--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Tuesday, May 21st. I'm Gideon Resnick, in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Coming up on today's show, the aftermath in Iran of the president's death, understanding the downfall of Red Lobster, and the portals connecting New York City to Dublin. But first, prosecutors have rested their case in Donald Trump's criminal trial in New York.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They have tried to prove to a jury that Trump falsified business records in order to conceal a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels over an alleged affair.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Prosecutors have argued that it was all part of a scheme to silence that story in order to help Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, which would elevate the alleged crime to a felony.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Over the course of four weeks, the prosecution has called 20 witnesses, including Daniels, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, and Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He is the prosecution's most crucial witness, in part because he's the only one that can directly tie Donald Trump to the allegedly falsified business records.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Kara Scannell has been inside the courtroom reporting for CNN, and she spoke about Cohen's testimony on CNN's podcast, One Thing.
--:-- Kara Scannell: It's just a question now of, did Donald Trump's team get enough nicks in Michael Cohen's credibility to have a juror have pause of, do you convict a former president and a current frontrunner for the Republican Party based on the evidence that they've heard and on Michael Cohen's testimony?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: From the beginning, some legal observers have said this will be a tough case for the prosecution to prove.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They don't just have the unprecedented job of convincing a jury to convict a former president, but they also have to show a very specific intent.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Here's Boston University law professor Jed Sugarman on the NPR podcast, Trump's Trials.
--:-- Jed Sugarman: One of the key lines that Cohen testified about was that Trump wanted to make this go away.
--:-- Jed Sugarman: And it seemed like a lot of people have interpreted the make this go away as Trump intent related to the campaign.
--:-- Jed Sugarman: The prosecutors need to show more than that I think.
--:-- Jed Sugarman: They need to show more than just that this was campaign related.
--:-- Jed Sugarman: They have to prove a crime that was being covered up by these documents.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yesterday, Trump's attorneys called lawyer Robert Costello as a witness.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: He consulted with Cohen in the past and contradicted some of his testimony.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Costello was argumentative with Judge Juan Mershon and the prosecution.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And at one point, the judge threatened to remove him from the witness stand.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Trump's attorneys did not indicate plans to call additional witnesses today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: That would mean that Trump himself would likely not testify.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And that's in line with what Sugarman and many other legal analysts have expected.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There's no way that the defense counsel wants to put Trump on the stand because he's so unpredictable.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: At this point, I think they probably see that there are sufficient gaps in the prosecutor's case.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And putting Trump on the stand could only give prosecutors the chance to close those gaps.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The judge has told attorneys to prepare closing arguments for next Tuesday.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Then Trump's fate will be in the jury's hands.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now let's look at some other stories that are in the news.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: President Biden said it's, quote, outrageous that the International Criminal Court is seeking the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Minister for war crimes charges related to Gaza.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hamas officials were also named.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Biden said there is, quote, no equivalence between Hamas and Israel.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It will now be up to a panel of judges to consider whether to issue those arrest warrants.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In Iran, the country is observing five days of mourning following the helicopter crash that killed President Ibrahim Raisi and the country's foreign minister.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: State media refers to the crash as a technical failure.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The area where the chopper went down was mountainous and it was foggy on Sunday.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says the deaths will not disrupt the country's operations.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And in the U.S., FDIC Chair Martin Grunberg is resigning.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: His leadership has been in question since an investigation into the bank regulatory agency found widespread sexual harassment bullying and discrimination.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The FDIC commissioned this investigation following a Wall Street Journal report last year.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: An iconic American food chain has filed for bankruptcy.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You may have seen the headlines about Red Lobster and how its endless shrimp deal sank the company.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But to blame the shrimp alone would miss the full story.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Really, it's a story of massive mismanagement, a series of bad business choices, and what happens when private equity takes over everything in our lives.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You see, a big sign of trouble came for the seafood chain in 2013 when prices for shrimp went way up, revenue dropped, and the owner at the time decided to sell Red Lobster to a private equity firm.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Now, by this point, Red Lobster had hundreds of locations across the country.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The land was sold to raise money for the deal and then leased back to the company.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So Red Lobster was paying rent for real estate it used to own.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Here's Wall Street Journal reporter Heather Haddon in a recent video report.
--:-- Heather Haddon: Restaurant leasebacks can be kind of common in restaurants.
--:-- Heather Haddon: It's something other chains do.
--:-- Heather Haddon: The positive is you get a whole chunk of capital way up front.
--:-- Heather Haddon: The negative is there can be consequences down the chain.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: For Red Lobster, those consequences hit hard.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It got stuck in leases it couldn't afford.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And the private equity firm saddled the seafood chain with tons of debt.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Later, there was a revolving door of CEOs, five since 2021.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One former executive told CNN that menu decisions were driven by executive opinion versus customer preferences.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The company asked employees to take on more work without providing extra resources in an effort to cut costs.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Then there's the endless shrimp deal.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Red Lobster made all-you-can-eat shrimp for $20 a year-round thing.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The bankruptcy filing points out that a major shareholder in the company was a seafood distributor.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And the filing says that the CEO gave it an exclusive deal to provide shrimp to the chain, which drove up costs.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: All-you-can-eat shrimp might have been good for that relationship with the big shareholder, but it was a potential conflict of interest.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In public, there's been a lot of focus on the damage done by the unlimited shrimp deal.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But the bigger picture of Red Lobster was a story of bad corporate choices that cause the iconic seafood chain to flounder.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Public artwork has the ability to delight and unite us but it can also bring out some bad instincts.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The creators of a portal project that features a live stream between New York City and Dublin found that out recently.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So basically in each city, there is a giant circular structure with a screen showing Dublin folks what's going on in New York at that moment and vice versa.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The portals were briefly shut down following a few incidents of public nudity and some unfortunate displays of upsetting and, in some cases, racist imagery.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The creator, a Lithuanian artist named Benedikta Gila, told the New York Fox affiliate that the bad behavior took him by surprise.
--:-- Benedikta Gila: We didn't see that coming.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So in a way, our team was upset that somehow we were so focused on bringing the portal to New York and we did not optimize the software for all the potential behaviors that might happen.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The portals reopened this past weekend, and now there are a few more guardrails, actual fencing to keep people from stepping on the installation.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And a feature where if someone tries to obstruct the camera, the live stream is blurred out.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's also only open during certain hours now, and security is on site.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: People seem to be enjoying the reopening.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The New York Times saw a game of rock, paper, scissors play out yesterday.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There was a brief effort at the Macarena as well.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There was also a transatlantic version of the wave.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: A lot of actual waving, too.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: One excited New Yorker told Fox, it's like living in the future.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's amazing.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And it's nice to share love, you know, with some other people in the world, especially at this time.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And if you're already listening to the News app right now, we have a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The New Yorker and ProPublica teamed up to dig into the history of 3M.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The company is among those responsible for the creation of forever chemicals, which don't break down in the environment.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: These contaminants have been found in drinking water and the bloodstreams of humans and animals.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The New Yorker and ProPublica spoke to a scientist who found evidence of this decades ago while working at 3M and says her bosses stopped her work.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
