How the U.S. is trying to keep the Gaza war from spreading

Good morning. It's Tuesday, January 9th. I'm Mark Garrison. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, the U.S. tries to prevent the war in Gaza from spreading. Problems with a Michigan law to help wrongfully convicted people. And a night vision camera reveals a strange little housekeeper.

First, to the Middle East, where U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting with regional leaders, trying to contain the war in Gaza.

This is a moment of profound tension in the region. This is a conflict that could easily metastasize, causing even more insecurity and even more suffering.

A major potential flashpoint is the border with Lebanon. The Iran-backed Hezbollah is in control of the area near Israel. Hezbollah and Israeli forces have exchanged fire nearly every day since the Gaza war began. But lately, there are signs that conflict could get more intense. Yesterday, an Israeli airstrike killed an elite Hezbollah commander. And Israel is widely seen as behind the attack that killed a top Hamas leader in Beirut last week.

We don't want an escalation in the war. We don't want what's happening in the south to be spread over Lebanon. We don't like a regional war because it's dangerous to everybody. Dangerous to Lebanon, dangerous to Israel and to the countries surrounding Israel.

But in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is in power, so the central government doesn't have total influence over the situation. But Bou Habib says it's encouraging Hezbollah to lower tensions.

You know, the decision is theirs, and we hope that they don't commit themselves to a larger war. But we're working with them on this, and we have a lot of reasons to think that this would not happen.

And then there are the questions of the Israeli government's thinking. Blinken is in Israel for meetings. He met today with Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Earlier, "The Post" spoke to Biden administration officials who worry that Netanyahu may be motivated to expand the war to Lebanon

as he fights for his own political survival at home. Now let's take a quick look at some other major stories in the news. Federal investigators say they're looking into whether missing bolts are the reason a large panel came off an Alaska Airlines flight,

forcing it to make an emergency landing. They say they still haven't found four key bolts that should have been on the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet, and it's possible they were never correctly installed in the first place. This comes as United and Alaska Airlines say they found loose parts when inspecting multiple grounded planes. A company called Spirit AeroSystems was responsible for installing the panel. It and Boeing are also investigating what happened.

Hail, hail Michigan. They are the champions of college football 2023.

Michigan beat Washington 34 to 13 last night.

It's the team's first national championship since 1997. The Wolverine strong run game helped seal the victory. It caps a year that was filled with drama, including a three-game suspension

of coach Jim Harbaugh because of a sign-stealing scandal. You can find more sports coverage in the Apple News app. Now to a story about people who fought for years to prove their convictions were wrongful. But after getting out of prison, they faced yet another battle. Authorities were making it hard for them to get compensated for years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit.

In Michigan, wrongfully convicted people are eligible for $50,000 in compensation for each year of incarceration. New reporting from "ProPublica" finds that narrow criteria and confusing language makes it extremely difficult for many people to get the money. "ProPublica's" Anna Clark told us about why the state set up the compensation program in the first place.

The intention behind this is to provide some support for people who are rebuilding their lives after experiencing grave injustice, to try to reckon somewhat for that.

But for Marvin Cotton Jr., the law didn't provide that support. Cotton spent almost two decades in prison on a murder conviction. The prosecutor's office ordered his release after finding his trial was unfair with police misconduct. Even though his name was cleared, Cotton found it hard to find a job and stable housing. He believed he was eligible for close to a million dollars in compensation, but his compensation claim was challenged by the state.

You only qualify if your conviction was overturned based on, quote, "new evidence," and that new evidence must meet a very high, clear, and convincing standard. If the courts didn't, like, literally decide it based on that new evidence, if they decided it based on trial errors or lawyer issues or something like that, even if new evidence was also on the table, then those folks end up getting shut out. They get nothing.

That's what happened in Cotton's case. The attorney general's office said that new evidence had not emerged to clear him of the crime, and therefore he did not qualify for compensation. Experts agree that wrongfully convicted people are entitled to financial help, but there's no uniform standard for how governments should compensate them. Michigan has the fifth most exonerations in the U.S. Close to 70% of people who filed claims have been paid.

Now that we've seen it in action, now that we've seen how it's been affecting real people's lives, there have been some lawmakers, some advocates, and even some state Supreme Court justices that have been urging the legislature to take this up again, to reconsider the language. You know, just account for how it's been excluding a lot of people that it was meant to help.

Cotton kept arguing his claim, and ultimately the state offered to settle his case for about $630,000. Cotton felt he had a good case for more, but he told "ProPublica" he was tired of fighting,

that more years of litigation could rip his life apart. Finally, a story of an intruder who leaves the place cleaner than it was before. In Wales, a man was trying to figure out who was going inside his shed every night.

The weird thing was the mystery guest was doing a great job of keeping the place organized. Night after night, things the owner left out, screwdrivers, nuts, bolts, clothespins, they were neatly placed in a box by the morning. So the owner of the shed installed a camera to find out what was going on while he was sleeping. And there, caught on tape, was a tiny mouse, scurrying around, grabbing whatever was laying around, and using its paws and mouth to neatly pile the junk in place.

Mice may be a little bit like humans, in that sometimes, doing something pointless is pretty fun. 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 a narrated article coming up next. "Rolling Stone" has the story of an FBI agent who spent two decades going undercover to stop human trafficking. Now she's talking about what she witnessed.