--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, October 1st. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. 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.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The good news is the government did not shut down last night. The Senate and the House both passed a temporary spending bill, keeping things running for another nine weeks. But Democrats didn't manage to reach consensus on infrastructure. What they had set as a crucial Thursday deadline for President Biden's legislative agenda is now extended for another day, at least.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We've been covering this all week, but to quickly bring you up to speed about what's at stake here, check out Politico. All summer, Democrats have been planning to pass two massive infrastructure packages. The first one passed with bipartisan support in the Senate. It's a little bit more than a trillion dollars and would pay for projects like roads, bridges, and expanding broadband internet access.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The second bill could be passed with only Democratic votes. It was supposed to have a much bigger price tag for social programs. Things like expanding health care, establishing universal pre-K, and fighting climate change. It all fell apart last night because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just didn't have the votes. According to Politico, last night was all about trying to get everyone on the same page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Pelosi promised a Thursday vote, but ultimately she sent her members home. She's hoping to get it all done today. Russell Berman tries to put this all into perspective in The Atlantic. You might look at last night's collapse and think Democrats are in disarray. They can't agree on things. But Berman says this is just how it works in Congress, especially when you don't have many votes to spare.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These spending packages are being compared to the New Deal. But some people forget FDR had massive majorities in both chambers of Congress. Berman is also stressing, aside from the government shutdown, a lot of these deadlines are pretty arbitrary. He writes, while things might look pretty scary come Halloween, it could all turn around by Christmas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Affordable Care Act was written off as dead several times before it was passed in March of 2010. And as Politico points out, the Thursday deadline isn't really dead yet. Even though Pelosi sent everyone home last night, party leaders used a procedural trick that prevented the legislative day from ending. So this morning, you might say it's still technically Thursday in the House.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What is time really?
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week we hearing a lot about public officials and conflicts of interest The question is whether their financial holdings make it look like they're not acting in the public's best interest. On Monday, two Federal Reserve leaders announced they're retiring. That's after they were criticized for trading stocks while in a position to influence U.S. monetary policy.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And on Wednesday, seven members of Congress were called out for failing to report stock trades. Now, The Wall Street Journal is out with a separate investigation that looks into a similar problem in the federal judiciary.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We found that more than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family own stock. That's James Grimaldi, one of the journalists who reported this story for The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- James Grimaldi: There is no law preventing federal judges from owning stocks, but there is a law saying they can't hear cases where they or their immediate family have any financial interest.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's one example Grimaldi told us about. We had a case out of New York. Judge Edgardo Ramos handled a lawsuit between Exxon Mobil Corp. And it was a pollution claim over who was going to pay for some chemicals that got into some groundwater. At the same time, Judge Ramos owned between $15,000 and $50,000 in ExxonMobil stock. Yet he still heard the case.
--:-- James Grimaldi: Judge Ramos ruled in favor of Exxon, but he told the journal he didn't know he was violating the law. The software that screens for conflicts of interest looks for exact matches. So in Judge Ramos's case, the recusal list included ExxonMobil Corp, but not the unit called ExxonMobil Corp Oil. Small difference.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of other judges told the journal the same thing. The system didn't catch a conflict and it was never their intent to violate the law. But Grimaldi explains intent doesn't really matter. Nor does it matter that most lawsuits don't actually move stock prices one way or the other.
--:-- James Grimaldi: The Supreme Court in 1988 said that the law's purpose is to promote confidence in the judiciary. So the main thing here is to keep the public confident that a judge will not be biased or even have an appearance of a conflict of interest Some of the judges the journal contacted apologized and at this point they trying to make things right 56 of the judges went to the court clerks and asked them to notify parties in more than 300 lawsuits, saying that they should have recused themselves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And what's interesting about that is that means new judges might be assigned to these cases and they could come up with different rulings than the first judge.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's a new reality in a lot of American workplaces. You have to get vaccinated or you might get fired. Vaccine mandates are being enforced in hospital systems, city governments, school districts, airlines. And there's been a fear that they would backfire, that people would quit en masse.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But as it turns out, when you take a closer look at the numbers, you'll see that hasn't happened at all. Just look at United Airlines. You might have seen a headline this week. 600 people could lose their jobs because they refused to get the vaccine. Seems like a big number. I know. But the more important data point here is more than 99 percent of the airline's 67,000 workers said, OK, I'll get the shot.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Same thing for Massachusetts state troopers. There was an announcement at the beginning of the week that dozens of state troopers were going to resign. So far, state police say just one officer retired because of the mandate. And that's from a force of about 2,000.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NPR cites one survey that shows lots of people might threaten to walk out or quit. But when push comes to shove, very few people actually do quit over vaccine mandates. One Washington Post analysis lists similar examples happening across the U.S. And these are big name organizations like Tyson Foods, Albany Medical Center and the Houston Methodist Hospital System.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What their analysis lays bare is you cannot talk about numbers without knowing and considering context. The facts show because of these mandates, many people got vaccinated. without these mandates, lots of people wouldn't have agreed to get these life-saving injections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the Post also points out there are some real examples where smaller workplaces were affected by people quitting. Think about rural hospitals where they can't afford to lose any hands. In one medical system in rural New York, 20 of nursing home staffers were placed on unpaid leave for failing to comply with the mandate Another hospital had to shut down its maternity ward because too many people quit over the mandate
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But in the majority of cases, data shows mandates do work. They help get holdouts to roll up their sleeves. Now, these people are not necessarily giving in quietly. Several lawsuits are making their way through courts, and there are a lot of protests. But the evidence is there. Vaccine mandates are not leaving the trail of resignations that so many feared they would.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So are you one of those people that just doesn't get art? It might be nice to look at and all, but you don't really see what all the hype is about. If so, this next story is for you. A modern art museum in Denmark gave a local artist, Jens Honig, around $84,000 to create two pieces of art. He delivered two blank canvases. I'm talking blank. There was nothing on them. And he titled the piece, Take the Money and Run.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Honig was supposed to recreate some of his previous work, two pieces meant to illustrate the average income in Denmark and Austria. and he was supposed to use the cash, those paper bills, as an element within the actual artwork itself. Literally fill the frames with money. Hunting says the blank canvases are meant to be a commentary on the rights of artists and working conditions within the art industry.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So according to the contract he signed, the artist is supposed to pay back this money in January when the exhibit closes. But considering the title of his work, who knows what will happen?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all those stories and more in the Apple News app. And check out our weekend interview show, In Conversation. This week, I spoke with Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about their new book, Peril. It's about the final months of the Trump presidency, a period of time they refer to as one of the most dangerous in American history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This created a national security crisis. Everything was being observed by the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and they went on alert. They actually thought that the United States might be experiencing a coup or some sort of collapse. Enjoy that week and listen. We'll be back with the news on Monday. Thank you.
