--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, August 15th. 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: Let's take a quick look at some of what's developed over the weekend after the FBI search of Donald Trump's home in Florida.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The House Democrats, who chaired the intelligence and the oversight committees, are calling on the director of national intelligence to deliver a national security damage assessment based on the documents the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Documents related to the warrant say the FBI found numerous classified papers, including those marked top secret, the most sensitive classification for U.S. government documents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are indications that some of the papers are so critical they were supposed to be stored and viewed only in specially secured rooms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's also growing concern that criticism of law enforcement from Trump and some GOP officials could drive violence.
--:-- Brian Fitzpatrick: I think everybody needs to be calling for calm, everybody across the board, and everybody needs to respect our law enforcement, whether they be local, state, or federal.
--:-- Brian Fitzpatrick: I'm very concerned for the safety of our law enforcement officers, especially right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump has not been charged with a crime related to classified documents. He has denied wrongdoing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Author Salman Rushdie is off a ventilator and said to be on the road to recovery, but he has severe injuries after he was stabbed at an event in New York State on Friday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The suspect pleaded not guilty to attempted murder Rushdie was there to deliver a lecture on the importance of the United States as a haven for targeted artists
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's lived with death threats for decades and spent many years in hiding.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 1989, Iran's then-Supreme leader issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination. A fatwa is a decree given by an Islamic leader.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He said Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses, was offensive to Islam.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In recent years, some moderates in Iran's government disavowed the fatwa, but many hardline clerics have supported it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As recently as 2019, the current supreme leader said it could never be revoked.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Authorities haven't said anything about the suspect's motive, and Iran's foreign ministry says it has no information about Rushdie's attacker.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In an interview two weeks before the attack, Rushdie told the German magazine Stern that his life felt normal again.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He said he was grateful social media wasn't around when the fatwa came out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He said it would have made things infinitely more dangerous.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This attack happened around an anniversary of something that Rushdie has spent practically his whole career thinking about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been 75 years since India became independent of Britain, and a British lawyer drew the borders that would divide India and Pakistan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Partition triggered violence between Hindus and Muslims, and one of the largest forced mass displacements in history, with around a million people killed and 15 million forced from their homes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This all happened the same year that Rushdie was born in India.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Partition is at the core of what many think of as his best novel, Midnight's Children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Rushdie sometimes explored violence in his books.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Until Friday, even after all the threats he's faced, he had managed to mostly escape it in life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A roof over your head and something to eat These are the most basic human needs
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the latest inflation numbers show the cost of both skyrocketing even as overall inflation eases a little bit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We talked last week about food costs. Today, our focus is shelter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a very difficult time for renters right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg looks into why and where.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not just the places that you always hear about, like New York and San Francisco.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Rent is up by double digits across America, from Vegas to Tucson to Chicago to Boston.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Miami, annual rents are up nearly 40 percent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: People of color are especially affected by the current rent inflation, since they account for a majority of renters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One factor that's making the rental market so tough is the housing sales market.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather talked about this on PBS.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Fed had to raise interest rates to fight inflation and mortgage rates also went up as a result.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Higher mortgage rates mean many families can't afford to buy homes anymore.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So they're stuck renting, which increases demand for rentals and pushes prices up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The pandemic is a big factor here, too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More people are returning to cities of all sizes to be close to the office now that some work-from-home policies are ending.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And tight inventory means bidding wars for apartments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, there may be hope down the road.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Redfin estimates a million new rental units will hit the market in the next year or so.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But that boost in supply probably won't do much about prices anytime soon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For now, as Bloomberg puts it, the rental crisis is sparing nowhere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2010, a retired art dealer hid a chest filled with roughly a million dollars worth of gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the only clue that he left behind was a cryptic poem
--:-- Shamita Basu: Since then thousands of people have gone looking for this treasure
--:-- Shamita Basu: At least five people have died in the search
--:-- Shamita Basu: A new podcast from Apple TV Plus called Missed Fortune tells the story of this epic hunt for riches.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We talked to the host, Peter Frickwright.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: A lot of treasure hunters had some kind of major disappointment in their life.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: This treasure was their plan for overcoming that or, changing the narrative of their entire story.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: Other people are just sort of bowled over by the romance of it.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: You know, they always loved pirate stories.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: This is kind of a dream come true that someone gave them the opportunity to actually go out looking for a million-ish dollars worth of actual gold.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: Frickwright follows the story of one treasure hunter, a former cop named Daryl Seiler.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: He dedicated years of his life to the chase.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: And along the way, Seiler had some pretty close calls.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: He got arrested.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: He was nearly swept away by a river in Yellowstone.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: He lost his job, his apartment.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: He ended up on friends' couches.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: But none of that discouraged him.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: And that's because Frickwright says, once you start treasure hunting, it's hard to stop.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: Maybe the feeling would be like, after you've read the lottery numbers and seen that they matched your ticket, and you just have to turn it in.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: Like, that's kind of the buzz that he got every time he went treasure hunting.
--:-- Peter Frickwright: And that's an addictive, addictive feeling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're interested in hearing more, check out Missed Fortune on the podcast's app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And you can find all the stories that we talked about and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
