--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, January 20th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, how California is reckoning with flood insurance after weeks of rainfall, what's going on with a possible TikTok ban, and why it's the most wonderful time of the year to be a goat. But first, Alec Baldwin faces criminal charges for the fatal shooting of cinematographer Helena Hutchins in 2021 on the set of the Western movie Rust.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Prosecutors in New Mexico, where it was filmed, say they're charging Baldwin and the movie's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, with involuntary manslaughter.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: About 15 months ago, Hutchins was shot in the chest, and the film's director, Joel Souza, was injured while rehearsing a scene with Baldwin.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Sheriff's records say the safety officer on set told Baldwin the gun he had was cold, meaning it contained no live ammo. But there was at least one live round in the weapon.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Investigators later found live bullets mixed in with dummy rounds on the set.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: The incident sparked broader questions about safety and labor practices on movie sets. Rust was shot during a time when some films and shows were put into production quickly after delays during pandemic lockdowns.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: There were previous issues on the same set, including two accidental weapons discharges less than a week before Hutchins was killed.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Baldwin is one of the film's producers. He and his partners settled with Hutchins' family to end a wrongful death civil lawsuit they filed.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: A year ago, he told ABC that he did not pull the trigger. "No, no, no, no, no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never. That was the training that I had. You don't point a gun at me and pull the trigger."
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--:-- Shumita Basu: FBI investigators have cast doubt on the idea that the gun went off without Baldwin pulling the trigger. Lab testing showed that the gun worked normally.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Both Baldwin and the armorer Gutierrez deny the charges against them. In the past year they both filed lawsuits blaming others.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Baldwin blamed Gutierrez Reed and the film safety officer. Gutierrez Reed sued the weapons provider, saying it mislabeled a box of ammunition that contained live rounds, which the provider denies.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Baldwin and Gutierrez Reed could serve up to 18 months in prison, or as long as five years, if prosecutors prove there was more than simple negligence involved.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Since late December, California has been hammered with practically nonstop rain. Around 32 trillion gallons of water in three weeks.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: President Biden visited yesterday to observe cleanup efforts.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: We'll see the full extent of the damage to the homes, the businesses, and the farms and ranches.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: And we now, we know some of the destruction is going to take years to fully recover and rebuild.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: It's an estimated billion dollars of destruction. And that includes thousands of homes that have been damaged.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Grist takes a look at an issue that's coming up for a lot of people in the state right now, flood insurance.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Around 98% of California homeowners don't have flood insurance.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Many Americans assume that it's included in standard homeowner insurance policies, but that's not the case.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: FEMA mandates flood insurance for homeowners with federally backed mortgages in high-risk areas.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: But Grist explains that FEMA's California maps are decades old. Some of them are missing rivers and streams, and they don't account for climate change.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: That means so many homeowners who are in flood-prone areas are not required to have flood insurance.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: On top of that, Grist reports that FEMA isn't consistently enforcing the mandates for homes that do fall in the flood zone.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: And mortgage companies often fail to alert customers when their policies expire.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Another barrier here is the cost of coverage.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Experts point to a national pattern. Rising premium costs means that Californians and people in other states are less likely to buy flood insurance.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: FEMA says the decline is also because of the pandemic and broader inflation.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: For California specifically, the agency cites the decades-long drought there as a reason why residents aren't purchasing coverage.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: But now, the images of swamped homes might be a wake-up call for homeowners nationwide to check to see if they're covered and to think twice about going without flood insurance.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: After years of back and forth over the fate of TikTok and whether the U.S. would ban the popular app due to potential national security concerns, in 2023, we might finally see some movement.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: The social media platform is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and it's spent over three years negotiating with U.S. government regulators.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Sarah Morrison is covering this for Recode.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: We don't know a lot about it. It's a very secretive process.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: But there isn't a deal yet, and people are getting more and more impatient for something to happen.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: TikTok also has lawmakers to deal with. Members of Congress, concerned about data security and the Chinese government's influence on the app, might pursue a ban.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: Some states have already done this, blocking it from government-owned devices.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: Some college campuses don't allow students to use TikTok on university networks.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: A ban at the federal level wouldn't make TikTok illegal for Americans to use, but it could block companies like Google and Apple from hosting it in their app stores, making it more difficult for users to access.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: If things keep moving in this direction, this would damage TikTok's business in a key market.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: So it's making moves to ease concerns, including working with the American company Oracle to host the app on U.S. servers, spending more than a billion dollars on the project.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: In the meantime, TikTok's popularity keeps growing. It was the most downloaded app in the world in 2022, with around 100 million downloads in the United States alone.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: TikTok becoming part of business plans and advertising plans.
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--:-- Sarah Morrison: So you know the longer it takes for any kind of deal to be worked out or any kind of law or ban or whatever to happen if it happens the more entrenched this thing is and the harder a sell it is to your constituents who rely on it for various reasons or just enjoy it.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: This is the time of year when Christmas trees get recycled. And there are plenty of creative ways to do it, to make sure it doesn't just rot at your curb or sidewalk, mulching programs, things like that.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: But the Wall Street Journal looks at a particularly creative and nutritious way to make sure those Christmas trees go to good use, feeding them to goats.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: The Journal visits Philadelphia, where a group called the Philly Goat Project accepts tree donations for goat feed.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Turns out the needles are full of vitamins A and C. Same goes for pine tree bark. There are also tannins, which can help protect goats from parasites.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: The story says goats with the most sophisticated palates prefer one type of tree over all the others, balsam firs.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: One goat named Teddy describes it to the journal as the Godiva chocolate of pine trees.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Okay, there aren't any actual goat quotes in this story. But the human who handles those goats really did say that, although she didn't exactly explain how she knew.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: And check out the latest episode of our interview show, In Conversation.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: This week, I talked to Wired journalist Andy Greenberg about a sting operation that took down a giant illegal marketplace on the dark web.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: And one big mistake made by the perpetrators, thinking that using crypto would hide their identities.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Bitcoin is really the opposite of untraceable. It's extremely traceable.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: It's kind of like a roadmap to everybody's finances that ultimately would serve as a kind of trap for people seeking financial privacy and all sorts of criminals that persisted for years.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the news app right now, we've queued up that episode of In Conversation to play next.
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--:-- Shumita Basu: Have a good weekend, and I'll be back with the news Sunday.
