--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Monday, March 28th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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: President Biden is planning to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans in his new budget proposal today. The Washington Post looks at the plan that the White House is calling the billionaire minimum income tax.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The plan would place a 20 percent minimum tax rate on U.S. households worth more than $100 million. The Biden administration says most of the tax revenue would come from around 700 American billionaires.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This proposal would tax both income and unrealized capital gains. The last part of that is key. The super wealthy often pay lower rates of taxes than people with average wealth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A previous White House estimate said some of the richest families paid an average federal tax rate of 8.2 percent of their income. Average rates can be this low because the wealth of billionaires is often in investments.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In the U.S., many investments are taxed when they're sold. And those are realized capital gains. What's different about Biden's plan is that it would tax some investments before they're sold for certain very wealthy people to make sure they pay a minimum 20 percent tax rate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, if that happens, the billionaire's tax could raise an estimated $360 billion in new revenue over the next decade. The plan is similar to a proposal from the Senate Democrats last year as a way to offset the cost of Biden's Build Back Better plan.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing Western leaders to send more weapons and ramp up sanctions on Russia. Over the weekend in a video address he praised Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol for defending the southern port city and he questioned the courage of some ally countries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Zelensky's gained a reputation for knowing how to harness the power of his on-screen image. But as we've mentioned before, he got his start on the small screen. His old sitcom, Servant of the People, is now on Netflix.
--:-- Annie Bundle: I wrote about it for NBC, and I say it's really strange watching Zelensky play a fictionalized president. This is a life or death situation. And it's surreal watching it presented as a comedy when you know the reality is that it's a tragedy that's going on.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the show, Zelensky plays a history teacher whose viral rant on corruption launches him to the presidency. Bumble points out, even though it wasn't that long ago, politics was an entirely different game when the show first premiered.
--:-- Annie Bundle: This is in 2015, you know, pre-Trump, pre-Brexit, pre-COVID. You know, this whole idea of a simple, good-hearted history teacher going viral and like, basically toppling power structures is still satirical. It's still something that we think of as it could be a good thing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nowadays, watching it back, it feels almost like quaint. Bundle says watching the series is a reminder that Zelensky got his start as an actor and a comedian and that he's really good at his craft.
--:-- Annie Bundle: And it turns out some of those skills definitely transfer to his style of leadership today. I don't know if you've watched those little Instagram videos that he puts up. He always finds his light. He knows improv really well. He knows short, quick sentences that are to the point. It's really impressive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What a great leader they accidentally got through a comedy show. And that to me may be the most surreal part about this of all.
--:-- Alon Stevens: A lot of mass shootings in the United States are carried out by people armed with semi-automatic weapons. It's not against the law to buy them. There are laws against fully automatic weapons which can empty an entire magazine with a single pull of the trigger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But increasingly, people are finding ways to convert their semi-automatic guns into fully automatic ones. As reporter Alon Stevens from The Trace explains, that requires a special tool.
--:-- Alon Stevens: To do that comes the AutoSeer, which is an automatic conversion device that you can drop in to, an AR-15 or you can attach to the back of a Glock handgun. And it essentially turns that into a fully automatic weapon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: AutoSeers are hard to get legally in the United States. People need an extensive federal background check just to buy one. But Stevens explains, in recent years, these conversion devices have become really popular on the criminal market.
--:-- Alon Stevens: Some are available for as little as $20. And for people who want to try to get a machine gun outside the purview of the law, they're very cheap and they're pretty easy to install if you know what you're doing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so they've really taken off in the last five years or so. Stephen's reporting found these conversion devices are particularly sought after by anti-government extremists.
--:-- Alon Stevens: We actually saw that in the case of Stephen Carrillo. He's an Air Force sergeant and a member of the Boogaloo Boys, an anti-government extremist group who ended up using one of these weapons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He ended up launching an ambush on two federal security officers, killing one in the attack. And then the following month, he would use the weapon again to go out and kill another law enforcement officer.
--:-- Alon Stevens: The investigation by The Trace and Vice News found that federal prosecutions, which involve automatic conversion devices, are rising fast. In the past few years, federal agencies launched initiatives to track production and delivery, especially from overseas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One federal agent said that in his first 10 years on the job he rarely came across machine guns. Now he sees these types of converted weapons all the time. We see them in robberies. We see them in just arms trafficking right. We see them in drug traffickers. And also, we just see them in videos on the street, in certain communities where violence is quite normal.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This year's Oscars included groundbreaking wins and a surprise moment that you may have already seen on social media if you didn't stay up to watch it. Will Smith walked on the stage and smacked Chris Rock and he wasn't kidding.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The comedian had just made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's baldness. She has a medical condition. Later in the night, when Smith returned to collect the Best Actor trophy, he referenced what happened earlier, saying, I'm hoping the Academy invites me back.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That was Will Smith's first ever Oscar. Jessica Chastain also was a first-time winner as Best Actress. It was a night of a lot of firsts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer person of color to win an acting Oscar with her supporting role. Jane Campion took home the Directing Award. She's the first woman to have been nominated twice in that category.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And Best Picture went to CODA, a historic win because the core cast members were mostly deaf actors performing in sign language.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Troy Kotzer won for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar. CODA also stood out as the first film from a streaming service, in this case Apple TV+, to win Best Picture.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Our colleagues have pulled together the best Oscars coverage from the winning moments to the red carpet looks. That's on the Apple News app, along with all the stories we talked about today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You'll also find full coverage of March Madness as college basketball gets closer to crowning its champions. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Goodbye for now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Goodbye.
