--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Tuesday, March 22nd. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, senators are going to start questioning President Biden's Supreme Court nominee. Yesterday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered her opening statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When I was born here in Washington, my parents were public school teachers. And to express both pride in their heritage and hope for the future, they gave me an African name, Ketanji Onyeka, which they were told means lovely one.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Judge Jackson told senators if she's confirmed, she would defend the Constitution and seek to live up to U.S. ideals.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I stand on the shoulders of so many who have come before me, including Judge Constance Baker Motley, who was the first African-American woman to be appointed to the federal bench and with whom I share a birthday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And like Judge Motley, I have dedicated my career to ensuring that the words engraved on the front of the Supreme Court building, equal justice under law, are a reality and not just an ideal.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Judge Jackson is an appeals court judge in Washington, D.C., and a two-time Harvard Honors grad. She has experience as a public defender, and at one point she clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, who she would be replacing when he retires at the end of this term.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She also received the highest rating a judge can get from the American Bar Association.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The L.A. Times recaps how many Democrats celebrated Judge Jackson yesterday. Senator Cory Booker called it, quote, a day of joy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Judge Jackson's nomination breaks an artificially confining mold of our past and opens up a more promising potential-filled future for us all as Americans.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And Senator Alex Padilla acknowledged how she'll be breaking new ground as the first black woman on the highest court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The men who wrote our founding documents could never have imagined that you would one day be here.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So that's a day one wrap. It was mostly niceties, but today things could be quite different. The Senate Judiciary Committee is going to be questioning her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over at the Wall Street Journal, Supreme Court reporter Jess Braven writes about the oppositions he's likely to face this week from Republicans.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, most are going to be asking her questions about things you expect to hear, questions about her judicial philosophy and past opinions. But as Braven told us, a few outlier Republican senators recently have captured the headlines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some Republicans were very harsh on her suggesting she a friend of child predators and criminals and terrorists.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Let's look at these claims. First, the question of defending terrorists.
--:-- Jess Braven: [Guest] Judge Jackson represented four Guantanamo Bay detainees as a public defender. But remember, under the law, everyone, no matter what your alleged crime is, is entitled to a lawyer.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Plus, in her cases, none of her defendants were ever convicted. Even those who were eventually charged had those charges dropped, and all were eventually released.
--:-- Jess Braven: Then there's the argument being made by Republican Senator Josh Hawley that Judge Jackson lets sex offenders get off easily.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As The Washington Post explains, Hawley is taking comments Judge Jackson made when she served as a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission out of context.
--:-- Jess Braven: The commission is a bipartisan agency whose stated goal is to, quote, reduce sentencing disparities and promote transparency in sentencing.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Still, Raven says expect to hear this come up this week. So they're going to say, well, you are soft on crime.
--:-- Jess Braven: And this is, in fact, a theme that Senator Mitch McConnell suggested last week that Republicans are going to push against her.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's worth noting Judge Jackson has been endorsed by several law enforcement agencies, which have said part of the reason they support her is that Jackson has family members who are in law enforcement, which gives her an understanding and appreciation for their work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If history is any indication of where this process is going to end up, let's look at the past. The Senate has confirmed Judge Jackson for judicial roles three times.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If she's confirmed again this time around, her appointment to the court would be historic, yes, but it won't change the makeup. There'll still be six justices on the court nominated by Republican presidents and three nominated by Democratic presidents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You have probably heard about the millions of people who have fled Ukraine. But there's another group of immigrants that's not getting as much attention. People leaving Russia.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Many say they're leaving their homes because the Russia they once knew, the one that they helped build, is becoming unrecognizable.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Bloomberg Businessweek is reporting an estimated 200,000 Russians have already left their country. They fled in the first few days of the war. They're traveling to countries like Armenia, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, places that allow Russians in without a visa.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In their rush to get out, they're leaving behind their homes, savings, cars.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Masha Gessen writes about this exodus for The New Yorker. Some of the people leaving fear political persecution. Gessen writes about one man named Grigory.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He has protested against Putin plenty of times in the past. He's even been detained. But recently he found out that his name is on a list of people targeted for political persecution.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So to protect himself and his family he decided to leave. He packed up his car and he went to say goodbye to his parents.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But in a sign of how quickly things are changing in Russia, when he got to his parents' home, he found them preparing to have their house searched.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gessen writes that others are leaving because they fear getting drafted, forced to enlist, or they're just morally opposed to the war and feel like they can't stay.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These Russians say the Russia they've long known is disappearing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This isn't the first time Russia has seen an exodus like this. Bloomberg Businessweek looks at the years after the Soviet Union collapsed, when 1.2 million people left Russia for opportunities elsewhere, contributing to a significant brain drain.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And if there was ever any doubt that this was, in fact, a brain drain, consider the people who left. They were mostly academics and professionals who went on to transform fields of science and education in the countries to which they fled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the more than 20 years since Putin first took power, close to 2 million people left Russia.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The author of this Bloomberg piece has a personal perspective on this. In 2014, he and his family left their home in Russia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He has a name to describe what he and millions of others did, the emigration of disappointment.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are a few moments in history when scientists made huge leaps. The COVID pandemic is proving to be one of them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When the pandemic began, scientists around the world dropped everything to study COVID. That's Liz Szabo. She's a senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News.
--:-- Liz Szabo: That led some to worry that research into cancer, heart disease, and other important conditions would suffer. But actually, the opposite is turning out to be true.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The surprise has been that the billions of dollars invested in COVID could pay dividends not just for COVID patients, but for people suffering from cancer, influenza, chronic fatigue, and rare genetic diseases.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's because the mRNA technology used to create COVID vaccines is now being used to create vaccines against a number of infectious diseases.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You've probably heard about how scientific breakthroughs during the pandemic may change the way we approach other medical conditions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This reporting from Kaiser Health News goes in a lot of detail that you may not have known before.
--:-- Liz Szabo: For example, with mRNA technology, researchers are hoping they can use this technology to create vaccines for the flu, the Zika, even HIV.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, if you're a parent, you likely know about RSV. Every year, millions of kids are hospitalized because of this respiratory infection.
--:-- Shamita Basu: mRNA may lead to a new RSV vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And then there's the technology that's been developed for testing and diagnostics.
--:-- Liz Szabo: One doctor in this Kaiser Health News article says he never imagined you could do a PCR test outside of a lab that it could be done just about anywhere including by you and me in our homes.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And let not forget research into long COVID.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know how some patients continue to experience symptoms for months, possibly even years after getting infected.
--:-- Liz Szabo: Well, it turns out that research is benefiting research into another chronic condition that up until now had mostly been dismissed by the medical community.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But now many top researchers say that long COVID and chronic fatigue are more or less the same disease.
--:-- Liz Szabo: Advocates for people with chronic disease now hope that the intense focus on long COVID will help people with both diseases.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One more important discovery we need to mention.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Scientists learned that roughly 15 to 20 percent of patients over 70 who die from COVID have something called interferon targeting antibodies.
--:-- Liz Szabo: Basically, rogue antibodies that attack your immune system instead of protecting it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The head of immunology at the University of Pennsylvania calls that discovery a, quote, paradigm shift in his field.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All this means huge strides for science.
--:-- Liz Szabo: Sabo says it's kind of similar to the breakthroughs we got from the space race in the 50s and 60s.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: During those decades, competitive scientific spirit was in hyperdrive, and it led to all sorts of developments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm talking about the invention of CT scanners and MRI machines, wireless headphones, even the computer mouse.
--:-- Liz Szabo: Sabo says the same kind of breakthroughs also came from all the resources devoted to AIDS research.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So scientists studying HIV in the 1980s, 90s, and later decades learned things that led to the development of better drugs for hepatitis and CMV, also known as cytomegalovirus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And research into HIV-AIDS also paved the way for successful immunotherapies in cancer.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And it also sped the development of vaccines that are now being used for COVID.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's another one of those days where there's a lot going on.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Here are a few other stories we're following closely on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President Biden confirmed that Russia has used hypersonic missiles in Ukraine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These are missiles that travel faster than five times the speed of sound.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He also urged U.S. businesses to increase their cybersecurity, bracing for potential cyber attacks from Russia.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As of early this morning, Reuters is reporting a rescue team was searching the area where a Boeing jetliner crashed in southern China yesterday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Investigators are looking into why the crash happened.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the state-run airline has grounded its entire fleet of Boeing 737-800s.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And dangerous storms are in the forecast for parts of the U.S. over the next few days.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Multiple tornadoes have already touched down in Texas and Oklahoma, where USA Today is reporting tens of thousands of people were without power this morning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's all on the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And when you're in there, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
