The Headlines - A School Shooting in Georgia, and 2 High-Profile Cases Return to Court

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Plus, bogus bands, fake fans and $10 million.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:14-Year Old Held in Georgia Shooting Was Questioned About Threats Last Year, by Rick Rojas and Alessandro Marazzi SassoonTrump’s Federal Election Case to Go Back Before a No-Nonsense Judge, by Alan FeuerHunter Biden’s Legal Woes Return to Spotlight Ahead of Tax Trial, by Glenn ThrushRepublicans Seize on False Theories About Immigrant Voting, by Alexandra BerzonThe Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10 Million Was Real, by Maia Coleman

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, September 5th. Here's what we're covering. It's locked down. Everyone's panicked. The nurse is crying in the corner. Lights were off.

Lights were off. I'm hearing gunshots. Sounds like a loud door being slammed. Students at Appalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, described chaos and confusion yesterday as a 14-year-old student opened fire, killing four people. Barely a month into the new school year, some students said they thought it was a lockdown drill at first. Then they heard shooting. How many gunshots did you hear?

I heard three before I turned it out. I just started bawling. down drill at first. Then they heard shooting. Two teachers and two students were killed, and at least nine others were injured. The suspect, who attended the school, surrendered after he was confronted by police. Authorities say he will be charged with murder and prosecuted as an adult. The FBI said the suspect was on law enforcement's radar more than a year ago, after anonymous tips came in about threats posted to a gaming site. The threats described a school shooting and included pictures of guns. The suspect and his father were interviewed at the time. The suspect denied making the threats. His father told investigators he had guns in the house for hunting, but said

his son didn't have access to the weapons. It's unclear if officials at Apalachee High School were notified about the threats. For almost eight months, Donald Trump's federal case on election interference charges has been on hold. Now, his lawyers are headed back to court. At a hearing in Washington, D.C. today, the judge overseeing the case will start the process of determining how the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity will apply to this case. Trump is charged with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and the judge is expected to outline exactly how she's going to decide which parts of the indictment might have to be tossed out and which can survive and go to trial.

Today's hearing is only one step in what will be a long, tangled legal process. Any decisions the judge makes will likely go back to the Supreme Court for further review. Meanwhile, another high-profile case that's been in the political spotlight will also move forward today. Jury selection is beginning in Hunter Biden's trial on tax charges. The president's son is accused of failing to file and pay taxes on millions of dollars in income from foreign businesses, among other crimes. The prosecutor overseeing the case already won a conviction against Hunter Biden earlier this year on gun charges, though he's still awaiting sentencing. If convicted in the tax trial, he faces up to 17 years in prison. With Election Day just two months away,

some Republicans, from right-wing pundits to vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, have been promoting unsubstantiated theories about non-citizens voting. People who are not citizens are not allowed to vote, and there's no indication that they do in large numbers. But the claim that they will flood the polls this year is spreading. Folks, that's where you stop it, in the registration rolls. We cannot let these people get registered.

The Times received a recorded call made over the summer of a group of Republican activists sharing suggestions about how to keep undocumented immigrants from voting. I don't think it's unfortunate, but sometimes the only way you can find out is look for ethnic names. I don't mean to be any kind of person. What they're doing is putting together instruction kits and telling activists around the country to be active in election office, talk to the election officials about this, to monitor voter registration groups. Times investigative reporter Alexandra Berzon has been looking into Republican efforts to crack down on what they say is a threat to the election. They've even created posters in English and in Spanish that have a big stop sign on it and tell people to basically be careful and that non-citizens

can be prosecuted. And they're planning to put those up around various neighborhoods, sending them to election officials to post and that kind of thing. And what we're seeing is that all of this talk about non-citizen and undocumented immigrant voting is having a real world impact. In Alabama recently, you had an announcement that they were deactivating a number of people from the voting rolls. And Texas, there the attorney general announced that of aligned with them that are claiming that voting rolls have a lot of non-citizen voters on them. And they're trying to say that local counties

have to take more action around this. There's a number of concerns that voting rights advocates have about these various actions and the overall kind of frenzy around the idea of undocumented citizens voting. What they're really concerned about is voter intimidation, as well as the idea of people getting knocked off of roles who are legitimate citizens and should be able to vote. And another major concern that they have is that this is another conspiracy theory that could be used to try to discredit the election in the event that Donald Trump loses and could be used by him or his allies as a way to try to contest results or to at least get the public to

have the sense that the results are not valid. And finally, if you were on Spotify or YouTube in recent years looking for new music and checking the charts to see what was big, you might have felt extremely out of the loop when you didn't recognize bands like Calorie Screams or Calvinistic Dust, even though they had top performing hits. But it turns out it's not just you being uncool. The songs were not written by bands hoping to make it big. They don't have huge fan bases racking up all those listens. Instead, the songs were the work of a 52-year-old man in North Carolina sitting at his computer, allegedly scheming to make millions from the

streaming platforms. Michael Smith was arrested yesterday for fraud. Prosecutors say he commanded an army of bots to continuously stream music that he'd uploaded to earn royalties. Smith, who is actually a musician, did write some of the songs himself, but he eventually turned to AI to crank out an entire catalog of songs by fake bands for the bots to play. The songs were played billions of times, and penny by penny, Smith collected $10 million over a seven-year period. The indictment lists just a fraction of the supposedly popular tracks that Smith uploaded, with randomly generated names like the very catchy Zygotic Wash Dance, Zyme Bedowing, Zymes, Zymite, Zymophyte, Zymogenes,

Zymoplastic, Zymopure. There are hundreds of thousands more. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a look at Kamala Harris's record on immigration and border security, from her time as a prosecutor to her vice presidency. You can listen on The Times audio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.