--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, October 30th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, the issues that matter to first-time voters, the Taliban strips more rights away from women in Afghanistan, and why you might need to rethink your Halloween costume. But first, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a speech last night that her campaign billed as her closing arguments to a crowd of tens of thousands of voters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She spoke at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where nearly four years ago, former President Trump urged a crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol, where they started a deadly riot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With the White House visible behind her, Harris described Trump as unstable and obsessed with revenge.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And she said that she understands the gravity of the role of president, and Trump does not.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Harris also hit on a range of policy issues, from price gouging at grocery stores to the cost of child care and abortion rights.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, the polls currently have Harris and Donald Trump neck and neck.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If she wins, it would be historic, not just because she would become our first woman president, but because of how short her campaign has been.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Remember, she only entered the race 101 days ago and has, in a matter of weeks, organized a massive coalition of supporters, outraised Trump three to one and signed up hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And she has the support of several high-profile Republicans, from Liz Cheney to, most recently, Barbara Bush, daughter of George W. Bush.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To take stock of it all, I spoke with The New Yorker's Evan Osnos, who has a long piece out in the magazine about Harris's whirlwind campaign.
--:-- [Discussion continues with Evan Osnos]
--:-- Evan Osnos: Well, that is a pretty poignant place to be, pretty powerful in some ways, I think unsettling for some people.
--:-- Evan Osnos: In this case, Kamala Harris's campaign clearly intended the location to evoke the memory of how awful that was and how it felt for Americans to see that kind of radical insult to our sense of peaceful politics in this country.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And to remind people in the most visceral way possible of what a Trump presidency felt like.
--:-- Evan Osnos: That moment, this closing moment of a campaign is very difficult, especially for the Harris campaign, precisely because it has to span this incredibly vast constituency.
--:-- Evan Osnos: At one point, somebody described it to me quite well as it runs from Cheney to Chomsky.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And somehow you have to have a speech that can speak to all of these different interests and preoccupations and priorities which is very different than what Donald Trump does in which he essentially has one unchanging message for the people who are most devoted to him.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And to that point, I mean, what a difficult thing to do, right, to try to address all of these different interests, all of these different people that you're trying to pull into your party.
--:-- Evan Osnos: I mean, Harris, it seems to me, is really trying to do a lot of things in this last week before Election Day, deliver a forward-looking message, an economic-focused message, but also really notably moving from the sort of joyful warrior stance that she took on early in her campaign to a much more somber and even urgent messenger.
--:-- Evan Osnos: Yeah. Well, the reality is no matter what she does, she gets criticized from one side or another.
--:-- Evan Osnos: This is partly the reality of politics, but it's also a measure of how dire this feels for Democrats, this sense that the Democrats really don't imagine that this is an election that they can afford to lose, that the country can afford to lose.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And so when she gets too focused on questions of democracy, then inevitably there are some Democrats who stand up and say, hold on, that's a kind of privileged issue.
--:-- Evan Osnos: They say that's not the kind of thing that your average person is talking about at the dinner table.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And then on the other side, if she focuses entirely on grocery prices and the cost of prescription drugs, then there are some people who say you're abdicating the significance, the gravity of this moment.
--:-- Evan Osnos: We've never had a presidential candidate like Donald Trump who is threatening basic norms of democracy.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And so she has to find a way to tack between the two.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And I will say it would be hard for any politician.
--:-- Evan Osnos: It's especially uncomfortable for her because so much of her career has been about this very directed form of inquiry, being a prosecutor, looking at specific facts and then litigating them in the moment.
--:-- Evan Osnos: rather than these kinds of capacious speeches where you step back and go for philosophical reach.
--:-- Evan Osnos: So it's hard.
--:-- Evan Osnos: You spent some time in your latest New Yorker piece really focusing on Harris's bio and going back some years.
--:-- Evan Osnos: What do you think voters should know about her and who she was before she became the presidential nominee, certainly, but even before she became vice president?
--:-- Evan Osnos: Well, I think it is really easy to forget just how amazing it actually is, how dramatically different it is to have a presidential nominee who is the daughter of two immigrants.
--:-- Evan Osnos: We've never had that before, much less the fact that she is a woman, that she is a woman of color, that she is would be the first black woman, the first South Asian woman.
--:-- Evan Osnos: All of this is significant.
--:-- Evan Osnos: She grew up in a family in which she had these two intense and highly educated parents, her mother, Shamala Gopalan, who came from India, her father, Donald Harris, who was this brilliant economic student from Jamaica.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And they both, in their own ways, raised her to believe very confidently in herself.
--:-- Evan Osnos: It was this kind of, in a sense, a sort of critical love for this country, a belief that the United States was something worth leading and at the same time a belief that it was worth criticizing.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And it was that combination of qualities that was the intellectual atmosphere she grew up in.
--:-- Evan Osnos: You know it can be said that it always takes some time to understand truly what an election was all about.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And I don't just mean tallying the votes and understanding who won but I mean reflecting back on what that moment meant in our country
--:-- Evan Osnos: What do you think history will say about what this presidential race was all about?
--:-- Evan Osnos: I think probably we will come to see this election as a moment when people had to decide
--:-- Evan Osnos: Whether this country was fundamentally trying to reconstruct an idea of itself from the past, which never entirely existed in the way that the nostalgia suggests what Donald Trump talks about when he says, make America great again.
--:-- Evan Osnos: or whether Americans are prepared to say, no, we're going to forge into a different era.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And what so much of her career has been about is the idea that actually this country has been on this long, steady, halting, zigzagging process of trying to turn outsiders into insiders and expand the perimeter of power.
--:-- Evan Osnos: She herself is a demonstration of that.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And I think that's what this election is about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To take stock of it all, I spoke with The New Yorker's Evan Osnos, who has a long piece out in the magazine about Harris's whirlwind campaign.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to America's youngest voters and how they're thinking about the election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The publication Chalkbeat, along with The New York Times, has been surveying a group of roughly 1,000 young voters over the course of the year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many of them are voting for the first time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Editor Caroline Bauman told us affordability and the economy, more generally, was a primary concern they heard from many young voters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Like Owen from Salt Lake City, who just graduated from high school.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He works as an automotive technician at a Ford dealership in the area.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He said that was his number one issue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, some direct quotes from Owen.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I pay so much for gas. I pay so much for food.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I can't move out of my parents' house because rent here is a minimum of $1,500 typically.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'd like the tax on gas heavily reduced.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bauman also told us about Annabelle from Chicago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's a student at Michigan State University.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Annabelle talked to us about gun violence and her experience, a personal experience in high school when she was at a mall and there was an active shooter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And just the trauma and the fear associated with living through something like that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then, of course, now at Michigan State, where a campus shooting occurred in recent history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So for her, this is very top of mind.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Emily is a freshman at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She grew up in the Bronx.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's always loved reading, and she told Chalkbeat her top issue is protecting books for future generations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What she told us is that for her as a Black woman, the issue is book banning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The banning of African-American courses and the potential erasure of Black history in public schools and college courses as well.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And, you know, she cited that AP African-American studies classes have already been banned in Florida and how concerning that is for her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so, you know, this is not necessarily an issue that I think people credit students with following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bauman got to spend time talking with these young people over many months and she says she was impressed by how deeply they thinking about this election and the range of issues that matter to them
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they could potentially be a very impactful demographic in what expected to be a historically close election
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2020, 50 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29 voted, the third highest turnout in decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This year, a slightly higher percentage say they plan to vote.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The man who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
--:-- Shamita Basu: David DePapp was found guilty in June on charges related to his attack on Paul Pelosi, who was 82 years old at the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The attack took place just before the 2022 midterm elections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Paul Pelosi suffered head wounds, including a skull fracture that required plates and screws to repair.
--:-- Shamita Basu: DePapp admitted during his trial that Nancy Pelosi was the intended target, but she wasn't home at the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's how the former Speaker of the House described the experience on CNN a year ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For me, this is really the hard part because Paul was not the target and he's the one who's paying the price.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's really sad because it is a flame that was fueled by misinformation and all the rest of that, which is most unfortunate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The San Francisco Chronicle reports DePap used his final statement before being sentenced to read off a number of conspiracy theories.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He did not apologize to the Pelosi's.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Following the sentencing, the Pelosi family said justice had been served.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In international news, the Taliban in Afghanistan has announced women are now banned from hearing each other's voices.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Afghan human rights experts say it amounts to banning women from having conversations with each other.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It comes after the Taliban already ordered women to cover their faces, to not speak with men besides their husbands or close relatives, and to speak quietly even inside their own homes so their voices can't be heard from outside.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One activist said in response to the latest measure, how are women who are the sole providers for their families supposed to buy bread, seek medical care, or simply exist?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Women who defy the rules can be arrested and sent to prison.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, something very spooky is going on this Halloween.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Unseasonably warm temperatures.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post reports that areas in the Midwest, South, and on the East Coast will be dealing with summer-like weather on Thursday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In places like Philadelphia and D.C., highs are expected to be around or above 80 degrees.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, I was going to dress my baby up as a chef with a little chef's hat and everything, but we might have to leave the onesie at home and let him be the naked chef.
--:-- 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 got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg Businessweek reports that thousands of asylum seekers are being held in former jails turned detention centers indefinitely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And while the Biden campaign once vowed to close these privately operated centers, the administration still relies on them.
--:-- 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thanks for listening to Apple News Today.
