--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, November 14th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, changes could be coming to your high rewards credit cards, how one of the world's top photojournalists covers combat zones and conflicts, and what happens when the hotel you're staying at goes bankrupt. But first, after 43 days of shutdown, the government has finally reopened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In some ways, the country is expected to go back to normal pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean it was cost-free. Over a million federal employees were either furloughed or worked without pay. They were expected to return to work as soon as yesterday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It'll take time to clear the bureaucratic backlog on everything from loan applications to unanswered customer calls. Museums will gradually open over the weekend and food stamp payments will go out in full. But again, there might be some delays there in states getting it to recipients.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg's Congress reporter John Fitzpatrick told his network it takes some effort after President Trump put his pen to paper.
--:-- John Fitzpatrick: The main impediment to getting things moving is that you have had people sitting at home because they were legally not allowed to work or people not being paid when they were working. And you get a bit of a morale issue and people using their time off to either work a second job or just not show up to a job where they're not getting paid.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Disruptions at airports are expected to linger. And yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced a $10,000 bonus for some TSA officers who were given high performance reviews by their managers while working through the shutdown.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When it comes to the economy, things might not just snap back right away. The Congressional Budget Office says roughly $11 billion in economic activity will be permanently lost as a result of the shutdown.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They have said that if it lasts for six weeks, which is what it basically did, that is expected to reduce annualized growth in gross domestic products in the fourth quarter by 1.5 percentage point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Harriet Torrey is an economics reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She says there's expected to be some make-up spending into the first quarter of next year as government workers receive back pay, but not everything will be recovered.
--:-- Harriet Torrey: Let's say you're a government worker and you used to go out for dinner every week. If you weren't going out for dinner in the shutdown, you're not suddenly going to go out for like five extra dinners in one week once you get your paycheck that you missed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So there is definitely some spending that is lost and is not recouped.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, the shutdown also created these blind spots in key economic data reporting. as jobs reports from September and October have been stalled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A more complete September jobs report is expected since most of the work on it was complete before the shutdown began. October, though, is a mystery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The White House initially said numbers for that month might never come out, but later on Thursday said a more scaled-back version could be released.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We probably will get a jobs report talking about payrolls, but it won't include the unemployment rate which is totally unprecedented.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Torrey says that a crucial missing data point because the unemployment rate can be a telling sign.
--:-- Harriet Torrey: There is a lot of interest in whether the slowdown in jobs growth that we're seeing is because of the supply of labor, like the supply of available workers going down, or if it's because of companies wanting to hire less or companies maybe starting to fire people, because those tell very different stories about the economy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, that data also informs the Federal Reserve as they consider another rate cut next month. Fed Chair Jerome Powell hinted at the last meeting that incomplete information could influence their decision and slow down any rate cuts, comparing it to driving in the fog.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When you make a purchase with a credit card, you wouldn't think that the price could be different based on which card you use or that a business might tell you that they only take a certain kind of Visa or MasterCard, for example.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But a proposed settlement this week, potentially ending a 20-year-long legal battle, could in fact lead to those very circumstances.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the biggest impact could be felt by those with high rewards cards.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It all has to do with swipe fees, those little costs that businesses pay when you use a credit card.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Visa and MasterCard are basically proposing that they're going to really loosen the details of the honor all cards rules.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they're giving merchants the option to kind of deny where they want, which cards they accept and how they accept them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Josiana Joshua is a corporate finance reporter for Bloomberg News.
--:-- Josiana Joshua: The honor all cards rule dictates that merchants are required to accept all types of Visa or MasterCards if they accept any cards from either company.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Back in 2005, retailers filed a class-action lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard. Merchants claimed that card issuers' fees and acceptance terms were anti-competitive in the marketplace.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, this is where the high-rewards cards come into it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As consumers increasingly seek out cards with higher annual fees and bigger rewards for things like hotels and airlines, businesses have had to pay higher swipe fees to help fund those fancy points and rewards.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Honoring all of them means that no matter the swipe fee, like the merchants have to accept them no matter what.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The fees themselves are small, but they add up. Altogether, businesses paid more than $100 billion last year in these swipe fees.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If the settlement does get approved, it could create some headaches for customers trying to use high rewards cards.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Any given retailer could just be like, hey, we don't take that card. Like, you can't use that card here.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Which seems like it would create a bit of friction for consumers as we know those higher premium cards are becoming more popular and a lot more people have them in their possession.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it could be one of those things where like you're being denied at the counter and you're like, well, I have nothing else to use.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the short term, not a lot is expected to change. A whopping 90 percent of credit card spending is on rewards cards, so many analysts say it would be harmful to retailers to choose to start rejecting them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Long term what this might end up looking like if this proposed settlement goes through is some businesses may choose to tack on an extra fee to process rewards cards to help cover the cost.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A court outcome is still months away.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On this show, we highlight some of the best reporting coming out today. And often that reporting comes with powerful photojournalism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Chances are, if you've followed reporting on any major war or conflict of the past two decades, you have seen Lindsay Adario's photographs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's been to Sudan to cover the ongoing civil war. She's documented migrants making the dangerous trek through the rainforest in South and Central America.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And now, a new National Geographic documentary called Love and War looks at how she approaches this high-risk, crucial work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I recently spoke with Adario for our latest episode of Apple News In Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I try to get the emotion of my subjects, but I also try to empathize and feel what it feels like.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We talked about some of the defining moments from her career, including her time in Ukraine in 2022 when Russia first invaded the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of her photographs became an indelible image of the war, of a family who had been killed while trying to evacuate along what was supposed to be a safe civilian route.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Adario says she was standing about 20 feet away from the deadly mortar strike that took the family's lives.
--:-- Lindsay Adario: It was very dusty, very chaotic, and I immediately clocked kind of these very small moon boots. And it dawned on me that it was a family or there were children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And after that, once we got into the car and sort of started heading back to the hotel, I immediately started messaging my editors saying, the reason this picture is important is because I was in this attack.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I survived the mortar attack, and I know that it was an intentional targeting of a civilian evacuation route.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You might remember that photograph. It appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It became one of the images that helped rally global support for Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, spurring countries to send weapons and aid.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The documentary also shows a very different part of her life, coming home from assignments to her husband and two young children, and navigating the tension between covering conflicts and being a parent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To create my own family with my husband has been a huge learning curve.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's really about your children now. You know, for me, it's about my kids and making sure that they're happy, that they're safe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Parenting is the hardest thing I've ever done.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, and I've covered almost a dozen wars and definitely parenting is much harder.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She told me that letting audiences see both sides of her life in this documentary was essential to understanding who she is and why she keeps doing this work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I also made a decision to just be completely transparent and vulnerable and open because I know what I ask of my subjects, and I did not think it would be helpful if I tried to paint a sort of pretty, perfect picture because that's not at all who I am.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can follow Apple News in Conversation in the podcast app to find that episode or come back to the Apple News Today feed tomorrow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New episodes of In Conversation will be available there on Saturdays too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you want to see some of Adario's photographs, check out our show notes page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A Chicago daycare worker who was detained by ICE at the center where she worked is now free after a judge ruled she was illegally arrested.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Diana Santiana Galliano was apprehended by agents while kids were being dropped off at the facility on Chicago's north side.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A video of her telling ICE officers she had papers while she was forcibly dragged out of the building went viral, prompting widespread outrage and leading local officials to call her arrest and abduction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Her lawyer says she has a valid work permit that allows her to work legally in the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A Trump administration spokesperson said officers were conducting a targeted traffic stop on Galliano.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A judge has ordered federal officials to give her a bond hearing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the U.S. is carrying out a military effort dubbed Operation Southern Spear meant to combat narco-terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hegseth didn't immediately elaborate on what, where, or how the operation will be carried out, but said it will, quote, secure our homeland from the drugs that are killing our people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It wasn't immediately clear whether he was announcing a new label for the ongoing U.S. operations near Venezuela or whether this is the start of a new mission.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It comes after the government announced it had carried out its 20th strike against suspected drug boats in and around the Caribbean, which have killed at least 80 people since early September.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, what happens when you're in the middle of vacation and your hotel goes bankrupt?
--:-- Shamita Basu: For people staying in properties owned by Sonder, the answer is that you get kicked out immediately.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The short-term rental booking company abruptly collapsed over the weekend when its partnership with the Marriott Hotels ended.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Once seen as a competitor to Airbnb, Sonder has struggled since the pandemic and announced it was liquidating its assets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN gathered stories from some disappointed guests, describing what it was like to be told to vacate without notice.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Imagine my surprise.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yesterday, the Lord's Day, Sunday. And all of a sudden I got a random email from Marriott.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That told us we had to vacate the premises by 9 a.m. the next day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Which I registered as spam because it made no sense.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it was even worse for staff.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many reported getting no warning either, meaning their final task before officially losing their jobs was to go room to room, ruining vacations and anniversaries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around for my entire conversation with war photographer Lindsay Adario on this week's Apple News in Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Enjoy the weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
