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

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey 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. About 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 $2-plus trillion to cover the costs of, among other things, the war in Iran and the tax cuts Republicans passed last year. 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. Issue 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 the administration's plan to bring in money through new tariffs was derailed. When the Supreme Court ruled that many of Trump's surcharges were illegal, ordering billions in refunds. Beyond that, costs for things like the military, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid continue to rise, with lawmakers reluctant to touch such sensitive topics. According to the head of a think tank, the Bipartisan Policy Center, that means the biggest ticket items in the budget are basically on autopilot. And that, quote, Even in the rosiest scenarios, we're still in the middle of a war. While the U.S. is still the world's largest economy, experts say the mounting debt could hold long-term risks, like potentially eroding confidence in the dollar. 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 five-year-old girl Hind Rajab and some of her family members, which drew international outrage and was turned into a feature film. The film used 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. 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 U.N. employee who drove by after the others had already been shot. Both of these cases really stood huge internationally. There was international attention, outrage, and condemnation, and, you know, allegations of war crimes. My colleague Isabel Kirshner 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. 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, OK, 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 trial. There's a group, Yesh Din, that has done analysis of military investigations and found that only about 2% ever end in a conviction. So rights groups, both in Israel and abroad, have essentially called past investigations a facade 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, almost a year after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, Israel has continued to carry out what it says are targeted killings in Gaza. According to local officials there, more than 1,000 people have been killed since the truce, some of them young children. 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 representatives 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 increased 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-changer, 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 sequence the DNA of a patient's tumor and find what are known as neoantigens, which teach them. 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 the possibility of using the vaccine, 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 were more than 60 cancer vaccines using mRNA or similar technology in development, including for lung, kidney, bladder, and pancreatic cancers. 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's launching an experiment to try and address that, the largest experiment of its kind. Over the next two years, it's going to make minor tweaks to some flight paths over one part of the Atlantic. Using weather data and AI analysis, it's going to help planes avoid humid stretches, where they're more likely to produce long-lasting contrails. Experts acknowledge 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, according to an expert, 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 non-profit 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 Hegseth has remade the American military by dismissing or sidelining 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 Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday news. News Quiz.