--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Hey there, it's Shamita. I've got a quick request for you. If Apple News today is an essential part of your morning routine, follow the show in Apple Podcasts. And if you have another 30 seconds, leave us a rating and a review too. It helps other people find our show and it helps us know what you like about it. Thanks.
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--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, September 3rd. Welcome back after a long weekend. I'm Shamita Abbasu, this is Apple News Today. On today's show, Netanyahu doesn't back down despite mass protests in Israel, why it's so hard to find a therapist who takes insurance, and why one of the largest democracies in the world banned X. But first, to the presidential election.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: The first absentee ballots are being mailed out to voters in North Carolina this week. Next week, Vice President Harris and former President Trump will have their first debate. And in two weeks, early voting starts in several states. Both campaigns took a break over the weekend. Yesterday, Harris made her first campaign appearance with President Biden, addressing steelworkers in Pittsburgh. And she spoke to a gym packed with union members in Detroit.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Everywhere I go, I tell people, look, you may not be a union member, you better thank a union member for the five-day work week. You better thank a union member for sick leave. You better thank a union member for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time. Unions are a key voting bloc in battleground states that both campaigns are heavily courting.
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--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: 20% of voters in battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are union voters. That's Washington Post labor reporter Lauren Cowrie Gurley. She points out union members are not a monolith. A teacher's union has different priorities than a firefighter's union or an actor's union and so on. And members don't always align with their leaders either.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: But she says they typically look for policies that support the working class. So making child care and health care more accessible and affordable, investing in public schools, creating limits on corporate price gouging, restoring reproductive rights, opposing trade deals that send jobs overseas, things like that.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: Gurley told us Biden has shown a lot of support for unions during his time in office. He became the first sitting president last year to walk a picket line. And so this year, he received some of the earliest endorsements ever in any election cycle from unions, and a lot of those just immediately transferred over to Harris.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: But this has not been a coronation, she says. Harris has a strong record from her time as a senator in California of supporting service and care unions And her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a former member of a teacher union The AFL which is the biggest federation of labor unions in the United States and is backing their ticket gave Harris Senate voting record a 98 approval rating and Walls scored just a little lower.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: On the Republican ticket, Senator J.D. Vance got a 0% rating for opposing the nominations of several judges and government officials with pro-labor track records, though Trump has picked up a few union endorsements. Gurley says a lot of union members have been turned off by the mismatch between Trump's 2020 campaign promises and the actions he took in office.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: Appointing great pro-business leaders to run key labor agencies who passed regulations that actually restricted union and labor rights. They also talk about how he cut taxes for the wealthy and abandoned some of his promises to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: She says Trump is trying to gain support among working class voters by appealing to them on other issues like trade, immigration and inflation. The latest polls show an extremely tight race. Harris has a small lead in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to multiple polling averages tracked by Politico.
--:-- Lauren Cowrie Gurley: Her team says it plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to reach roughly three million union households in battleground states this fall. Recent elections have been decided by just tens of thousands of votes in those states. So the way Harris and Trump pitched themselves over the next two months to these voters could make the difference in who's sitting in the White House come January.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Now to Israel, where after a weekend of mass protests calling for a ceasefire deal that would release the hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he hasn't changed his stance.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: This renewed pressure on Netanyahu comes after Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six hostages from Gaza over the weekend. Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv over the last few days. Many of them blame Netanyahu for prioritizing his political survival over a ceasefire deal, which they say could have prevented the deaths of the hostages.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Some carried signs calling Netanyahu a murderer and a criminal. And to add more pressure, Israel's largest trade union authorized a nationwide strike on Monday that temporarily shut down flights, banks, schools, government buildings and more.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: On Monday evening, Netanyahu gave a long, rare televised news conference, doubling down on his stance in negotiations, saying he will continue to insist on Israeli control over the Philadelphia Corridor, a small strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border, which has been a sticking point in ceasefire talks.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: He also said he was sorry he wasn't able to bring the hostages home alive. One of the hostages recovered over the weekend was 23-year-old Israeli Hirsch Goldberg Polin He was buried in Jerusalem yesterday His mother Rachel has been an outspoken advocate for a ceasefire deal over the last 11 months meeting with world leaders to bring awareness to the hostage crisis.
--:-- Rachel Polin: Part of what is so deeply crushing and confusing for all of us is that a strange thing happened along this macabre path upon which our family found itself traveling for the last 332 days. amidst the inexplicable agony, terror, anguish, desperation and fear. We became absolutely certain that you were coming home to us alive. But it was not to be.
--:-- Rachel Polin: Now I no longer have to worry about you. I know you are no longer in danger. President Biden criticized Netanyahu yesterday, saying he hasn't done enough to reach a ceasefire. And Biden says he's preparing a final proposal. a take-it-or-leave-it type of pitch that his administration says it plans to present in the coming weeks.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: There are around 100 hostages still in captivity. Seven are American. In the past 11 months, Israel has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: It can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming to find a therapist who takes your insurance. A new in-depth investigation from ProPublica and NPR finds it's also rough out there for the therapists. Many say insurance companies make it so difficult for mental health providers to get paid, they have to pull out of insurance networks entirely.
--:-- Annie Waldman: A lot of therapists have described to us that they experience a lot of red tape dealing with insurers, delayed and low payments, audits, and reviews. That's ProPublica reporter Annie Waldman.
--:-- Annie Waldman: So many of them told us that the practices of insurance companies are pushing them out. They spoke with over 500 psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists across America, from major cities to rural areas. And over and over, they heard stories of long, exhausting processes to get paid.
--:-- Annie Waldman: A psychologist from New York was testing a college student for ADHD. Insurance was supposed to cover most of the cost, but the company refused to pay. He went down the rabbit hole, and it took him more than a year and 45 different phone calls to eventually get paid.
--:-- Annie Waldman: And we heard this from a number of therapists, that it feels like you're just sending faxes into the void, emails into the void, phone call after phone call just to get paid. So, you know, while your hourly rate might look good on paper, if you count all the time that it takes to chase down these payments, that rate actually goes down quite substantially.
--:-- Annie Waldman: Insurance companies say they're paying market rates and working to take care of patients and providers. But policy experts and health advocates told Waldman and her colleagues that's not what they're seeing.
--:-- Annie Waldman: Many of the providers they interviewed said the same thing that they struggled to stay in business waiting to get paid Some had to take second jobs Others had to seek mental health care for themselves
--:-- Annie Waldman: Many of them pointed out the system doesn just hurt providers it limits options for patients Overall, roughly half of the Americans who need mental health support cannot get it, including many people with insurance.
--:-- Annie Waldman: It's often these days the insurers and not the therapists that are determining who can get treatment, what kind of treatment they can get, and for how long. And, you know, the consequences of not accessing mental health care, you know, it's touched so many American families, whether you have a friend or a family member who couldn't find a therapist who needed it or someone who needed residential treatment or inpatient treatment during a crisis but couldn't access it.
--:-- Annie Waldman: And the consequences for this can be fatal.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Before we let you go, here are some other stories being featured in the Apple News app. In Germany, the far-right party made historic gains in elections in two small eastern states. We mentioned this might happen heading into the weekend. NPR reports on the Alternative for Germany party, or the AFD, as it's known.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: The party began gaining popularity in the last few years, as more migrants fleeing wars in the Middle East were allowed into the country. The AFD is notoriously anti-immigrant. It's also under federal surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany's constitution.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: So this election victory is raising concerns about the return of anti-immigrant and nationalist policies to not only Germany, but Europe more broadly.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: Let's turn now to Brazil, where the Supreme Court has voted to uphold a ban on social media platform X. It's notable that X was shut down in Brazil, one of the largest democracies in the world, after the company failed to suspend accounts that contained hate speech and misinformation.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: The move has drawn praise from leftist Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for holding Elon Musk accountable, while free speech advocates have criticized the court's decision.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: And finally, in Paralympics news, organizers say British archer Jodi Grinham is the first athlete to medal while pregnant, winning bronze in the women's individual compound.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: She told The Guardian that the baby hasn't stopped moving, and that during training she practiced getting bumped around by her coach so that a small kick wouldn't throw off her shot.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a Narrated article coming up next. New York Magazine has one person's story of how being written out of her father's will helped them gain clarity and untangle financial security and love.
--:-- Shamita Abbasu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
