--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, July 10th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, why the Texas floods were so deadly, the hacking group wreaking havoc on retailers and airlines, and the viral band climbing Spotify's monthly listens that is literally unreal. But first, a federal judge in New Hampshire has placed a new temporary block on President Trump's order to ban birthright citizenship nationwide.
--:-- Tom Hals: This decision comes on the heels of the Supreme Court's ruling in June, where the conservative majority ruled to significantly limit the power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions that block Trump's orders from taking effect. But that ruling carved out certain exceptions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For example, the Supreme Court left an exception for class action lawsuits. And Tom Halls, a correspondent with Reuters, told us that's how the ACLU and other groups representing the plaintiffs in this case positioned their argument.
--:-- Tom Hals: We spoke with him yesterday before the judge's ruling. What the plaintiffs are seeking is they're asking the judge to certify a class of all the children who will be subject to the president's order on birthright citizenship. And by combining all those people into a class, the judge could then enter an order protecting that entire class.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A similar legal strategy was used successfully in another recent case where a lower court judge blocked President Trump's attempted asylum ban at the southern border.
--:-- Tom Hals: And Halls told us the tricky part of this approach is that class action lawsuits have to follow a legal stipulation called Rule 23, which basically says that all of the proposed members of a class have to show that they would be harmed in the same way by a given government action.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: In the birthright citizenship case, the administration argued they don't. The administration is already saying you can't include these people in the same class. They should be separate classes. They're going to really fight this. They're going to be doing that in case after case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: [pause] Hall says class action cases are often appealed. So this most likely is not the end of the legal fight over birthright citizenship. They take a very long time to play out. Sometimes it can take years to play out.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: The judge in this case has said he would stay his ruling for a few days to allow the Trump administration to appeal. The birthright citizenship order was scheduled to take effect on July 27th.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Advocates challenging the order say more than 150,000 newborns would be denied citizenship annually if it takes effect nationwide.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been nearly a week since the Texas floods, and there remain well over 100 people still unaccounted for. In the immediate aftermath, there have been a lot of questions asked about how such a disastrous weather event could take so many by surprise, And what, if anything, could have gone better in the local disaster response?
--:-- Emily Foxhall: Today, we wanted to spend a bit of time exploring how a confluence of factors made these floods so deadly. In particular, the geography and history of the area itself, climate change more generally, and local warning systems and preparedness.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: There has been a long, long history of deadly flash flooding in this region. That's the area is prone to major flooding most notably in 1987 when 33 people died. You may have heard this term flash flood alley That's how some people refer to this area.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: It's very hilly. There's not like a deep layer of soil to absorb the water. It's a very rocky area. And when the water comes, it goes downhill fast. The thin topsoil combines with a non-absorbent limestone bed, so there isn't much to slow it down, making the Guadalupe River Basin one of the most dangerous regions in the country when it comes to flash floods.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: These were the highest floodwaters to hit hill country in decades. The initial deluge had, according to some analysis, a 0.1% chance of occurring in a given year. So can we attribute that to climate change? As always, it's difficult to draw a straight causal line for any singular event.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: But as Foxhall told us, global warming does pose specific risks for flooding events. And extreme rain in the U.S. is increasing. We know climate change is warming temperatures and in warmer air that can hold more moisture. So it makes heavy rainfall more likely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Given the area's history and topography against a backdrop of worsening rainfall due to climate change, should Texas Hill Country have been better prepared or issued more effective warnings?
--:-- Emily Foxhall: These are the types of questions being asked at the local press conferences this past week, and the exchanges with reporters are becoming increasingly tense.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's the Care County Sheriff's team on Tuesday, unwilling to get into the details or timeline of the night of the flooding. All those questions will be answered, but the priority right now is bringing people home.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: We totally understand that, but your community is asking these questions. And we will get answers. Right now, all of our resources are focused to recovery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Unlike some of its neighbors, Care County does not have a siren system to warn people to evacuate, though it's been heavily debated in recent years.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: Local officials determined they couldn't afford to install one or add tools like river gauges, which trigger warnings when rain or floodwaters exceed a certain level.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A former county commissioner told NBC that's in part because Care County did not receive disaster relief funding they had asked for from FEMA.
--:-- Emily Foxhall: Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick says he and Governor Greg Abbott are now discussing how to allocate state funds to improve warning systems.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Had we had sirens along this area, up and down, it's possible that that would have saved some of these lives. And the state needs to step up and pay for these.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: The National Weather Service did, however, put a flood watch out for the region on Thursday, which simply means the conditions are present for a flood to happen.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Its first flash flood warning, meaning a flood is ongoing or imminent, came at 1.14 a.m. on Friday. The Weather Service said that then triggered alerts to cell phones and weather radios, and over the next few hours issued more warnings for phones and through social media channels.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Some people may have never received those warnings, though. Service during the flooding was spotty, especially in the region's most rural areas, according to KUT News, a local NPR affiliate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And many of the children at camps along the river didn't have phones with them, according to media reports.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Many feel the warnings simply didn't reach them in a timely way, some arriving hours late.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, there's been a lot of speculation about whether recent federal cuts to the National Weather Service had an impact here.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: But Foxhole told us officials are saying that wasn't the case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many of these experts in the weather world really say the National Weather Service did everything they could. You know, at least watching this from the outside The Weather Service had extra staff overnight as this was happening.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Ultimately, as global warming patterns suggest rare weather events like extreme rainfall and flooding are to become less rare The tragedy in Texas may now prompt a wider debate about how our warning systems work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Like, should there have been additional sirens? Should there be more education about how to respond to a weather watch or a weather warning?
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: And I think that's where kind of these big picture conversations, we'll be watching to see where those go in the weeks to come.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to a cyber criminal organization run by teenagers and young men that's been wreaking havoc in recent weeks on retailers, insurance companies and other big businesses across several countries.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: They seem to be sort of on a joyride in a sense, just rampaging through multiple sectors in the U.S., in the U.K., in Canada, causing outages, delays, a lot of chaos.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Lily Hay Newman, a senior writer for Wired magazine. She told us how this group called Scattered Spider has been disrupting supply chains and shutting down digital infrastructure.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: This week, the FBI issued a new warning that they appear to be targeting the airline sector. They use sort of hacking techniques where they gain initial access in complex digital ways. But really, their bread and butter is social engineering where they trick someone into granting them access on purpose.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For example, they've impersonated staff members of companies pretending to have gotten locked out of a company email, tricking IT teams into giving them access to corporate systems.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: They've also created convincing phishing websites with URLs that include the name of their target organization, along with words like help desk or VPN, to get workers to click on the links, giving them access to steal data that they then use to extort companies for money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But they also seem to be just delighted by any time they can start to get a string of wins or, you know, infiltrate companies and slow down their operations.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: And once members of Scattered Spider figure out a way in at one company, Newman says they attempt to use that same method to hack companies across entire industries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They'll think, well, probably the systems of that, let's say it's a grocery store chain. Maybe other grocery store chains are using similar systems, similar software. And so they'll start to go on these sprees.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Some of their high-profile attacks have targeted casinos like Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts. MGM lost $100 million.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Another widely reported target was the British retailer Marks & Spencer, which sells food, clothing, home goods, and more. The company recently had to pause online orders for several months, and authorities are investigating Scattered Spiders' possible role.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: The fact that they've been targeting critical sectors, it shows the vulnerability of our digital systems that without even doing sophisticated hacking in most cases, simply by having this talent for finding these weak spots and tricking someone into giving you the access you need to compromise systems, this actor is really threatening critical services
--:-- Shamita Basu: How to stop the group remains an open question For one as Newman reports it not clear exactly how big Scattered Spider even is or how it structured The leadership is opaque and tight-knit.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: One cybersecurity expert told her it's relatively easy for the group to grow because its members are on Discord and Telegram, platforms they seem to be using to teach new wannabe hackers how to join.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other words, once one hacker is taken offline, there are others ready to replace them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. First, to a major company shakeup, Linda Iaccarino, the CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, announced that she would be stepping down yesterday.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: She had a tumultuous run at the company for two years, and her departure comes a day after Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok made a series of anti-Semitic comments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yaccarino did not provide a reason for her departure.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Now let's turn to the number of confirmed measles cases in the United States. It's now the highest it has been in a single year since the virus was declared eliminated 25 years ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There have been more than 1,200 cases so far this year, mostly in Texas and spreading to Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Two children and one adult have died, marking the first measles deaths in a decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Experts who spoke to Stat News expressed concern that the spread and a tepid federal response could portend more trouble if vaccination rates continue to decline.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: According to the CDC, the vast majority of cases have been identified in people who have either not been vaccinated or whose vaccination status was unclear.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, to the rise and fall of an unusual band. That's the song Dust on the Wind, a brief number one hit on Spotify from a group called Velvet Sundown that's racked up over one million listens during its first month.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: But here's the catch. This band isn't real. It's AI. Or as Velvet Sundown put it over the weekend, AI that's, quote, guided by human creative direction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, they left a lot of pretty obvious breadcrumbs that helped internet detectives figure out the truth. The photos of this so-called band looked totally fake.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Their lyrics were basically a mad lib of 70s anti-war rock tropes. And they were pumping out music at breakneck pace. Two albums in June, with a third coming in July.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of Spotify users interviewed by The Washington Post were disturbed to find out this music made its way to their feeds without more clear labeling that it was made by AI.
--:-- Lily Hay Newman: Despite all the listens, the critics were not as impressed with the somewhat generic sound. The Atlantic put it this way, no human artist could tolerate producing such soulless lackluster, but an AI is unburdened by shame.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the apple news app and if you're already listening in the news app right now we've got a narrated article coming up next the atlantic's jennifer senior dives in on something all humans do but americans seem to be struggling with sleep through her own insomnia journey she examines the collective anxiety around sleep and what this means for the way we live if you're listening in the podcast app follow apple news plus narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
