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--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, May 5th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A warning that the stories we're about to talk about deal with sexual violence in war. They are difficult to hear, but it's important to recognize what's happening and not sanitize these accounts.
--:-- Shumita Basu: More and more Ukrainian women are reporting being raped by Russian soldiers. Here's a 16-year-old from Kherson who spoke to CNN. She says a soldier came into her home and choked her, threatening to kill her if she resisted.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating this incident as a war crime. According to Ukraine's ombudswoman for human rights, lots of stories like this one are being documented in areas occupied by Russian forces. She told the BBC how in the basement of one house in Bucha, dozens of girls and women were systematically raped.
--:-- Shumita Basu: According to the ombudswoman, Russian soldiers said they were attacking them so they would never want to be with a man as a way to prevent them from having Ukrainian children in the future. These are not just individual acts of violence. Rape can be used as a weapon of war, a widespread, systematic effort to terrorize people.
--:-- Shumita Basu: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there's evidence of a deliberate campaign to rape, kill, and torture civilians in Ukraine. Russia has denied allegations of atrocities by its forces. But more testimonies are emerging.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Speaking through a translator, one woman told her story to the BBC. A soldier entered our house. My husband and I were there. At gunpoint, he took me to a neighboring house. He was ordering me, take your clothes off or I'll shoot you. Then he started raping me.
--:-- Shumita Basu: NPR spoke to British lawmaker Arminka Helich, who advocates for war crime victims. She was a refugee from Bosnia, where tens of thousands of people were raped in camps.
--:-- Arminka Helich: It is not something that is just happening in Ukraine now. It something that happened in Bosnia in DRC in Iraq in Syria in Myanmar in Central African Republic You name it there is hardly a conflict where we haven seen violence being used particularly against women and girls in some cases against men and boys as well
--:-- Arminka Helich: And even though the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor says he will fast-track an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine, Helich tells NPR justice for victims is often slow or non-existent. It is the least prosecuted and the number of successful international prosecutions for sexual violence in conflict remains in the low single digit.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The news this week that the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade is sending shockwaves through both political parties. For decades, conservative politicians rallied and campaigned to overturn Roe. But now that it might actually happen, some Republicans are treading carefully.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Here's Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Hughes, who spoke to us from The Hill. Republicans are in an unusual position because after winning a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, they now have to deal with the consequences of that. And so a lot of the Republican senators are being immediately thrust into a position of evaluating in a very fine pointed way whether they support an absolute ban on abortion or whether they believe in any sorts of exceptions or modifications.
--:-- Siobhan Hughes: Abortion is one of the most consistently divisive issues in America. Recent Pew polling found nearly 60 percent of Americans think it should be legal in all or most cases.
--:-- Siobhan Hughes: With midterm campaigns underway, Republicans have good reason to worry that Democrats could use this issue against them. The thing you hear privately from Republicans is how concerned they are that the leaked draft opinion will be a deficit in the midterm elections.
--:-- Siobhan Hughes: I've heard Republicans mention states like, for example, Pennsylvania, where David McCormick and Mehmet Oz are the two most likely primary contenders. But to win their primary, they might need to take a position on abortion that differs from the one they would need to take to win the general election.
--:-- Siobhan Hughes: Which may be why some Republicans are trying to shift focus to what this says about the breach of protocol at the Supreme Court. For Republicans the timing could not have been worse which may be part of the reason the Republicans are so much more focused on the leak itself rather than the substance of that leak
--:-- Siobhan Hughes: Hughes told us about how Democrats are already counting on newly animated voters. Chuck Schumer at an event on Tuesday night said he thought in states like North Carolina and Florida, Democrats now had a better chance at taking Republican controlled seats because the draft Supreme Court opinion would so energize women and other voters.
--:-- Shumita Basu: I also want to recommend a story that's very different from a lot of the abortion coverage in the last few days. There's been a lot of focus on law and politics, and for good reason, but for people seeking abortions, getting access to that medical care is a personal and private moment. And that's the point of a photo essay in BuzzFeed News that I've been thinking about ever since I saw it.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It's a rare look inside the closed doors of an abortion clinic. The photographer, Glenna Gordon, wanted to document what it's actually like as a counterpoint to some of the sensational and frankly inaccurate imagery around abortions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Whether you're listening to me in a car or on your iPhone, microchips are what makes it possible. The more high-tech our gadgets get, the more of these complicated little chips they need. This is why the microchip shortage is in the news so much.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It can make the things we buy more expensive. Also, because so many microchips are now made abroad, it's become a kind of national security concern. Recode reporter Rebecca Highwell looks at how the U.S. government is trying to do something about this and create domestic jobs in the process.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Now there's this broad movement supported by the White House and members of both parties to basically invest about $52 billion in building new chip factories in the United States.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Just a few days ago, one of those factories opened in upstate New York, and the plan is to make more facilities like it. This is part of a larger effort for America to reclaim market share.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: The U.S. did use to dominate chip manufacturing. In fact, in the mid 20th century, scientists at places like Bell Labs did some of the initial research into the transistors and basic integrated circuits that created the foundation for the computer chips that we use today.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And because this was to a large extent invented in the United States a lot of the original design and manufacturing capacity for these chips started out in the United States But today that no longer the case These days Taiwan makes nearly all of the world most advanced chips.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And bringing production back to American soil, Highwell says that's easier said than done. One reason is that making microchips is a globalized process. Different steps happen in different countries. A single chip might cross borders 70 times before it's done.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So what we saw during the pandemic was that you could have one step of that process be disrupted. And even if all the other parts of the process were good to go, you would still potentially end up with a shortage because it's so spread out across the world.
--:-- Shumita Basu: We highlight a lot of investigative journalism on this show. Today, we want to give kudos to ProPublica and the long, long tale of its reporting on TurboTax, which is still getting results.
--:-- Shumita Basu: This reporting revealed that the company misled millions of Americans into paying for tax prep that should have been free for them. The software company behind TurboTax is now settling with state attorneys general for $141 million. It'll send up to 90 bucks apiece to more than 4 million people.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The state's investigations came after ProPublica's reporting in 2019. Taxpayers with lower incomes are eligible for a free version of TurboTax software, but ProPublica found that TurboTax's maker, Intuit, used marketing and design tactics to steer customers toward paid products.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The company is not admitting to wrongdoing in the settlement. You can read the latest in the Apple News app along with all the stories we talked about today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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