--:-- Yasmin Khan: Good morning. It's Thursday, June 13th. I'm Yasmin Khan, in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Coming up, how tensions are coming to a head at the Supreme Court, some good news for consumers weary of high prices, and the surprising character who's helping cricket get a foothold in America. But first, let's take a quick look at some other stories in the news.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone. It ruled that an anti-abortion group that challenged the FDA did not have legal standing to sue. The decision means the drug will still be available.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The case was seen not just as a threat to mifepristone access, but to the FDA's entire method of regulating drugs. Abroad, the United Nations says that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in the early stages of the Gaza war.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Its investigations of the Hamas attacks and Israel's response found that both sides committed torture and murder. Israel rejected the UN's findings. Hamas didn't immediately comment.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The report comes as a ceasefire deal is on the table, but it's not clear how close it is to becoming reality. The war in Gaza is one of the topics of the G7 summit in Italy, where world leaders, including President Biden, will talk about the war in Ukraine and other issues.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: In other news, the Southern Baptist Convention has voted to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization, adopting a stance equating frozen embryos with human life.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's non-binding. It doesn't mean that our members are going to be in any way shunned if they have used IVF, but it encourages their followers, their congregants, to either adopt children or adopt existing frozen embryos.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They are standing against IVF because of how the practice actually uses and then discards embryos that are non-viable.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: At the same meeting, delegates rejected a ban on churches with women pastors.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Moving to Washington, where House Republicans have voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The largely symbolic vote was because Garland has refused to turn over recordings of an interview that President Biden did with a special counsel on his handling of classified documents. The Justice Department shared a transcript but said releasing tapes would set a bad precedent.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And today, Tesla is announcing results of the vote on a $56 billion pay package for Elon Musk. He claims that numbers so far show that he will win the vote, but shareholders can change their minds up to the start of the meeting.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And even if Musk wins the vote, the pay package faces legal challenges.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: In addition to ruling in the abortion pill case we talked about, the Supreme Court has more rulings coming tomorrow and in the coming weeks.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: There are still a lot of consequential decisions left to make, even though the court typically tries to wrap up the term by early July.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Part of the problem is pacing. Data shows justices completing decisions at the slowest rate in decades. Their decisions will have huge impact for abortion, guns, former President Trump, and more.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Another issue for the court that may be contributing to their backlog? Their fraying relationships with each other.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: This is going to be, with all likelihood, a very, very contentious June.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Tension is typical on the bench, but he says it's worse than usual these days.
--:-- Jess Bravin: The turning point was 2022, when the controversial Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked weeks in advance.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And that is a level of personal distrust and a sense of not complete good faith among the different wings of the court, and then divisions even within the two ideological wings of the court.
--:-- Jess Bravin: He says you'll often notice the tension tucked into legal disagreements and opinions, which is slowing down decisions in some cases.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Continuing to write, to respond to each other, to want to have the last word in this back and forth between majority and dissent.
--:-- Jess Bravin: They have something more to say because they care very passionately and they may not be fully convinced that those who disagree with them are playing fair, at least intellectually fair.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Sometimes this tension is more public. like when Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke at Harvard last month.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Justice Sotomayor said that she is sometimes so upset by decisions of the court when she gets back to her chambers, she cries.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Now that a serious sense that this is going beyond just an academic or professional or jurisprudential disagreement
--:-- Jess Bravin: And this term has attracted added public scrutiny over ethics Justice Clarence Thomas accepted gifts and lavish trips from a conservative megadonor and didn't fully disclose all of them initially.
--:-- Jess Bravin: ProPublica received a Pulitzer Prize this year for investigating that relationship.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And at two different properties owned by Justice Samuel Alito, flags were flown that were also carried by people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: As the court struggles with trust internally, there's mounting external pressure too. Recent public polling shows growing distrust in the court.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Inflation is a key topic right now for everyone from presidential candidates to regular folks figuring out monthly bills.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: New numbers this week show the average price of consumer goods and services is up 3.3 percent from a year ago.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell talked about prices yesterday after the bank announced that it's holding interest rates steady.
--:-- Jerome Powell: As labor market tightness has eased and inflation has declined over the past year, the risks to achieving our employment and inflation goals have moved toward better balance.
--:-- Jerome Powell: But inflation is still not quite as low as Powell and other economists would like.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And a big question is how ordinary shoppers are going to react.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: I'd say we're seeing the consumer spending growth continue to be positive, but it's growing at a softer level. It's stable.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: Some prices are coming down. You may have noticed big retailers like Target and Walgreens making noise about how they're cutting cost for shoppers.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: And you'd be right to be skeptical when stores claim they're cutting costs for the good of consumers, because they're also telling this to Wall Street investors, which means companies believe it's good for business.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: So to understand why some prices are dropping now instead of months or years ago, New York Magazine talked to some experts.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: One factor is that the pandemic supply chain issues are largely smoothed out.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: Retailers aren't paying as much to buy and ship things, so they can pass on some of those savings to shoppers.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: Also, some stores raised prices earlier in anticipation of inflation continuing to go up.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: But now that overall inflation has settled a bit, companies can pull back on pricing.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: Don't expect cuts across the board though. A Wharton marketing professor points out that retailers may cut prices on items you buy a lot like vitamins or face wash since they know you notice.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: But not for things you buy less often, like a bottle of perfume.
--:-- Liz Everett-Krisberg: And overall, prices will probably never drop to where they were before the pandemic.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: If there's one thing American sports fans can't get enough of, it's a good underdog story.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And that's what the sport of cricket has going for it in this country.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: At the T20 World Cup, Team USA pulled off a massive upset against Pakistan earlier, and players put in a respectable showing in a loss to India's number one ranked team yesterday.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: On top of that, several members of Team USA, unlike many of their competitors, have to juggle day jobs.
--:-- Sareb Natravalar: It gives me the flexibility to sort of work remotely, and it helps being a software engineer that I actually don't need to be physically present to do my day job.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Growing up in India, he was a top-ranked junior player, but never made the national team there.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The Washington Post reports on how he's part of a broader movement driven by immigrants in tech to raise cricket's profile in the U.S.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: Satya Nadella, the Indian-born CEO of Microsoft, co-founded an American Pro League. Most teams are co-owned by South Asians with tech fortunes.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The T20 World Cup plays a shorter game of cricket, where matches take a few hours instead of a few days.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: For players like Nate Travolker, who's taking time off from work to play, that's definitely appreciated.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: But if Team USA keeps improving, players on the squad may need to have a chat with their bosses about taking even more time off.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next from Vanity Fair.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: The magazine goes behind Disney's hunt for a CEO to replace the legendary Bob Iger when he retires again.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus narrated to find that story.
--:-- Yasmin Khan: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
