--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Monday, January 24th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shemitah 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.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: A U.S. program to get food to kids in need during the pandemic is struggling. It started as a way to make sure low-income students who depend on school meal subsidies got enough to eat when classrooms were closed. It's been extended, but most states haven't signed up because it's become harder to administer. So a lot of kids are being left behind.
--:-- Laura Riley: [Guest, The Washington Post] I'm covering this for The Washington Post. I spoke to one mother who struggled to feed her son during this time. Odessa Davis was working three-plus part-time jobs at the beginning of the pandemic. One was in the school district where her son, her 12-year-old son, was in class. And one was at the local community center doing kind of camp programs. And both of those came to a halt at the beginning of the pandemic. And then her son, Leon, was home with her. Every meal that he might have eaten at school, she was now in charge of providing. She relied on food banks, but still found it tough.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The pandemic program was put in place to help families like hers. 30-plus million kids who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, they had no way to get that benefit. So they stood up a program, you know, kind of from whole cloth overnight called Pandemic EBT, which is a debit card with the intent that that card would go to the families of those low-income kids who were qualified for free or reduced-price lunch and weren't getting it because school was no longer in session.
--:-- Laura Riley: The program started during the Trump administration and continued under Biden. At one point, there were more than 18 million kids using it. For Odessa, that $200 a month was a lifeline. But at the start of the most recent school year, for Odessa's family and many others, the money stopped. Part of the reason behind that is running the programs got more complicated. When schools went virtual, all kids who received subsidized meals got the benefit. But as classrooms gradually reopened, it got harder to track who was back in the classroom or who was learning virtually.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Laura, what's the impact on these families?
--:-- Laura Riley: It's created more paperwork for schools that were already stretched. The school administrators were already overburdened and had labor shortages and supply chain disruptions and all of these other problems. It was also complicated for the states.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: This year, more than 30 states haven't even applied for that benefit. And, you know, I went into this story thinking that the states were the villains in this story, that they were leaving billions of dollars on the table, that the USDA had fought for this money for low-income kids and made it available to states and that states were not availing themselves of it. But I talked to states and many of them said, it's just too big a burden. We don't have the manpower to administer this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Laura, what's the current status of the program?
--:-- Laura Riley: Currently, eight states are approved for this federal aid. 17 are in the application process. And that means money allocated for this assistance program, and we are talking about billions of dollars, is currently unspent, while parents like Odessa are scrambling to figure out how to feed their children.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: President Biden is considering sending thousands of American troops to Eastern Europe ahead of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. The State Department is ordering family members of embassy staff in Ukraine to get out of the country as soon as possible. Biden has warned Moscow that there will be consequences if it moves into Ukraine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NBC News is now reporting the Pentagon gave Biden a range of military options over the weekend. Possibilities include bomber flights over the region, sending ships into the area, and moving troops and equipment from elsewhere in Europe into Poland, Romania, and other countries that neighbor Ukraine. And just today, NATO says it's putting forces on standby and sending ships along with jets to Eastern Europe.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Britain is accusing Russia of plotting to replace Ukraine's president with someone friendly to Moscow. Russia calls that disinformation and says Britain was trying to ramp up tension. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on CBS yesterday. He said he hopes talks between Russia and the West will keep things peaceful but he says allies are ready for possible aggression.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Even as we're engaged in diplomacy, we are very much focused on building up defense, building up deterrence, both for Ukraine. NATO itself will continue to be reinforced in a significant way if Russia commits renewed acts of aggression. All of that is on the table.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Maybe you or someone you know is into electric cars. That could reduce fossil fuel use, but it can create other environmental problems. And one of them is what to do with all of the batteries when they die.
--:-- Dan Garino: [Guest, Inside Climate News] The surge in demand for electric vehicles and battery storage systems could result in millions of tons of batteries that are unusable unless they're recycled. Inside Climate News reporter Dan Garino looks at the industry that's popping up around recycling these batteries.
--:-- Dan Garino: What's changed with some of these newer battery recycling companies is they are finding increasingly sophisticated ways to use chemicals and acids to extract the valuable metals and valuable materials from inside batteries. That includes stuff like cobalt and nickel. If the industry gets better at extracting and reusing them, that means less garbage ending up in landfills and also less energy wasted mining to get more of them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's just not that much of this material in the world, and most of the sources are outside the United States. By increasingly relying on recycling to get some of the metals like cobalt and nickel, you reduce the need for mining. Or at least you slow the increase in the need for mining, which has all kinds of environmental benefits.
--:-- Dan Garino: Some U.S. researchers worry about falling further behind China. It leaves the world in making batteries. It's also leading on recycling them. As one scientist in this story put it, we're behind, but we're picking up speed.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: Instagram isn't just a place where humans get famous. It's also a place where your pets can become mega influencers. In fact, there's a name for this. It's called being a pet influencer.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And lately, some of the humans behind these accounts have been wading into ethically murky territory, cloning their pets. Now, maybe you've heard of pet cloning before. Barbara Streisand is a pretty famous example of this. But this story has a social media twist.
--:-- Courtney Udvar-Hazy: [Guest, Input Magazine] Her dog, Willow, has a pretty big following on Instagram, around 139,000 followers. There are photos of Willow in the snow, riding in the car, running on the beach. Except, I should say, it's not Willow. It's Willow's clone, Phoenix. After Willow died, Courtney decided to get her dog cloned. And this is starting to catch on among pet influencers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, it isn't cheap. Cloning a pet can cost up to $50,000. A representative from a company offering the service compared it to IVF. It involves putting animals through the difficult process of being a surrogate, something they can't really consent to.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: The other ethical downside is that there are more than 6 million animals entering the shelters every year. Critics of cloning ask, why not adopt one of them? If you ask these pet owners, they say they've got good reasons for going through the cloning process. For some of them, it's a way to deal with their grief after losing a pet. And for others, it's also about maintaining their Instagram following.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One person told Input Magazine that when she decided to get her cat cloned after she died, the process took a while and she watched her Instagram followers drop. Now that she has her cat's clone, she says she's finally able to start building back her follower base.
--:-- Shemitah Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. By the way, today is the first day the IRS is accepting tax returns. We've picked out a Wall Street Journal article with some important tips for filing your taxes. There's a lot that's different this year because of the pandemic. If you're in the Apple News app, just tap that notification we send you midway through the show. Plus, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our news plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
