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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, November 11th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, President Biden travels to Egypt for the big climate conference, what's behind this week's cryptocurrency meltdown and a look at who wins and who loses when we play the lottery.
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But first, more and more races are being called as votes are counted. Democrat Tina Kotek won the race for governor in Oregon. The three-way contest was tighter than expected in a state where Democrats have held the governor's mansion for a long time.
Senate control still depends on the big three races in Arizona, Nevada, where votes are being counted, and in Georgia, where a runoff is coming.
A few days out, we're starting to see some interesting patterns as analysts dig into the voting data and exit polling. There's new analysis of the impact of the youth vote by Tufts University researchers. "Forbes" looked at the numbers.
Tufts estimates that youth turnout was strong, the second highest for a midterm in the past 30 years, the highest being in 2018. Exit polling shows that voters aged 18 to 29 chose Democrats by strong margins, so they may have tipped the scales in close contests. And young people are also getting elected. 25 year old Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost talked to "CBS" about his historic win.
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Maxwell Frost: Being the first Gen Z member of Congress isn't the reason I decided to run. I really wanted to run to represent my district. But it's a huge part of the story. You know, Gen Z and millennials make up about a third of the country, but we're nowhere near a third of the government, and I think we need a government that needs to look like the country.
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Frost has also spoken about how school shootings and gun legislation were big motivating factors for him to get into politics. Other big issues for young voters: abortion, student debt, and LGBTQ+ rights. One Harvard political scientist says that recent election cycles show younger voters are emerging as a serious political force that's deeply engaged. He says both parties need to pay more attention to them.
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Another top issue motivating young voters: climate change. They'll inherit the consequences of the decisions we make today. President Biden is in Egypt for the U.N.'s Climate Change Conference, COP27. He's expected to highlight the hundreds of billions of dollars in new climate investments he got passed into law. But many world leaders say the U.S. needs to do a lot more to cut its own emissions and make up for historical pollution.
Sarah Kaplan: There are critics here who say that even what the U.S. has pledged is not sufficient, it's not the U.S.'s fair share of how much emissions need to be reduced.
"Washington Post" climate reporter Sarah Kaplan spoke to us from the conference. It was packed with global delegates ahead of Biden's arrival.
Kaplan: So, they say the U.S. needs to go above and beyond the average, right? They can't just set the same target as what the overall world needs to meet.
There were expectations that Biden's trip abroad would be a sort of foreign policy escape hatch after his party took a beating in the midterm elections. It turns out, Democrats did better than expected. But as we've talked about, Republicans are likely to control the House when all the votes are counted. And that raises questions about whether Biden can get Congress to take further climate action.
Kaplan: President Biden pledged last year to increase the U.S.'s climate finance to more than $11 billion, but only one billion has been approved and appropriated by Congress, so you know, that's sort of an outstanding question of whether the U.S. can actually deliver what developing countries say they need.
After Egypt, Biden will meet with world leaders at summits in Cambodia and Indonesia. That second summit is where he'll have his first face to face meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping since Biden took office.
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Even if you don't pay close attention to cryptocurrency, you probably heard about the meltdown in prices recently. Bitcoin investors took huge losses in recent days. It was the latest blow in what's been a rough year, where the larger cryptocurrency market has fallen by about two-thirds. We're talking trillions in losses.
Things got wilder in the last few days, when a popular crypto exchange experienced the digital equivalent of a bank run. And it's been quite a road, from glory to bankruptcy.
At the center of this story is FTX, which ran one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. In January, it was valued at 32 billion dollars. At one point, "Forbes" said its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the richest person in the world under 30.
There's an old saying on Wall Street: in a gold rush, gold miners eventually go broke. But the people who sell them picks and shovels get rich. FTX could've just been that, an exchange where people could buy and sell crypto, making money charging fees, whether digital currencies themselves were up or down.
But there was also a related company, a hedge fund trading cryptocurrency. "The Wall Street Journal" and "Reuters" report that FTX transferred billions in customer money to the hedge fund, where it could be used to place risky bets on crypto. In other words, it's almost like a banker borrowed money from people's personal savings accounts to make their own investments. FTX did not comment to the "Journal" or "Reuters" on their reporting on customer money.
As word got out that FTX was in trouble, customers started to pull their money out. But the exchange struggled to come up with the funds. It had to scramble to find an emergency investor. A rival exchange called Binance was set to buy FTX, but it pulled out. It said FTX's problems were too bad for it to save.
FTX said this morning it's filing for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. U.S. regulators are reportedly looking into FTX's implosion. Some FTX customers could lose a whole lot of what they put in.
We just gave you the real simplified version of the story. If you want to get into the details, check out the reporting from the "Journal" and "Reuters" in the Apple News app.
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This week, we learned that someone out there has the winning ticket for the record-breaking two billion dollar Powerball jackpot. We still don't know who they are, but what if I told you there are two other big winners in this story?
There's the guy who sold the winning ticket, 75 year old Joseph Chahayed. California's Powerball rules say that the retailer gets a cut of the jackpot, so Chahayed will get a one million dollar prize. The "L.A. Times" has this write-up about him that'll have you smiling, because everyone just has the nicest things to say about this man. He owns a gas station in Southern California, he's known by customers as 'Papa Joe' because he treats everyone like family. They say no one deserves this money more.
Chahayed emigrated from Syria to Los Angeles in 1980 to build a better life for his family. Along the way, he became a beloved figure in his neighborhood. He says he plans to share his winnings with family, who help him run the store.
The other winner? State schools in California. They'll receive over 150 million dollars from the Powerball drawing.
Now, lots of people who buy lottery tickets say, "Hey, at least the money goes to a good place, like an education fund." But it's worth understanding how state-run lotteries work, and seriously questioning whether gambling is a good way of raising money for government services.
That's the focus of this weekend's episode of "Apple News In Conversation." I spoke with historian Jonathan D. Cohen, who wrote a book called "For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America." And Cohen argues that states running lotteries is really at odds with the purpose of government, which is to serve the common good.
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Jonathan D. Cohen: You would never, ever see a state promoting cigarettes and advertising them so that they could get the tax revenue. But that's exactly what we have with state lottery tickets, where states have entire agencies and officials whose job it is to increase lottery sales and to entice people to gamble.
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Cohen says the fact that the lottery is so popular says something about the state of the American economy and the American dream.
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Jonathan D. Cohen: It is not inevitable that we get 91.4 billion dollars in lottery sales every year. That is only the product of an economy that is not working for enough people, and that is not providing enough people the chance through the traditional economy, through their work, through entrepreneurship, to get ahead.
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You can hear the full interview by searching for "Apple News In Conversation" in the Apple News App or in the Podcasts App. And if you're already listening in the News app, stick around. We've got a narrated article coming up next from "The New Yorker." It looks at the phenomenon of performative Twitter apologies. So sit back, enjoy listening to that, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
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