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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, August 16th. 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The American people are going to see lower prescription drug prices, lower health care costs, and lower energy costs. And big corporations are finally going to start to pay their fair share. Today, President Biden will sign a major climate, health, and tax bill. It sets aside nearly $370 billion for energy and climate change spending.
--:-- Marianne Lavelle: [Inside Climate News reporter] This bill is all incentives. All carrots, no sticks. Instead of taxes on using fossil fuels, there will be tax credits and other incentives to use greener power. The idea is to make clean energy the cheapest choice and therefore the most politically attractive choice.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It really gives a boost to things like electric vehicles, wind energy, solar energy. There also are benefits for projects that are carbon capture and storage, clean hydrogen. The Democrats wanted to make sure that these tax credits were as broad as possible to bring as many people to the table to hold together as big a coalition as they could.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To get this bill through the Senate, Democrats needed to win over Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, which is a coal state. He was not down with a carbon tax. And he was in favor of using the approach of incentives, especially if those incentives would especially benefit his state and target energy communities in his state to be part of the transition and to get support in transitioning to good paying jobs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: No Republicans voted for the bill, so it passed the Senate with a tie vote from Vice President Harris. If Republicans take control of Congress in the midterms or the White House in 2024 they could weaken or entirely roll back Democratic policy on climate. We saw that happen in the Trump administration to some climate policies from the Obama administration.
--:-- Marianne Lavelle: But how much they could reel it back may depend on whether public support for climate action grows. Some people are very optimistic that it's going to have the kind of effect that in a way the health care reform of the Obama era did, that there's a lot of people who benefit from it all over the country. And it becomes very hard to undo when there are so many people benefiting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Independent analysts say the bill could get the U.S. in striking distance of President Biden's pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by the year 2030.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to Uvalde, Texas, where political views are changing in the months after the school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers. We're seeing a lot of local residents really start to embrace moderate gun reform in a way that they really haven't before in this area.
--:-- Elizabeth Findel: [The Wall Street Journal reporter] Uvalde County voted 60 percent for Trump in 2020. But some people in this deep red area are rethinking Republican gun policies after a wave of funerals for elementary school kids. You had hundreds of people marching in the streets in temperatures so hot people were passing out to call for greater gun control measures.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it looks like politicians in the area are noticing. The local representative in Congress is Tony Gonzalez. He was one of only 10 House Republicans to support the recent gun legislation. Three of the deadliest mass shootings in American history were in or near his district.
--:-- Elizabeth Findel: Political change is happening at multiple levels. You had the local city council, the local county commissioners, and the local school board boards which include both Democrats and Republicans all pass resolutions asking the governor to call a special session of the legislature to raise the age of purchasing certain weapons to 21 or older.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So far, Governor Greg Abbott hasn't announced a special session. Heading into the midterms, many people in Uvalde are eager to vote. Miguel Cerillo, whose 11-year-old daughter testified to the House about surviving the shooting, told the Journal that he registered to vote for the first time this summer.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, a story that crosses from Texas to New York, with migrant families caught in the middle. For months now, the governors of Texas and Arizona have been sending buses full of migrants to New York and Washington, D.C.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gothamist reports that the buses sometimes don't have enough food or water. A diabetic child was put on a bus without any insulin. A New York City official told ABC News that many of the migrants were confused and lied to before getting on the bus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's not always government help for the new arrivals, so they rely on volunteers, like this woman in New York who spoke to Reuters. They don't know anybody. Most of them don't have anybody to help. They don't know where to go, so we're taking them to shelters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The governors of Texas and Arizona say they don't think the Biden administration is doing enough to help border states deal with people crossing illegally. Governor Abbott spoke in April about launching plans to bus migrants to D.C. We are sending them to the United States Capitol where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, let's turn the music down right now, because I need you to listen closely to something unusual. What you're hearing is a simulation of the very, very slow heartbeat of a blue whale.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's still playing, but you won't hear another heartbeat until about now. Slow, right? That long gap between blue whale heartbeats is really interesting to scientists. Vox explains why, and also how this research is pretty tricky.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can't exactly pop a stethoscope on a creature that's bigger than a dinosaur, with a heart that weighs over a thousand pounds. But a few years ago, scientists managed to attach an EKG sensor to a whale's flipper using a 20-foot pole. And they got data on just how slowly a whale's heart can go, sometimes just two beats per minute.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That gives us some clues on how to answer a pretty basic question. How did blue whales evolve to get so big? Large hearts beat more slowly, and they take longer to replenish oxygen. If whales were any bigger, they could need even larger hearts. But that would also mean they'd need to spend more time near the surface to catch their breath, leaving them less time to dive down deep for food, which is what allows them to grow bigger in the first place.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a trade-off between heart size and body size. And it seems like blue whales have managed to strike this incredible balance to be the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, including coverage of the primary races today in Wyoming and Alaska. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. I'll talk with you again tomorrow. Thank you.
