--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, April 4th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, why a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin could have major national implications, a March Madness record that you might not have realized was broken, and the best scam artists in the animal kingdom. But first, Donald Trump will be arraigned in New York this afternoon, where he's expected to plead not guilty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today's the day we'll learn exactly what charges he faces, involving hush money paid to adult film actor Stormy Daniels by Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen. These two people are lead players in a complicated story that started years ago, so we thought you could use a refresher on the key facts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's start with Daniels. She says in 2006, she had consensual sex with Trump, which he denies. He had married his third wife, Melania, the year before. Daniels says they met at a celebrity golf tournament where Trump invited her to dinner.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She later told 60 Minutes that it turned out the meal was served in his hotel suite. I realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into. And I was like, oh, here we go. And I just felt like maybe it was sort of I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I just heard the voice and I, well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen. So you deserve this. A Wall Street Journal investigation of the run up to the 2016 election revealed that Michael Cohen secretly paid Daniels one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to keep quiet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That reporting helped trigger a federal investigation in 2018. Initially Cohen said he paid Daniels using his own money and Trump was not involved. But his story changed and he testified on The Hill in 2019.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The last time I appeared before Congress I came to protect Mr. Trump. Today, I am here to tell the truth about Mr. Trump. This time, Cohen said Trump did know about the payment to Daniels and he was done defending him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The more people that follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I'm suffering. Federal prosecutors argued the money amounted to illegal, unreported assistance to Trump's campaign.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law and other charges. He was sentenced to three years in prison, which he mostly served in home confinement.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As we've mentioned before on this show, hush money payments can be legal, but falsifying business records to cover them up or paying them in a campaign context can be against the law.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Legal watchers expect charges along those lines for Trump and for Cohen to be a star witness. Trump says he simply followed Cohen's legal advice and says investigations of him are motivated by politics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Apple News will have full coverage and analysis through the day of his court appearance and the charges. Let's turn now to an election that's happening today in the critical swing state of Wisconsin that has major national implications.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Voters there are choosing a justice for their state Supreme Court. If the candidate that Democrats support wins, it would flip the ideological balance of the court for the first time in 15 years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: University of Wisconsin political science and law professor Howard Schwaber talked to Wisconsin Public Radio about why it's such a big deal. This election really does live up to its hype in the sense that the stakes are extraordinarily high across an extraordinarily broad range of issues.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Supreme Court races in Wisconsin are officially nonpartisan but many Democrats are supporting Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protosawitz. Republicans are backing former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Whoever wins this election could be the deciding vote in an upcoming challenge to Wisconsin's abortion ban. It's a pre-Civil War law that was reinstated after Roe v. Wade was struck down last summer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gerrymandering is another top issue at stake here. Republican-drawn maps have helped conservatives hold power in the state for more than a decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The state Supreme Court could also rule on legal challenges to election results, union rights, gun safety legislation, and other hot-button issues.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The high stakes are pushing campaign spending to an all-time high for this kind of race. By one estimate, a total of $45 million has been spent, triple the previous national record.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Men's college basketball has a new national champion. Here's the moment when UConn beat San Diego State.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hurley and the Huskies have their dreams come true. This is the fifth championship in the program's history. UConn won 76-59. It was a lopsided victory to end March Madness, but this year's tournaments had a lot of close games and upsets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it was also a record-breaking year for women's basketball TV ratings. LSU's win over Iowa in the championship game drew nearly 10 million viewers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That shattered the record for the most-watched women's college basketball game in history. Demand to see the women play in person was way up this year, too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For the Final Four average ticket prices for the women games were around more than the men matchups. Wall Street Journal sports reporter Rachel Bachman was in Dallas for the women championship and described the energy on NPR.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tickets being sold were face value. Huge throngs of fans who drove ours to be there. In fact, Taylor Swift was also here in Dallas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And one ticket reseller said that championship game tickets were going for more than the concert tickets. So it had a very big time feel.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's end with a story from The New Yorker about scam artists. Not the kind you might be expecting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As it turns out, the animal kingdom is full of scammers. From butterflies to snakes to fish, creatures are constantly conning each other to get any kind of survival edge they can.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are basically two kinds of deception in the wild. One is when a creature takes advantage of a cognitive weakness in another species.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That can include mimicking. For example, there's a butterfly that's evolved to have the same markings of a toxic butterfly species to avoid getting eaten.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's the other way around, too. A snake whose tail looks like a wiggling worm so it can attract a meal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Then there's just good old-fashioned lying. Like crows, which call out to alert each other when there's danger nearby.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But a con artist crow might send out a danger call as a tactic to keep others away from food that it found.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This piece has all kinds of creatures in it, including famous human scammers and liars like Frank Abagnale, you know, the catch me if you can guy, and George Santos, the New York congressman facing multiple investigations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Who's been caught in so many lies that we don't have time to list them all here. If you're listening in the Apple News app right now, the Animal Kingdom scammer story is queued up to play for you next as a narrated article.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So enjoy listening to that and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
