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Why the Kansas abortion vote gives Democrats hope · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Wednesday, August 3rd. 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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  Abortion-rights activists are celebrating a major victory this morning. Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state legislature to ban abortion. This is a state Trump won big in 2020. But voters there supported abortion rights by a double-digit margin. Former Kansas Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius was on "MSNBC" as results came in.
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  Kathleen Sebelius: Kansans not only voted "no," they voted "hell no" to change the constitution.
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  Sebelius and others in the Democratic Party say the result shows that the U.S. Supreme Court decision could influence voters nationwide in November.
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  Kathleen Sebelius: People are saying, "Wait a minute, this is very real. This is about me, this is about my child, this is about my grandchild. I really am going to take back control over my own rights and own health." And that's what happened in Kansas tonight.
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  That's the biggest of several primary results from last night in multiple states. You can find full coverage on the Apple News app.
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  Let's turn now to other big news in politics. Congress has finally passed a veterans health care bill. It'll expand benefits for people with illnesses linked to toxic fumes from burn pits, which are trash fires that many service members were exposed to at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a long and tough road to getting this passed. Veterans campaigned for a long time. They had help from a celebrity advocate, Jon Stewart. I talked with Stewart about this earlier this year on "In Conversation." He mocked politicians who said they weren't sure the science was sound on the health dangers.
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  Jon Stewart: I challenge every representative, go back to your district, dig a ten-acre hole, put everything that that town discards, burn it with jet fuel 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And then when your constituents go, "I don't feel so well," you say to them, "Could be anything. Maybe you're just stressed."
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  The legislation was held up in the Senate last week when two dozen Republicans, who had previously supported the bill, blocked it from advancing. They cited legislative procedural reasons. Jon Stewart was on Capitol Hill and he was not having it.
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  Jon Stewart: America's heroes, who fought in our wars, outside sweating their asses off, with oxygen, battling all kinds of ailments, while these [BLEEP] sit in the air conditioning, walled off from any of it.
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  Lots of veterans advocates were outraged at the delay. The Republicans reversed course and the bill passed. Stewart was on the Hill again yesterday to mark the moment.
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  Jon Stewart: I'm not sure I've ever seen a situation where people who have already given so much had to fight so hard to get so little. And I hope we learned a lesson.
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  Big Oil is making record profits, with earnings reports showing BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and other big energy companies racking up tens of billions of dollars.
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  Evan Halper: They're making a windfall, and they're making a windfall for a number of reasons that really have to do with international markets and the way the oil market works.
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  That's Evan Halper, who covers energy for "The Washington Post."
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  Halper: Their profits are set to what the international market will pay for a barrel of oil, what the cost of refined gasoline is. And right now, demand is high, supply is low.
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  Some of the things driving that demand are the return of travel and other pandemic recovery factors. Plus, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has choked off supply. President Biden has been critical of the industry for making a lot of money while Americans are struggling with high gas prices. And Halper says a lot of people agree.
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  Halper: Voters believe it too if you look at polls. You know, "The Washington Post" did one. People place a lot of blame on the oil industry for the high prices they're paying.
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  Biden's options are limited. Some in his party want a windfall tax. That could be a one-time tax on Big Oil companies' profits, and the money could go to low-income Americans. But there's not much of a chance that'll make it through the divided Senate. So, what about the supply side? Oil companies say they're spending money to increase production and transition to cleaner sources of energy. But skeptics point out something else they're doing right now: boosting dividends and stock buybacks. Put simply, they're giving billions to their shareholders, so that money won't be used to do anything about our current energy situation. And in any case, as Halper points out, you can't drill a new oil well overnight.
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  Halper: These are 20, 30, sometimes 40-year investments. And the concern is that it locks us into those fossil fuels for that period of time. And so, trying to balance bailing us out of this energy crisis right now and bringing prices down without doing things that, over the long term, really undermine the energy transition. These are a lot of tough decisions that need to be made.
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  There's a lot of hype around Mexico City right now: the art scene, the great food. Since the start of 2022, 1.2 million foreigners flew in to the Mexican capital to check it out. And some of them are sticking around for a while.
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  Kate Linthicum: It's a city that's just been flooded with remote workers who are posting up in cafes and loudly taking Zoom calls and just kind of changing the fabric of the city a little bit.
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  That's Kate Linthicum, an "L.A. Times" correspondent in Mexico City. Now, there's two reasons why so many people are rushing there to live like digital nomads: the pandemic, which made it far easier for people to work from anywhere, and the cost of living. Linthicum points out, in a place like Los Angeles, $2,000 can get you a one-bedroom apartment, maybe. In Mexico City, that money can get you a penthouse. But for people who grew up there, they are not so thrilled.
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  Linthicum: There are locals who are concerned about the ramifications when it comes to cost of rent, for example, who feel a little isolated when they're sitting at a restaurant and they're the only person speaking Spanish.
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  The backlash has been fierce at times. At one point, there were posters plastered around town that said, "Remote workers are a plague and locals hate them." I'm paraphrasing here, and leaving out the F-bombs. Linthicum writes about longtime family-run restaurants being turned into Pilates studios, or cafes starting to serve things like avocado toast and oat milk lattes. In many ways, this is a classic love-hate gentrification story: newcomers bring in money and development, which is good. But then long-time residents can't afford to stay, which is bad. Linthicum told us covering this made her think about her own role in gentrification, as an American who moved to Mexico City six years ago.
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  Linthicum: Reporting this story was like looking in a mirror a bit, and it really kind of forced me to think about my own experiences and my own reasons for being here in Mexico, and also like check my privilege a bit, like really think about kind of all of the things that I get to benefit from being here. And that was healthy, if a little uncomfortable.
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  Anything can be a bookmark if you want it to be. Right? You've probably done this before without even thinking about it. To hold your page in a book, you'll shove in a note, a scrap of paper with a phone number on it, your last grocery list. But what happens if that was a library book? Your forgotten scrap of paper enters circulation for another reader to discover. One librarian in Oakland saves all of these left-behind items and posts them online. Librarian Sharon McKellar told "NPR" what's so special about this collection.
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  Sharon McKellar: It lets us be a little bit nosy in a very anonymous way. It's like reading people's secret diaries a little bit, but without knowing who they are.
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  Some of the things found between pages include birthday cards, old photographs, a concert ticket from 2002, a Yahoo Maps printout from who-knows-when, recipes, love notes, an old dental report.
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  One of my favorites is in a copy of "Matilda" by Roald Dahl. I must've read that book literally dozens of times as a kid. And clearly a kid enjoyed reading this copy, because it's filled with Post-It notes with little reactions to what's happening in the story, like "Wow, I can't believe the teacher did that!" [CHUCKLES] Which I find very endearing.
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  This librarian has done us all a service by scanning images of these found objects and cataloguing them. You can follow a link to the collection in the "NPR" story. That's in the Apple News app, along with all the stories we mentioned today. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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