New evidence found in Alaska Airlines flight investigation

Good morning. It's Monday, January 8th. I'm Mark Garrison. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, a possible budget deal in Congress could avoid a government shutdown, the end of online cookies may change the ads you see online, and how tonight's college football championship is the end of an era.

But first, we're learning more information about the Alaska Airlines flight that was forced to make an emergency landing on Friday. Officials now have a crucial piece of evidence in the investigation of that Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet. A heavy four-foot-long panel came off in midair. A Portland school teacher found the piece in his backyard. The FAA temporarily grounded Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets for immediate inspection. Passenger Emma Vu told "Reuters" about how the incident woke her up.

I'm sleeping and I just feel the plane drop and it wasn't like any other turbulence just because the masks had came down too. So that's when I knew like, oh gosh, this is something way different. And, yeah, I started freaking out.

She says she was relieved that it happened so soon after takeoff so the pilot could quickly get the plane back on the ground.

But, yeah, I'm so grateful we weren't higher in the air, like, that more things didn't fly out, that no one flew out. I think that's incredible that we're all safe.

It could have been worse, but fortunately, there was no one sitting in the two seats right next to the gaping hole. And the flight attendants made sure everyone was safe, including unaccompanied children and several babies. This Boeing plane has a troubled history. The MAX 9 is a bigger version of the 737 MAX 8, which had two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, killing more than 300 people. That plane was grounded worldwide for almost two years.

was overwritten, so some key evidence may be missing. Now, let's take a quick look at some other major stories in the news. Congressional leaders have a bipartisan budget deal that could avoid a government shutdown.

It's a roughly $1.6 trillion federal spending agreement, but it's not fully done. The House and Senate will have to write the actual bills that fund the government in under two weeks to avoid a shutdown. That's not a guarantee, given that Congress has struggled to pass other major spending bills on time.

Thank you. We would like to dedicate this to every single person on the planet who dressed up and went to the greatest place on earth, the movie theaters.

Also, Oppenheimer won for Best Dramatic Film, while Poor Things took home the award for Best Musical or Comedy. On the TV side, Succession was the best drama series, and The Bear was the winning musical or comedy.

You can see the whole list of winners and check out the red carpet looks on the Apple News app. Chances are pretty good that you've had an internet browsing experience like "Wall Street Journal" tech reporter Miles Krupa.

So I think a lot of us have become accustomed to, if we're looking at a shoe on Neiman Marcus's website, that an advertisement for that shoe will probably follow us around the internet and we'll be like, well, I decided not to buy that shoe for a reason, right?

Those product ads follow us around because of what are called cookies. They track your online activity. Advertisers can tap into them so they can show you ads for stuff they think you're likely to buy. But things are about to change. This month, Google kicked off a test that'll shut down these cookies for some users of its Chrome browser, and it plans to kill them off for good by the end of this year. Krupa told us how this move is causing huge panic among some advertisers.

I think cookies were a really easy and widely-used standard and an easy way for advertisers to build these profiles on people and with fairly-detailed information. You know, they could give advertisers pretty high-fidelity info into what consumers were doing online. You know, it drove a lot of value in the advertising industry.

He says that eliminating cookies is one of the biggest changes in the history of the $600 billion a year online ad business, where Google is a giant player. Advertisers really don't like the move.

Their main gripe is that even after four years of planning for this, Google's solutions don't really come close to even replicating the value they got from cookies, and they believe Google has done it in a way that has made it very difficult for people to prepare for when cookies eventually, by the end of the year, go away in Chrome.

The end of third-party cookies is seen as a win for consumer advocates. They've long argued that they're an invasion of privacy. Krupa says over time, we may get a break from all those targeted ads. But make no mistake, there will still be plenty of ads online.

Marketers will just have to find different ways to pitch us more stuff. Tonight, the Michigan Wolverines take on the Washington Huskies for college football's championship. Nicole Auerbach is a college football senior writer for "The Athletic." She told us what she'll be watching for.

The Huskies play the most entertaining style of offense in the country. I can tell you that I didn't expect that Michael Penix Jr., a transfer from Indiana who had injury issues, was going to become, I think, the best player in college football. But he is electrifying. The deep ball he throws is, I think, the most beautiful deep ball that there is in college football.

This will be the last year where only four teams get into the playoffs. Next year, the field will expand to 12. That could help the sport avoid the disputed end to this season. A lot of fans didn't agree with who officials chose for the playoffs and especially who got left out.

Well, there was a great deal of controversy around the selection of the four-team field, and it's because of Florida State. They were unbeaten, and they're in one of the five power conferences. We've never seen the selection committee leave out a team with a resume like that. And they put it solely on the injury to quarterback Jordan Travis. They said this was not the same team.

College football teams are also reshuffling into different conferences. After this year, Washington is leaving the Pac-12 conference to join Michigan in the Big Ten.

The Big Ten is going to start the 2024 season with the defending national champion. Either way. And that's huge considering how much the SEC has dominated this sport. And so many national champions, in the last couple of decades, have come from the Southeast.

As for who wins tonight, here's Auerbach's take.

So, I went to Michigan. I'm going to say that out here because I'm going to be accused of being a homer here, but I'm going to take the Wolverines. They were my preseason pick to win it all because I felt like they had the pieces to get over the hump.

And Michigan is finally going to win national title for the first time in 25 years.

You can find more pregame coverage in the Apple News app, along with all the stories we talked about. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around. We've got a Narrated Article coming up next from "The New Yorker." The writer tells the story of how he tried to piece together his father's murder, which happened when the writer was just three years old. If you're listening in the Podcasts app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.