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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, February 4th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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: Democrats are on course to pass a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill without Republican support. A key part of that plan is raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. But it's not clear whether this would fly with more conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin, or if it's even possible to raise the minimum wage as part of the stimulus bill.
--:-- Politico: To pass the bill without Republican support, Democrats are using a parliamentary procedure called budget reconciliation. Yesterday, we spoke about it in depth. While it does offer a workaround to a Republican filibuster, this is not a magic wand lawmakers can use to pass whatever they want. To use budget reconciliation, the bill must impact federal spending, revenue, or debt.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The person who decides whether raising the minimum wage qualifies under the rules is the Senate parliamentarian. You can think of her as the referee of the Senate. Mostly, it's an obscure job. But in this situation, Republican Congressman Tom Cole says the parliamentarian is close to a god.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And so members of both parties are now trying to sway her. Senator Bernie Sanders asked the Congressional Budget Office to look into what impact increasing wages could have on federal spending.
--:-- Annie Lowry: The CBO study is expected to support the argument that if wages go up, the federal government wouldn't actually have to spend as much on social welfare programs. I write about this in The Atlantic, and I cite previous CBO research that shows $15 an hour would bring 1.3 million Americans out of poverty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Republicans argue that raising the minimum wage to $15 would hurt businesses and cause lots of people to lose their jobs. If businesses have to pay their workers more, they might have to cover the cost by dropping some people from the payroll.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: A wage hike could be especially painful for businesses in rural areas where costs of living and wages are much lower.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The questions now are which arguments will sway the skeptical Democrats and how the Senate parliamentarian will treat this whole debate.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The FBI is still making arrests in connection with the January 6th storming of the Capitol. Cases have been brought against more than 150 men and 20 women.
--:-- Ronan Farrow: In a series of articles, I profile some of the extremists that were captured on video that day. I describe the gradual and insidious ways that they were pulled into this violent movement.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In my latest piece, I talk to Rachel Powell. You might recognize her from her FBI Wanted poster. She was wearing a pink hat at the Capitol, and in videos of her online, you can see her smashing a Capitol window and yelling orders to other insurrectionists through a bullhorn.
--:-- Ronan Farrow: Powell's story is an example of how a person with no apparent history of extreme views can be so quickly radicalized. She's 40 years old, has eight children, and lives in western Pennsylvania. She used to sell cheese and yogurt at local farmers markets, and her Facebook posts were mostly about things like yoga and organic food.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She describes her views as, quote, libertarian at heart. And she tells me she didn't support Trump in 2016, but while he was in the White House, she not only became a supporter of the president, but also developed more and more radical views.
--:-- Ronan Farrow: A lot of it started with COVID conspiracy theories. She refused to wear a mask in public spaces. And by the time the election rolled around, Powell was an easy target for disinformation. She was convinced by false claims that the election was stolen.
--:-- Joan Donovan: The radicalization process Powell went through is becoming increasingly common. This disinformation about the election is not hidden in the dark corners of the Internet. It's mainstream. It's coming from Fox News, members of Congress, the former president himself. And it's being reinforced over and over again in echo chambers on social media.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some people have speculated that Powell was maybe part of an organized group that stormed the Capitol because of those videos of her shouting commands into a bullhorn. But she says that's not the case. She wasn't part of any plot or plan.
--:-- Ronan Farrow: She's a person who was convinced that the election was stolen, that her country was being taken over, that she was doing the right thing by storming the Capitol.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Farrow's profiles of these unlikely insurrectionists speaks to the broader mainstreaming of extremism and the forces responsible for it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People who cheered on Reddit investors who drove up stocks like GameStop and AMC embraced a particular narrative. Regular folks online got rich and Wall Street lost billions. But it's not that simple.
--:-- Derek Thompson: Plenty of Wall Street players won big too. One hedge fund earned $700 million on GameStop alone. And a giant private equity firm made a fortune on AMC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As for the small investors, many of them are now facing painful losses. The Washington Post spoke with some of these individual traders. These are the people on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets.
--:-- Evan Oosterink: I'm a 19-year-old college student, and I didn't know much about GameStop, but I was seeing a lot of hype about it online. So I invested thousands, and basically I lost my life savings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And you know, Evan is still holding out hope. He told the Washington Post he's staying in the game and holding his breath, hoping the stock has a turnaround.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There is a lesson in all of this after a crazy week of GameStop mania. Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic says it best. These Reddit traders thought they could, you know, stick it to the man, stick it to Wall Street by buying up GameStop and sending the market into a frenzy.
--:-- Derek Thompson: But that just isn't how the markets work. It's sort of like going to Vegas with a few thousand dollars in your pocket, pulling up a chair at the high rollers table. You can play and you can play. Maybe you even win a few hands. But at the end of the day, the house always wins.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are a couple of ingredients that make a really good online dating profile. You need a great picture of yourself with your best friend's shoulder kind of cropped out of it, and you know, list some cool interests, maybe a catchy quote.
--:-- Danielle Cohen: And now, apparently, during COVID, proof that you are vaccinated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I love this story. You know, this is the latest trend in the online dating world. Danielle Cohen writes about this for GQ.
--:-- Danielle Cohen: At the beginning of the pandemic, profiles would include messages about having the antibodies. Then there were screenshots of negative COVID-19 tests. And now people are highlighting their COVID-19 vaccination and even including pictures of that little card received after getting the shots.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Cohen, the writer here, is not too impressed, and the experts back her up. She spoke with an epidemiologist who emphasized getting a vaccine does not mean that you have the OK to just get out there and breathe on other people.
--:-- Danielle Cohen: We don't know definitively yet if the vaccines actually prevent someone from spreading COVID-19. So basically, you could still get coronavirus from your vaccinated date, which Cohen says for her is not exactly makeout material.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And by the way, there are other reasons why posting pictures of your COVID-19 vaccination card online is just a bad idea, whether it's on Tinder, Facebook, or, you know, some of the others.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, the Better Business Bureau warns, as happy as you might be to have that little card, it has a lot of personal info on there, like your full name and birthday. Sharing them makes it easier for scammers to steal your identity or make fake vaccination cards. Swipe left.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
