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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Tuesday, March 21st. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, 20 years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, what life is like for Iraqis today, why gas prices are swinging around so much, and speeding space debris.
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But first, we recently learned new information about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public might learn even more soon.
There have been two leading theories for a long time now: that the virus leaked from a lab or that it came from a wild animal.
Yesterday, President Biden signed legislation pertaining to the first theory, a lab leak. He's declassifying information related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The bill was introduced by Republicans, who've accused Biden of not being tough enough on China. A number of government agencies have conducted their own investigations but haven't reached confident conclusions. China has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of their labs.
While lawmakers play political football with COVID origin theories, scientists around the world have been working tirelessly for over three years now, trying to find answers. It can be hard to know which theories to pay attention to, which ones are grounded in facts or obscured in politics. So you might've missed this recent one from "The Atlantic" about new findings that some scientists are calling the strongest evidence so far in support of the second theory, the wild-animal hypothesis, that the virus jumped from animals to humans.
This is based on genetic data that only became public a few weeks ago. The Chinese equivalent of the CDC posted it on a global forum, and researchers outside of the country noticed and ran their own analysis of the data. They say it shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at a wholesale market in Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic could have been carrying the virus. Raccoon dogs are sort of like foxes. They're sold for their meat and fur in markets like this.
As one researcher put it, this isn't perfectly definitive proof, but it's like finding the DNA of your main suspect at the scene of the crime.
And it still leaves open the possibility that other animals may have been carrying the virus too.
At this point, it's not clear why this data was so recently posted to the public database. And Chinese researchers appeared to take it off the database shortly after. One researcher in China called this latest analysis "nothing new." The World Health Organization has renewed its calls for China to be more transparent and to share all of the data it's collected on the origin of the pandemic.
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This week marks 20 years since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a mission that was part of the United States' broader "war on terror" after 9/11. At the time, President George W. Bush said the war was intended to root out weapons of mass destruction and free the Iraqi people.
It only took about a month for Western forces to topple Saddam Hussein's government, but the war continued for another nine years, killing an estimated 270,000 Iraqis and 4,600 U.S. service members. It's hard to know exactly how much the war cost, but one estimate from Brown University puts it around $2 trillion. Ultimately, weapons of mass destruction were never found and early claims that Hussein may have been linked to Al Qaeda also turned out to be false.
There's been a lot written about how American lawmakers and media failed the accountability test by bullishly supporting the war. And that criticism is important. But I want to focus today on some stories that center the lives of Iraqis, what they've lost, and the future that they see for themselves.
<v The first one comes from "The Washington Post." It looks at the effects of burn pits on Iraqis who live near them. These are the open pits where American military bases would burn their waste. You might have heard about this issue. Congress recently recognized it as a serious cause of harm for American soldiers, and President Biden signed a bill to expand benefits for Americans who were exposed to them. But "The Washington Post" asks>what about the Iraqis living there? Some got sick, cancer rates started to spike in young people. One Iraqi described the smoke to "The Washington Post" as a "poisoned blanket."
Another story worth checking out is from "NPR's" Ruth Sherlock. She spoke with young people who've pretty much only known their country since the U.S. invasion, whose entire lives have been shaped by it. People like Hajar Hadi.
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Hajar Hadi: Most of our teenage years were more scary because you would see a lot of dead bodies lying on the street, or you would fear for your family being taken by a bombing or being kidnapped.
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Many young Iraqis told "NPR" they feel the United States destroyed their country and that there is still corruption and violence long after Hussein's regime.
<v The final story I want to call out is from "CNN." It's a photo series. An American photographer named Michael Itkoff had the idea to send 20 disposable cameras to Iraq, a year after the war began. He asked for the cameras to be given to ordinary people, with a simple prompt>show Americans what you want them to see. And he repeated the same exercise again this year. The photos show people carrying on with normal life. Little girls playing with umbrellas, a man taking a cigarette break, a street vendor selling juice.
One man who had been given a camera, Tariq Raheem, told "CNN," "I want the world to have a different image of Iraq, rather than seeing scenes of destruction and killing. I want to send a message to the world that Iraqi people love peace and want to live in peace."
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Natural gas prices have been on a wild rollercoaster ride over the last year, rising and falling with extreme volatility, affecting homes, businesses and people across the country.
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Unfortunately, "Wall Street Journal" reporter David Uberti tells us there is no end in sight. The number of price swings in recent months indicates that the market for natural gas will continue to be shaky. The way Uberti puts it, natural gas impacts so much of the economy.
David Uberti: So natural gas is essential for making steel. It is fundamental to creating fertilizer on which all of our food production relies on. It's used to make PVC pipes, to make drywall. It's used to heat industrial laundry facilities across the country, in addition to heating our homes and giving us the power that we need to light our office spaces and whatnot.
In other words, when the price of something so fundamental is swinging like a pendulum, the entire system is under pressure. There are a few reasons why experts think that we're in for more turbulence. A big reason, here in the U.S., is we just don't have many alternatives. As more coal power plants have closed, Uberti says there haven't been enough wind and solar farms to replace them.
Uberti: So that really puts a lot of pressure on the market, which drives up prices to an extent we'd never seen before.
That combined with the fact that the U.S. doesn't have great infrastructure for moving natural gas around the country, and its boosting gas exports to support allies in Europe, it all means people here are bearing the brunt of price swings.
Emily Hodge from Colorado told Uberti this has created a lot of stress for her family of four. Their gas bill recently jumped up to $900 a month, almost double where it was a year ago. She said it's officially their biggest bill now, more than their mortgage or insurance.
Uberti: Emily told me she's basically now living paycheck to paycheck, and for many of the people that we spoke to, if their gas bill jumps $100 per month or $500, it really puts a strain on overall spending in the economy and really, you know, makes people's day-to-day lives much more difficult.
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Houston, we have a space trash problem.
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And now a team of international researchers are sounding the alarm over all of the junk that we've got floating around in space. They say it's something like 100 trillion objects. And that includes thousands and thousands of satellites; some of them are not working anymore. But it's also things like little bits of debris, stray bolts, paint chips. "TIME" has this story.
Now, you might be thinking, what's a couple of paint chips in the scheme of the universe? Well, you gotta know how fast these objects are actually orbiting the Earth. They're whizzing around at about 17,000 miles per hour, which means that if a paint chip hits a spacecraft, it's like a bullet. Astronauts regularly have to shelter in place to wait out passing storms of junk. It's a real danger.
This team of scientists is saying it's time to come up with some kind of international agreement. A global treaty on how we can curb the amount of stuff that we throw into space. They're saying the mess that we've made up there is similar, in a lot of ways, to how we've polluted our oceans. And similarly, it's gonna take international cooperation to figure out how to solve the problem and hold everyone accountable. As "TIME" puts it, a species that was smart enough to get itself to space now needs to be smart enough to keep it clean.
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You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around.
We've got another energy story coming up next from "Texas Monthly" that goes inside Elon Musk's plan to transform renewable energy in the state, and the unlikely allies who are helping him.
So sit back, enjoy listening to that, and we'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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