--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, April 18th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. 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 have been watching for updates on Mariupol all weekend. Russia issued an ultimatum on Sunday to the last standing Ukrainian troops in Mariupol, surrender the city or face destruction. The troops refused. As of early Monday morning, Russian forces are reportedly close to capturing the city.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ukrainian authorities say bombardments rocked other cities in the East and the West over the weekend. Coming out of Holy Week and Easter Sunday, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church is getting a lot of criticism. The Washington Post looks at Patriarch Kirill. He's become one of the most prominent voices in Russia, backing the war.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This Russian Orthodox bishop is justifying the invasion with religious dogma. Kirill is pushing the concept that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are one people. Now, that might sound inclusive at first, but critics say Putin is using this ideology to reassert dominance over territory that Russia used to control during the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This bishop and his propagandistic sermons are creating a rift in the global Orthodox Church. The Post reports more than 300 Orthodox priests in Ukraine signed an open letter asking global church leaders for a formal inquiry into whether Kirill should be removed from his post.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One church scholar put it this way to the Post. Any war has to have guns and ideas. In this case, the Kremlin is providing the guns and the church is providing the ideas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's tax day. And that means if you're like the average single worker who earns $45,000 a year, you're paying 21% of your earnings in taxes. Now, if you're married with a child and make at least $200,000, your tax rate might be closer to 26 But if you are among the wealthiest Americans Your effective tax rate could be closer to just 4 That according to ProPublica.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Paul Keel is one of the reporters behind this investigation. The richest people tend not to have the form of income that is subject to payroll taxes.
--:-- Paul Keel: As I explain, we have a clear system for taxing wages, not so much for taxing investments. I think our system is very good and efficient at taxing labor or taxing wages. It's almost seamless. It comes right out of your paycheck every month in terms of the tax withheld. But taxing business income, taxing wealth growth is something that our tax system, there's a lot more wiggle room. It's much more susceptible to manipulation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ProPublica has been investigating the tax records of the top earners since last summer. Their latest piece looks at the tax filings of the top 400 American earners over a five-year period from 2013 to 2018. These are people who are making an average of at least $110 million annually.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This investigation found that billionaires in the tech industry are paying the lowest tax rate. Now, part of the reason why their tax rates are so low is most of their wealth is accumulated in investments like stocks.
--:-- Paul Keel: If you get richer and you don't turn it into the form of income that ends up on your tax return, so for instance, if you get richer because you own a lot of stock and it goes up $10 billion in a year. If you don't sell it, you don't get taxed on that. And so we've looked at that as a measure of income, which is not what our tax system does, but is what an economist would generally consider, you know, a form of income if you're getting that much wealthier.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Huge charitable donations also help wealthy people keep taxes low. Take Michael Bloomberg, for example. He earned an average of $2 billion during the tax year's ProPublica examin. But because he made such huge charitable donations, he was able to deduct two-thirds of his income. His effective tax rate was around 4%.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Others, like Warren Buffett, use a strategy known as buy, borrow, die, essentially keeping income as low as possible to avoid taxes and instead borrowing against their wealth to fund their lifestyles.
--:-- Paul Keel: And then there are the money managers. Executives and founders of private equity companies use loopholes that allow them to report fees from managing clients' money as investment income, which is taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All of these tax avoidance measures are perfectly legal but for a system that at least in theory designed so that the richest pay their share the question is is the current system fair President Biden and many Democrats don't think so.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: President Biden had a proposal a couple of weeks ago that he called the billionaire minimum income tax. And basically the idea was to get at this form of income that's not effectively taxed, the wealth growth that billionaires are able to avoid turning into income on a tax return, to tax that as opposed to allowing them to sidestep the system.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More than 50 workers have been killed driving for companies like Lyft, DoorDash, and Uber since 2017. That's according to a report put together by the advocacy group Gig Workers Rising. Gig workers tend to have odd hours, minimal to no benefits. And if something happens to them on the job, there isn't a whole lot of legal recourse their families can pursue.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Here's NPR's Bobby Allen. The gig companies like Lyft and Uber have spent, you know, tens of millions of dollars to ensure that the workers who drive cars for them stay independent contractors. This is absolutely pivotal to these companies' business model. And what that means is if you're hurt on the job, you can't file for workers' compensation.
--:-- Bobby Allen: Alan says the very nature of their work, picking up strangers in strange neighborhoods often late at night, that makes it inherently dangerous. Alan told us about Bella Lewis, who was a Lyft driver in the Dallas area. She was killed on the job. She picked someone up in this sort of industrial parking lot, and she didn't think much of it. I mean, she does this almost every single day and you pick up hundreds of passengers. You don't really think twice about picking someone up in really any location.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But this individual got in the backseat of the car, shot and killed her, pulled her out of the car and then drove away in her vehicle.
--:-- Bobby Allen: As NPR reports, firms like Lyft make drivers sign what are known as forced arbitration agreements. These agreements prevent drivers from suing if they get injured or if something goes wrong while they're working. Families can't file wrongful death lawsuits.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the families I spoke to think that they should be owed at the very least funeral expenses burial expenses and just some kind of compensation to help them deal with the actual cost of burying their loved one and maybe some compensation to make them whole to sort of help them with the grieving process These are grieving families, many of them working-class families, who lost someone at no fault of their own because a stranger got into their vehicle and killed them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In the case of Bella Lewis, her family paid for the funeral and burial bills. Lif didn't respond to NPR's questions about why it didn't help with funeral expenses. A spokesperson said the company tried to get in touch with the family, but Bella's sister says she never heard from them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are living in the golden age of unique baby names. Maybe you can credit celebrities who fight over who gets to name their kid Wolf, or even just a string of characters. But whether it's their influence or not, a lot of parents are under pressure to come up with a unique name. and some of these parents are willing to pay for help.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The New Yorker recently profiled a professional baby namer. Last year, she helped name more than 100 babies. For one of her clients, she suggested the name Parks since the parents had their first kiss in a town called Parker.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Another client, Lebanese and French, reached out asking for a name that could work across multiple cultures. The winning suggestion was Chloe. Ooh, I like that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So this woman, the baby namer, she's just not throwing names at babies randomly. As The New Yorker reports, she mines film credits, checks street signs, and even researches naming trends. Oh, and she also goes through the Social Security database to see which names are on the downslide. Think Siri and Alexa.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And for this service, parents are paying her anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000. 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 Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
