$40,047,425,768,420 in U.S. Debt, and an Experimental Vaccine for Skin Cancer

**Tracy Mumford** (0:00)
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**Tracy Mumford** (0:29)
Pay testimonials. Results may vary. From the New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Thursday, August 20th. Here's what we're covering.
The US national debt has now hit a record high, passing $40 trillion for the first time ever yesterday. More than 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 $2-plus trillion.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:11)
This has been the fiscally most irresponsible administration that we have seen. I mean, we have increased the national debt, almost doubled it since George Bush took office.

**Tracy Mumford** (1:22)
For years, presidents of both parties have vowed to get the debt under control.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:27)
The Treasury Department is planning to pay down the national debt issued to the public this quarter.

**Tracy Mumford** (1:32)
But administration after administration has failed to fundamentally turn things around.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:37)
We're going to reduce the hell out of the debt and reduce your taxes further.

**Tracy Mumford** (1:41)
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's 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 an 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 US 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 Hind 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 Israeli 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 Israeli 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 shot.

**Isabel Kershner** (3:57)
Both of these cases really stirred huge international attention, outrage and condemnation and allegations of war crimes.

**Tracy Mumford** (4:08)
My colleague Isabel Kershner is based in Israel.

**Isabel Kershner** (4:11)
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 we're now two and a half years on. And this fact-finding mechanism has 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, Yeshtin, that has done analysis of military investigations and found that only about 2% ever end in a conviction. So, rights groups both in Israel and abroad have essentially called past investigations a façade and a whitewash, just intended to try and stave off international criticism without actually producing much in the way of results.