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Why protesters are taking to the streets in Iran and Russia · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Monday, September 26th. 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.
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  Russia and Iran are vastly different countries, thousands of miles apart, but the events unfolding in the streets in both places have a common thread: widespread protests against the regimes, demonstrations that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. In Russia, marchers chanted "no to war."
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  [START THE GUARDIAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  [RUSSIAN PROTESTERS CHANTING]
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  [END THE GUARDIAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  "The Wall Street Journal" has some on-the-ground reporting, as Russians are taking to the streets to protest the Kremlin's decision to mobilize more than 300,000 troops to fill gaps in Ukraine. Thousands of men have been drafted over the past few days. They'll spend a few weeks in training before being sent to war. Thousands more have fled the country. Putin recently signed a new law that carries up to a ten-year prison sentence for soldiers who refuse to fight.
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  Over the weekend, riot police cracked down on protesters. Some never even got the chance to unfold their banners and signs, thousands have been detained, and some protesters are being handed military-draft notices at police stations.
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  In Iran, the latest protests are the biggest in years, with demonstrators marching in multiple cities.
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  [START THE GUARDIAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  [IRANIAN PROTESTERS WHISTLING AND CHEERING]
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  [END THE GUARDIAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  Police have been using tear gas and firing live ammunition to disperse crowds. Dozens of protesters have been killed. This all started with the death of Mahsa Amini, when she was taken into police custody for a hijab citation earlier this month. But the issues run deeper. Many people are expressing long-standing anger at the conservative Islamic regime and its limits on women's rights, personal freedoms, and economic opportunity.
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  The New Yorker's Robin Wright has been covering Iran for decades. She writes about how the current regime is doubling down on the hardline policies of the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution. Iran's president gave a fiery speech at the UN last week, accusing the U.S. of "double standards" and criticizing Western countries for keeping up sanctions against Iran.
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  There have been past Iranian leaders who engaged in back-channel diplomacy with the U.S, but that time seems long gone. Wright points out how Iran has strengthened its relationships with China, and other controversial regimes. The drones that Russia's using to attack Ukrainian targets were sold to it by Iran.
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  Several women who worked for Tesla are now suing the electric car company for what they describe as "rampant workplace sexual harassment." Stephen Roderick reported on their stories for "Rolling Stone."
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  Stephen Roderick: The ones I talked to universally talked about having to put up with foul, sexual innuendo language. Many of them alleged that they were touched inappropriately and the male worker would say "Oh sorry, I didn't mean to touch you". Just a right-out-of-central-casting situation of sexual harassment.
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  Alissa Blickman worked at Tesla's Fremont California factory and she says the harassment started on day one.
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  Roderick: On her first day of work, she saw a group of men taking pictures of a woman worker's backside, and she went up to see the woman and see if she was okay and the woman basically said "This stuff happens here all the time and, you know, you just got to sort of roll with it."
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  Blickman says she did try to roll with it, to just focus on her job, but things got worse. She heard some men openly ranking women's bodies in graphic terms. She also alleges a male worker touched her without her consent and made death threats against her to other co-workers. A woman who recently had a baby said her colleagues refer to her as a cow for pumping during her 12-hour shifts, and another woman described stacking boxes around her workstation so her coworkers couldn't gawk at her body.
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  In total, seven former Tesla workers have filed sexual harassment lawsuits in the past ten months. Most of them were let go. Tesla has denied their allegations in court filings.
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  Roderick told us this kind of sexual harassment is baked into the culture at Tesla. He describes Elon Musk as having a "frat boy as businessman" persona.
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  Roderick: Corporate culture starts at the top, and if your boss, the CEO of the company, is making internet memes about sexual positions or a mythical university that has a T-I-T-S as its acronym, it's gonna trickle down to the workers. And the workers, some of them, felt that "Well, if our boss is doing all these jokes, we can do the same thing here on the factory floor or at the service centers." And that really had had a terrible impact on the women I talked to.
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  Roderick told us there's no evidence that Musk knew about harassment allegations at Tesla's Fremont, California, factory before the women filed lawsuits.
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  For decades, politicians at almost every level have pitched gun buyback programs as a solution to violence in their communities. Gun owners voluntarily hand over their firearms to police in exchange for money or gift cards. The idea is simple: fewer guns on the street will lead to less violence. But Talib Visram at Fast Company says that's not what's happening.
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  Talib Visram: Data has consistently shown that really it does kind of next to nothing to reduce violence.
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  The National Bureau of Economic Research recently studied the long-term effects of buyback programs in cities across the country, from Springfield, Oregon, to Akron, Ohio. And the rates of gun deaths, including suicides, did not go down.
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  Now there are a few reasons why. For one, it's not clear that people with violent intent are the ones handing over their weapons. More often it's people who just want to get rid of a gun, maybe an old one that didn't even pose much of a threat.
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  Visram: One of the experts said it's kind of like a special garbage collection day where you're giving in really ancient guns that they don't even make ammo for anymore. And then sometimes people use the cash to go and buy new guns.
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  The study suggests that paying more for returning guns might make the program more effective. Also prioritizing high crime neighborhoods. But critics say governments are wasting money on buybacks.
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  Visram: Local resources are limited, and local politicians know that more than anyone. When money is so tight, the experts are saying, why not use that money in ways that have been proven to work? So things like safe storage education, which seems to be a better way to stop accidental deaths in the home than buybacks.
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  The mayor of Richmond, Virginia told Visram that he recognizes gun buyback programs won't single-handedly fix the problem, but the city doesn't have the power to increase background checks or ban military style weapons. He says it's "at least one way to take action."
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  NASA is launching a mission today that could be a dress rehearsal for saving humanity someday. In a first-of-its-kind mission, NASA is planning to intentionally smash a spacecraft into an asteroid. It's a test to see if we can alter the asteroid's course, which might be needed to protect Earth from a catastrophic strike someday.
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  This is a scary scenario that Hollywood loves to play with, right? "Armageddon," "Don't Look Up," "Deep Impact." The actual version is somehow less dramatic. "NBC News" explains how, in a real life situation, it might only take the tiniest nudge to change an asteroid's path enough to make it miss Earth.
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  The space agency says there's no significant chance of a big asteroid smashing into Earth any time in the next 100 years. But it's better to start testing now, just in case we need some kind of plan B to save the world.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our news plus partners. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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