--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, July 26th. 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, one of America's most influential conspiracy theorists is on trial. Alex Jones is in court in Texas to determine how much he will owe for defaming parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims. 20 students and six educators were killed there in 2012. That fact is not disputed. But Jones has repeatedly spread lies about the shooting, claiming that it was a hoax meant to fuel a government crackdown on guns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jones has also spread lies about other mass shootings, the January 6th Capitol attack and the 2020 election. He has an enormous following on the right. Donald Trump has been on his show. Just the other day, Steve Bannon praised Jones, comparing him to the founding fathers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jones went after Sandy Hook victim's parents, saying that they were part of a hoax. His many followers ended up harassing the grieving parents. The court is a place where the parents now can fight back. It's an attempt to make him pay for his falsehoods, but also to try and hurt his company and make it harder to spread future lies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The parents of one of the victims, six-year-old Jesse Lewis, are set to take the stand to describe the toll that Jones and his conspiracies have taken. You know, to say that Sandy Hook was a hoax and it never happened, it's an outright lie. It's a total disrespect to myself, my son, the individuals who lost their lives that day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But it extends so much further than that. That was Jesse's dad, Neil Hesslin, in an interview on NBC a few years ago when he filed the lawsuit. Alex Jones has already lost multiple defamation cases. In the one in Texas this week, a judge already ruled he defamed the Sandy Hook parents. So now a jury will decide how much Jones has to pay.
--:-- Chuck Lindell: First part of the trial, the jury will come back and decide how much money Alex Jones owes these two parents for reputational and emotional damage. And then a whole new proceeding begins. New opening statements, new discussions, and that focuses on the net worth of Alex Jones and his companies. And that moves on to punitive damages. That's where the big money is going to come in.
--:-- Chuck Lindell: Lindell says Jones has stuck to his lies, saying the legal cases are part of a broader conspiracy to silence him. The parents of these victims describe what they've been through as a decade of torment. They went from facing the loss of a child to being attacked for telling the truth about the shooting. Now they've spent years trying to get justice and maybe do something to damage a powerful media machine churning out waves of dangerous lies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Picture this, a gas giant planet, kind of like Jupiter, with temperatures above a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and clouds made of sand. It was such a wild moment to me because I am talking to this astronomer and she is telling me very casually, yeah, there are probably clouds made of sand on this planet just because it's so hot and conditions are right.
--:-- Marina Corrin: I was sitting next to my window and I looked out and it was a beautiful day. And I looked at our very Earth-like, puffy white clouds, you know, these things that I think we kind of take for granted. And I tried to imagine being on any other type of world. And that was just very surreal to me.
--:-- Marina Corrin: The planet that I'm talking about doesn't have a catchy name yet. It's called WASP-96b. It's an exoplanet, which means that it orbits around a star that's outside of our solar system, not our sun. It's over a thousand light years away. And it's just one of the latest revelations from the James Webb Space Telescope.
--:-- Marina Corrin: Astronomers have been, I don't know if excited is enough of a word, they've been giddy about the endless possibilities since the first few images from the telescope went public earlier this month. With Webb, they have a new view on the origins of the universe. Webb was designed specifically to study the light of the very first stars and galaxies, the ones that flickered on just, you know, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
--:-- Marina Corrin: So any time that Webb captures this ancient light, it's really looking back in time because that starlight left, you know, 13-some billion years ago. Astronomers have found more than 5,000 exoplanets using other methods, but Webb is helping them learn more. Researchers are studying these planets to see whether they're made up of the right stuff to support life. The million-dollar question, right?
--:-- Marina Corrin: So far, we haven't gotten a lot of really beautiful dazzling images from Webb so far, but none of them have captured a little alien waving and saying hi. I say the Webb telescope alone won't give us the answer. Let's say it finds something like oxygen or carbon dioxide or methane or better yet, a combination of both, because a combination of those molecules might mean that there could be something beneath the cloud tops producing that. It could be life.
--:-- Marina Corrin: But just knowing what is inside an exoplanet atmosphere can't tell you definitively, you know, life is causing it. Turning on the Webb telescope is like switching from squinting to high-powered binoculars. I say if it's already revealing fascinating discoveries like this one, just imagine what it'll show us in the years ahead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It might not feel like fall and football season are right around the corner, but the NFL is getting ready. Teams across the league are reporting to training camps, including the franchise that's widely considered the most popular, most valuable team in the league, the Dallas Cowboys.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, I want you to seriously think about this. When was the last time the Cowboys won the Super Bowl? I'll just tell you, it was 1996, a year that Bill Clinton was president and everyone was dancing to the Macarena. So if the Cowboys are not particularly good at winning, why are they so popular?
--:-- Tom Clute: I think the Cowboys are just one of those perennially relevant teams. That's Tom Clute, who recently wrote about the team for The Guardian. It really doesn't matter where they are in the standings, what their record is, which players they're trotting out. Those uniforms are just so indelible, so iconic, that they're always going to be a significant A1 story no matter what.
--:-- Tom Clute: Clute explains how, despite losing a lot, the Cowboys are still considered America's team. They top the Forbes list of the most valuable sports franchises at around $6.5 billion, a number that Clute says is probably low. A lot of that success is credited to one man, Jerry Jones. The team's longtime owner.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jones is singularly responsible for turning them into a financial juggernaut, but he's also played a huge role in turning the NFL into the cash cow that it is today. He saw the enormous potential financially that this league had and said, we don't need to settle. See, in 1993, Jones was a key part of the deal with Rupert Murdoch to bring the NFL to Fox for a much higher price.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jones also took the league to court and won the ability to strike bigger marketing deals for the Cowboys. Jones helped elevate the NFL overall and made his team a lot of money in the process. The immense value of the Cowboys is ultimately a testament to the league in which they play, right? The NFL is the richest sports league in the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They just signed a $150 billion media contract last year with a host of broadcasting and streaming partners. 75 of the top 100 shows in America last year were NFL games. So could this be the year when the Cowboys finally rise to the occasion on the field? They should make the playoffs again this year. Whether or not that translates to postseason success, that's another story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This last story is a weird one and kind of complicated. But sometimes an article stands out because it reads a little like a Mad Libs. And this one from CNN includes Elvis Presley, Wall Street, and the impact of the pandemic on the tourism industry.
--:-- Shamita Basu: First, here's something that I didn't know until reading this. Pre-pandemic, Graceland was the second most visited home in America after the White House. It's one of the biggest tourist draws in the South. The VIP ticket, which includes Graceland Mansion, Elvis's private jets, his car museum, and a bunch of other stuff, goes for almost 200 bucks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The state of Tennessee makes so much money off of Elvis fans that it actually issued bonds tied to how much tourist revenue Graceland generates. So that's the Wall Street part. Now, you can probably guess how the pandemic comes in. The bonds were issued way before COVID did a number on tourism. Graceland had to close for a while. So the bonds went into default.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Graceland and the city of Memphis got into a big fight. At one point, Elvis Presley Enterprises threatened to move Graceland out of the city. But CNN points to signs of a turnaround. Attendance is reportedly up after the Baz Luhrmann Elvis film came out last month. And Elvis Week is next month. That's when fans make a pilgrimage to mark his death with a candlelight vigil and concerts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So investors who bet on Graceland bonds are in a rough spot now, but they may just have to be patient. You can find all these 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. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
