--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, March 31st. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- [Discussion begins]
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, what happens to health research when studies that use the word women are cut? South Korea's dark history of adoptions? And in men's college basketball, it's an all-number-one seed Final Four. But first, there are a couple of important special elections this week that we're following.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Tomorrow, we'll break down a crucial contest in Wisconsin for a state Supreme Court vacancy that's attracted the attention of Elon Musk. Today, we're going to look at two House seats up for grabs in Florida that are making Republicans nervous about their slim majority.
--:-- Shumita Basu: One of those races in Florida's 6th Congressional District is to replace Mike Waltz, President Trump's national security advisor, who's been in the headlines over the Signal Group chat where he and several other top officials discussed military strike plans in Yemen.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Running to replace Waltz is Republican state senator Randy Fine. Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was asked about the contest.
--:-- [Audio clip of Ron DeSantis speaking]
--:-- Ron DeSantis: I will tell you this, regardless of the outcome in that, it's going to be a way underperformance from what I won that district by in 22 and what President won it by in November. That is not a reflection of President Trump. It's a reflection of the specific candidate running in that race.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Fine's opponent, Democrat Josh Weill, has out-fundraised Fine by 10 to 1. And according to CNN, those figures sent shockwaves from Florida all the way to Washington.
--:-- Shumita Basu: CNN also reports senior GOP leadership intervened, calling Fine and saying he needs to step up his efforts in the race. One poll showed Fine's lead within the margin of error. Another pollster also found Fine's lead a lot tighter than expected.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, in Florida's other congressional race, Democrat Gay Valamont also outraised Trump's endorsed candidate Jimmy Petronas about 7 to 1. That race is to replace former Congressman Matt Gaetz.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Republicans have a 218 to 213 edge over Democrats in the House, so every seat and every vote matters.
--:-- Shumita Basu: NBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki broke down the race on the network and said, it's a big ask for Democrats to flip these seats, given just how Republican these districts are.
--:-- Shumita Basu: But these are the exact types of elections where they have a shot. In the last couple of years, in special elections for the House and in lower turnout elections, like not like presidential elections where everybody votes, that's where the Democrats have had an advantage.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That's where they've overperformed. They've done well. Why? Because it seems that the Democratic base for elections that do not have Donald Trump on the ballot seems more motivated than the Republican base.
--:-- Shumita Basu: That was the story going right into the 24 election. Didn't turn out to be a thing in November, but it may still very much be a thing in special elections.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The president has acknowledged the importance of holding on to these and other Republican seats. It's the reason he gave reporters last week for pulling the nomination of Loyalist and New York Representative Elise Stefanik for UN ambassador.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And I said Elise would you do me a favor We cannot take a chance We have a slim margin We don't want to take any chances. We don't want to experiment.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Most observers think these seats will likely remain with the GOP, and the campaign arm of House Republicans called talk about it, quote, noise.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Democrats have said if their candidates overperform in these races, which Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said shouldn't even be on the radar, it's a sign some attitudes might be shifting.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Trump, who won both districts by 30 points, spent part of these final days in teletown halls for both candidates shoring up support.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Let's turn now to recent actions the Trump administration has taken that are impacting science and research.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The administration has ordered major cuts to the workforce and funding at the National Institutes of Health and huge reductions of NIH grants to universities.
--:-- Shumita Basu: These are institutions that lead research on a huge array of diseases and conditions, everything from pediatric brain cancer to heart disease and asthma.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And because of Trump's crackdown on DEI, NIH employees are being told not to approve grants that include words such as women, trans or diversity.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: They had been in the works of running clinical trials or analyzing data and suddenly were told they could no longer do that.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: And some of them were able to find stopgap funding from other sources. Some of them are figuring out if they will have to shut down their studies entirely.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: They're seeing if their universities will appeal these cuts and hoping that they will be able to restore some of that funding.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: And Luther says if they can't get that funding back, it'll be a waste of, in some cases, years of research.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: We simply won't get the answers to questions that we had already paid to ask, and in turn aren't going to be able to reap the health benefits.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: One of the gaps in health care that these kinds of studies seek to address is our understanding of conditions that impact women.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: Research on women's health already lags far behind men. That's in part because for a long time, the FDA actively discouraged researchers from including women who could become pregnant in clinical trials.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: Which means we have less reliable data when it comes to how a lot of medications might impact women or for women's specific conditions.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: Luthra told us the story of one researcher at Columbia University. She studies uterine fibroids, which are these tissue growths.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: They are quite common and they cause severe pain. They can cause bleeding. They can cause infertility.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: They are under-researched. They have a heightened impact for Black women in particular.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: And we don't know much about them, let alone how to treat them.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: This researcher says she recently got a call from her advisor that her federal funding had suddenly been cut.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: And she didn't know what to do. She knew what this would mean for her research in the long term whether she would be able to do her research which she views as a piece of the puzzle of trying to understand fibroids and also what it means for our ability as a society to improve this condition and ultimately improve the health of people who have been really neglected by our ecosystem
--:-- Shefali Luthra: Luthor told us that the opposition to funding research on women is rooted in the culture wars we're seeing play out, but also in a misunderstanding of the research.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: A lot of this sort of comes from this anti-trans rhetoric and this idea that, as the president said in his recent joint address, So we're funding research in transgender mice, which was a really inaccurate mischaracterization of how this research was actually being done.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: It was looking at whether hormones might affect asthma or breast cancer or other conditions that manifest differently based on sex and gender.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: But what's really important is there's just a real disinterest in thinking about what gender means in our society and what sex means in our society.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: And that we have seen not only in the NIH cuts, but in how people talk about health funding in a larger sphere, how they talk about international development funding.
--:-- Shefali Luthra: And it's something that soon will touch many, many aspects of the public infrastructure we've come to take for granted.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The NIH did not respond to the 19th request for comment.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In 1975, a mother in South Korea named Choi Young-ja reported her son had gone missing.
--:-- Shumita Basu: She told PBS's Frontline her son had been outside playing with neighborhood kids when he disappeared.
--:-- Shumita Basu: She went to the police. She checked orphanages and adoption agencies.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Years later, she got a phone call that would change everything she thought she knew about her son's disappearance.
--:-- Shumita Basu: She had submitted her son's DNA to an agency that works to reunite adoptees and birth parents.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And she says there to Frontline that she got a call from someone saying they found her son.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Her son, named at birth Sangyeol, was now named Frank.
--:-- Shumita Basu: She was overwhelmed. She hung up and burst into tears.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A few weeks later, she videoconferenced with her now adult son for the first time.
--:-- Shumita Basu: She says there she was shocked.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The boy she last remembered at the age of four had become an adult with gray hair.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Her story is just one of many that's come to light in recent years about fraudulent Korean adoptions.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Kids and infants who were stolen without the consent of their biological parents.
--:-- Shumita Basu: For the families who adopted them, they too were lied to, told that the children were abandoned or orphaned, and that their identities and information about their birth families was lost or fabricated.
--:-- Kyao-in Lee: From my understanding, the government did not really care about the details.
--:-- Kyao-in Lee: The top level of the police makers were not really interested about the specific rules and regulations to protect the rights of the child the safety of the child the need of the children
--:-- Kyao-in Lee: What they focused was the welfare need of the national budget
--:-- Shumita Basu: For the South Korean government foreign adoptions had become a way to reduce social welfare spending.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Recently, Lee has played a significant role in passing adoption reform in South Korea.
--:-- Shumita Basu: As these children have grown up, and with the help of DNA websites like 23andMe, some of these adoptees have come to find out their true identities, and they've pushed South Korea to reckon with this dark past.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Last week, they got a major victory when South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released the preliminary results of an ongoing investigation into this matter.
--:-- Shumita Basu: For the first time, they acknowledged that human rights abuses took place and that the government failed to protect the rights of adoptees.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shumita Basu: President Trump is threatening new sanctions on Russia if it doesn't agree to a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He told NBC News he was, quote, very angry at Russian President Vladimir Putin for his comments calling for an interim governance in Ukraine to push out Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Putin said Zelensky lacks the authority to sign a peace deal because his term expired last year.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Ukraine is under martial law, and according to its constitution, national elections can't be held while it's in effect.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Zelensky has vowed to call elections as soon as the war ends.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In Myanmar, the death toll continues to rise as the country accounts for the destruction from a 7.7 magnitude earthquake that rocked the nation on Friday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Many people are thought to still be trapped under collapsed buildings.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The earthquake struck near Mandalay, which has a population of 1.5 million people.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Years of civil war are complicating recovery efforts.
--:-- Shumita Basu: A Red Cross regional spokesperson called it not just a disaster, but a complex humanitarian crisis layered over existing vulnerabilities.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And finally, the men's NCAA basketball Final Four is set, and perhaps in not-so-climactic fashion, all four No. 1 seeds are headed to San Antonio to compete for the national championship.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It's the first time all four No. 1s reached the Final Four since 2008.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The matchups will be Auburn vs. Florida and Duke vs. Houston.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Those games tip off next Saturday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Meanwhile, the women's Final Four will be set tonight.
--:-- Shumita Basu: USC takes on UConn and Texas takes on TCU.
--:-- Shumita Basu: UCLA and South Carolina punch their ticket to the Final Four on Sunday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Wall Street Journal has the story of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist that some consider the world's leading thinker on decision making.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Last year, at the age of 90, he decided to go to Switzerland and end his own life via assisted suicide.
--:-- Shumita Basu: He informed his friends, but many are still struggling with his decision.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
