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How to access federal student-loan forgiveness · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Tuesday October 18th. 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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  Applications for student loan debt relief are now officially open. The Department of Education formally launched their website on Monday. President Biden stressed how easy the process is before the site went live.
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  President Joe Biden: You'll be able to fill out your name, social security number, date of birth, and contact information. No forms to upload, no special login to remember. It's available in English and in Spanish on desktop and mobile.
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  The website had a soft launch over the weekend, which let more than eight million people submit their applications already. As we've mentioned before on the show, borrowers who made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 will be eligible for up to $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness. That number doubles if they received a Pell Grant.
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  And the DOE has said that for most borrowers, the application form won't even be necessary. If you've already reported your income to the Department of Education - like through an income-based repayment plan - you should get the relief offer automatically.
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  The "L.A. Times" has a clear explainer of what to know about the application. It asks for basic information, like the president said. You don't need to refer to any other documents. You don't need to login to TurboTax to get old W-2's or anything like that. And Biden has warned, watch out for scam calls about this. No one from the government is making phone calls to sign you up for debt relief, so don't give out your information out by phone.
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  Applications for this are due by the end of this year. And once they're approved, the "Times" says the money should arrive before federal student loan payments, which were paused during the pandemic, are scheduled to resume again in January. You can find the form at studentaid.gov.
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  A new NBA season tips off tonight. The league is returning from a busy off-season with several big storylines. We asked Apple News Sports editor Shaker Samman to sum it all up for us, and the word he landed on was "chaos."
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  Shaker Samman: The last month has been kind of scatter shot in a way that most kind of ramp-ups to NBA seasons aren't. You had Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving demanding a trade out of Brooklyn. Both are still there. You had maybe Russell Westbrook will get traded from the Lakers. He's still there. Draymond Green, in the last few weeks, got in a fight at Warriors Practice with Jordan Pool. Both are still there. Ime Udoka, the head coach of the Boston Celtics, last year's runner up to the Warriors, is suspended the entire season for sexual misconduct allegations that are being investigated by the team and by the NBA. There's a lot of chaos and a lot going on, and we haven't even played a minute of basketball yet.
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  One of the players that's getting the most attention is not even in the NBA. Victor Wembanyama. He's French. He's a teenager. He's over 7 feet tall, and he's been described charitably as an "alien" for his abilities. Shaker says teams in the league are practically throwing elbows to draft this kid.
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  Samman: If you told me he weighed more than two hundred pounds, I would tell you that you were lying. He looks like skin and bone, but he moves in the most miraculous way. He is the most talented prospect to come into the NBA maybe since LeBron James.
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  We asked Shaker, who's got what it takes to make it to the finals?
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  Samman: Los Angeles Clippers. They are more known for being historical punching bag and a laughingstock in the NBA than they are for actually winning games. And yet, they could have the best top end talent in the NBA. And for that reason, I'm picking the Los Angeles Clippers to win their first NBA title this year over the Milwaukee Bucks.
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  ESPN's got a solid preview of the season. We'll link to that in our show notes. Tonight, the Philadelphia 76ers take on the Boston Celtics. And the Los Angeles Lakers square off against the reigning champions, the Golden State Warriors.
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  At the end of the month, Brazilians will vote in a runoff election to determine their next president. Their choices are current President Jair Bolsonaro from the right and former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from the left. Jessica Brice from "Bloomberg" spoke to us from Sao Paulo. She told us that this face-off comes with high stakes for just about every living thing on Earth.
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  Jessica Brice: So, the key issue for the international community of this election is Amazon policy.
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  More than 40 percent of Brazil is covered in rainforest. If people continue to cut and burn trees at the rate they currently do, it'll have a big impact on global warming. But Brice told us, inside the country, there's other reasons why people are closely following this election.
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  Brice: We have two bigger than life sort of personalities who have really troubled histories and reputations, and they have a name recognition that's almost on par with Donald Trump and Hugo Chavez. So, people are really paying attention this time around.
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  Lula is campaigning on nostalgia. When he was last president, before he was jailed for his role in a corruption scandal, he spent federal funds on housing, education, and social welfare programs that lifted many Brazilians out of poverty.
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  Brice: For the poor Brazilian, issues like inflation are serious, issues like a stagnant job market, stagnant economy. So, they're typically supporting Lula because they remember sort of a golden era from when Lula was president.
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  Brice told us Lula's also saying that he'd promote environmental protection if he's elected; not so much for popular support in the country, but for the international community that recognizes the importance of the Amazon. Now, Bolsonaro, on the other hand, Brice says he doesn't have a great reputation on the environment. His administration has been friendly to ranchers and farmers who want to clear trees to raise cattle and crops. Under his administration, deforestation rates hit a 15 year high. And Bolsonaro's made it clear to the rest of the world, he doesn't see the need for change.
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  Brice: His rhetoric has been very aggressive on the international stage. He very much says to the rest of the world, "You tore down your forest, now it's Brazil's turn. We're a poor nation. This is how we develop, and you all are the ones who are buying all the products that we're selling from the Amazon."
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  The two candidates are now in a heated campaign to win over swing voters in the country. Recent polls have Lula ahead of Bolsonaro, but Bolsonaro outperformed expectations in the first round of voting earlier this month. The run-off vote is set for October 30th.
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  Basu: The Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe V. Wade this past summer is being felt by patients and health care providers across the country. And as the midterm elections draw closer, it's affecting our politics as well. That's the focus of our next episode in our special election series from "Apple News Today." My colleague Gideon Resnick is back with me to talk about it. So, Gideon, how did the Dobbs decision change the political calculus this year?
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  Gideon Resnick: I think it really started to re-frame what this election is about for a lot of voters. If you asked any pollster a few months ago which party they thought had an upper hand, they probably would have said Republicans, right. But the Dobbs decision is certainly challenging that. We've already seen some evidence of it in actual results from special elections that took place earlier this year, as well as a vote in Kansas on a constitutional amendment that would have taken away the right to an abortion in the state's constitution. People may remember this, but in Kansas, which is a pretty red state, voters there came out pretty overwhelmingly against that amendment in favor of protecting abortion rights.
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  Basu: So, you talked to Sarah McCammon, who covers abortion access for "NPR." What did she tell you?
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  Resnick: Yeah, we talked a lot about how some of these restrictive state laws are changing people's lives in really fundamental and critical ways.
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  Sarah McCammon: One of the gravest concerns for many patients and providers is that it is complicating the ability of doctors to make medical decisions.
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  Resnick: McCammon talked about one example in Texas where a woman was miscarrying at 19-weeks and the standard of care for doctors would have been to offer a termination. But there were concerns about doing so given the fact that Texas law at the time would have dictated that the doctor face serious financial repercussions should they have done so. We also talked about the origin of opposition generally to abortion rights in the U.S.
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  Basu: And I know that McCammon also told you about a conservative friend of hers, who's in Kansas, right? Who's maybe rethinking her own politics because of abortion bans. So, tell us about that.
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  Resnick: Yeah, so when the Kansas vote was happening earlier this summer, McCammon said that her conservative friend texted her with this message:
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  McCammon: She said, "Look at little Kansas pulling through last night on the vote. I felt like I was being super rebellious with my vote. And ironically, in the line I stood in, I was surrounded by men on either side. I just wanted to scream, 'You don't know what it's like to give up your body for years. You have no idea.' I cried in my car. It's just so complicated."
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  Resnick: So, that part of our conversation really jumped out to me but there was a lot more that McCammon and I got into.
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  Basu: Well, Gideon thank you so much.
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  Resnick: Yeah, thank you so much for chatting.
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  And if you want to hear more about how abortion could impact the vote this November, where it's on the ballot, and how it's changing the approaches from both political parties in these final weeks, you can check out the latest special episode from "Apple News Today." We'll queue it up to play right after this episode.
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  You can find all the stories we talked about today and more in the Apple News app. I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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