--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, September 26th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, a novel lawsuit to hold a big plastic producer responsible for harming the planet, the complicated legal challenge of defending a school shooter, and Oakland bids farewell to yet another sports franchise. But first, it's been a busy 24 hours in American politics, both locally and nationally.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here are some stories we're watching. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams is facing federal criminal charges. The indictment unsealed this morning includes five charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal campaign donations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Prosecutors allege the crimes began when Adams served as Brooklyn's borough president and continued through his mayoral term. Last night, before the charges were announced, Adams released a video statement saying he is innocent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He is now the first mayor of the city to face a federal charge while in office. It comes amid a series of probes and investigations involving a number of his associates, and as officials like the city's police commissioner, school's chancellor, and more have either resigned or said they'll step down.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On Capitol Hill, Congress approved a bill to fund the government until December, taking the risk of a potential shutdown off the table during the remainder of the election season.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As we mentioned earlier in the week, the bill also ended up including $231 million in funding for the Secret Service, which has been under new scrutiny from lawmakers for its challenges in protecting former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, both candidates have been on the road talking to voters about their economic plans. Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris focused on the economy in a speech in Pittsburgh and a later MSNBC interview.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The speech was in part an effort to blunt a consistent edge that former President Trump has had in polls on the issue of inflation and the economy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Look, I'm a capitalist. I believe in free and fair markets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She appeared to be responding there to Donald Trump and other Republicans calling her a Marxist.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the speech, Harris also touted her own middle-class upbringing, talked about her proposal to increase the tax deduction for startup businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, and vowed to double the number of people being trained in registered apprenticeships.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She referred to herself as pragmatic, said that she would not be beholden to ideology and would take good ideas wherever they come.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She also criticized her opponent's plans and attempted to draw a contrast with his economic values.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You see, for Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers. Not those who actually build them. Not those who wire them. Not those who mop the floors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump has been visiting battleground states all week, first Georgia, then yesterday North Carolina, where he spoke about reviving American manufacturing, imposing tariffs on foreign goods and lowering the corporate tax rate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now I'm taking it a step further. We going to bring the 21 rate which everyone said we could never get down to 15 percent but only if you manufacture your product here in the USA
--:-- Shamita Basu: While Trump has consistently led Harris on the issue of the economy, there is some recent evidence that the gap is narrowing in polling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's now averaging a six percentage point lead on the economy, down from a 12 point lead against President Biden earlier in the year, according to a Washington Post analysis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's partly because the economy is in fact looking better. Interest rates are coming down, prices are stabilizing, and maybe the most important measure of how the economy is doing, people are generally starting to feel better about the economic picture.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the big lie about plastic recycling. This week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, saying the oil and gas company has deceived the public about plastic recycling for decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as a result, the state has spent billions of dollars to deal with it. He accuses them of really falsely claiming that recycling is the solution to the plastics crisis, when in actuality, a very small percentage of plastics can economically or technically be recycled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tony Briscoe is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times. So by promoting plastic products, whether that's water bottles or food containers as recyclable, they're saying that they caused consumers really to go out and buy plastic products with impunity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if they threw them in their blue curbside recycling bins, that this product will be remade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The suit says decades of misleading marketing materials and ads encouraged consumers to buy single-use plastics guilt-free.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It said that ExxonMobil and other companies essentially hijacked the chasing arrow symbol, which we commonly associate with recycling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That was actually created by a student who entered a contest for paper recycling, which is very effective. and you see it on all of these plastic products which are recyclable or not.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Exxon is one of the largest producers of plastic polymers, the building blocks you need to make single-use plastics, things like straws and plastic water bottles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Briscoe told us the goal of this lawsuit brought by the state of California is to force the oil giant to end the deceptive messaging around recycling and pay financial penalties for the damage inflicted on California's environment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In response, Exxon blamed California officials for the state's ineffective recycling system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But experts say it's plastic, not our recycling systems. That's the problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the U.S., plastics recycling has never exceeded 9 percent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And ExxonMobil's own recycling facilities really only repurposes 8 percent of their plastics into more plastic products.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Most of it actually, 92%, is broken down, superheated, and made into fuel, which is combusted.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they're saying that that's really not recycling. That's destroying a product and contributing more pollution and emissions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Environmental groups are praising California for trying to hold Exxon accountable and hoping this might set a precedent for future cases that can hold plastic producers responsible for decades of misleading the public and impacting the planet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to reporting from the Marshall Project that paints a complicated picture of how our justice system looks at mass shootings and what it means to seek mercy for awful crimes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Six years ago, 19-year-old Nicholas Cruz shot and killed 17 students and educators at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It remains among the worst mass shootings at a school in American history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Among Cruz's victims, a beloved wrestling coach, a newly naturalized 17-year-old U.S. citizen, a national merit scholar, and a geography teacher.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Cruz pleaded guilty to murder.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Prosecutors and many of the victim's families wanted the death penalty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But a jury in Florida decided he should be spared and should spend life behind bars instead.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It was a surprising verdict.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Florida, you know, has more people on death row than all but three other states.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Joe Sexton with the Marshall Project.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The crime was so ugly and brutal and its, you know, costs and consequences so far reaching that, you know, there was great upset that the jury had not sentenced Cruz to death.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sexton spent months investigating the story and its fallout.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, we're going to focus on just one part of the reporting, how Cruz's defense was able to pull this off to convince the jury not to recommend the death penalty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A robust defense is a bedrock principle of America's criminal justice system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it is a very, you know, noble promise.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But for those people who try to deliver on that promise, making a case for mercy, for instance, can sometimes be absolute hell.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And for Cruz's defense team, it was hell.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They had doors slammed in their faces.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They were threatened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Parents and teachers wanted them disbarred.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They spent basically close to five years of their lives dedicated to this case, almost every minute of which was in some way soaked in literally blood or trauma or sorrow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The interviews they had to conduct were done within a community that had been profoundly traumatized by Nicholas Cruz's crime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They would have to reckon with the idea in their own consciences about, are there some cases that are just too awful to actually defend?
--:-- Shamita Basu: They ultimately argued that Cruz's life should be spared because of the actions of his biological mother, who drank heavily while she was pregnant with him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She'd eventually tell members of the defense team that she was likely drunk every day of the first eight months of her pregnancy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So for the defense team, the linchpin of their bid for mercy for Nicholas Cruz was the argument that he had been damaged in utero, that he had been effectively poisoned by his mother's drinking, and that he suffered from one of what are now known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the defense argued from the time he was a toddler, it was clear to Cruz's daycare playmates, to his teachers, to neighbors, that he was troubled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He had a very low IQ.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He suffered from extreme anxiety, depression.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He was an incredibly impulsive young child.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He was socially awkward, difficulty of understanding right from wrong, a kind of addiction to video games, violent video games as a child, to explosive outbursts of anger
--:-- Shamita Basu: And not surprisingly for a child like that you know he wound up in many ways ostracized stigmatized
--:-- Shamita Basu: His lawyers didn't use this to excuse Cruz's heinous crimes but rather to point out the damage done to his brain before he was born wasn't something that could be ignored.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that for this reason, the state should spare his life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Remarkably, it worked.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The jury agreed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the foremost experts on fetal alcohol syndrome said that he'd never seen such a convincingly documented case, which means Cruz is now serving a life sentence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He will not be executed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tomorrow, we're going to pick up on this story and focus on the fallout from the jury's decision to spare his life and how it's changed the death penalty in the state of Florida.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories that'll stick with you in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's start with international news. The United States and a number of allied nations are calling for a three-week ceasefire across the Israel-Lebanon border.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This comes as Israel launched additional strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon yesterday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as the country's military chief said, a ground assault was possible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here in the U.S., Hurricane Helene is expected to hit Florida hard today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post reports that the storm is another reminder of something that forecasters have been trying to drive home for years, that people who live hundreds of miles away from the center of the storm should still be concerned and prepared.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's because winds and waves from a storm like Helene can span a distance that is several hundred miles wide.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, meteorologists even redesigned the forecast cone graphic, you know, the one you see on weather maps that shows the path of a storm.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They wanted to make it more clear that it's not just about the direct path.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Surrounding areas should be on alert, too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NPR has the incredible story of a boy who was abducted when he was six years old and was reunited with his family more than 70 years later.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 1951, Luis Armando Albino went missing in a park in California where he had been playing with his older brother.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His mother spent her life trying to find him, but she died before getting any answers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this year, his niece tracked him down through a DNA test.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He had been living on the East Coast and was raised by people who he believed were his parents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In June of this year, he flew to California where he was reunited with his biological family, including his brother, who was with him in the park that day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Seven decades ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, today we say goodbye to the Oakland Athletics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The four-time MLB champions played their last game in Oakland this afternoon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Then they head to West Sacramento, where they await the building of their new stadium in Las Vegas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the meantime, the team will just be known as the Athletics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Their departure leaves Oakland, which once produced many champions, without any major league teams, men's or women's, after the Warriors and Raiders also left the city a few years ago.
--:-- 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, we've queued up that story about the Parkland shooting case from The Marshall Project to play for you next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
