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What parents need to know about school-lunch bills · Apple News Today

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  Mark Garrison, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, August 26th. 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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  There are new details about the FBI's search of Donald Trump's Florida home. The affidavit in the case is now public. This is the document the FBI submitted to a judge to get the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago. Agents recovered several boxes of classified government records. The search was part of a federal investigation into whether documents may have been illegally removed and potential obstruction of the investigation.
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  Affidavits are normally kept secret during investigations, but media outlets fought in court to make this one public. DOJ argued that a release could compromise the investigation. A judge said the government had to put it out, but allowed it to redact some sensitive details. You can find full coverage and analysis on the Apple News app.
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  Kids are heading back to school, and their parents are facing the biggest lunch bills in years. NPR reports on how the end of the pandemic universal free lunch program is affecting family budgets.
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  Congressional COVID aid gave all students, regardless of income, free school meals for the last two school years. Around 10 million kids who would've paid got to eat for free. Now, families have to apply for free or discounted meals. A family of four making under $36,000 qualifies for free meals. Discounted meals are available to families making up to a little bit over $51,000. But it's a lot of paperwork for parents and schools to keep track of. Advocates worry that families with limited English will have trouble navigating the system.
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  NPR reports on Mountain View Elementary in Boise, Idaho, where school officials checked lunch bags and trays on the first day to make sure that everyone had something on their plate. The district's food supervisor says students who have limited access to healthy food at home could suffer without free, universal school lunches. Alessandra Ferrara-Miller is the founder of a nonprofit working to eliminate lunch debt. She talked about the importance of free lunches with Georgia Public Broadcasting.
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  Alessandra Ferrara-Miller: People aren't aware that, you know, we have students living in their cars that don't know where their next meal is coming from, and this is the only meal of the day that they're looking forward to. So it really does affect children of every race, every area. There are children struggling with this.
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  Inflation for energy and rent is already straining families. Now that more parents are having to pay for school lunches, they're having trouble keeping up.
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  Alessandra Ferrara-Miller: I'm already having cafeteria managers and principals reach out to see if we are still able to help eliminate the school lunch debt, which is already accruing, elementary schools through high schools.
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  Schools have to pay more for food, and many are raising prices of meals. In Idaho, that's included hikes of ten cents here, thirty cents there. It may sound small, but it adds up over time. Especially when so many parents got a two-year break in having to pay. That's over now, and many families aren't sure how they'll get through.
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  California is dealing with severe drought, and some of America's biggest celebrities are going way over the limits on water use. The "L.A. Times" broke this story. It got ahold of documents from a community in the Los Angeles area showing who's been cited for using too much water. There are enough famous names to fill an award show red carpet. Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, Sylvester Stallone, Kevin Hart. And some of these homes are going over the limit by a lot. Take Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union. At their $18-million place, they busted the water budget by 1,400%. That's 90,000 excess gallons. The couple says there was a leak in their pool that they've fixed, and they've taken steps to save water. "NBC News" talked to a spokesperson for the Las Virgenes water district.
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  Mike McNutt: Our reservoirs are severely depleted. The land is incredibly dry. There is not a lot of water to go around. It doesn't matter if it's a celebrity. It doesn't matter if it's somebody who doesn't have the same means. Everybody's treated completely equal. We're serious about this. This is critical. We need everybody to be a part of that solution.
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  The water district could take serious steps against celebrities who are over the limit. It has the power to install flow restrictors on homes that break the rules. That could automatically reduce outside water use by about 70%. The drought means regular people are worried about having enough water to cook and clean, so some are getting fed up with celebrities that are breaking rules for their lush landscaping and swimming pools.
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  The Wall Street we tend to see in the movies is all about the heavy hitters, billionaires doing multi-billion-dollar deals involving glamorous businesses. But in real life, investors make a lot of money in some pretty humble areas. You can see that in a recent story about how private equity firms are buying up local car washes.
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  Miriam Gottfried: The reason private equity usually makes the headlines is for big deals, big buyouts, big failures, job losses, that kind of thing. But what's really happening for most private equity firms is that they're buying small companies.
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  That's Miriam Gottfried, who covers private equity for "The Wall Street Journal." She told us why car washes are drawing so much interest right now.
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  Gottfried: The evolution of the car wash business helps explain why all of a sudden private equity started to take notice. Car washes used to be pretty labor intensive back in the day. They involved a lot of people who had to both wash and dry the car, but also originally to pull it through the conveyor, 'cause these were pre-automation.
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  That rise of automation is key here. Private equity investors love to find ways to cut expenses to make businesses more profitable.
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  Gottfried: So now, a typical express car wash has only two employees on site because everything else is mechanized. And the other thing that was really the big change that allowed this business to become appealing to private equity is the subscription model.
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  Fewer employees make car washes cheaper to run, and subscriptions mean steadier revenue.
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  Gottfried: Private equity sees an opportunity in these businesses that have been run by ma and pa business owners for their entire existence. And so, maybe they're not that professional. Maybe there's a lot of room to be more efficient. Maybe they could run them in a more consolidated way if they roll them up.
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  This is how private equity is different. Other investors buy shares in companies. Private equity firms buy whole companies. The goal is selling them for a big profit. Sometimes that means lots of job and budget cuts. Sometimes that means smooshing a bunch of companies together, which is what's happening with car washes.
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  Gottfried explains, car washes are just one local business that's getting attention. She says private equity is also going after dental clinics, rehab centers, dry cleaners, and more. That corner business you pass by every day might be part of a giant Wall Street portfolio.
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  Gottfried: They're all out there scouring the landscape, looking for businesses to buy. And when they find an industry that really works well for private equity, they kinda go crazy and it catches on like wildfire.
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  It feels like nearly every week there's some story in the news that makes a big claim about a food or drink that seems a little too good to be true, like drinking coffee lowers your risk of dying. But how do you know what to trust and what's just junk science?
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  Michael Hobbes: Every week, there's gonna be some new study and it's gonna show something surprising. And the findings that are a little bit against what you thought you believed, those generate clicks. And the most important lesson is to try to zoom out from those studies and try to look at how they fit into the bigger picture.
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  That's Michael Hobbes. He hosts a podcast with Aubrey Gordon called "Maintenance Phase." Shumita spoke with them for the latest episode of our series called "Think Again," on "In Conversation."
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  Shumita Basu: I will say one of the joys of listening to the show is that you two are… How do I put this? You're like methodology enthusiasts, to put it mildly.
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  Michael Hobbes: [LAUGHS]
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  Basu: I find it so entertaining the way that you talk about and pick apart, you know, studies and stats, and maybe you can share with us some of your favorite tips for spotting red flags in things like this, in studies, in news articles, health science news.
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  Aubrey Gordon: You know, over the last few years, we've had some really interesting sort of political conversations about misinformation and disinformation and how that flows. And I think quite a bit of health and wellness information that we get is through one giant game of telephone. [LAUGHS] Right? So that, by the time you hear it from your friend, it has been through 18 different permutations and has sort of, you know, gotten escalated in all these wild ways. And it's, like, not particularly accurate anymore, if it ever was. I mean, I think we found some polling when we talked about celery juice, which was sort of a craze that was started by a guy who considers himself to be a medium, a psychic medium who's working with a spirit from the future to give him health information.
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  Basu: So in other words, a medical doctor.
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  Hobbes: [LAUGHS]
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  Gordon: Absolutely. Accredited, trustworthy, nothing but the best. But most people who drank celery juice regularly thought it was a recommendation from a doctor, right?
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  Basu: Yeah. Yeah.
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  Gordon: That folks were not really tracing that origin story. So, we sort of get these disembodied little factoids, and that all seems really worth picking apart.
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  Hobbes and Gordon offer us a bunch of other tips as well.
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  Aubrey Gordon: Like, snake oil actually worked.
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  As for Kombucha…
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  Aubrey Gordon: Not a lot of evidence that it hurts, but also not a lot of evidence that it helps.
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  Check out this weekend's episode by searching for "In Conversation" in the Apple News app or the Podcasts app. And if you've missed any of the "Think Again" series, go back and take a listen. We also have Malcolm Gladwell on how to open your mind, and Kate Mangino on how to achieve gender equality at home. Shumita is taking time off next week. Our colleague Gideon Resnick is filling in, and will be back with the news on Monday.
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