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- [00:05]
Shamita Basu
Good morning. It's Friday, November 14th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, changes could be coming to your high rewards credit cards. How one of the world's top photojournalists covers combat zones and conflicts. And what happens when the hotel you're staying at goes bankrupt. But first, after 43 days of shutdown, the government has finally reopened. In some ways, the country is expected to go back to normal pretty quickly. But that doesn't mean it was cost free. Over a million federal employees were either furloughed or worked without pay. They were expected to return to work as soon as yesterday. It'll take time to clear the bureaucratic backlog on everything from loan applications to unanswered customer calls. Museums will gradually open over the weekend and food stamp payments will go out in full. But again, there might be some delays there in states getting it to recipients. Bloomberg's Congress reporter John Fitzpatrick told his network it takes some effort after President Trump put his pen to paper.
- [01:17]
John Fitzpatrick
The main impediment to getting things moving is that you have had people sitting at home because they were legally not allowed to work or people not being paid when they were working, and you get a bit of a morale issue and people using their time off to either work a second job or just not show up to a job where they're not getting paid.
- [01:36]
Shamita Basu
Disruptions at airports are expected to linger. And yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced a $10,000 bonus for some TSA officers who were given high performance reviews by their managers while working through the shutdown. When it comes to the economy, things might not just snap back right away. The Congressional Budget Office says roughly $11 billion in economic activity will be permanently lost as a result of the shutdown.
- [02:04]
Harriet Tory
They have said that if it lasts for six weeks, which is what it basically did, that is expected to reduce annualized growth in gross domestic products in the fourth quarter by 1.5 percentage point.
- [02:16]
Shamita Basu
Harriet Tory is an economics reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She says there's expected to be some makeup spending into the first quarter of next year as government workers receive back pay. But not everything will be recovered.
- [02:29]
Harriet Tory
Let's say you're a government worker and you used to go out for dinner every week. If you weren't going out for dinner in the shutdown, you're not sudd to go out for like five extra dinners in one week once you get your paycheck that you missed. So there is definitely some spending that is lost and is not recouped Meanwhile.
- [02:44]
Shamita Basu
The shutdown also created these blind spots in key economic data reporting, as jobs reports from September and October have been stalled. A more complete September jobs report is expected, since most of the work on it was complete before the shutdown began. October, though, is a mystery. The White House initially said numbers for that month might never come out, but later on Thursday said a more scaled back version could be released.
- [03:09]
Harriet Tory
We probably will get a jobs report talking about payrolls, but it won't include the unemployment rate, which is totally unprecedented.
- [03:15]
Shamita Basu
Tory says that's a crucial missing data point because the unemployment rate can be a telling sign.
- [03:21]
Harriet Tory
There is a lot of interest in whether the slowdown in jobs growth that we're seeing is because of the supply of labour, like the supply of available workers going down, or if it's because of companies wanting to hire less or companies maybe starting to fire people because those tell very different stories about the economy.
- [03:38]
Shamita Basu
Meanwhile, that data also informs the Federal Reserve as they consider another rate cut next month. Fed Chair Jerome Powell hinted at the last meeting that incomplete information could influence their decision and slow down any rate cuts, comparing it to Driving in the fog when you make a purchase with a credit card, you wouldn't think that the price could be different based on which card you use, or that a business might tell you that they only take a certain kind of Visa or MasterCard, for example. But a proposed settlement this week, potentially ending a 20 year long legal battle, could in fact lead to those very circumstances. And the biggest impact could be felt by those with high rewards cards. It all has to do with swipe fees, those little costs that businesses pay when you use a credit Card.
- [04:35]
Josianna Joshua
Visa and MasterCard are basically proposing that they're going to really loosen the details of the honor all cards rules and they're giving merchants the option to kind of deny where they want, which cards they accept and how they accept them.
- [04:49]
Shamita Basu
Josianna Joshua is a corporate finance reporter for Bloomberg News. The Honor all Cards rule dictates that merchants are required to accept all types of Visa or mastercards if they accept any cards from either company. Back in 2005, retailers filed a class action lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard. Merchants claimed that card issuers fees and acceptance terms were anti competitive in the marketplace. Now this is where the high rewards cards come into it. As consumers increasingly seek out cards with higher annual fees and bigger rewards for things like hotels and airlines, businesses have had to pay higher swipe fees to help fund those fancy points and rewards.
- [05:31]
Josianna Joshua
Honoring all of them means that no matter the swipe fee like the merchants have to accept them no matter what.
- [05:37]
Shamita Basu
The fees themselves are small, but they add up. Altogether, businesses paid more than $100 billion last year in these swipe fees. If the settlement does get approved, it could create some headaches for customers trying to use high rewards cards.
- [05:53]
Josianna Joshua
Any given retailer could just be like, hey, we don't take that card. Like, you can't use that card here. Which seems like it would create a bit of friction for consumers. As we know those higher premium cards are becoming more popular and a lot more people have them in their possession. So it could be one of those things where like, you're being denied at the counter and you're like, well, I'd have nothing else to use.
- [06:16]
Shamita Basu
In the short term, not a lot is expected to change. A whopping 90% of credit card spending is on rewards cards. So many analysts say it would be harmful to retailers to choose to start rejecting them long term. What this might end up looking like if this proposed settlement goes through is some businesses may choose to tack on in extra fee to process rewards cards to help cover the cost. A court approved outcome is still months away. On this show, we highlight some of the best reporting coming out today. And often that reporting comes with powerful photojournalism. Chances are if you followed reporting on any major war or conflict of the past two decades, you, you have seen Lindsay Adario's photographs. She's been to Sudan to cover the ongoing civil war. She's documented migrants making the dangerous trek through the rainforest in south and Central America. And now a new National Geographic documentary called Love and War looks at how she approaches this high risk. Crucial work. I recently spoke with Addario for our latest episode of Apple News.
- [07:29]
Lindsay Addario
In conversation, I try to get the emotion of my subjects, but I also try to empathize and feel what it feels like.
- [07:38]
Shamita Basu
We talked about some of the defining moments from her career, including her time in Ukraine in 2022 when Russia first invaded the country. One of her photographs became an indelible image of the war of a family who had been killed while trying to evacuate along what was supposed to be a safe civilian route. Addario says she was standing about 20ft away from the deadly mortar strike that took the family's lives.
- [08:03]
Lindsay Addario
It was very dusty, very chaotic, and I immediately clocked kind of these very small moon boots and it dawned on me that it was a family or there were children. And after that, once we got into the car and sort of started heading back to the hotel, I immediately started messaging my editor saying the reason this picture is important is because I was in this attack. I survived the mortar attack, and I know that it was an intentional targeting of a civilian evacuation route.
- [08:36]
Shamita Basu
You might remember that photograph. It appeared on the front page of the New York Times. It became one of the images that helped rally global support for Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, spurring countries to send weapons and aid. The documentary also shows a very different part of her life, coming home from assignments to her husband and two young children. Navigating the tension between covering conflicts and.
- [09:00]
Lindsay Addario
Being a parent to create my own family with my husband has been a huge learning curve. It's really about your children now, you know, for me, it's about my kids and making sure that they're happy, that they're safe. Parenting is the hardest thing I've ever done. I mean, and I've covered almost a dozen wars, and definitely parenting is much harder.
- [09:21]
Shamita Basu
She told me that letting audiences see both sides of her life in this documentary was essential to understanding who she is and why she keeps doing this work.
- [09:30]
Lindsay Addario
I also made a decision to just be completely transparent and vulnerable and open because I know what I ask of my subjects, and I did not think it would be helpful if I tried to paint a sort of pretty perfect picture because that's not at all who I am.
- [09:48]
Shamita Basu
You can follow Apple News In Conversation in the podcast app to find that episode or come back to the Apple News Today feed tomorrow. New episodes of In Conversation will be available there on Saturdays, too. If you want to see some of Addario's photographs, check out our Show Notes page. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. A Chicago daycare worker who was detained by ICE at the center where she worked is now free after a judge ruled she was illegally arrested. Diana Santiana Galeano was apprehended by agents while kids were being dropped off at the facility on Chicago's north side. A video of her telling ICE officers she had papers while she was forcibly dragged out of the building went viral, prompting widespread outrage and leading local officials to call her arrest and abduction. Her lawyer says she has a valid work permit that allows her to work legally in the United States. A Trump administration spokesperson said officers were conducting a targeted traffic stop on Galliano. A judge has ordered federal officials to give her a bond hearing. Defense Secretary Pete Heth announced the US Is carrying out a military effort dubbed Operation Southern Spear, meant to combat narco terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. Hegseth didn't immediately elaborate on what, where or how the operation will be carried out, but said it will, quote, secure our homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. It wasn't immediately clear whether he was announcing a new label for the ongoing US Operations near Venezuela or whether this is the start of a new mission. It comes after the government announced it had carried out its 20th strike against suspected drug boats in and around the Caribbean, which have killed at least 80 people since early September. And finally, what happens when you're in the middle of a vacation and your hotel goes bankrupt? For people staying in properties owned by Sonder, the answer is that you get kicked out immediately. The short term rental booking company abruptly collapsed over the weekend when its partnership with the Marriott Hotels ended up. Once seen as a competitor to Airbnb, Sonder has struggled since the pandemic and announced it was liquidating its assets. CNN gathered stories from some disappointed guests describing what it was like to be told to vacate without notice.
- [12:16]
Harriet Tory
Imagine my surprise yesterday, the Lord's Day.
- [12:18]
Shamita Basu
Sunday, and all of a sudden I got this random email from Marriott that told us we had to vacate the premises by 9am the next day, which.
- [12:24]
Josianna Joshua
I registered as spam because it made no sense.
- [12:28]
Shamita Basu
And it was even worse for staff. Many reported getting no warning either, meaning their final task before officially losing their jobs was to go room to room ruining vacations and anniversaries. 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 for my entire conversation with war photographer Lindsay Addario on this week's Apple News News in Conversation. Enjoy the weekend and I'll be back with the news on Monday.