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Why the new spending bill is such a big deal · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Monday, August 8th. 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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  A massive bill with changes to climate spending, prescription-drug policy, and taxes is finally through the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer referenced the year-and-a-half of debate and fifteen straight hours of weekend votes.
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  Chuck Schumer: It's been a long, tough, and winding road. At last, we've arrived, and we are elated.
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  "Vox" points out that this is the single most important step the U.S. government has ever taken on climate, and it's one of the single biggest climate investments in world history. President Biden has a goal of getting America to cut its carbon emissions to half of their peak by 2030. If signed into law as anticipated, this bill won't get the U.S. all the way there, but the clean-energy investments and tax breaks for electric cars, and other measures, are expected to move the US away from its reliance on fossil fuels and closer to its emissions goal.
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  There's plenty in this bill that isn't about climate. In fact, it's officially called the Inflation Reduction Act, although many economists are skeptical it'll have an immediate impact on prices. Many of the moves in the bill don't take effect anytime soon.
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  Beyond climate, one of the biggest changes would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Democrats and seniors-advocates have wanted this for decades. Medicare is a giant buyer of drugs, so it could drive a hard bargain, but the drug industry lobbied hard and spent lots of money trying to keep Medicare from being able to use its buying power.
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  Now, Big Pharma lost this lobbying fight, but it's hardly giving up the war. "Stat" looks into how this could play out. It'll be three years before the drug negotiation part of this law takes effect, and initially it'll only apply to a handful of drugs. That gives Pharma lobbyists some time to see how they could influence the regulatory process in their favor.
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  On the other hand, advocates think they could build on what they see as a historic win. Negotiating drug prices could save patients and taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and some are hoping this'll crack open the door to future reforms that'll continue to make drugs more affordable in America.
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  There's now a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad. The truce comes after days of Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of Palestinians, including children, and waves of Islamic Jihad rockets were fired deep into Israeli territory. It's the most intense fighting there this year.
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  Norwegian Refugee Council aid worker Yousef Hammash spoke to Britain's Channel 4 during some of the worst of the attacks. He says a 72-year-old woman was killed in a bombing near his home.
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  Yousef Hammash: I don't think we can consider any place safe in Gaza. I don't think it's right to consider a place safe. Just staying home, this is the most we can do. We don't have bunkers, shelters, to hide.
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  Hospitals there are now struggling with a lack of medicine, power outages, and water shortages.
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  Israel launched a surprise attack on Friday. It says it targeted high-level Islamic Jihad members. The Gaza Health Ministry says many children were among the dead. Islamic Jihad launched more than 1,000 rockets at Israel. The Israeli military says it intercepted many of them and others landed in unpopulated areas. There were a few dozen injuries inside Israel, most not serious.
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  Islamic Jihad is not as powerful, well-known, or well-armed as Hamas, which controls Gaza. Like Hamas, Islamic Jihad gets money and weapons from Iran. Unlike Hamas, Islamic Jihad does not participate in elections. Hamas did not join this recent battle against Israel, which could've expanded it into a wider conflict.
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  This is the first major bout of violence since last year's conflict, which killed 13 people in Israel and at least 250 in Gaza. At times, Israel eased some restrictions on Gaza and issued work permits for thousands of people living there. But tensions rose last week when Israeli forces arrested an Islamic Jihad commander in the West Bank.
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  President Biden says he supports the cease-fire and Israel's right to defend itself. He also wants civilian casualties in Gaza investigated.
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  There's this article in "The New Yorker" about student debt that tells a very different story than the one we're used to hearing. It involves someone who borrowed a modest amount to pay for school, and over the years, it ballooned into a six-figure debt. But there's a big twist.
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  Eleni Schirmer: Today, she is 91 years old, and she owes $330,000 in federal student loan debt.
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  Most of the time, these stories are about people in their 20s and 30s, not their 90s. This woman's name is Betty Ann, and the person who's telling her story is Eleni Schirmer, who studies inequality at UCLA. Schirmer told us Americans aged 62 and older are actually the fastest growing demographic of student debtors. She says declining wages and botched loan-relief programs are pushing more elderly Americans deeper into debt.
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  Schirmer: Older debtors are our future. It's what we are all going to become without really courageous and bold moves from our nation's leaders.
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  Schirmer says current proposals aren't bold enough to help many of these seniors. When she asked Betty Ann about President Biden's proposal to cancel $10,000 of student debt, she laughed. That's practically nothing when your debt's that big. When people like Betty Ann first borrowed the money, they thought their degrees would lead them to better jobs that would help pay off the debt, but it just didn't turn out that way.
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  Schirmer: What we're seeing is that the realities of how the labor market works, the terms of lending, the interest, the fees, the relief options, the actual reality of student loans tend to make that sort of myth, that mirage of the future richer self, really a fantasy more than a reality.
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  Schirmer says many of the older people she's gotten to know for this story were squeamish about sharing their names and going public. They said they feel ashamed about their loan balances.
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  Schirmer: That was maybe the hardest thing for me to deal with this piece was the humiliation and the shame that people feel for carrying debt. And for them to be old and still have student debt is, like-- they've really internalized this as if they've done something wrong.
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  Betty Ann says she wonders if she would have retired earlier without her debt, or maybe she wouldn't have had to sell her home. As Schirmer puts it, a small loan mutated into something bigger, something that cast a shadow over her whole life.
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  Some of the most controversial examples of looted art will finally return home. A museum in Britain plans to return dozens of artworks that British invaders stole from Nigeria more than a century ago.
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  They include some of the Benin bronzes, among the most notorious examples of plundered art in history, like the Elgin Marbles stripped from the Parthenon in Greece. NPR explains that these plaques were used to decorate the king's palace in the ancient Kingdom of Benin.
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  Nigeria's museum commission requested these artifacts be returned in January. The Horniman Museum just recently agreed. In recent years, some museums have made moves to return Benin bronzes to Nigeria, but the most significant collections of the bronzes are still in Europe and the U.S.
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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+ partners. I'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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