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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, July 22nd. I'm Shumita 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.
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The January 6th committee says it's not just that Donald Trump failed to act quickly enough to tell rioters to leave the Capitol, it's that he intentionally chose not to act for hours. And that choice made the situation even worse. In last night's prime time hearing, we learned more details about how Trump and the people around him were reacting at the time. The committee played tape of a White House security official who testified anonymously about the people charged with protecting Mike Pence…
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Unidentified Speaker: Members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives.
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The audio there isn't great, but what he's saying is staffers were calling the people that they love to say goodbye.
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Unidentified Speaker: It was disturbing. I don't like talking about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth. It was getting… For whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.
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Pence and the people with him could have been killed, but rather than defending his vice president, Trump was attacking him on Twitter, saying Pence didn't have the courage to help undermine the election he lost. Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security advisor to Trump, testified that this tweet was the last straw for him.
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Matthew Pottinger: I was disturbed and worried to see that the president was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty. So the tweet looked to me like the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation, and that's why I had said earlier that it looked like fuel being poured on the fire. So, that was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign, that that would be my last day at the White House.
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Sarah Matthews, the deputy White House press secretary at the time, also resigned on January 6th. She told the committee that Trump's words had a dangerous effect…
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Sarah Matthews: I'm someone who has worked with him… You know, I worked on the campaign, travelled all around the country, going to countless rallies with him, and I've seen the impact that his words have on his supporters. He… They truly latch onto every word and every tweet that he says, and so I think that in that moment, for him to tweet out the message about Mike Pence, it was him pouring gasoline on fire and making it much worse.
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And things did get worse. The committee says after that tweet, the attack escalated. Pence had to be evacuated for a second time. He was just 40 feet from the rioters.
The committee also presented evidence that Trump never reached out to law enforcement or national security officials.
It took 187 minutes before Donald Trump released a video where he finally told his supporters to go home. The committee played outtakes from the recording sessions of Trump's statements. They show Trump's hesitation to condemn the violence or use phrases suggesting that the election was over.
There will be other revelations from the January 6th committee, as well as a new criminal investigation into missing Secret Service texts. The committee plans to issue an interim report ahead of the midterm elections. Representative Liz Cheney ended the night with a promise of more to come…
Liz Cheney: Our committee understands the gravity of this moment, the consequences for our nation. We have much work yet to do and we will see you all in September.
As for Trump, he's still pushing to overturn the 2020 election. Just this week the speaker of Wisconsin's state assembly revealed that Trump called him recently. He was pressuring him to overturn the results in that state.
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This was supposed to be the summer of revenge travel, of finally getting back to planes, and passports, and vacations, and family visits. But when we asked listeners to tell us your summer travel nightmare stories, boy did you deliver.
Michael Austin: The check-in line was from the far left side of the building all the way to the main entrance of the arrival gates.
Aimie Carter: We were supposed to depart the airport at 8:30 in the morning. We did not leave until 11:15 at night.
Unidentified Speaker 2: She said "So, I'm gonna be totally honest with you, we actually don't have a pilot."
So, how did things get so bad? And what can we do about it? To get some answers, I turned to Scott McCartney. He's a journalist, and a private pilot, who wrote "The Wall Street Journal's" travel column, "The Middle Seat," for around two decades.
Scott McCartney: I used to joke that if airlines ever figured out how to run their business, I'd be out of a job. But I didn't think that was gonna happen in my lifetime and I think that's pretty clear at this point. [CHUCKLES]
Scott says a lot of the problems that we're seeing this summer come down to one thing: staffing.
McCartney: The big mistake that the industry made was anticipating that they would have more workers than they have, thinking "Hey, we're gonna have X number of pilots for this summer." They don't. "We're gonna have X number of baggage handlers for the summer." We don't. "Heathrow Airport in London is gonna be able to handle X number of passengers." It can't.
And the reason that the industry doesn't have enough workers is partly tied to miscalculations made by airlines during the pandemic.
McCartney: What we did see, and this is the-- the questionable action airlines took, what we did see were early retirement programs. Airlines offered workers early retirement. Far more took 'em up on the offer than they ever anticipated.
Now that they're trying to hire workers back, not as many people are biting.
McCartney: Used to be, at Southwest Airlines, it was-- a job was highly coveted, right? There were 50 people applying for every job or whatever it would be. Southwest says they've offered jobs to people, they've been accepted, and the new hire still never shows up and ghosts them. And they've never seen that kind of thing before where people just don't-- don't want the jobs.
Scott says travel is always going to have its ups and downs. This summer is full of downs, but he's got tips on how you can be better at navigating everything, from choosing what time of day you should get on a plane to what airline has the best policy for overbooked flights.
If you want to hear my full interview with Scott, check out this weekend's episode of "In Conversation." Just search for "Apple News In Conversation" in the Apple News app or in the Podcasts app.
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Netflix is asking "Are you still watching?" These days, the streaming service has a lot more competition and it's harder to hold on to paying customers. A lot of people are dropping it.
David Sims: There's a lot of sort of turmoil that you can perceive at Netflix or at least change, both financially and also creatively. Like, the company's kind of gone from its earlier status as this sort of online disruptor that was changing the way that movies and TV was being consumed…
David Sims covers culture for "The Atlantic."
Sims: This has not been a great year for the company in terms of its, like, shareholder reports, and its earnings, and its subscribers, in particular. It does seem like the company has hit some kind of subscription plateau.
The company's earnings report this week showed it lost nearly a million subscribers in the last quarter. That's two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses, which is a first for the company. Sims recently wrote about how Netflix is now trying something like an old Hollywood studio.
Sims: Netflix has pivoted away from its earlier strategy, which was just a firehose of content, and now I feel like Netflix seems to be a little more interested in the idea of making event-sized stuff and also more of, like, a glitzy Hollywood brand. Like, you know, "Come to Netflix, we've got a Ryan Gosling movie you can't see anywhere else."
In other words, when you wanna put butts in seats, even if those seats are at home on the couch, you make a blockbuster.
Sims: Like, very expensive, hundred-million-dollar-plus budgeted, superstar-laden, you know, action thrillers and family adventure films.
That Ryan Gosling movie that David mentioned earlier, it's out today. It's called "The Gray Man." Chris Evans is in it, too. It's directed by the Russo Brothers, who made some of the biggest Marvel movies. "The Gray Man" reportedly cost around $200 million to make, which would make it the most expensive in Netflix history. But if it's a big enough hit to create a franchise, it might be worth the money.
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Even if you don't know all the words to the song "American Pie," chances are, you know more than you mean to. It's an ear-wormy nine minutes of Don McLean whipping through all these coded references and characters.
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<v The lyrics are campfire-catchy and kind of cryptic, which has encouraged this fun guessing game for half a century, with fans debating and picking apart the meaning. Now, McLean himself is finally opening up about the lyrics in a new Paramount+ documentary. It's called "The Day the Music Died>The Story of Don McLean's 'American Pie'."
McLean debunks some of the more common theories about his lyrics. Like, take this part of the song:
[MUSIC - "AMERICAN PIE" BY DON MCLEAN]
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Lots of people believe that the jester there is Bob Dylan and the king is Elvis. But now, McLean says in this documentary, nope and nope.
Don McLean: You know, I certainly would have mentioned Dylan's name if I had meant to mention him. I would have said Bob or something else, but I didn't 'cause it ain't him.
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We picked out a piece for you to read in "American Songwriter" that breaks down 13 references, decoded by Don McLean himself. You can find that, and all the stories we talked about today, in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our "News+" partners. I'll talk with you again on Monday.
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