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WNBA star Brittney Griner freed in prisoner swap · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Thursday, December 8th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, a day of stunning political upheaval in Peru, a town in North Carolina devastated by drug deaths, and what to consider before you download a hot, new AI portrait app.
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  But first, reports as of this morning say that WNBA star Brittney Griner has been released from Russian detention and is in U.S. custody. Her freedom was granted through a prisoner swap with the U.S. for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. President Biden shared the news this morning after speaking with Griner by phone.
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  President Joe Biden: I'm glad to be able to say that Brittney's in good spirits. She's relieved to finally be heading home. And the fact remains that she's lost months of her life, experienced a needless trauma. She deserves space, privacy, and time with her loved ones to recover and heal from her time being wrongfully detained.
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  Griner has been detained since February, when she was arrested on drug smuggling charges at a Russian airport. She pleaded guilty, but she also said the vape with cannabis oil was to treat chronic pain and she unintentionally packed it in her bag. Over the summer, she was sentenced to nine years in prison and had been moved to a penal colony last month. Griner's wife, Cherelle, was in the Oval Office with President Biden this morning, and by his side to share the news.
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  Cherelle Griner: Today, my family is whole, but as you all are aware, there are so many other families who are not whole. And so, BG's not here to say this, but I will gladly speak on her behalf and say that BG and I will remain committed to the work of getting every American home.
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  She's referring there to another American who's been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who was not included in this deal. A Russian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison on espionage charges that he denies. He's been detained since 2018.
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  The Supreme Court is considering a case that could have major national impact on the 2024 election. It heard oral arguments yesterday in a case where North Carolina Republicans are trying to stop a court from throwing out a congressional district map that was ruled as biased against Democrats. "Reuters" explains that based on what justices said in court, the conservative majority looks like it's ready to limit judicial power over voting policies. But it might not go as far as Republican lawmakers want in this case.
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  The argument from Republicans hinges on a legal theory called "independent state legislature," or ISL. It started as a fringe idea, but more conservative legal scholars are supporting it, and they may have key Supreme Court justices on their side. Basically, people who support ISL say the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures authority over election rules and district maps, not state courts or other entities.
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  Critics of ISL say this gives state lawmakers too much power. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan talked about the implications yesterday in court.
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  Elena Kagan: This is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country. And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most. Because legislators, we all know, have their own self-interest.
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  Kagan and the two other liberal justices on the bench signaled they will oppose the arguments from Republican lawmakers. Three conservative justices seemed sympathetic, including Justice Samuel Alito. He pushed back on the argument that state legislatures would go unchecked if the Court ruled in favor of Republicans.
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  Samuel Alito: Congress can come in any time, under any circumstances, no matter what we say the Elections Clause means. Congress can always come in and establish the manner of conducting congressional elections.
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  Other conservatives on the court seemed more skeptical. So Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, may hold the key to how far a final ruling goes. The Court's decision is due by the end of June.
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  Let's go now to South America, where Peru is reeling after a rapid turn of events yesterday that included a dramatic attempt to seize power by the president, his removal from office and arrest, and the swearing-in of the country's first woman to serve as head of state.
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  It all unfolded over the course of a few hours. It started when President Pedro Castillo said he would temporarily dissolve Congress and call for new elections. It turned out to be a huge miscalculation as to how much support he had. His cabinet ministers resigned, the military and police said they would not support the move, the U.S. embassy called on Castillo to stop. This is what it sounded like as Peru's Congress removed him.
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  Unidentified Speaker: [SPEAKING IN SPANISH FOR LATIN AMERICA]
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  Yesterday was a dramatic close to his tumultuous 17 months in power, during which "The Guardian" counts five cabinets, six criminal investigations, and two failed attempts to impeach him.
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  Castillo came into office as a political novice. He campaigned to help poor Peruvians who were left behind. He was the first president from the left in more than a generation. But in the end, his attempts to preserve power reminded people of the coup by former right-wing leader Alberto Fujimori, who is now in prison on corruption and human rights charges.
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  The former vice president, Dina Boluarte, was sworn in as president, becoming the first woman to lead Peru. In her first speech as president, she called for a political truce as she starts to build a united government.
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  Our next story comes from "The Washington Post," where Jordan-Marie Smith investigated a troubling pattern in her hometown, Greenville, North Carolina. Every time she went back, she heard about another one of her old classmates dying from a drug overdose. So Smith started making calls.
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  Jordan-Marie Smith: Soon, I realized that a lot of these drug overdoses were opioid overdoses as well.
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  She learned over the last decade or so, more than a dozen people she grew up with died of drug overdoses. Greenville, like many other places in the U.S., has seen a sharp upswing in overdose deaths for more than a decade. Smith says one family lost multiple people to substance-related deaths over the course of just a few years.
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  Smith: In so many other cases in America, it's very accurate that you see so many people who are out, may take one bump of cocaine, they don't know what's in that cocaine, and next thing you know, they're in the hospital, or next thing you know, worse, they're in the morgue.
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  Some of the deaths involved heroin, some fentanyl. Another family told Smith about their son Stuart, who struggled with addiction for years.
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  Smith: One thing that Stuart's father said that stands out to me is that, "I laid in bed 10 years, not sleeping at night," because he knew he was going to get a phone call from someone saying, "Come get him out of jail. Come get him out of the ditch. Come get him out of the morgue."
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  Stuart died in 2019.
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  Smith: Every year, every six months, someone is going to the funeral home and mourning one of their friends who passed. So it's just a rampant, a rampant problem that I know is not just isolated to Greenville, North Carolina. There are so many other Greenvilles in America right now.
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  Smith told us one thing that she wanted to highlight in her reporting is the good work being done by members of the community to address the crisis and break the stigma. A woman who lost a son opened a harm reduction center. Families have turned to activism. But the burden of survival is heavy. One person who grew up in Greenville told Smith, after losing at least 20 friends to drugs, "It's a weight that never really goes away."
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  Maybe you've seen these images all over your social media in the last few days. These stylized digital portraits. Some look like pop art, some look like they're ripped out of a cartoon strip or sci-fi movie or even a Renaissance portrait. They're coming from an app called Lensa AI that's quickly become very popular. You pay a couple bucks, you feed it some selfies, and it generates a bunch of portraits in different styles.
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  Now, lots of people are excited about trying it and sharing what they get back. But the art news outlet "Hyperallergic" looks into how actual working artists feel about it. There are a lot of concerns, and not only the obvious worries about whether artificial intelligence will take their jobs.
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  One issue is how the AI is making images. It uses a dataset that trains the AI by looking at copyrighted images of human-made art on websites like Pinterest. Artists complain that this is essentially stealing from previous artwork, even if it is digitally altered. Lensa did not respond to "Hyperallergic's" request for comment.
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  "Hyperallergic" also points out that when you agree to the terms on this app, you're giving away the rights to the images it makes. So once these AI portraits of you are done, you can't do much to stop the company from using them however it wants to down the road. It's a reminder that AI has the potential to do amazing things, but it can lead us into some new and murky ethical territory. At the very least, we should understand what we're opting in to.
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  You can find all the stories we talked about today and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app, stick around. We've got a narrated article coming up next from "The Atavist Magazine" about a reporter's investigation into a murder case that spanned Afghanistan and Athens.
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  So check that out, and I'll be back here with the news tomorrow.
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