others like Shame and the Satanic Verses, and it really blew the doors open for them, imaginatively, politically, and in terms of just a sense of freedom and what was possible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, and yet when something like this happens, it feels like it reaches across history, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The fatwa order, having been many decades ago, and yet this reminder, this visceral and dangerous and nearly fatal reminder to Rushdie, but also to all those in his community, that the threat lingers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The threat does linger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The threat lingers and it makes us think about speech very carefully.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I know that there's a lot of debate about how speech can damage, how speech can harm.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Ayyad Akhtar says, you know, I can continue to have that debate, but I can't put it in the same paragraph or the same level of importance as the freedom of the imagination and the freedom of the written and spoken word.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Rushdie not only speaks out for that, but he embodies it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he would wish that his life were less interesting than his books.
--:-- Shamita Basu: but he is, in a sense, cursed by having a life as interesting in many ways as his books.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, thank you so much for your time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: My pleasure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can listen to Remnick's interview with Salman Rushdie on The New Yorker Radio Hour on the Apple Podcasts app, and you can read his profile in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next from The Times of London.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You'll hear about the Ukrainians defending Snake Island, who became national heroes when they refused to surrender to a Russian warship.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's much more to the story than was reported at the time, and it's a good time to hear it with reports of new Russian troop movements ahead of an expected offensive against Ukrainian forces.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's playing for you next, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find more on these stories and others in the Apple News app.
