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Shumita Basu: Good morning! It's Thursday, August 10th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today."
Basu, Narrating: On today's show, why the federal government doesn't declare emergencies for heat waves, profiling special counsel Jack Smith, who's bringing the historic federal criminal cases against Trump, and an unexpected explainer on why bees need saving.
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But first, let's look at the fast-moving wildfires in Hawaii. At least 36 people are dead and thousands have had to evacuate. Hundreds of homes and businesses are destroyed. The fires have been burning on the Big Island, and especially on Maui. In its popular resort area of Lahaina, fire damage is extensive. Maui hospitals are overstretched, trying to deal with waves of patients with burns and smoke inhalation. "Reuters" spoke to resident Mason Jarvi, who escaped the flames.
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Mason Jarvi: We just had the worst disaster I've ever seen. All of Lahaina is burnt to a crisp.
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He said it was like an apocalypse. You can hear how windy it is there in that clip. The unusually strong winds are one reason the fires are so bad. Wildfires have happened before in Hawaii, but rarely on this scale. "The San Francisco Chronicle" looks at what's different this year, and how fires have been gradually getting worse on the islands.
At the moment, Hurricane Dora is a factor. It may be far away from Hawaii, but it's close enough to do damage. It's sucking up moisture, meaning the Hawaiian Islands are especially dry. And the hurricane was there at the same time as a high pressure area to the north drove super-strong winds.
So that's why things are bad now, but fires have steadily gotten worse in Hawaii in recent years. Like elsewhere in the world, climate change has made the state hotter. That heat, plus invasive grasses that now grow wild across the island, make a dangerous combination. These highly flammable grasses have taken over former farmland that once grew pineapple and sugar cane. That means once a fire starts, it can grow and spread quickly.
Forecasters say the worst of the winds seem to be over for now. That'll make it easier for firefighters to contain the wildfires. But with little rain in the forecast, there's still a tough fight ahead.
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Wildfires are widespread this summer. Extreme heat is affecting even more people. But even though heat can unquestionably be a deadly emergency, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, doesn't respond to heat waves alone. "Grist" looks at why.
Before FEMA can fully kick into gear, the president has to declare a major disaster in a specific area. No president has ever made that kind of declaration for a heat wave. And that includes President Biden, who has made more than 40 declarations this year for other emergencies.
Now part of the reasoning goes back to a 1988 law that lays out what qualifies for federal emergency aid. Floods, hurricanes, fires, mudslides, tornadoes, earthquakes. All those and more. But the word heat is not on the list, or anywhere in the language of the law.
A climate advocate at the Natural Resource Defense Council told "Grist," that's because disaster funding is typically geared toward repairing what's broken in an emergency: think roads, buildings, infrastructure. But disaster funding doesn't focus as much on people's health. Since heat waves do more damage to people than they do to buildings, they don't get the same kind of attention as hurricanes and floods.
But there is movement on Capitol Hill to change that. An Arizona Democrat has a bill to add "extreme heat" to the list of disasters covered. It has some bipartisan support, but there's no guarantee it'll make it through the very divided Congress.
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<v Today, there's another hearing on additional charges former President Trump is facing related to how he handled classified documents. He's pleaded not guilty to those charges and others. Trump faces a lot of court cases at the moment, but two of the biggest are federal criminal trials>the documents case, and another one related to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Behind both is a name you've been hearing more recently, special counsel Jack Smith.
"The Wall Street Journal" takes a look at Smith's track record as a prosecutor, and spoke with legal experts about the historic cases he's building against Trump.
Smith was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, where he won convictions in some high-profile and complex cases. He later took over the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department. This is the office that goes after political corruption. He had some more wins, but also some big setbacks, like the failed prosecution of former Democratic Senator John Edwards in 2012. Sadie Gurman is the "Journal's" Justice Department reporter. She told us how the Edwards case fell apart.
Sadie Gurman: It was a very famous implosion. One of the jurors said at the time that they felt like the evidence just wasn't there, that there could have been a lot more evidence.
There was also the conviction of Republican Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia in 2014, which was overturned in a unanimous Supreme Court decision. Gurman explained how losses in court can be telling.
Gurman: The point was made to me in reporting this story that if you're not losing, you're not bringing hard cases and you're not bringing high stakes cases, and so I think if anything, this mixed record shows that Smith is somebody who is not afraid to lose if he thinks he has the evidence needed to bring a case.
Smith now faces the highest-profile cases of his career, arguably some of the highest-profile cases in American history. In particular, the case involving Trump's actions to undermine the election may be the most challenging one legally.
Gurman: Here he has alleged that for the first time in history, a president has tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power to his successor. This is a novel case and the legal theories here are novel. He's using statutes that have been brought time and time again, but the facts of this case are just unprecedented. And so I think that most legal experts agree that makes it, in some ways, a more challenging case.
But an attorney who worked with Smith calls it a quote "classic Jack case," it's streamlined, compelling, and fairly simple to follow.
Gurman: That doesn't necessarily mean that a jury is going to convict on all of the counts. But nevertheless, I mean, it's also for the history books
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Finally, I wanted to highlight a piece that's worth a long read when you've got some time. It's from "The Ringer," it's about honeybees. You've probably already heard about the problem of bees dying en masse. And you probably know that bees give us a lot more than honey. They play a big role in our entire food system because they pollinate a wide range of food crops.
But "The Ringer" goes to a very different place on this topic. It argues that this isn't really a conservation issue. It's not about you or me "saving the bees" in the wild. It's about how we've come to rely on bees as part of our massive system of agriculture, a buzzing cog in a machine that goes from farms to grocery stores to our kitchens.
"The Ringer" story is an extensive look into the entire U.S. farming system and all the ways bees play into it. How bees get strategically shipped from farmland to farmland, providing "pollination services," and how beekeepers struggle to keep their numbers up. It speaks to keepers, and scientists, and activists, and it paints a much more nuanced picture than the typical coverage of this issue. You can read the whole story, and all the stories we talked about today, in the Apple News app.
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And if you're already listening in the News app right now, don't go anywhere.
We've got a narrated article coming up next from "New York Magazine." It looks at how the diagnosis of trauma became so prevalent in America.
That's cued up to play next, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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