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The US National Dead has now hit a record high, passing $40 trillion for the first time
ever yesterday. But then 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 US is on track to borrow another two plus trillion dollars.”
This has been the fiscal, the most irresponsible administration that we have seen. I mean, we have increased the national debt almost doubled 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 for the already guy. 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 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 credit worthiness. 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, HIN 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 his really 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 is really 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 shocked. Both of these cases really stood huge international attention, outrage, and condemnation, and allegations of war crimes. My colleague Isabel Kirsner 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 in our two and a half years on, and this fact-finding mechanism is 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, yes, Dean, that has done analysis of military investigations...
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. Isabelle 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 troops, 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 lived 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 de-militarization occurs," quote, "we will not allow Gaza to be rebuilt." No one knows this is going to be seven years, nine years, but there's a chance that you have an increase ability to beat disease-free, and for a potentially extended period of time. Yesterday the pharmaceutical company's 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 Neal Antigence, 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 occurring.
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.
The 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-forced 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 human stretches, where they're more likely to produce contrails. In other words, 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's Pete Heggseth has remade the American military
“by dismissing or sidelines in 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 time 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.
