--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, December 8th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, a day of stunning political upheaval in Peru. A town in North Carolina devastated by drug deaths. And what to consider before you download a hot new AI portrait app. But first, reports as of this morning say that WNBA star Brittany Greiner has been released from Russian detention and is in U.S. custody.
--:-- [Sound of a phone ringing]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Her freedom was granted through a prisoner swap with the U.S. for convicted Russian arms dealer Victor Bout. President Biden shared the news this morning after speaking with Greiner by phone.
--:-- President Biden: I'm glad to be able to say that Brittany's in good spirits. She's relieved to finally be heading home. And the fact remains that she's lost months of her life, experienced the needless trauma. She deserves space, privacy and time with her loved ones to recover and heal from her time being wrongfully detained.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Greiner has been detained since February when she was arrested on drug smuggling charges at a Russian airport. She pleaded guilty, but she also said the vape with cannabis oil was to treat chronic pain. And she unintentionally packed it in her bag. Over the summer, she was sentenced to nine years in prison and had been moved to a penal colony last month.
--:-- [Sound of a phone ringing]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Greiner's wife, Sherelle, was in the Oval Office with President Biden this morning and by his side to share the news.
--:-- Sherelle Greiner: Today my family is whole, but as you all are aware, there are so many other families who are not whole. And so BG's not here to say this, but I will gladly speak on her behalf and say that BG and I will remain committed to the work of getting every American home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's referring there to another American who's been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who was not included in this deal. A Russian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison on espionage charges that he denies. He's been detained since 2018.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Supreme Court is considering a case that could have major national impact on the 2024 election. It heard oral arguments yesterday in a case where North Carolina Republicans are trying to stop a court from throwing out a congressional district map that was ruled as biased against Democrats.
--:-- [Sound of a gavel banging]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Reuters explains that based on what justices said in court the conservative majority looks like it ready to limit judicial power over voting policies. But it might not go as far as Republican lawmakers want in this case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The argument from Republicans hinges on a legal theory called Independent State Legislature, or ISL. It started as a fringe idea, but more conservative legal scholars are supporting it, and they may have key Supreme Court justices on their side.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Basically, people who support ISL say the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures authority over election rules and district maps, not state courts or other entities. Critics of ISL say this gives state lawmakers too much power.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Liberal Justice Elena Kagan talked about the implications yesterday in court.
--:-- Justice Elena Kagan: This is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country. And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most, because legislators we all know have their own self-interest.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kagan and the two other liberal justices on the bench signaled they will oppose the arguments from Republican lawmakers. Three conservative justices seemed sympathetic, including Justice Samuel Alito.
--:-- Justice Samuel Alito: He pushed back on the argument that state legislatures would go unchecked if the court ruled in favor of Republicans. Congress can come in anytime, under any circumstances, no matter what we say the elections clause means. Congress can always come in and establish the manner of conducting congressional elections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Other conservatives on the court seemed more skeptical. So Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, may hold the key to how far a final ruling goes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The court's decision is due by the end of June.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's go now to South America, where Peru is reeling after a rapid turn of events yesterday that included a dramatic attempt to seize power by the president, his removal from office and arrest and the swearing-in of the country's first woman to serve as head of state.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It all unfolded over the course of a few hours. It started when President Pedro Castillo said he would temporarily dissolve Congress and call for new elections. It turned out to be a huge miscalculation as to how much support he had. His cabinet ministers resigned. The military and police said they would not support the move. The U.S. Embassy called on Castillo to stop.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is what it sounded like as Peru Congress removed him.
--:-- [Sound of a gavel banging]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yesterday was a dramatic close to his tumultuous 17 months in power, during which The Guardian counts five cabinets, six criminal investigations, and two failed attempts to impeach him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Castillo came into office as a political novice. He campaigned to help poor Peruvians who were left behind. He was the first president from the left in more than a generation. But in the end, his attempts to preserve power reminded people of the coup by former right-wing leader Alberto Fujimori, who is now in prison on corruption and human rights charges.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The former vice president, Dina Boloarte, was sworn in as president. Becoming the first woman to lead Peru.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In her first speech as president, she called for a political truce as she starts to build a united government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Our next story comes from the Washington Post, where Jordan Marie Smith investigated a troubling pattern in her hometown, Greenville, North Carolina.
--:-- Jordan Marie Smith: Every time I went back, I heard about another one of my old classmates dying from a drug overdose. So I started making calls. Soon I realized that a lot of these drug overdoses were opioid overdoses as well.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She learned over the last decade or so, more than a dozen people she grew up with died of drug overdoses. Greenville, like many other places in the U.S., has seen a sharp upswing in overdose deaths for more than a decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Smith says one family lost multiple people to substance-related deaths over the course of just a few years. In so many other cases in America, it's very accurate that you see so many people who are out, may take one bump of cocaine, they don't know what's in that cocaine, and next thing you know they're in the hospital, or next thing you know worse, they're in the morgue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of the deaths involved heroin, some fentanyl. Another family told Smith about their son Stuart, who struggled with addiction for years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One thing that Stuart's father said that stands out to me is that I laid in bed 10 years, not sleeping at night, because he knew he was going to get a phone call from someone saying, come get him out of jail, come get him out of the ditch, come get him out of the morgue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Stuart died in 2019. Every year every six months someone is going to the funeral home and mourning one of their friends who passed. So it just a rampant a rampant problem that I know is not just isolated to Greenville North Carolina. There are so many other Greenvilles in America right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Smith told us one thing that she wanted to highlight in her reporting is the good work being done by members of the community to address the crisis and break the stigma. A woman who lost a son opened a harm reduction center. Families have turned to activism. But the burden of survival is heavy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One person who grew up in Greenville told Smith, after losing at least 20 friends to drugs, it's a weight that never really goes away.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Maybe you've seen these images all over your social media in the last few days. These stylized digital portraits. Some look like pop art. Some look like they're ripped out of a cartoon strip or a sci-fi movie or even a renaissance portrait. They're coming from an app called Lensa AI that's quickly become very popular.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You pay a couple of bucks, you feed it some selfies, and it generates a bunch of portraits in different styles. Now, lots of people are excited about trying it and sharing what they get back. But the art news outlet Hyperallergic looks into how actual working artists feel about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are a lot of concerns and not only the obvious worries about whether artificial intelligence will take their jobs. One issue is how the AI is making images. It uses a data set that trains the AI by looking at copyrighted images of human-made art on websites like Pinterest.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Artists complain that this is essentially stealing from previous artwork, even if it is digitally altered. Lenza did not respond to Hyperallergic's request for comment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hyperallergic also points out that when you agree to the terms on this app, you're giving away the rights to the images it makes. So once these AI portraits of you are done, you can't do much to stop the company from using them however it wants to down the road.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a reminder that AI has the potential to do amazing things, but it can lead us into some new and murky ethical territory. At the very least, we should understand what we're opting into.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all the stories we talked about today and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app, stick around. We've got a narrated article coming up next from The Atavist magazine about a reporter's investigation into a murder case that spanned Afghanistan and Athens. So check that out, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
