The Headlines - $40,047,425,768,420 in U.S. Debt, and an Experimental Vaccine for Skin Cancer

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Plus, could tweaking flight paths reduce global warming?  Here’s what we’re covering: U.S. Debt Hits $40 Trillion as America’s Borrowing Binge Continues, by Alan Rappeport Israel Opens Criminal Inquiries Into Killings of Hind Rajab, 5, and of Medics, by Isabel Kershner A New mRNA Vaccine Could Prevent Skin Cancer From Returning, by Carolyn Y. Johnson U.K. to Test Whether Tweaks to Trans-Atlantic Flight Paths Affect Global Warming, by Leo Sands Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, August 20th. Here's what we're covering. The U.S. national debt has now hit a record high, passing $40 trillion for the first time ever yesterday. More than half of that is just interest payments to investors who have purchased American debt,

pushing the country into a deep financial hole, which is only expected to get deeper. This year alone, the U.S. is on track to borrow another two-plus trillion dollars. This has been the fiscally most irresponsible administration that we have seen. I mean, we have increased the national debt, almost doubled it since George Bush took office. For years, presidents of both parties have vowed to get the debt under control. The Treasury Department is planning to pay down the national debt issued to the public this quarter.

But administration after administration has failed to fundamentally turn things around. We're going to reduce the hell out of the debt and reduce your taxes further. For his part, President Trump promised to completely eliminate the national debt when he first ran for office. But since then, the debt has doubled. Despite him rolling out initiatives, he said, would change that. Doge delivered just a fraction of the cuts it promised. And parts of the administration's sweeping tariff plans that it said were supposed to help bounce the national budget were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court earlier this year. Beyond that, the tax cuts that Trump has touted will cost the federal government and estimated

$100 billion in lost revenue this year. And other expenses, including the military, social security, Medicare, and Medicaid continue to rise with no end in sight. The president of a think tank, the bipartisan policy center, told the times, quote, the biggest ticket items in the federal budget are all running on autopilot. While the U.S. is still the world's largest, economy, experts say the mounting debt could pose long-term risks, potentially eroding confidence in the dollar, and raising questions about the nation's creditworthiness. In Israel, the military has announced that it will open criminal investigations into two high-profile cases of its troops killing Palestinians during the height of the war in Gaza.

One of the cases the military police is taking up involves the deaths of the fire. five-year-old girl Hind Rajab and some of her family members, which drew international outrage and was turned into a feature film using the real tape of Hind begging rescuers over the phone to come and get her, after Israeli troops fired on her family's car in Gaza City. Despite a frantic effort to reach her, Hind was found dead nearly two weeks after the call, along with two paramedics who tried to get to her. her. The second case, military police are now set to investigate, involved Israeli forces fatally shooting 14 Palestinian medics and rescue workers in southern Gaza, as well as a UN employee

who drove by after the others had already been shot. Both of these cases really stood huge international attention, outrage, and condemnation and, you know, allegations of war crimes. My colleague Isabel Kirchner is based in Israel. So the Israeli military, they have a body, a fact-finding mechanism, which is made up of professionals who are outside the regular chain of command. They've been investigating for years. I mean, the Hind Rajab killings were in January 2024. So we're now two and a half years on.

And this fact-finding mechanism has basically just come to the point now in both these cases, where it's saying, okay, we see enough. grounds here for a criminal investigation. So in a way, this is just the beginning. And what we've seen in the past is that very, very few of these cases actually ever make it to criminal prosecution and even less to an actual conviction. There's a group Yestin that has done analysis of military investigations and found that only about 2% ever ending a conviction. So rights groups, both in Israel and abroad, have essentially called past investigations a façade and a whitewash, just intended to try and stave off international criticism without actually producing much in the way of results.

Isabel says the military also announced yesterday that it did not find grounds for criminal investigations into other high-profile cases, including the killing of seven employees of the Relief Group, World Central Kitchen. Meanwhile, Israel has continued to carry out what it says are targeted killings in Gaza almost a year after a ceasefire with Hamas took effect. According to local officials there, more than a thousand people have been killed since the truce, some of them, young children. That includes an attack this week that Israel said targeted a, quote, gathering of terrorists in a police station.

The Gaza official said one of the victims was a 13. year old who live nearby. In the last few days, President Trump sent his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to try and make progress on a plan to end the fighting and rebuild Gaza. Kushner met with both a representative of Hamas and the Israeli prime minister, but things remain at a standstill, in part due to disagreements over how and when Hamas needs to disarm. In an interview with Fox News this week, Kushner said that until demilitarization occurs, quote, we will not allow Gaza to be rebuilt. We don't know if this is going to be seven years, nine years, but there's a chance that you have an

increase ability to be disease-free and for a potentially extended period of time. Yesterday, the pharmaceutical companies Merck and Moderna announced a significant step towards a potentially game-changing cancer treatment, cancer vaccines. The company said that in a trial, their experimental vaccine allowed people with skin cancer, specifically high-risk melanoma, to live longer without their cancer coming back. The breakthrough relies on mRNA, the same technology that allowed for the rapid development of COVID vaccines. The way it works is that scientists sequenced the DNA of a patient's tumor and find what are known as neo-antogens, which teach the immune system to attack the cancer.

Then, over the course of about six weeks, they use fast, flexible MRNA technology to create custom vaccines for each patient that are designed to help stop the cancer from recurring. One oncologist who was not involved in the trial said that this could, quote, help usher in a whole new wave of treatments, though experts caution that melanoma is traditionally more responsive to treatment than other cancers. While researchers have been interested in cancer vaccines for decades, those efforts have really picked up steam in recent years, in part thanks to investments in pharmaceutical production during the pandemic. As of last year, there are more than 60 cancer vaccines using mRNA or similar technology in development, including for lung, kidney, bladder, and pancreatic cancer. And finally, up in the sky when a plane goes overhead and leaves those thin, wispy clouds

in a line, those are contrails, short for condensation trails. They form when the hot exhaust from a jet engine mixes with moisture and particles in the air. Some linger for just a few minutes, but some can last for hours, essentially trapping heat in the atmosphere, which experts say is contributing to climate change. According to one study, contrails are actually responsible for more than a third of the global warming caused by aviation. Now, the British government is launching an experiment to try and address that. Over the next two years, it's going to make minor tweaks to some flight paths over one part of the Atlantic. In the largest experiment of its kind, it's going to use weather data and AI analysis to help planes avoid humid stretches where they're more likely to produce contrails.

Experts acknowledged there could be a trade-off, flying at lower altitudes, which some of the planes might be told to do, can require more fuel. But previous studies have shown that the benefits of reducing contrails outweigh the impact of burning more fuel when it comes to the environment. Overall, the head of a nonprofit that studies contrails said he was optimistic, saying that even with small tweaks to flight patterns, quote, we should be able to take a meaningful chunk out of aviation's climate impact. Those are the headlines.

Today on the Daily, how Secretary of Defense Pete Head, Meg Seth has remade the American military by dismissing or sideline top-ranking officials who he sees as disloyal to him. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a Times subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish, no credit card information required, when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday News Quiz.