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What to know about big developments in Trump investigations · Apple News Today

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  [MUSIC FADES IN]
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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, October 14th. 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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  Let's catch you up on three big developments this week in the legal investigations into former President Trump, his family and his businesses.
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  First, he's being subpoenaed by the January 6th committee. Members voted on it unanimously.
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  [START TRUMP SUBPOENA ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Bennie Thompson: Those in favor will say aye.
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  House Committee Members: Aye.
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  Thompson: Those who oppose it is no.
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  Thompson: In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it.
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  [END TRUMP SUBPOENA ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  In yesterday's public hearing, the House committee made the case that Trump acted in a pre-meditated way leading up to January 6th, making major decisions in the days after his election loss, including ordering the pull-out from Afghanistan. That, they said, was evidence he knew his term was ending.
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  Now with this move to subpoena him, the committee is demanding Trump's personal testimony. Chairman of the committee Representative Bennie Thompson said Trump is the central figure in the story of January 6th, and they want to hear from him.
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  [START GOVINFO LIVE STREAM ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Bennie Thompson: But the need for this committee to hear from Donald Trump goes beyond our fact-finding. This is a question about accountability to the American people. He must be accountable.
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  [END GOVINFO LIVE STREAM ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Trump reacted on social media, criticizing the committee for not asking him to testify earlier, although he didn't say whether he would have complied.
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  Onto the second update… Last month, we told you about the investigation launched by New York Attorney General Letitia James. She says the former president falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars, and she filed a suit accusing Trump, his business, and three of his children of financial fraud. Well, according to a new court filing this week, on the day that lawsuit was filed, the Trump Organization quietly registered a new entity called Trump Organization II.
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  Investigators at the Attorney General's office say they suspect Trump is moving assets to this new entity to evade liability. Her office is now seeking to stop the organization from taking further action while the case is still pending. The Trumps have called this latest move politically-motivated and a "stunt."
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  And lastly, let's turn to Mar-a-Lago and the investigation into the classified documents that the former president took to his Florida residence. The Supreme Court, yesterday, rejected Trump's plea for the court to intervene and allow a special master to review some of the recovered documents. The Court did not explain its reasoning, and there were no noted dissents.
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  Earlier this week, "The Washington Post" had new reporting about the lead-up to the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago. According to "The Post," a Trump employee told federal agents after Trump's team received a subpoena in May for any classified documents that remained at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told people to move boxes to his residence at the property. Spokespeople for the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment. A Trump spokesperson called it "unequal justice."
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  There's been a string of hoax phone calls reporting active shooters on school campuses over the past few weeks, in some cases claiming that people at schools have already been shot. You can imagine the panic that comes next: the schools go into lockdown, tons of police are dispatched, parents, students and educators fear for their lives. All for what turns out to be some kind of prank.
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  Basu: Odette Yousef covers domestic extremism for "NPR." She told the network that, as of last weekend, she's counted over 100 calls across 19 states and Washington DC, all within the span of three weeks. She managed to get recordings of some of those calls.
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  [START NPR ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  St. Cloud Police Dispatcher: St. Cloud Police Department.
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  Unidentified Caller: Active shooter-- [SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY]
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  St. Cloud Police Dispatcher: Your phone is cutting in and out. I can't hear you.
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  Caller: Hello. There is an active shooter at Apollo High School.
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  [STATIC]
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  Springfield Police Dispatcher: Springfield Dispatch.
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  Caller: Hello. There is an active shooter at Central High School. There is an active shooter at Central High School.
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  [END NPR ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  "The Washington Post" reports that these threats forced Denver to shut down all 25 public library branches, and that in just one week, a dozen schools in Minnesota were targeted. At one school in San Antonio, a man was so panicked when he heard that there might be a shooter in the building that he hurt his arm trying to break a window.
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  Youssef explained on "NPR" that law enforcement has a term for calls like this that falsely claim that violence is about to happen. They call it "swatting," like calling in a SWAT team.
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  [START NPR ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Odette Yousef: You know, this can be really dangerous. You know, police are showing up hot with guns drawn, you know, they may be breaking down doors. And what's really concerning here is that swatting kind of originated in spaces with extremely online communities, including live-gaming communities as a prank. It's also something that extremists do to intimidate and harass their perceived ideological enemies. But this seems to be something else entirely.
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  [END NPR ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  The FBI says swatting is a serious crime and it's working with local law enforcement to gather more information about these incidents.
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  [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
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  One car couldn't navigate around traffic cones, others struggled to make a basic left turns, and another drove, slowly, straight into the tail of a private jet…
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  These are just some of the problems that self-driving cars have run into, or, I guess I should say, have driven into.
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  Max Chafkin is a columnist for "Bloomberg Businessweek" and he recently took a good hard look at why self-driving cars haven't managed to live up to the hype, almost 20 years after the first demos. His story starts with an anecdote about a woman in California whose driveway, inexplicably, became the go-to turnaround spot for some of Google's driverless cars. Chafkin says, the way she describes it, they would form a little line, like an army of zombie driver's-ed students, they would pull into her driveway, make a K-turn and leave.
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  Max Chafkin: It just felt almost like a beautiful metaphor. You have tens of billions of dollars, maybe a hundred billion dollars of capital, the best scientists, the-- you know, the best engineers in the world, and what they've made are some cars that are doing U-turns on a dead-end street in San Francisco.
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  Google disputed that the cars were running into a tech problem in this incident, but Chafkin sees it as indicative of a bigger issue.
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  He writes that companies like Google, GM, Tesla and others promised they could deliver self-driving cars that can navigate the toughest conditions without humans. But right now the reality is, in many cases, they struggle with certain weather patterns, with construction, animals, even making left turns safely while there's oncoming traffic. It turns out driving is actually pretty hard, and humans are actually pretty good at it.
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  Chafkin speaks to several self-driving evangelists who have come to realize we're still a long way from making this technology happen. Anthony Levandowski is one of them. He's the co-founder of Google's self-driving car program. He left Google for Uber and was convicted of stealing trade secrets. Later, he was pardoned by former President Trump. Levandowski told Chafkin that it'd be hard to find another industry that's invested so much and delivered so little.
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  Chafkin: He's one of the best-known engineers in this field, and what he's saying, and what he was saying to me, is that the whole thing is basically an illusion, that for years these companies have kind of been kidding themselves, doing demos that look like finished products, but that aren't, in fact, finished products.
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  The fact is, as long as driving means navigating tricky weather and surprise scenarios, we're gonna need humans at the wheel.
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  [GENTLE CHIMING MUSIC]
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  What if the sound of your voice could play a real role in diagnosing an illness?
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  That's the hope behind a massive research project launched by the National Institutes of Health. They're collecting samples of human voices to develop artificial intelligence that can diagnose people based on speech.
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  "NPR" brings us this reporting, and it's a story best told with audio.
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  For example, here's a sample clip from the Voice Foundation at St. John's University, read by a person who has vocal fold paralysis…
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  [START VOICE FOUNDATION ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Unidentified Speaker: The blue spot is on the key again. How hard did he hit him?
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  [END VOICE FOUNDATION ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  And here's the same exact sentence read by a person with cancer in their larynx, also from the Voice Foundation…
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  [START VOICE FOUNDATION ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Unidentified Speaker 2: The blue spot is on the key again. How hard did he hit him?
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  [END VOICE FOUNDATION ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  See, your vocal cord vibrations and breathing patterns reveal a lot about your health. A computer could be taught to look for signs in these audio recordings and categorize them, things like slurring as a sign of a stroke, or speaking low and slowly as a marker of Parkinson's disease.
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  While this isn't the first time Al is being used to study human voices, it is the first time data will be collected on this scale. They're trying to collect 30,000 voices in four years.
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  And the ultimate goal is to build an app with a huge diagnostic database that would be available in rural or underserved communities. Doctors could use it to refer patients to specialists, and maybe someday your smartphone could listen to changes in your voice and be able to tell you, "Hey, go get checked out by a doctor."
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And check out our weekend interview show, "In Conversation." This week, journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser talk about their new book called "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."
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  [START APPLE NEWS IN CONVERSATION CLIP]
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  Susan Glasser: The account here, and there are many damning stories, comes from, by and large, Republicans, officials who worked willingly for Donald Trump. Those have always been the source of some of the most startling and alarming stories about Trump's conduct in the presidency and in the Oval Office.
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  [END APPLE NEWS IN CONVERSATION CLIP]
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  I'll be back with the news on Monday.
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