--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Tuesday, January 25th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is Apple News Today. 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: We're in one of those rare moments where Wall Street traders, Washington politicians, and ordinary Americans are all talking about the same economic force, inflation. It's a big reason why the stock market has been on such a wild ride lately.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Fed bankers will be talking about inflation at their big meeting today. And did you hear the clip of President Biden caught on a hot mic cursing about a Fox News reporter who shouted a question about inflation?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Maybe you've wanted to use some colorful language at the supermarket after looking at how much more you're spending on groceries lately. And it's even worse if you've bought chicken or beef recently. Those prices are up a massive 12.5 percent. That's way above groceries in general.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When prices have these wild swings, it often comes down to basic economics, a mismatch of supply and demand. The pandemic has messed with both of those. Supply has been down at times because of a shortage of food and transportation workers. And demand has been up because so many of us are cooking at home.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But there may be more to this story. Reuters zooms in on what's happening with meat prices. The argument from the Biden administration is meat prices are high because the industry is dominated by a small group of companies. The administration is accusing them of abusing their market power to squeeze shoppers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The fact is meat packing in the United States is dominated by just four companies. A White House analysis shows their net profit margins tripled during the pandemic. Basic economics tells us that when a handful of companies dominate, they can be aggressive on prices because buyers don't have many other options.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The meat industry says higher prices are a temporary result of shortages across the economy. Also, the price of food is set by grocery stores, not meatpackers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Biden has a plan to deal with these high prices, including a billion dollars in grants and loans for independent meatpacking companies. There's also additional money to train more workers. But for now, if you're planning on picking up a couple of steaks to sear this week, be prepared for a big, fat price tag.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The 400 million N95 masks the White House is distributing are now starting to arrive in drugstores around the country. Doctors want people to use high-quality masks to slow the spread of the super-contagious Omicron variant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the biggest headlines this morning are not about the science. They're about politics and law. The Wall Street Journal looks at how fights over mask mandates are playing out in two key states.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The newest development comes from New York. That's where a judge struck down the state's indoor mask mandate. Health officials put a rule in place last month requiring masks in schools, transit hubs, and other indoor settings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New York's governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul, says the state will fight the ruling immediately. This week in Virginia, the battle is in many ways the flip side of what's happening in New York. The brand new governor there is a Republican, Glenn Youngkin.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He announced a mask optional order on his first day in office. And already, seven school boards sued him because they want to mandate masking. The local school leaders say this is unconstitutional, that he's stepping on their authority to protect their students and teachers as they see fit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Youngkin argues it should be parents' choice whether their kids wear masks. This pattern is playing out in multiple states, Republican governors versus school districts. And in some cases, the White House is involved. Just last week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey sued the Biden administration.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This was in response to the administration saying the state had to stop sending pandemic aid to schools that don't have mask requirements. And Biden's education department is still pursuing civil rights investigations into five states for blocking mask mandates in schools.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When you think about places in the United States prone to earthquakes, the first state that pops into your mind is probably California, right? But what about Texas? Before 2008, the state got just one, maybe two annual earthquakes people could feel.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But nowadays, there are hundreds every year. And this is taking place in a state not designed to handle earthquakes. So what's going on? Well, the real question, Duarte, is what the frack is going on. I'm sorry. It's a story about fracking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All right, this is the part to understand. When you drill for oil and gas, it releases billions of gallons of wastewater. And all that wastewater, it has to go somewhere.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Vox science reporter Neil Dinesha explains what happens next. They separate out the water from their oil and gas, and then they take that water to a site somewhere far away from their oil or gas drilling site, and they just inject it deep into the earth, into an aquifer somewhere that has just been lying under the surface of the earth undisturbed for millennia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Dinesha explains, injecting all that wastewater back into the earth messes with ancient fault lines. It can turn a stable area into a shaky one. That means more and more earthquakes. Some of them have been magnitude 4 earthquakes.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Last year, Texas had nearly 2,000 earthquakes. That's a record. In December, the state agency that regulates oil and gas operations suspended wastewater injection at dozens of sites.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Dinesha says it's still not clear what to do with the water. One possibility is to inject it into shallower parts of the Earth's crust. But realistically, no one knows what the impacts of that might be.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The other issue Dinesha pointed out to us is that infrastructure in Texas just wasn't designed with these new challenges in mind. And Texans just aren't used to earthquakes. And so experts I've talked to are kind of worried that people in Texas don't really know what to do when an earthquake happens.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, like they don't know whether they're supposed to stay inside a building, which they are, or if they should run out in the middle of an earthquake, trying to get away from their building, collapsing on top of them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's like the oil and gas industry is playing a dangerous game of Jenga in Texas. They're trying to take something out of one part of the Earth and put something back in another. But if you aren't careful, everything can come crashing down.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's be real. Getting a job at NASA is pretty hard. But right now, there's a way you can work with NASA. And all you need are a smartphone or computer and an eye on the sky.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NASA is recruiting volunteers to help research cloud coverage. They're trying to understand more about our changing climate. The agency wants you to help out its satellites by telling it what clouds look like from the ground.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post explains how this works. You can use an app on your phone to time your observations with the path of satellites overhead. And researchers can use that information from ordinary people to clear up questions they have about clouds that satellites have a hard time identifying.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They're interested because clouds, they play a big role in our climate. They can warm the planet by trapping heat. They can cool it by shielding the Earth from sun rays.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With help from regular folks on the ground, NASA hopes it'll get a better understanding of how different types of clouds affect what we feel on Earth.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
