Former Vice President Mike Pence said abortion should be banned when a pregnancy is not viable, according to the Associated Press.
“I’m pro-life. I don’t apologize for it,” Pence told the AP in a recent interview. “I just have heard so many stories over the years of courageous women and families who were told that their unborn child would not go to term or would not survive. And then they had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery.”
CNN has reached out to the Pence campaign for comment.
Pence strongly opposes abortion and has been perhaps the most outspoken Republican candidate about the issue as many of his GOP rivals have avoided staking out a clear position on abortion.
During a CNN town hall in Iowa last month, Pence said he supports a federal abortion ban including exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. He also backs federal legislation limiting the procedure and has called on other 2024 GOP candidates to support a 15-week national abortion ban.
Pence told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer back in March that he would support legislation restricting abortion to six weeks of pregnancy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law in his state that banned abortion at six weeks while President Donald Trump has suggested the legislation was “too harsh.”
Clinicians use ultrasound results and measure pregnancy hormone levels in order to determine “whether a pregnancy is viable beyond the first trimester,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Pregnancies that are deemed unviable regardless of gestational age include tubal ectopic pregnancies and early pregnancy loss, according to the ACOG, which can be deadly for the pregnant person. There are cases, such as “genetic or isolated structural abnormalities in which essential structures do not develop properly,” in which survivability is poor and patients may choose to end their pregnancies or give birth with palliative care options, the ACOG notes.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, several women have shared their harrowing stories of trying to obtain medically necessary abortions in states that have greatly restricted the procedure. One Texas woman told CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen that she nearly died after her water broke four months into her pregnancy, putting her at high risk for a life-threatening infection. Doctors in Texas had to wait until the woman was sick enough so they felt legally safe to terminate her pregnancy and then bring her to the ICU after she started developing symptoms of sepsis.
A Christian conservative, Pence views the “cause of life” as “the calling of our time.”
“As your President, I will always stand for the sanctity of life and I will not rest and I will not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in the land,” he said in his presidential campaign announcement last month.
Pence has called for more support and resources for women in crisis pregnancies and advocated for adoption as alternatives to abortion.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has proposed hosting Twitter Spaces interviews with political candidates of all stripes, reflecting the billionaire’s supposed commitment to ideological neutrality and to promoting Twitter as a true “public square.”
So far, however, Musk appears to be more interested in platforming candidates that align with his own views rather than those who might challenge them. On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.
The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone. But this time, it also deepens doubts about Musk’s claims to open-mindedness — and his willingness to use Twitter as anything other than a tool for his own activism.
Musk, who built much of his early reputation as an entrepreneur on a concern for ensuring humanity’s survival, has opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and spent much of the pandemic railing against Anthony Fauci, the government’s formertop infectious disease expert. Musk has claimed as recently as January that he is “pro vaccines in general” but that they risk doing more harm than good “if administered to the whole population.”
Medical experts widely agree that the broad application of vaccines helps prevent the spread of disease not only by making it less likely for an individual to get sick, but also by creating herd immunity at the societal level. In other words, part of the purpose of vaccines is to administer them as universally as possible so that even if one person falls ill, the infection cannot find other suitable hosts nearby.
For years, Kennedy has pushed back on that consensus, including by invoking Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech in Washington last year. Instagram shut down his account in 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” though the company announced Sunday it has restored Kennedy’s account because he is now running for office. Instagram’s parent, Meta, has also banned accounts belonging to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group.
Kennedy has also attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance. At the start of the pandemic, churches were closed and social distancing was enforced across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, while the government used methods to track cases. (Musk, for his part, also objected to state lockdown orders earlier in the pandemic.)
It’s unclear if Musk has reached out to other candidates. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a CNN poll published last month, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they back President Joe Biden for the top of next year’s Democratic ticket, 20% favor Kennedy and 8% back Williamson. Another 8% say they would support an unnamed “someone else.”
With the national profile and visibility that comes with running for high office, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology and vocal stances against prior Covid policies were already primed to become a topic of the 2024 presidential race. But by putting Kennedy center stage on Twitter, Musk appears poised to promote these views further to his millions of followers.
Musk took a similar tack in sharing a stage with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his White House bid with Musk during a Twitter Spaces event last month plagued by technical glitches. Musk declined to endorse a candidate but has previously tweeted that he would support DeSantis if he ran for president.
As Twitter’s owner, Musk has shared conspiracy theories and welcomed extreme voices back to the platform who had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules in the past. He has also laid off more than 80% of Twitter’s staff, including many who had previously been responsible for content moderation.
All of that, combined now with his direct association with Kennedy, could have significant ramifications both for Twitter as a platform and for Musk’s credibility.
DeSantis at least has the plausible distinction of being a top challenger to former President Donald Trump. But as a marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims, Kennedy and his appearance with Musk could further cement the perception that Twitter actively mainstreams extremism.
That could be the very thing that drives away more moderate candidates from accepting Musk’s “invitation” to appear alongside him.
Ahead of the anniversary on Saturday, Senate Democrats will ask for “unanimous consent” on legislation which would seek to expand abortion access for women in the US. The procedural step allows any single senator to ask for a vote on a bill, but any one senator can object and the bill fails. It is a quick way to force a vote on an issue, but it won’t force every senator to go on the record, meaning Democrats and Republicans who may be facing a tough election in 2024 won’t be forced to take a vote.
All of the requests are expected to fail.
The effort is being led by Sen. Patty Murray, a member of Democratic leadership from Washington state.
“Senate Democrats will force Republicans to go on the record once again, and explain to the American people why they refuse to codify our right to contraception, why they refuse to let women travel across state lines for lifesaving health care – as we fight to get the votes we need to restore Roe, it’s imperative that we make plain to the country just how extreme and dangerous Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda is,” Murray said in a statement.
Abortion politics have also recently been in the spotlight in the Senate as Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, has placed a hold on confirming more than 250 military promotions over a Pentagon policy created after the Dobbs decision, which allows servicemembers to access time off and reimbursement for travel costs if they have to cross state lines to access reproductive care.
In the 2022 midterms, abortion was a crucial motivator for many voters, as CNN exit polls showed that 46% of people said that abortion was the most important issue to their vote. Abortion is also likely to be a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, as administration officials highlight what Democrats have done to protect access to abortion.
Nearly 5 million children in eight states could lose out on some extra funds for food unless their state officials sign up for a federal relief program by Friday.
The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer program, known as P-EBT, is providing $120 over the summer to families whose children qualify for free or reduced-price meals or attend schools in low-income areas where all students receive free meals.
While the vast majority of states are participating in the program this summer, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Texas have yet to join.
The funding is crucial for families who are having trouble affording groceries, housing, utilities and other necessities, which are all more expensive now, advocates say. Many of these parents depend on the free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch program during the school year, but only about 1 in 7 eligible kids receive meals over the summer.
“For a lot of families that are struggling, the summer is the hungriest time of the year,” said Lisa Davis, senior vice president at Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign.
The P-EBT program was launched in the spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced schools to close. The funds provided parents with money to buy groceries to make up for the meals their children were missing in school.
Congress renewed the measure several times, most recently in December as part of the fiscal 2023 spending package. But this final extension cut the benefit to help offset the cost of a permanent summer EBT program that starts next year. Lawmakers also limited it to school-age children – younger kids are not eligible this summer because the Covid-19 public health emergency has ended.
Last summer, families received $391 – providing a total of $13.7 billion in benefits to 35 million kids, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Alaska and South Dakota were the only states not to participate, while Idaho only provided the funds to younger children in day care programs, said Kelsey Boone, a senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center.
Some states have said they don’t have the capacity to administer the summer program this year, according to Boone. However, she points out that each of the eight states participated in the summer P-EBT program either in 2021 or 2022, or both years.
Mississippi opted not to sign up for this summer’s program now that the Covid-19 public health emergency has ended, the state’s Department of Human Services said.
“Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) was a supplemental benefit for households with students who temporarily lost access to free or reduced-price school meals due to pandemic-related school closures or distance learning,” the agency said. “Existing pre-pandemic summer feeding programs continue to operate across Mississippi school districts.”
Alaska, meanwhile, decided not to apply for the summer benefits because of staffing constraints, said Gavin Northey, child nutrition program manager at the state’s Department of Education & Early Development.
Agencies in the other six states did not return requests for comment.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has urged the states that have yet to sign up for the summer program to do so, noting in a tweet in June that “hunger doesn’t take a break when school is out for the summer.”
“I encourage these governors to enroll their states and ensure millions of children can receive the nutritional benefits essential to our nation’s economic health and security,” he tweeted.
In Texas, at least 3.7 million children would be eligible for the summer P-EBT program, said Mia Medina, senior program manager for No Kid Hungry Texas. Some 40% of parents of children in public school experienced food insecurity, including skipping meals or running out of food, in the past 12 months, according to a poll the nonprofit group commissioned earlier this year.
Last summer, about 3.5 million children in the Lone Star State received a total of more than $1.4 billion in benefits, according to Gov. Greg Abbott’s office.
Families in Montana are also having a tougher time affording food, said Lorianne Burhop, chief policy officer at the Montana Food Bank Network. Some local pantries are seeing record demand, and parents are visiting multiple times a month.
Some 32,000 children received a total of $12.5 million in summer P-EBT benefits last year, according to the state Department of Public Health and Human Services. But this year, officials said they were concerned about administering the program and about whether it was needed, according to Burhop.
“Our state is really missing a key opportunity to help Montana families keep food on the table,” she said.
Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.
Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.
“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.
That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”
Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”
There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.
But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.
“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”
But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.
The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.
At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.
In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.
As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.
In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)
While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.
“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”
The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.
“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.
Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.
“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.
“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”
In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”
Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.
For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.
Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.
“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”
Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.
Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.
More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.
“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”
Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.
“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.
But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.
Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.
“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.
The Justice Department and a manufacturer of abortion pills have submitted the final round of court briefs in the emergency dispute over whether an appeals court should freeze a judge’s ruling that would suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medication abortion drugs.
Now that the filings have been submitted, the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Court could rule at any time on whether to put a hold on the order from US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Kacsmaryk on Friday night said he was halting the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone but that he was delaying the order by seven days to give the pill’s defenders time to appeal the case. The Justice Department has asked the appeals court to act by 12 p.m. CT Thursday on its request that Kacsmaryk’s ruling be paused, to give the government time to seek a Supreme Court intervention if need be. The 5th Circuit is not obligated to meet that deadline.
The Justice Department wrote in its new filing that Kacsmaryk purported “to be acting in a restrained manner … but there is nothing modest about upending the decades-long status quo by blocking access nationwide to a safe and effective drug.”
“Effectively requiring Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro to cease distribution of mifepristone after more than two decades would upend the status quo, severely harming women, healthcare systems, and the public,” the Justice Department said, referring to the two US manufacturers of mifepristone.
The Justice Department filing pushed back on the assertions by the challengers, made in their filing overnight in the emergency dispute, that the 5th Circuit did not have the authority to hear the appeal of Kacsmaryk’s ruling. The Justice Department also called out Kacsmaryk and the challengers for relying on anonymous blog posts to claim mifepristone is unsafe.
Danco Labroratories, which intervened in the case to defend mifepristone’s approval, wrote in its new filing with the appeals court that if the ruling is not frozen, “women across the nation will face serious, unnecessary health risks from the elimination of access to a drug FDA has repeatedly deemed safe and effective and that is the standard of care.”
In an overnight filing, the anti-abortion doctors who sued to ban medication abortion drugs told a federal appeals court that it should leave in place the ruling that will halt the drug’s FDA approval.
The anti-abortion doctors defended Kacsmaryk’s ruling called it a “meticulously considered” ruling that “paints an alarming picture of decades-long agency lawlessness – all to the detriment of the women and girls FDA is charged to protect.”
Mifepristone has been approved by the FDA for terminating pregnancies for nearly 23 years. Leading medical associations have rebuked the claims by the approval’s legal challengers and by the judge that the drug is unsafe.
Elizabeth Holmes won’t be starting her 11-year prison sentence just yet.
The disgraced Theranos founder was previously expected to report to prison on Thursday, but she will remain free a little longer while the court considers a last-minute appeal, according to a filing Tuesday night.
Holmes was sentenced last November after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct blood testing startup. Earlier this month, her request to remain free while she appeals her conviction was denied by a judge, setting her up to report to prison on April 27.
On Tuesday, however, Holmes’ legal team filed an appeal of the judge’s decision. As a result, Holmes can remain free on bail while the latest appeal is considered by the court, as per the court’s rules.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 to focus full-time on Theranos, the health tech startup which claimed to have invented technology that could accurately test for a range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors and was valued at some $9 billion at its peak – making Holmes a paper billionaire.
Her company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 reported that Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy. It also came to light that Theranos was relying on third-party manufactured devices from traditional blood testing companies rather than its own technology.
Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and former COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was indicted alongside Holmes and convicted of fraud in a separate trial. Like Holmes, Balwani’s legal team delayed the start of his prison sentence by roughly a month with an appeal.
Balwani reported to prison last week to serve out his nearly 13-year sentence.
Days after taking over as the new CEO of Lyft
(LYFT) last month, Risher announced plans to “significantly reduce” the company’s workforce and stressed that the decision was his. The next week, Lyft
(LYFT) revealed the extent of the layoffs: 26% of the staff, or more than 1,000 employees, would lose their jobs.
“It was a very, very tough decision and a tough, you know, set of days and weeks to go through, of course,” Risher told CNN in an interview Thursday. “Nobody likes it.”
“But,” he added, “It’s also really important for us to be a strong player.”
Lyft hasn’t seemed like such a strong player of late. The company has shed 90% of its market value since going public in 2019. It has lagged behind its chief rival, Uber
(UBER), in recovering from the pandemic shock to business. And Lyft has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and management changes, including Risher taking over as CEO last month and the company’s two co-founders stepping back.
Now, Lyft’s new chief executive says he hopes to draw on the lessons from Amazon
(AMZN), where he worked very early on, and from his former boss Jeff Bezos in his efforts to turn the rideshare company around.
“We’re going to focus on customers,” Risher said, alluding to Amazon’s guiding principle. “That’s a fundamental, just truth of business – if you can create a business that, really, your customers love, you can do amazing things for the world.”
Many tech companies like to compare themselves to Amazon, but if anyone has the credibility to say it, Lyft is probably hoping it’s Risher. Risher was Amazon’s 37th employee, and his contributions are memorialized on the site with a thank-you note from Bezos, which can still be seen today more than two decades after Risher left the company.
In its first product update since Risher took the helm at Lyft, the rideshare company on Thursday unveiled new features aimed at taking some of the pain points out of the summer travel season. With the update, customers can preorder their Lyft rides from the airport the moment their plane touches the ground; Lyft then handles the rest of the logistics to ensure a driver is waiting for the customer as they exit the airport.
The airport preorder option rolled out at Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports on Thursday, with plans to expand to other airports in the near future.
“You can outsource a lot of that stress to us, that’s what we want to do. And that really is Jeff Bezos,” Risher told CNN. “I’m just copying his strategy that worked pretty well for Amazon. I think it can work pretty well for Lyft and our customers.”
But as Risher works to revive Lyft’s fortunes, he faces a rival, Uber, that has shown renewed strength in recent quarters. (Uber has also added features to make airport pickups less painful.)
When asked what went wrong for Lyft, Risher told CNN, “I think the pandemic went wrong with Lyft.” But the pandemic did not impact Lyft and Uber the same.
Under the leadership of Expedia veteran Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over after founder Travis Kalanick resigned following a long list of PR crises, Uber doubled down on diversifying its business with meal deliveries. That service has helped carry it through the pandemic and bounce back quicker as the economy reopened.
But in a previous interview with CNN, Risher seemed to dash hopes that Lyft would borrow from Uber’s playbook and branch into other delivery categories.
Risher told CNN’s Julia Chatterley he wants to make sure Lyft focuses on providing a great ride-hailing service and “not get distracted by delivering pizzas or packages or all sorts of other things that other companies are doing.”
For now, Risher and Lyft are focusing on the all-important summer travel season.
Another update unveiled Thursday helps customers get out the door to the airport at the best time by syncing their flight info from their smartphone calendar into their Lyft app to get reminders about booking airport rides. Risher told reporters Thursday that the basic idea for this arose because he and his wife could never agree on the best time to leave for the airport.
“Our focus right now as summer travel begins is really de-stressing the airport experience in particular,” Risher told CNN.
Risher demurred when asked if Lyft would be an independent company a year from now, after many industry-watchers initially thought news of his appointment was aimed at positioning the company for a sale.
“It’s not our focus to be part of somebody else’s company,” Risher said.
Uber may be outpacing Lyft today, but Risher believes customers are best served by having both companies around.
“My view is every single person who’s a rider should have both apps on their phone, I really believe that, because sometimes you want a choice,” he added, “but then we want you to choose Lyft, and the reason we want you to choose Lyft is because we think we can provide a better experience.”
Late last year, Facebook-parent Meta quietly phased out certain content labels on its platforms that for much of the pandemic had directed viewers to its central Covid-19 information page, after internal research concluded the labels may be ineffective at changing attitudes or stopping the spread of misinformation, according to a report Thursday by the company’s external oversight board.
Facebook rolled out the labels in early 2021, after coming under criticism for the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platforms during the first year of the pandemic. The company applied the labels to a wide range of claims both true and untrue about vaccines, treatments and other topics related to the virus.
But Meta’s use of the labels began slowing on Dec. 19, and ended completely soon after, the report said, following the internal research. Study results provided to the Meta Oversight Board, a quasi-judicial body, showed that the company’s labels appeared to have “no detectable effect on users’ likelihood to read, create or re-share” claims that had previously been rated as false by third-party fact-checkers or that discouraged the use of vaccines, the report said.
The research focused on Meta’s direct labeling interventions as opposed to labels the company applies to content as part of its third-party fact-checking program. The research found that the more frequently a user was exposed to the labels, the less likely they were to visit the Covid-19 information center, which offers authoritative resources and information linked to the pandemic.
“The company reported that initial research showed that these labels may have no effect on user knowledge and vaccine attitudes,” the report said.
Meta’s internal research on the labels has not been previously released, and the Oversight Board on Thursday called for Meta to publish its findings as part of a broader review of the company’s handling of Covid-19 misinformation.
The new details highlight the struggles platforms have faced in fighting misinformation and could raise broader questions about the efficacy of labeling and directing users to more accurate information. It also comes at a time when some of the biggest social media companies, including Twitter and Meta, are either rolling back their Covid-19 misinformation policies or considering doing so.
Meta should not relax its approach to Covid-19 misinformation as the company has proposed, the Oversight Board added. Until the World Health Organization determines that the pandemic has eased, Meta should instead continue to remove misinformation that violates the company’s policies, rather than shifting toward more lenient treatments such as labeling or downranking misleading information, the board said.
Meta said Thursday it will publicly respond to the Oversight Board’s recommendations within 60 days.
“We thank the Oversight Board for its review and recommendations in this case,” a company spokesperson said. “As Covid-19 evolves, we will continue consulting extensively with experts on the most effective ways to help people stay safe on our platforms.”
In the past, Meta has touted its ability to direct users to the Covid-19 information center. Last July, the company said it had connected more than 2 billion people across 189 countries to trustworthy information through the portal.
Some of those visits occurred through labels that Meta referred to internally as “neutral inform treatments,” or NITs, and “facts about ‘X’ informed treatments,” also known as FAXITs.
The labels were automatically applied to content that Meta’s automated tools determined were about Covid-19, the Oversight Board said. The labels never directly addressed the claims within any given post, but they provided a link to the Covid-19 information center as well as more contextual information, including messages saying that vaccines have been proven safe and effective or that unapproved Covid-19 treatments could cause bodily harm. (Meta provided examples of a NIT and a FAXIT in its July 2022 request for Oversight Board guidance on whether it should relax its Covid-19 misinformation policy.)
The decision to begin phasing out the labels came after Meta’s product and integrity teams ran an experiment studying Meta’s global userbase, the report said. The study found that users who were shown the labels approximately once a month were more likely on average to click through to the Covid-19 information center than users who were shown the labels both more and less frequently.
In light of the results, Meta later told the Oversight Board it would stop using the labels altogether, to ensure they could remain effective in other public health emergencies, according to the report.
While the Oversight Board’s report Thursday did not pass judgment on Meta’s decision to stop using the labels, it urged the company to reevaluate the 80 distinct types of claims that the company considers to be Covid-19 misinformation and therefore subject to removal from its platforms.
Meta should perform the reassessments regularly, the Oversight Board said, consulting with public health officials to determine which claims on Meta’s banned list continue to be false or misleading and worthy of removal. Meta should also publish a record of when and how it updates that list, the board added.
Google has earned more than $10 million over the past two years by allowing misleading advertisements for “fake” abortion clinics that aim to stop women from having the procedure, according to an estimate from a report released Thursday from the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The estimated amount is microscopic compared to the more than $200 billion Google generates from ad sales annually. But the report’s data hints at the broad reach pro-life groups can have by placing these advertisementsin Google results for common phrases searched for by abortion seekers.
Using Semrush, an analytics tool, researchers at the CCDH identified “188 fake clinic websites” that placed ads on Google between March, 2021 and February of this year. CCDH estimates that ads for fake clinics were clicked on by users 13 million times during this period.
Some searching for “abortion clinics near me” on Google instead found results directing them toward so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that may try to talk abortion-seekers out of treatment and offer medically unproven abortion pill reversal techniques, according to the report.
Other Google searches populated by crisis clinic ads included “abortion pill,” “abortion clinic” and “planned parenthood,” the report said, with clinics in states where abortion is legal spending two times as much as those in states with bans.
In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Google faced calls from Congressional Democrats to do more to prevent searches for abortion clinics from returning results for misleading ads – as well as calls from Republican lawmakers to do the opposite. The dueling pressure from lawmakers highlighted how central Google can be for women searching for information on the procedure.
In a statement Thursday, Google said its approach to abortion ads follows local laws and that any advertiser targeting certain keywords or phrases related to abortions must complete a certification to confirm if it does or does not provide abortion services.
“We require any organization that wants to advertise to people seeking information about abortion services to be certified and clearly disclose whether they do or do not offer abortions,” a Google spokesperson told CNN. “We do not allow ads promoting abortion reversal treatments and we also prohibit advertisers from misleading people about the services they offer.”
“We remove or block ads that violate these policies,” the company added.
Google said it does not allow for abortion reversal pill advertisements because the treatment isn’t approved by the FDA. In response to Thursday’s CCDH report, the company told CNN it took “enforcement action” on content violating this policy.
Google has continued to face scrutiny in recent months for the steps it takes to protect abortion seekers’ location data.
Nearly a dozen Senate Democrats wrote to Google in Maywith questions about how it deletes users’ location history when they have visited sensitive locations such as abortion clinics. The letter came after tests performed by The Washington Post and other privacy advocates appeared to show that Google was not quickly or consistently deleting users’ recorded visits to fertility centers of Planned Parenthood clinics.
Google previously declined to comment on the lawmakers’ letter. Instead, it referred CNN to a company blog post that includes abortion clinics on a list of sensitive locations, but did not explain what it means when it claims the data will be deleted “soon after” a visit.
Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law Friday that bans most abortions in the state as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
“This week, in a rare and historic special session, the Iowa legislature voted for a second time to reject the inhumanity of abortion and pass the fetal heartbeat law,” she said in remarks ahead of signing the bill at the Family Leadership Summit.
The law, which is effective immediately, comes after Reynolds ordered a special legislative session last week with the sole purpose of restricting the procedure in the state. But it is already facing a legal challenge after a group of abortion providers in the state filed a suit to try and stop the law.
The bill, which passed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this week, prohibits physicians from providing most abortions after early cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus or embryo, commonly as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
It includes exceptions for miscarriages, when the life of the pregnant woman is threatened and fetal abnormalities that would result in the infant’s death. It also includes exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rapes reported within 45 days and incest reported within 140 days.
While the bill language makes clear it is “not to be construed to impose civil or criminal liability on a woman upon whom an abortion is performed in violation of the division,” guidelines on how physicians would be punished for violating the law are left up to Iowa’s board of medicine to decide – leaving the potential for some vagueness in how the law ought to be enforced in the interim.
Iowa joins a growing list of Republican-led states that have championed sweeping abortion restrictions in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
Reynolds’ push for abortion restrictions in the state comes weeks after Iowa’s Supreme Court declined to lift a block on the state’s 2018 six-week abortion ban, deadlocking in a 3-3 vote whether to overturn a lower court decision that deemed the law unconstitutional.
“The Iowa Supreme Court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said Tuesday in a statement following the bill’s passage. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”
Abortion rights supporters have been speaking out against the abortion ban in the state. National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called the ban the “latest show of abortion extremism from MAGA Republicans.”
“Governor Kim Reynolds just signed a cruel abortion ban into law among a crowd of extremists who cheered as Iowan women’s abortion rights were stripped away,” Harrison said in a statement Friday.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups, including National Right to Life and Iowa Right to Life, praised Reynolds and the law’s supporters in the state legislature for the abortion ban.
“We will continue to advocate for life and will not stop fighting until abortion becomes unthinkable,” Kristi Judkins, executive director of Iowa Right to Life said in a statement. “We want to see lives saved and women no longer placed in harm’s way because of abortion.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
The US Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case concerning whether a self-appointed “tester” of the Americans with Disabilities Act has the right to sue hotels over alleged violations of the civil rights law.
The court was asked to take the case by Acheson Hotels, which owns and operates a hotel in coastal Maine. The company was sued by Deborah Laufer, who they say has filed hundreds of lawsuits against hotels across the country, claiming their websites are not in compliance with ADA rules that require hotels to disclosure information about how accessible they are to individuals with disabilities.
Though Laufer doesn’t intend to visit the hotels she’s suing, the lawsuits are brought in an effort to force the hotels to update their websites to be in compliance with the law.
A district court dismissed Laufer’s suit against Acheson Hotels, ruling she lacked the procedural threshold – known as standing – needed to bring the suit. But an appeals court later ruled in her favor.
Now, the justices will decide next term whether she has the right to act as a “tester” toward hotels she doesn’t intend to visit.
“Laufer is one of numerous ‘testers’ who have collectively brought thousands of lawsuits under the ADA. A cottage industry has arisen in which uninjured plaintiffs lob ADA lawsuits of questionable merit, while using the threat of attorney’s fees to extract settlement payments,” the hotel told the justices in court papers. “These lawsuits have burdened small businesses, clogged the judicial system, and undermined the Executive Branch’s exclusive authority to enforce federal law.”
The hotel run by Acheson Hotels has a notice posted to its website that says, “Please Note: Unfortunately, we do not have the capabilities to provide pet-friendly or ADA compliant lodging. We apologize for the inconvenience!”
Laufer had urged the justices to take the case, with her attorneys arguing in court papers that they should affirm the appeals court ruling.
“Without civil rights advocates such as this plaintiff, there would be no enforcement of the ADA,” they wrote in part.
YouTube on Tuesday announced a series of changes to how it deals with content related to eating disorders.
The platform has long removed content that glorifies or promotes eating disorders, and YouTube’s Community Guidelines will now also prohibit content that features behaviors such as purging after eating or extreme calorie counting that at-risk users could be inspired to imitate. For videos that feature such “imitable behaviors” in the context of recovery, YouTube will allow the content to remain on the site but restrict it to users who are logged into the site and are over the age of 18.
The policy changes, developed in consultation with the National Eating Disorder Association and other nonprofit organizations, aim to ensure “that YouTube creates space for community recovery and resources, while continuing to protect our viewers,” YouTube’s Global Head of Healthcare Garth Graham told CNN in an interview.
“We’re thinking about how to thread the needle in terms of essential conversations and information that people might have,” Graham said, “allowing people to hear stories about recovery and allowing people to hear educational information but also realizing that the display of that information … can serve as a trigger as well.”
The changes come as social media platforms have faced increased scrutiny for their effects on the mental health of users, especially young people. In 2021, lawmakers called out Instagram and YouTube for promoting accounts featuring content depicting extreme weight loss and dieting to young users. And TikTok has faced criticism from an online safety group that claimed the app served eating disorder related content to teens (although the platform pushed back against the research). They also follow several updates by YouTube in recent years to how it handles misinformation about medical issues such as abortion and vaccines.
In addition to removing or age restricting some videos, YouTube plans to add panels pointing viewers to crisis resources under eating disorder-related content in nine countries, with plans to expand to more areas. And when a creators’ video is removed for violating its eating disorder policy, Graham said YouTube will send them resources about how to create content that’s less likely to harm other viewers.
As with many social media policies, however, the challenge often isn’t introducing it but enforcing it, a challenge YouTube could face in discerning which videos are, for example, pro-recovery. YouTube said it will be rolling out enforcement of the policy globally in the coming weeks, and plans to use both human and automated moderation to review videos and their context.
“These are complicated, societal public health [issues],” Graham said, “I want never to profess perfection, but to understand that we have to be proactive, we have to be thoughtful … it’s taken a while to get here because we wanted to articulate a process that had different layers and understood the challenges.”
Nearly a dozen Senate Democrats wrote to Google this week with questions about how it deletes users’ location history when they have visited sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, expressing concerns that the company may not have been consistently deleting the data as promised.
The letter dated Monday and led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren and Mazie Hirono seeks answers from Google about the types of locations Google considers to be sensitive and how long it takes for the company to automatically delete visit history.
The letter comes after tests performed by The Washington Post and other privacy advocates appeared to show that Google was not quickly or consistently deleting users’ recorded visits to fertility centers of Planned Parenthood clinics.
“This data is extremely personal and includes information about reproductive health care,” the senators wrote. “We are also concerned that it can be used to target advertisements for services that may be unnecessary or potentially harmful physically, psychologically, or emotionally.”
Concerns about the security of location data have spiked in Washington since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, opening the door to state laws restricting or penalizing abortion-seekers. Under those laws, privacy advocates have said, states could potentially compel tech companies to hand over location data that might reveal whether a person has illegally sought an abortion.
“Claiming and publicly announcing that Google will delete sensitive location data, without consistently doing so, could be considered a deceptive practice,” the senators added, implying that Google’s conduct could be grounds for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, which is authorized to police unfair and deceptive business practices.
Google declined to comment Wednesday on the lawmakers’ letter, instead referring CNN to a blog post that answers some but not all of the senators’ questions.
Google defines sensitive locations as “including counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics, and others,” according to an update to the blog post dated May 12. “If you visit a general purpose medical facility (like a hospital), the visit may persist.”
The blog post does not, however, address the senators’ request for Google to explain what it means when it claims the data will be deleted “soon after” a visit.
A bill that would legally protect doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in states where abortion services are outlawed or restricted is now headed to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk after the state legislature passed the legislation on Tuesday.
The bill ensures that doctors, medical providers and facilitators in the state will be able to provide telehealth services to patients out of state, according to anews release from the New York State Assembly.
The new legislation also protects New York health providers from out-of-state litigation, meaning the state will not cooperate with cases prosecuting doctors in New York who provide telehealth abortion or reproductive services to people in other states.
“This bill expands protections for telehealth providers by providing them the same protections afforded to doctors in other states with strong reproductive healthcare shield laws,” according to the news release.
The bill also ensures that New York medical providers, complying with their practice, who offer telehealth services are not subject to professional discipline, “solely for providing reproductive health services to patients residing in states where such services are illegal.”
CNN has reached out to the governor’s office to see if she will sign the legislation.
CNN previously reported Hochul has indicated support for a shield law protecting medical providers of out of state abortion and reproductive services.
Assemblymember Karines Reyes, a registered nurse who sponsored the bill, said she was “proud to sponsor this critical piece of legislation to fully protect abortion providers using telemedicine.”
According to the state assembly’s news release, the bill recognizes the common use of medication abortion drugs, stating that 54% of abortions across the country are now medication abortions.
Speaker of the New York State Assembly Carl Heastie said, “It is our moral obligation to help women across the country with their bodily autonomy by protecting New York doctors from litigation efforts from anti-choice extremists. Telehealth is the future of healthcare, and this bill is simply the next step in making sure our doctors are protected.”
Unlike last year, when the Supreme Court greatly upset liberals by overturning Roe v. Wade, this year’s big rulings by the justices are unlikely to spark a major backlash from the public at large.
This is well reflected in the public polling. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, had become massively popular.
Right before the decision to overturn Roe leaked in May 2022, a Fox News poll found that 63% of registered voters were opposed to such a move while 27% supported it. An ABC News/Washington Post poll put the split at 54% wanting the court to uphold Roe and 28% wanting the decision overturned.
This majority of Americans who wanted abortion to be legal nationally have maintained their stance since the Supreme Court officially struck down Roe in June 2022. Since that time, abortion supporters have won every related measure placed on the ballot across the country – from deep-blue states like California to ruby-red ones like Kentucky.
California is an important state to note because voters there faced a 2020 ballot measure to consider the use of race, sex or ethnicity in government institutions (such as education). A clear majority, 57%, voted against allowing state and local entities to consider such factors in public education, employment and contracting decisions.
When a state that voted for Biden by nearly 30 points is against affirmative action, it shouldn’t be surprising that the nation as a whole is.
A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that 50% of Americans disapproved of certain colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions to increase diversity. Only 33% approved of the practice.
This Pew poll is no outlier. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the court decided its case showed that 52% of Americans approved of the decision, while 32% were opposed.
Some polling before the ruling hadshown even more opposition: 70% of Americans in a recent CBS News/YouGov survey indicated that the Supreme Court should not allow colleges to consider race and ethnicity in admissions.
But perhaps what’s most interesting isn’t how many people are for or against considering race in college admissions. Rather, it’s how many people simply didn’t care enough to pay close attention to the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.
When explicitly given the option, a majority (55%) said in a May Marquette University Law School poll that they hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the case. (Those who had heard enough were against allowing colleges to use race in admissions.)
This is quite different from March 2022, when just 30% of Americans hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the court potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, when asked the same question by Marquette but about the abortion case. (A plurality of those who had heard enough didn’t want the court to overturn Roe.)
It’s hard for an issue to galvanize voters when they aren’t paying attention to it.
The same holds true for Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan that the court blocked. A USA Today/Ipsos poll from April indicated that 52% of Americans were familiar with the case and a mere 16% were very familiar with it. (Those who had student loans were more familiar at 71%, though that’s a fairly low percentage for something that could affect them directly.)
Possibly because of that low familiarity, the percentage of Americans who favor or oppose canceling certain student debt differs greatly depending on how the question is worded. When Marquette didn’t mention Biden or the government specifically in its May poll, a majority (63%) said they favored forgiveness of up to $20,000. It was a much lower 47% in the Ipsos poll.
Surveys that did identify the proposal as Biden’s plan tend to be in the same ballpark, with a split public and a sizable percentage unsure.
The ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 45% approved of the court striking down Biden’s student debt plan, with 40% disapproving. About a sixth (16%) of the public was undecided.
This jibes with polling before the court’s decision was announced. An NBC News poll from last year showed that 43% said Biden’s plan was a good idea compared with 44%, who said it was a bad idea. Just over 10% had no opinion.
The USA Today/Ipsos survey found that 43% of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to allow the government’s student loan forgiveness plan to move forward, while 40% did not. Another 17% had no opinion.
(I should point out that those with student debt were more likely to want government forgiveness in all these surveys, though about 80% of Americans don’t have student loan debt.)
The public was similarly split about the court ruling in favor of the Colorado web designer who refuses to make wedding websites for same-sex couples over religious objections. According to the ABC News/Ipsos poll, 43% of Americans agreed with the court’s decision, 42% disagreed and 14% were undecided.
There was limited polling on this case before the ruling, though none of it indicated massive opposition. A majority (60%) in a Pew poll that specifically mentioned “wedding websites” and “same-sex marriages” indicated they believed business owners should be allowed to refuse services if it violated their religious or personal beliefs.
The polling on Roe v. Wade didn’t look anything like this last year. There were no close splits in opinion. People were consistently against overturning Roe, and they cared a lot about it. This led to a historically strong performance for the party in the White House during the 2022 midterm elections and a major backlash against the Supreme Court.
The current polling on affirmative action in college admissions, Biden’s student loan forgiveness planand allowing people to opt out of certain services to married LGBTQ couples if they believe it goes against their religion suggests that court’s opinions on those issues aren’t likely to have a similar impact.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that he will follow precedent for replacing Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee if she resigns, signaling a willingness to vote to replace the California Democrat if she left the chamber altogether.
“If she does resign, I would be in the camp of following the precedent of the Senate, replacing the person, consistent with what we have done in the past,” the South Carolina lawmaker told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Feinstein was hospitalized in March for shingles and has yet to return to the Senate. She has asked to be “temporarily” replaced on the Senate Judiciary Committee while she is recovering but remains committed to returning to Washington.
Democrats would need 60 votes to replace Feinstein on the panel, but senior Republicans in leadership and on the committee have made clear that they would not give them the votes to do that on a temporary basis.
Senate Republicans blocked an effort last week by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to temporarily replace Feinstein on the Judiciary panel with Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin.
But Graham – who objected to Schumer’s request – signaled Sunday that the situation would be different if Feinstein resigned.
“If she resigned, I would make sure that whatever we did in the past when members resigned would be followed,” he said.
“As to Sen. Feinstein, she is a wonderful person. She’s been a very effective senator. I hope she comes back,” the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee added.
Feinstein is facing calls to resign from at least two House Democrats, though most congressional Democrats have remained largely supportive of her decision to remain in office while absent from the Capitol.
More than 60 progressive organizations across California signed a letter Friday calling for Feinstein’s resignation.
“For three decades, 39 million Californians counted on you to be our hardworking voice in Washington, day in and day out. We still need a daily voice, now more than ever,” the letter stated. ” We respectfully ask you to give one more gift of service to our great state by fully stepping back to allow a new appointee to carry forth and extend your legacy.”
On the issue of abortion, Graham would not say Sunday whether he believes the procedure should be regulated at the state or federal level.
“It’s a human rights issue, does it really matter where you’re conceived?,” Graham said. He added later: “I welcome this debate. I think the Republican Party will be in good standing to oppose late-term abortion.”
Graham’s comments highlight the difficulty that Republicans have had navigating the abortion issue. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year has energized Democrats, with voters across the country rejecting ballot efforts to restrict abortion at the state level.
which was once a popular GOP premise. After Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, voters overwhelmingly rejected further efforts to restrict abortion.
The South Carolina senator introduced a bill in September that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
“Here’s what I believe, that anybody running for president who has a snowball’s chance in hell in the 2024 primary is going to be with me, the American people, and all of Europe, saying late-term abortions should be off the table,” Graham, who has endorsed former President Donald Trump’s reelection bid, said Sunday. “I am confident, over time, that’s where our nominee will be.”
The issue of abortion has continued to reverberate across the political landscape. The Supreme Court on Friday protected access to a widely used abortion drug as appeals play out by freezing lower-court rulings that had placed restrictions on its usage.
Meanwhile, Graham, who recently traveled to the Middle East, said Sunday that he saw dramatic change while on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
“The biggest prize, for lack of a better word, would be to get Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel and vice versa. And the Biden administration is trying to do that. And I want to help them. I think the Biden administration is right to want a normalize relationship with Saudi Arabia, based on the changes I see,” he said.
Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book, “Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Reclaim It,” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
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Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, recently signed two bills into law that sharply restrict children’s use of social media platforms. Under the legislation, which takes effect next year, social media companies have to verify the ages of all users in the state, and children under age 18 have to get permission from their parents to have accounts.
Parents will also be able to access their kids’ accounts, apps won’t be allowed to show children ads, and accounts for kids won’t be able to be used between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. without parental permission.
It’s about time. Social networks in the United States have become potentially incredibly dangerous for children, and parents can no longer protect our kids without the tools and safeguards this law provides. While Cox is correct that these measures won’t be “foolproof,” and what implementing them actually looks like remains an open question, one thing is clear: Congress should follow Utah’s lead and enact a similar law to protect every child in this country.
One of the most important parts of Utah’s law is the requirement for social networks to verify the ages of users. Right now, most apps ask users their ages without requiring proof. Children can lie and say they’re older to avoid some of the features social media companies have created to protect kids — like TikTok’s new setting that asks 13- to17-year-olds to enter their passwords after they’ve been online for an hour, as a prompt for them to consider whether they want to spend so much time on the app.
While critics argue that age verification allows tech companies to collect even more data about users, let’s be real: These companies already have a terrifying amount of intimate information about us. To solve this problem, we need a separate (and comprehensive) data privacy law. But until that happens, this concern shouldn’t stop us from protecting kids.
One of the key components of this legislation is allowing parents access to their kids’ accounts. By doing this, the law begins to help address one of the biggest dangers kids face online: toxic content. I’m talking about things like the 2,100 pieces of content about suicide, self-harm and depression that 14-year-old Molly Russell in the UK saved, shared or liked in the six months before she killed herself last year.
I’m also talking about things like the blackout challenge — also called the pass-out or choking challenge — that has gone around social networks. In 2021, four children 12 or younger in four different states all died after trying it.
“Check out their phones,” urged the father of one of these young victims. “It’s not about privacy — this is their lives.”
Of course, there are legitimate privacy concerns to worry about here, and just as kids’ use of social media can be deadly, social apps can also be used in healthy ways. LGBTQ children who aren’t accepted in their families or communities, for example, can turn online for support that is good for their mental health. Now, their parents will potentially be able to see this content on their accounts.
I hope groups that serve children who are questioning their gender and sexual identities and those that work with other vulnerable youth will adapt their online presences to try to serve as resources for educating parents about inclusivity and tolerance, too. This is also a reminder that vulnerable children need better access to mental health services like therapy — they’re way too young to be left to their own devices to seek out the support they need online.
But, despite these very real privacy concerns, it’s simply too dangerous for parents not to know what our kids are seeing on social media. Just as parents and caregivers supervise our children offline and don’t allow them to go to bars or strip clubs, we have to ensure they don’t end up in unsafe spaces on social media.
The other huge challenge the Utah law helps parents overcome is the amount of time kids are spending on social media. A 2022 survey by Common Sense Media found that the average 8- to12-year-old is on social media for 5 hours and 33 minutes per day, while the average 13- to18 year-old spends 8 hours and 39 minutes every day. That’s more time than a full time-job.
The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that lack of sleep is associated with serious harms in children — everything from injuries to depression, obesity and diabetes. So parentsin the US need to have a way to make sure their kids aren’t up on TikTok all night (parents in China don’t have to worry about this because the Chinese version of TikTok doesn’t allow kids to stay on for more than 40 minutes and isn’t useable overnight).
Of course, Utah isn’t an authoritarian state like China, so it can’t just turn off kids’ phones. That’s where this new law comes in requiring social networks to implement these settings. The tougher part of Utah’s law for tech companies to implement will be a provision requiring social apps to ensure they’re not designed to addict kids.
Social networks are arguably addictive by nature, since they feed on our desires for connection and validation. But hopefully the threat of being sued by children who say they’ve been addicted or otherwise harmed by social networks — an outcome for which this law provides an avenue — will force tech companies to think carefully about how they build their algorithms and features like bottomless feeds that seem practically designed to keep users glued to their screens.
TikTok and Snap didn’t respond to requests for comment from CNN about Utah’s law, while a representative for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the company shares the goal to keep Facebook safe for kids but also wants it to be accessible.
Of course, if social networks had been more responsible, it probably wouldn’t have come to this. But in the US, tech companies have taken advantage of a lack of rules to build platforms that can be dangerous for our kids.
There’s nothing innocent about the experiences many kids are having on social media. This law will help Utah’s parents protect their kids. Parents in other states need the same support. Now, it’s time for the federal government to step up and ensure children throughout the country have the same protections as Utah kids.
Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988. The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you and your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States. En Español: Linea de Prevencion del Suidio y Crisis: 1-888-628-9454.
Millions of Americans are at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage in coming months, but residents in Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire and South Dakota will be the first to bear the brunt of the terminations.
States have been barred by Congress from winnowing their Medicaid rolls since the Covid-19 pandemic began. That prohibition ends on Saturday, and some states are moving much more swiftly than others to kick off those deemed ineligible for the public health insurance program for low-income Americans.
That worries advocates, who say speed will result in eligible residents being incorrectly terminated. Also, it could hamper shifting those who no longer qualify to other types of coverage.
“This is the fable of the tortoise and the hare,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown UniversityCenter for Children and Families. “Taking time is absolutely going to result in a better outcome for eligible children and families to remain covered. So speed is a big concern.”
The five states will start cutting off coverage in April, followed by 14 more states in May and 20 additional states plus the District of Columbia in June. All states must complete their redeterminations over the next 14 months.
Around 15 million people could be dropped from Medicaid, according to various estimates, though several million folks could find coverage elsewhere. Others may still be eligible but could be terminated for procedural reasons, such as not completing renewal forms. Those at risk include at least 6.7 million children, according to a Georgetown analysis.
Medicaid enrollment has ballooned since March 2020, when lawmakers passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which prevented states from involuntarily removing anyone from coverage. In exchange, Congress boosted states’ federal Medicaid match rates by 6.2 percentage points.
The provision was initially tied to the national public health emergency, but lawmakers changed that as part of the federal spending bill that passed in December. In addition to being able to start conducting terminations in April, states will receive an enhanced federal match through the rest of this year, though it will phase downover time.
More than 92 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in December, up 31% since February 2020, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Reviewing the eligibility of all those enrollees will be a monumental task for state Medicaid agencies, many of which are also contending with slim staffing. To gear up, they are hiring new employees, temporary workers or contractors or bringing back retirees, according to a recent survey conducted by Georgetown and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Most states can automatically renew coverage for at least some of their enrollees using other data, such as state wage information. But agencies must get in touch with others in their Medicaid programs, which proved challenging even prior to the pandemic. Most states are using multiple methods to update enrollees’ contact information, including working with insurers that provide Medicaid coverage to residents.
If notices sent by mail are returned, states must make good faith attempts to contact enrollees through at least two other methods before cutting them off. And states have to adhere to additional requirements to continue to qualify for the enhanced match. If they don’t, CMS also could suspend their terminations, require they take corrective action or impose monetary penalties.
Of the roughly 15 million people who could lose Medicaid coverage, about 8.2 million will no longer qualify, according to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis released in August. Some 2.7 million of these folks would qualify for enhanced federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies that could bring their monthly premiums to as low as $0.
Some 6.8 million people, however, will be disenrolled even though they remain eligible.
Though the federal government has given states more than a year to conduct the eligibility reviews and terminations, some plan to move much more quickly.
Idaho, which has been monitoring enrollees’ eligibility throughout the pandemic, plans to complete its reevaluations by September, which it touts as one of the fastest timelines in the country.
Of the nearly 450,000 Idahoans in the program, about 150,000 of them either don’t qualify or haven’t been in touch with the state in the past three years. The state began sending notices in February to those who face termination. People have 60 days to respond before they are removed.
Those that are not eligible have 60 days from their termination date to enroll in Idaho’s state-based Obamacare exchange, Your Health Idaho. The exchange receives information nightly from the state Medicaid agency about residents who no longer qualify for public coverage but may be eligible for federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies.
The exchange is reaching out to those folks weekly while they still have Medicaid and then every 15 days during the two-month special enrollment period via various methods, including mail, email and text messages, said Pat Kelly, Your Health Idaho’s executive director.
The exchange works with 900 agents, brokers and enrollment counselors who can help folks sign up for policies. And it plans to start an advertising campaign this monthhighlighting the hefty subsidies.
“We have to really help Idahoans know and understand that low-cost options are available, and most importantly, that it’s comprehensive health insurance that they can get for $0 a month,” Kelly said.
Still, advocates in Idaho are concerned that the state’s push to unwind quickly will result in eligible residents losing coverage.
Many people are not aware that they once again need to prove that they qualify, and the state agency is understaffed and underfunded, said Hillarie Hagen, health policy associate at Idaho Voices for Children. Renewal letters may not make it to enrollees, and those who need help may not be able to get through to customer service.
“We are very concerned about families, and particularly children, losing health coverage without their knowledge – that they will find out when they show up to the doctor,” Hagen said.
Aware that many people don’t know they’ll have to renew their eligibility, Arizona’s Medicaid agency last summer sent text messages and letters and made robocalls to enrollees, asking them to update their contact information. It is also working with community partners, health care providers, pharmacies and insurers. And it’s ramping up another text campaign since the prior one was so successful, said Heidi Capriotti, public information officer for the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System.
While the state can automatically redetermine the eligibility of about 75% of its Medicaid participants, it still has to connect with about 670,000 residents who could lose coverage because they are no longer eligible or they haven’t responded to the agency’s requests. The state plans to take 12 months to assess whether its enrollees still qualify.
South Dakota will start terminating Medicaid enrollees in April, though some low-income adults may become eligible again in July, when the state’s Medicaid expansion program begins.
Voters approved the broadening of Medicaid to low-income adults at the ballot box in November, over the objections of the Republican governor and legislature.
Nearly 152,000 residents were enrolled in Medicaid in January, an increase of more than 30% from March 2020, according to the state’s Department of Social Services. But more than 22,000 people appear to be ineligible currently.
The agency said in an FAQ that it will prioritize reviewing folks who are most likely to be ineligible because they no longer meet a coverage group or their income has increased, among other reasons.
Those who are not eligible will be disenrolled with 10-days’ notice. If they appear eligible for expansion in July, they’ll receive a notice about it when they are terminated and sent a reminder in June.The agency is encouraging any enrollees who are determined to be ineligible to reapply after Medicaid expansion takes effect.
But that three-month gap can wreak havoc on low-income residents’ health, said Jen Dreiske, deputy director of South Dakota Voices for Peace, which is working with the state’s immigrants and refugees to inform them of the unwinding. These folks may have to go without their heart medication or their cancer treatment. They may also be afraid to go to the doctor because of the cost.
“Why can’t we just wait until July 1?” Dreiske said. “Our concern is that people are going to get sick or die because they’re not going to be able to access the health care that they so desperately need.”
Across the United States, more than 150 million people are being faced with the possibility of a new reality: life without TikTok.
The wildly popular short-form video app has been at the center of an ongoing battle, with lawmakers calling for an outright ban, and the company portraying itself as a critical community space, educational platform and just plain fun.
Its abrupt departure was met with mixed reactions: disappointment from some users and content creators, but also relief from others who say life is better without the app’s infinite scroll.
At the time of its exit, TikTok had a relatively modest presence in the city and was not ubiquitous like it is in the US today.
But the varied reactions to its departure, and the way users have pivoted to other platforms or even real-life offline communities, offer Americans a glimpse into their potential TikTok-less future.
TikTok announced its exit from Hong Kong in July 2020, a week after China imposed a controversial national security law in the city. The decision came as the app tried to distance itself from China and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, in the face of growing pressure in the US under the Trump administration.
But it meant a jarring halt for creators likeShivani Dukhande, who had roughly 45,000 followers at the time the app left Hong Kong.
Dukhande, 25, saw her account take off in early 2020 during the pandemic, with lifestyle content such as cooking and wellness videos flourishing on the platform.
“There were a lot of new creators emerging,” she said. “We used to all collaborate together, we had a chat where we would all speak and share ideas and it created a community.”
Momentum began to build. Companies started reaching out to Dukhande, paying for sponsored content and collaborating on ad campaigns. Brands began partnering with creators on trending “challenges” in a bid to attract young new consumers.
“More people were joining and it was becoming such a fun thing to do,” she said. “Then, it just kind of went away one morning.”
“If it continued, then I probably could have made enough to have quit my 9 to 5,” she said. “If I had the chance to grow, it could have been a potential career path.”
This is one of the main arguments TikTok has made in recent weeks in the US. In March, as the company’s CEO prepared to testify before Congress, TikTok produced a docuseries highlighting American small business owners who rely on the platform for their livelihoods.
The platform is used by nearly five million businesses in the US, TikTok said in March. And it’s set to surpass rivals: London-based research firm Omdia projected in November that TikTok’s advertising revenues will exceed the combined video ad revenues of Meta – home of Facebook and Instagram – and YouTube by 2027.
This is partly because people are spending more time on TikTok. In the second quarter of 2022, TikTok users globally spent an average of 95 minutes per day on the app, according to data analytics firm SensorTower – nearly twice as much time as users spent on Facebook and Instagram.
But in Hong Kong, other platforms have jumped in to fill the gap. Reels, Instagram’s short-form video product, with similar features as TikTok such as an endless scroll, is growing quickly – and Dukhande has gotten on board.
She had to rebuild her audience from scratch, and now has 12,500 Instagram followers, but she feels optimistic about its growth. Still, the loss of TikTok was a “missed opportunity,” she said, and the burgeoning community of creators has largely faded from sight.
“The amount of jobs, the amount of content creation, the amount of marketing opportunities that were there with TikTok – we sort of missed out on that whole chunk of it.”
But for some people, TikTok’s departure was a welcome change.
Poppy Anderson, 16, has been using TikTok since its launch in 2018. And, like many others in her generation, she would spend hours “scrolling and scrolling” – even when feeling unfulfilled.
“It was very easy to kind of find exactly what you like on there, because the [algorithm-run] For You page kept you there,” she said. “And it’s entertaining, but you don’t really get anything from it.”
She described TikTok as often being a toxic environment that breeds narrow thinking, herd mentality, a misguided “cancel culture” and inappropriate online behavior such as critiquing the bodies of girls and women. Even people she knew in real life began acting differently after joining the app, which strained friendships, she said.
Martin Poon, 15, also grew weary of TikTok, but it was hard to quit.
“Everyone was using it, so I feel like there was a sense that you have to use it, you have to be on top of things, you have to know what’s going on. And I think that was stressful to me,” he said.
Misinformation and misogyny ran rampant on TikTok, with accounts like those of Andrew Tate, the self-styled “alpha male” recently detained in Romania on allegations of human trafficking and rape, gaining popularity among boys at Poon’s school.
“It’s just concerning how [these accounts] have so much impact on the youth, and it has so much grip on what we think and how it affects our behavior,” said Poon – though he added that misinformation is a major problem on all social media platforms, not just TikTok.
Experts have long worried about the impact of TikTok on young people’s mental health, with one study claiming the app may surface potentially harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders to teenagers within minutes of them creating an account.
In response to growing pressure, TikTok recently announced a one-hour daily screentime limit for users under 18, though users will be able to turn off this default setting.
Anderson acknowledged some positives about TikTok, like open conversations about mental health. Still, she was glad when the app became inaccessible. Falling asleep became easier without the lure of TikTok. “I didn’t have the self control to get off it on my own,” she said.
For Poon and his friend Ava Chan, also 15, TikTok’s disappearance sparked new beginnings.
When the app left in 2020, they were doing online classes, isolated from friends and bored at home. At the time, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts had yet to arrive in Hong Kong.
“We had to figure out how to use our time other than being on TikTok,” said Chan. “For us, that was exploring our passions more.”
For both, that came in advocating for the neurodiverse community. They launched a club at schoolthat spreads education and awareness about neurodiversity, as well as participating in volunteer activities with neurodiverse people.
Both said it lent them a sense of purpose, and as time went on, they saw other benefits.
Their friends, who would previously spend time filming and watching TikToks together, began having more face-to-face conversations. They noticed peers begin exercising outdoors more, which was made easier as Covid restrictions lifted. Their mental health improved.
Of course, being teenagers, they’re not off social media entirely and use it as a tool to promote their club – but it’s far from the previous hours of scrolling. And while they occasionally wonder what’s happening on TikTok outside Hong Kong, the allure of it is lost when nobody else around them uses it either.
“A lot of people, they’ve just kind of forgotten about it,” said Anderson. “People move to different platforms – or just move on.”
