--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, October 18th. I'm Shamita 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.
--:-- [Soft music fades out]
--:-- Shamita Basu: Applications for student loan debt relief are now officially open. The Department of Education formally launched their website on Monday. President Biden stressed how easy the process is before the site went live.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You'll be able to fill out your name, social security number, date of birth, and contact information. No forms to upload, no special login to remember. It's available in English and in Spanish, on desktop and mobile.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The website had a soft launch over the weekend, which let more than 8 million people submit their applications already. As we've mentioned before on the show, borrowers who made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 will be eligible for up to $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That number doubles if they received a Pell Grant. And the DOE has said that for most borrowers, the application form won't even be necessary. If you've already reported your income to the Department of Education, like through an income-based repayment plan, you should get the relief offer automatically.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The LA Times has a clear explainer of what to know about the application. It asks for basic information, like the president said. You don't need to refer to any other documents. You don't need to log into TurboTax to get old W-2s or anything like that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Biden has warned, watch out for scam calls about this. No one from the government is making phone calls to sign you up for debt relief. So don't give out your information by phone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Applications for this are due by the end of this year. And once they're approved, the Times says the money should arrive before federal student loan payments, which were paused during the pandemic, are scheduled to resume again in January.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find the form at studentaid.gov. A new NBA season tips off tonight. The league is returning from a busy offseason with several big storylines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We asked Apple News Sports editor Shaker Saman to sum it all up for us. And the word that he landed on was chaos. The last month has been kind of scattershot in a way that most kind of ramp ups to NBA seasons don't.
--:-- Shaker Saman: You had Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving demanding a trade out of Brooklyn Both are still there You had maybe Russell Westbrook will get traded from the Lakers He's still there. Draymond Green, in the last few weeks, got in a fight at Warriors practice with Jordan Poole. Both are still there.
--:-- Shaker Saman: Ime Udoka, the head coach of the Boston Celtics, takes last year's runner-up to the Warriors. They suspended the entire season for sexual misconduct allegations that are being investigated by the team and by the NBA.
--:-- Shaker Saman: There's a lot of chaos and a lot going on, and we haven't even played a minute of basketball yet. One of the players that's getting the most attention is not even in the NBA, Victor Wembinyama. He's French, he's a teenager, he's over seven feet tall, and he's been described charitably as an alien for his abilities.
--:-- Shaker Saman: Shocker says teams in the league are practically throwing elbows to draft this kid. If you told me he weighed more than 200 pounds, I would tell you that you were lying. He looks like skin and bone, but he moves in the most miraculous way.
--:-- Shaker Saman: He is the most talented prospect to come into the NBA, maybe since LeBron James. We asked Shocker, who's got what it takes to make it to the finals? Los Angeles Clippers. They are more known for being historical punching bag and a laughingstock in the NBA than they are for actually winning games.
--:-- Shaker Saman: And yet, they could have the best top-end talent in the NBA. And for that reason, I'm picking the Los Angeles Clippers to win their first NBA title this year over the Milwaukee Bucks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ESPN's got a solid preview of the season. We'll link to that in our show notes. Tonight, the Philadelphia 76ers take on the Boston Celtics. And the Los Angeles Lakers square off against the reigning champions, the Golden State Warriors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the end of the month, Brazilians will vote in a runoff election to determine their next president. Their choices are current president Jair Bolsonaro from the right and former president Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva from the left.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jessica Bryce from Bloomberg spoke to us from Sao Paulo. She told us that this faceoff comes with high stakes for just about every living thing on Earth.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: So the key issue for the international community of this election is Amazon policy. More than 40 percent of Brazil is covered in rainforest. If people continue to cut and burn trees at the rate they currently do, it'll have a big impact on global warming.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: But Bryce told us inside the country there other reasons why people are closely following this election We have two bigger sort of personalities who have really troubled histories and reputations and they have a name recognition that almost on par with Donald Trump and Hugo Chavez So people are really paying attention this time around.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: Lula is campaigning on nostalgia. When he was last president, before he was jailed for his role in a corruption scandal, he spent federal funds on housing, education and social welfare programs that lifted many Brazilians out of poverty.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: For the poor Brazilian, issues like inflation are serious. Issues like a stagnant job market, stagnant economy. So they're typically supporting Lula because they remember sort of a golden era from when Lula was president.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: Bryce told us Lula is also saying that he'd promote environmental protection if he's elected. Not so much for popular support in the country, but for the international community that recognizes the importance of the Amazon.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: Now, Bolsonaro, on the other hand, Bryce says he doesn't have a great reputation on the environment. His administration has been friendly to ranchers and farmers who want to clear trees to raise cattle and crops.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: Under his administration, deforestation rates hit a 15-year high. And Bolsonaro's made it clear to the rest of the world he doesn't see the need for change. His rhetoric has been very aggressive on the international stage.
--:-- Jessica Bryce: He very much says to the rest of the world, you tore down your forests. Now it's Brazil's turn. We're a poor nation. This is how we develop. and you all are the ones who are buying all the products that we're selling from the Amazon.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this past summer is being felt by patients and health care providers across the country. And as the midterm elections draw closer, it's affecting our politics as well.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's the focus of our next episode in our special election series from Apple News Today. My colleague Gideon Resnick is back with me to talk about it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So, Gideon, how did the Dobbs decision change the political calculus this year?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: I think it really started to reframe what this election is about for a lot of voters If you asked any pollster a few months ago which party they thought had an upper hand they probably would have said Republicans right But the Dobbs decision is certainly challenging that
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We already seen some evidence of it in actual results from special elections that took place earlier this year, as well as a vote in Kansas on a constitutional amendment that would have taken away the right to an abortion in the state's constitution.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: People may remember this, but in Kansas, which is a pretty red state, voters there came out pretty overwhelmingly against that amendment in favor of protecting abortion rights.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So you talked to Sarah McGammon, who covers abortion access for NPR. What did she tell you?
--:-- Sarah McGammon: Yeah, we talked a lot about how some of these restrictive state laws are changing people's lives in really fundamental and critical ways. One of the gravest concerns for many patients and providers is that it is complicating the ability of doctors to make medical decisions.
--:-- Sarah McGammon: McCammon talked about one example in Texas where a woman was miscarrying at 19 weeks and the standard of care for doctors would have been to offer a termination. But there were concerns about doing so given the fact that Texas law at the time would have dictated that the doctor faced serious financial repercussions should they have done so.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We also talked about the origin of opposition generally to abortion rights in the U.S. And I know that McCammon also told you about a conservative friend of hers who's in Kansas, right, who's maybe rethinking her own politics because of abortion bans.
--:-- Sarah McGammon: So when the Kansas vote was happening earlier this summer, McCammon said that her conservative friend texted her with this message. She said, look at little Kansas polling through last night on the vote. I felt like I was being super rebellious with my vote.
--:-- Sarah McGammon: And ironically, in the line I stood in, I was surrounded by men on either side. I just wanted to scream, you don't know what it's like to give up your body for years. You have no idea. I cried in my car.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It's just so complicated. So that part of our conversation really jumped out to me. But there was a lot more that McCammon and I got into.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, Gideon, thank you so much.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Yeah, thank you so much for chatting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you want to hear more about how abortion could impact the vote this November, where it's on the ballot, and how it's changing the approaches from both political parties in these final weeks, you can check out the latest special episode from Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll queue it up to play right after this episode. You can find all the other stories we talked about today and more in the Apple News app. I'll be back with the news tomorrow. Thank you.
