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Mark Garrison, Narrating: Good morning! It's Thursday, August 25th. I'm Mark Garrison, in for 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.
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A federal judge has blocked part of an abortion law that was set to go into effect today. This marks the first legal victory for the Biden administration since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The Department of Justice argued the law went against a federal requirement to provide care when a pregnant person's health is at stake. The ruling says doctors can't be punished for performing an emergency abortion in Idaho. However, the rest of the state's law remains in place, meaning abortions are still banned in most cases. This week, another ruling in a similar case in Texas went against the Biden administration. And by the end of this month, nearly all of the abortion trigger bans in the country will be in effect. Abortion access in America now looks very different than it did a few months ago.
Rachel Roubein: So, about 20.9 million women have lost access to nearly all elective abortions in their home states.
That's Rachel Roubein, a healthcare reporter at "The Washington Post."
Roubein: As of right now, there are roughly 14 states that have banned most abortions, such as prohibiting the procedure, with narrow exceptions from the time of conception or after fetal cardiac activity has been detected. Five more states have similar bans that have temporarily been blocked by the courts.
And if those bans ultimately win in court?
Roubein: That's roughly 36% of women in the country between the ages of 15 and 44 would be largely unable to obtain an elective abortion in their home state.
And more trigger laws expected to take effect soon will mean even more women will lose access to abortions, both medication abortion and surgical procedures. The rules are different from state to state. Some have no exceptions for rape or incest, some consider life to start at the moment of conception. Some bans state that life starts at six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they're pregnant. And in many cases, even if a pregnancy is not viable, laws ban terminating it, even if it could threaten the life of the mother. Abortion rights activists are taking their fight to the courts and the ballot box. They're hoping some injunctions of trigger laws will hold and that voters will support candidates backing abortion rights in November. Anti-abortion advocates are trying to push the law further in their direction. Roubein explains that they're supporting laws that would prevent patients from traveling out of state to get the procedure, and they want to grant fetuses legal rights.
One Republican lawmaker got attention recently for publicly expressing reservations about an anti-abortion bill he supported. South Carolina State Representative Neal Collins told his colleagues about a phone call that's been haunting him. A doctor told him about a patient who was 15 weeks pregnant when her water broke. The fetus wasn't viable, but the doctor said because of the state's abortion ban, treatment couldn't happen and the prognosis was bad.
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Representative Neal Collins: There's a 10% chance that she will develop sepsis and herself die. That weighs on me. I voted for that bill. These are affecting people. It took… That whole week, I did not sleep.
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We wanna take a quick look at some major developments on a couple stories we've been following at Apple News. First, to Uvalde, Texas, where the school board voted unanimously to fire the district's police chief, Pete Arredondo. He's been heavily criticized for his role in the delayed response to the elementary school shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers. Arredondo wasn't at last night's hearing. His lawyer has hinted at a possible lawsuit.
The other story involves the court case around the handling of photos of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others in 2020. A federal jury says Los Angeles County should pay his widow Vanessa Bryant $16 million. It found that sheriff's deputies and fire officials violated the civil rights of her and other victims' family, by taking and sharing graphic photos of the accident site. As always, you can go deeper into these stories on the Apple News app.
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Election officials are working to secure their systems against hackers as the midterms approach. Ohio has spent the past few years working on something new. It's called the Ohio Cyber Reserve. It's a volunteer army of tech professionals. And when we say "army," we're being kinda literal. It's ultimately under the command of the state's National Guard. Katrina Manson covers cybersecurity for "Bloomberg."
Katrina Manson: Although they're civilians, they're not National Guard reservists in that sense, but when they are called up, they do swear an oath. And so, if they were to make a misstep, they could be tried under the Military Code for Justice in Ohio.
Members of the team have day jobs, mostly in cybersecurity. They fight cybercrime on weekends and for a three-hour stretch every Tuesday. And just like army reservists, they train a lot. Manson tells us about a simulation where hackers went head-to-head.
Manson: The only thing they told the 19 people who took part in the exercise in advance was a website of a fictional county in Ohio has been defaced. So, that was the setup. And then once they got there and really started looking at the networks, they started finding other vulnerabilities. And that's because, in a room not so far away, was the so-called red team who were hacking to their delight.
The civilian reserve has been called on at least twice to handle real attacks. The general in charge says his phone has been ringing off the hook with people who wanna join up. Now, a number of states are following Ohio's lead. California, Texas, Maryland and others are creating similar volunteer cyber teams. The military response states are taking speaks to how big the threats to elections are, from cybercriminals at home and abroad. As one guardsman puts it, states are "light-years behind" all the criminal hackers out there. But civilians with the right skills and a passion for democracy might be able to fend 'em off.
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Raising a kid is expensive, and inflation is making it worse. New research hangs a pretty striking price tag on it: $310,000. And that doesn't even include college. That's the latest Brookings Institution estimate of what it'll cost for 17 years of diapers, food, haircuts, healthcare, babysitting, everything it takes for a middle-income couple to raise a kid. That's a jump of around 10% from two years ago. "The Wall Street Journal" talked to families about how this is playing out in their lives. A mom from Pittsburgh said her family usually does something they call "boys week" in the summer. Her three sons and their cousins all get together, nearly ten boys in all. But this year, she canceled it. She told the "Journal" it's just too expensive to feed everyone. Stories like this might sound scary to new parents, or people considering having kids. If you want a little perspective that might ease your mind a little, we recommend a recent episode of "NPR's" "Life Kit." It's basically 22 minutes of hearing, "You got this." The key is, don't get pressured into blowing your budget on things your kid doesn't really need. Farnoosh Torabi is a personal finance expert and also a parent.
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Farnoosh Torabi: I often hear from expecting parents, "Oh, my gosh. We have to move. We have to get a bigger place." It's like, "Relax." You don't need to have all this space. It's not going to be the sort of need, immediate need, that you think it will be. Sure, is it nice to have more space? Of course. But don't do it if it's going to stress you out, if it's gonna push you beyond your financial limits in that first year to buy a home or rent up to a bigger place just because you think you need it.
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That episode also has good advice on how to take full advantage of support you might be able to access, from tax breaks to workplace policies to community resources. You can check it all out on the Apple News app.
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We've been digging all the amazing new images from the Webb Telescope lately. And we've talked about them on the show, but it's tricky, since we're doing audio here and that's a very visual story. Outer space is just not set up for podcasting. It's a vacuum, where sound doesn't work like it does on Earth. But it turns out, there are certain rare cases where space makes a little noise. So as an audio show, we were pretty stoked when NASA shared some sound from space. Now, we should warn you, it's not beautiful sound the way those Webb pictures are beautiful. The sound is… Well, just listen.
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Ooh, it's spooky, right? We're basically listening to what a black hole sounds like. NASA found one that was creating sound waves. It's a little complicated, involving how the black hole sucks in cosmic material and pushes some back out. You can read the whole explanation in "The Atlantic." Sorry, let's just turn this off because this is a little too creepy for the morning.
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That's better. Now, the sound waves created in the black hole are way too low for the human ear to pick up, so NASA had to convert them to a higher frequency, so we could actually hear that terrifying sound. The story behind it is pretty cool. It was inspired by a blind astrophysicist, who engineered a program to convert sunlight into sound. She was able to hear an eclipse. And now, we can listen to a black hole.
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We promise not to play any more of that sound today, but if you wanna hear more and learn more, it's on the Apple News app, along with all the stories we talked about today. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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