A judge on Monday denied Elizabeth Holmes’ request to remain free while she appeals her conviction, setting the stage for the disgraced Theranos founder to report to prison later this month.
In his order, Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California said Holmes does not pose a danger to the community or a flight risk, but he cast doubt on her appeal. Even if Homes won her appeal, he said, it is unlikely to result in a reversal, or an order for a new trial, for all of the counts on which she was found guilty.
Davila previously ordered Holmes to turn herself into custody on April 27, 2023.
Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last November, after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the failed blood testing startup Theranos. Attorneys for Holmes did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on the ruling.
Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and the former chief operating officer at Theranos, was also found guilty on multiple counts of fraud in a separate trial. He was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison last December. Balwani’s request to remain out of prison during his appeal was also denied, and he has been ordered by Davila to surrender to prison on April 20.
Once valued at $9 billion, Theranos attracted top investors and retail partners with claims that it had developed technology to test for a wide range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. The 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.
Holmes’ trial was initially delayed multiple times, due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and then because of her pregnancy. Following her sentencing in November, Holmes sought to delay the start of her prison term after giving birth to her second child.
While Davila denied Holmes represented a flight risk, he also addressed the fact that she had previously booked a one-way ticket to Mexico in January 2022.
“Booking international travel plans for a criminal defendant in anticipation of a complete defense victory is a bold move, and the failure to promptly cancel those plans after a guilty verdict is a perilously careless oversight,” Davila wrote in the court filing.
Holmes’ attorneys had previously claimed that Holmes had hoped the verdict would be different when booking the travel plans and that she wanted to make this trip to attend the wedding of friends in Mexico. Davila wrote in court documents that the court accepts Holmes’ “representation that the oneway flight ticket—while ill-advised—was not an attempt to flee the country.”
On a recent Sunday morning, I found myself in a pair of ill-fitting scrubs, lying flat on my back in the claustrophobic confines of an fMRI machine at a research facility in Austin, Texas. “The things I do for television,” I thought.
Anyone who has had an MRI or fMRI scan will tell you how noisy it is — electric currents swirl creating a powerful magnetic field that produces detailed scans of your brain. On this occasion, however, I could barely hear the loud cranking of the mechanical magnets, I was given a pair of specialized earphones that began playing segments from The Wizard of Oz audiobook.
Why?
Neuroscientists at the University of Texas in Austin have figured out a way to translate scans of brain activity into words using the very same artificial intelligence technology that powers the groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT.
The breakthrough could revolutionize how people who have lost the ability to speak can communicate. It’s just one pioneering application of AI developed in recent months as the technology continues to advance and looks set to touch every part of our lives and our society.
“So, we don’t like to use the term mind reading,” Alexander Huth, assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “We think it conjures up things that we’re actually not capable of.”
Huth volunteered to be a research subject for this study, spending upward of 20 hours in the confines of an fMRI machine listening to audio clips while the machine snapped detailed pictures of his brain.
An artificial intelligence model analyzed his brain and the audio he was listening to and, over time, was eventually able to predict the words he was hearing just by watching his brain.
The researchers used the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI’s first language model, GPT-1, that was developed with a massive database of books and websites. By analyzing all this data, the model learned how sentences are constructed — essentially how humans talk and think.
The researchers trained the AI to analyze the activity of Huth and other volunteers’ brains while they listened to specific words. Eventually the AI learned enough that it could predict what Huth and others were listening to or watching just by monitoring their brain activity.
I spent less than a half-hour in the machine and, as expected, the AI wasn’t able to decode that I had been listening to a portion of The Wizard of Oz audiobook that described Dorothy making her way along the yellow brick road.
Huth listened to the same audio but because the AI model had been trained on his brain it was accurately able to predict parts of the audio he was listening to.
While the technology is still in its infancy and shows great promise, the limitations might be a source of relief to some. AI can’t easily read our minds, yet.
“The real potential application of this is in helping people who are unable to communicate,” Huth explained.
He and other researchers at UT Austin believe the innovative technology could be used in the future by people with “locked-in” syndrome, stroke victims and others whose brains are functioning but are unable to speak.
“Ours is the first demonstration that we can get this level of accuracy without brain surgery. So we think that this is kind of step one along this road to actually helping people who are unable to speak without them needing to get neurosurgery,” he said.
While breakthrough medical advances are no doubt good news and potentially life-changing for patients struggling with debilitating ailments, it also raises questions about how the technology could be applied in controversial settings.
Could it be used to extract a confession from a prisoner? Or to expose our deepest, darkest secrets?
The short answer, Huth and his colleagues say, is no — not at the moment.
For starters, brain scans need to occur in an fMRI machine, the AI technology needs to be trained on an individual’s brain for many hours, and, according to the Texas researchers, subjects need to give their consent. If a person actively resists listening to audio or thinks about something else the brain scans will not be a success.
“We think that everyone’s brain data should be kept private,” said Jerry Tang, the lead author on a paper published earlier this month detailing his team’s findings. “Our brains are kind of one of the final frontiers of our privacy.”
Tang explained, “obviously there are concerns that brain decoding technology could be used in dangerous ways.” Brain decoding is the term the researchers prefer to use instead of mind reading.
“I feel like mind reading conjures up this idea of getting at the little thoughts that you don’t want to let slip, little like reactions to things. And I don’t think there’s any suggestion that we can really do that with this kind of approach,” Huth explained. “What we can get is the big ideas that you’re thinking about. The story that somebody is telling you, if you’re trying to tell a story inside your head, we can kind of get at that as well.”
Last week, the makers of generative AI systems, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, descended on Capitol Hill to testify before a Senate committee over lawmakers’ concerns of the risks posed by the powerful technology. Altman warned that the development of AI without guardrails could “cause significant harm to the world” and urged lawmakers to implement regulations to address concerns.
Echoing the AI warning, Tang told CNN that lawmakers need to take “mental privacy” seriously to protect “brain data” — our thoughts — two of the more dystopian terms I’ve heard in the era of AI.
While the technology at the moment only works in very limited cases, that might not always be the case.
“It’s important not to get a false sense of security and think that things will be this way forever,” Tang warned. “Technology can improve and that could change how well we can decode and change whether decoders require a person’s cooperation.”
President Joe Biden wasn’t planning to take questions on Thursday. His helicopter was waiting outside on the White House’s South Lawn.
But after a 10-minute statement on the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, a CNN reporter called out, “Is this a rogue court?” The president stopped in his tracks.
Pausing to think a moment, he looked over his shoulder. “This is not a normal court,” he said before leaving.
This week’s monumental rulings – striking down affirmative action in college admissions and unraveling Biden’s student debt relief plan among them – amount to serious setbacks for a president who promised as a candidate to advance racial equity and erase student debt.
They are also an urgent reminder to Democrats of the enduring consequences of elections at a moment Biden’s advisers are searching for ways to inject enthusiasm into his bid for another term.
What impact that will have on the coming election remains unknown. But Biden and his team have already begun assigning blame on Republicans for dismantling programs that have benefited young, college-educated and minority voters – all critical components of the Democratic coalition Biden will need to mobilize if he hopes to win reelection.
That three justices within the court’s conservative majority were appointed by President Donald Trump – both Biden’s predecessor and, according to polls, his most likely opponent next year – creates even more of an impetus for Biden to use the rulings as a political cudgel as his campaign heats up.
“The excesses of the Supreme Court are going to backfire,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat. “You know, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe versus Wade reduced what was supposed to be a red wave in the 2022 election cycle to nothing more than a red trickle. So not only is the Supreme Court’s decision bad law, it’s also bad politics and it’s going to come back to haunt the Republican Party.”
Speaking to a group of Democratic donors in New York City on Thursday evening, Biden sought to underscore the stakes of the court’s new supermajority, a preview of how he’ll frame the issue over the coming year.
“The Supreme Court is becoming not just conservative, but almost – it’s like a throwback. It’s like a throwback, some of the decisions they’re making,” Biden told donors in a private dining room inside the Seagram Building. “Did you ever think we’d be in a position, after 50 years of acknowledging the right of privacy in the Constitution, suggesting that there’s no such thing as the right to privacy?”
Despite his criticism of the court, Biden has rejected some liberal suggestions on reforming the panel. He opposes expanding the number of justices that sit on the court and hasn’t embraced term limits.
“If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it, maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy,” Biden said during a friendly interview on MSNBC shortly after Thursday’s decision on affirmative action.
Biden’s student loan plan, which came about last year after months of agonizing internal debate over its costs and eligibility criteria, was intended to free low- and middle-income Americans from crippling debt.
Throughout the process, Biden expressed concern at being seen as offering a handout to the wealthy. Eventually, pressure to fulfill one of his top campaign promises led to the plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for certain borrowers.
For months the White House publicly said there was no alternative plan if the Supreme Court struck down the student debt relief program. But behind the scenes, top White House officials were working for several weeks to fulfill a simple directive from the president to “be ready in the event the Supreme Court did not do the right thing,” White House officials said.
The president’s charge to his team was described as this: “If the court ruled against the program, find other ways to deliver relief for as many working and middle-class borrowers as possible, accounting for all the legal issues.”
For the past few weeks, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients gathered his team for weekly meetings to map out all scenarios for the Supreme Court’s ruling and explore all legal avenues available to them after the president told his team to build a “fully developed response” to all possible rulings, officials said.
Zient’s office – led by deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian, the Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council and White House Counsel’s Office – worked with the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to come up with options the administration could take if the ruling was not in their favor.
“All of these meetings were structured around one question – how would we be able to deliver relief to as many borrowers as we could, as quickly as possible under any possible outcome of the Supreme Court,” official said.
The White House also stayed in touch with and fielded suggestions for next steps from debt relief advocate groups and congressional allies throughout the process. Lawyers from the White House, Justice Department and Education Department examined all of the recommendations, including administration action and the legal authorities available to the administration, and ultimately crafted responses for multiple scenarios.
Inside the White House, some officials had held out hope the court would uphold Biden’s student debt program, pointing to some surprising decisions over the past weeks that saw some conservative justices joining liberals on issues of voting rights and congressional redistricting.
But even Biden acknowledged after the court’s oral arguments in February he wasn’t certain the ruling would go his way.
“I’m confident we’re on the right side of the law,” Biden told CNN in March when asked if he was confident the administration would prevail in the case. “I’m not confident of the outcome of the decision yet.”
His instinct was correct. The president was in the Oval Office on Friday morning when he was informed of the Supreme Court’s decision by his senior aides and then engaged in meetings stretching into the afternoon to fine-tune their response after the ruling was not in their favor.
Ultimately, the president directed his team to move forward with a new plan, which includes pursuing a new path for debt relief through the authorities in the Higher Education Act of 1965, which was promoted by some debt relief advocate groups and progressive lawmakers, as well as creating a temporary 12-month “on-ramp repayment” program for federal student loan borrowers when payments resume in October.
A day earlier, Biden was watching the news on television when the affirmative action decision was handed down by the court, according to an official. A team from the White House counsel’s office came to brief him on the ruling.
“In our conversations with the White House about why student debt cancelation was needed, it’s about reducing the racial wealth gap,” said Wisdom Cole, national director of the Youth & College division at the NAACP. “If the administration is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, they must use every tool in their toolkit. Every legal authority to ensure that we see relief happen.”
Demonstrating urgency in responding to the court’s actions was a key objective as the White House prepared for both rulings, according to people familiar with the matter.
Looming over the preparations was the impression left after last year’s Supreme Court term that the Biden administration was unprepared for the decision striking down the nationwide right to abortion, despite a leaked court opinion months ahead of time indicating the justices were prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The White House has strongly denied it was caught flat-footed on abortion and has pointed to actions taken in the months after the decision to expand access, including to medication abortion.
The issue proved galvanizing to Democratic voters in November’s midterm elections and has propelled Democratic victories even in traditionally Republican districts.
Whether the court’s ruling on student debt relief and affirmative action can have a similar effect will prove critical over the coming year, as Biden works to convince voters he is still fighting to fulfill his promises. Initial reaction from progressive Democrats was positive.
“It was not a foregone conclusion that the President would act so swiftly today. But he announced an alternative path to student debt cancellation by using his Higher Education Act authority given by Congress – and that deserves praise,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute.
Iowa’s state House passed a bill Tuesday night that would ban most abortions in the state as early as six weeks into pregnancy, acting quickly in the special session ordered by GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds with the sole purpose of restricting the procedure in the state.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where it must earn approval before it can move to Reynold’s desk for her signature.
Senate File 579 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.
The bill 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.
The state House voted 56-34 largely along party lines to advance the measure following a roughly 12-hour day that saw the measure move through rounds of consideration and debate. Debate in the state Senate continued late into Tuesday night.
The bill would immediately take effect with Reynolds’ expected signature.
However, 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.
“There may or may not ever be rules promulgated,” said Iowa Senate President Amy Sinclair, a Republican, amid several questions from Democrats on the floor. There were no legal penalties for physicians added in the bill, she said.
“As far as clarity, this is about as clear as mud,” Democratic state Sen. Molly Donahue said on the floor.
The new bill and its 2018 predecessor are nearly identical, though the latter was not enacted immediately, granting the board of medicine time to flesh out how it planned to administer the law.
Democratic backlash to the bill and Reynolds’ special session grew throughout the day, with state House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst saying in a statement, “Women are not free when they cannot make their own healthcare decisions. And after today, women won’t be free.”
Iowa’s Senate Democratic Leader Pam Jochum said in a statement that her Republican colleagues were “ignoring Iowans in their rush to pass an extreme ban” and that “their actions today threaten the health and futures of all Iowa women.”
“This extreme Republican power grab infringes on the personal freedom of every Iowa woman and girl. There are women alive today who will not be alive in six months because of this law,” Jochum added.
Former Vice President Mike Pence posted his support of the bill on Twitter Tuesday night, writing, “Grateful to see Iowa Republicans and Governor @KimReynoldsIA Standing For Life! Pro-Life Americans are Cheering You On!”
As the US Army moves to a new way to measure soldiers’ body fat, officials acknowledged Wednesday that some soldiers who had previously passed under the old regulations may now fail under the new.
The Army is changing its tape test – a method to measure soldiers’ body fat by taking the circumference of various parts of a soldier’s body with a measuring tape. The tape test, an often-dreaded practice among soldiers, is used when soldiers’ weights do not fall within the mandated body mass index screening table.
Previously, men were taped around their neck and abdomen, while women were taped around their neck, waist, and hips. Now, all soldiers regardless of gender will be taped in one area – around the navel – to calculate their body fat.
Many soldiers had cheered the Army’s efforts to update its Body Composition Program when the study started in 2021.
But Holly McClung, a lead researcher on the Army’s Body Composition Study that resulted in the change, told reporters Wednesday that more soldiers will fail the new test.
Army data provided to CNN showed that 34% of people were passing the previous version of the tape test when they should have failed. The new test is expected to align with the regulations and lead to more failures, the data said.
The change is a potential concern considering that soldiers who fail to meet the weight standards can be separated from the service, after several months of attempting to get within their weight standard.
Asked about concerns over more soldiers potentially failing because of the updated body composition study, Sgt. Maj. Christopher Stevens, the senior enlisted leader of the Army’s personnel office, told reporters on Wednesday that the Army is “putting everything on the table to really look at how we can ensure that we continue to assess and retain quality.”
The tape test practice has long been criticized as outdated and inaccurate, particularly as the Army shifted to a new fitness test that introduced more weightlifting than the old test, sparking concerns that the body assessment wouldn’t account for gaining muscle mass.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the measurement of waist circumference can help predict who may be at higher risk of developing obesity-related health problems like diabetes and heart disease, but it is not a diagnostic tool to determine body fatness or health.
Indeed, the Army said in March that soldiers “with a high volume of lean muscle mass were still at risk of failing the body fat assessment.” So the Army made an exemption for soldiers who scored a 540 out of 600 total points on the Army Combat Fitness Test, saying that those soldiers would not need to be taped. The exemption requires a minimum of 80 out of 100 points earned in each of the six fitness tests.
“As soldiers leverage all domains of Holistic Health and Fitness and strive to reach their maximum potential, our policies should encourage their progress, not constrain It,” Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston said at the time.
McClung said Wednesday that efforts by the Army to link data of body composition to soldiers’ performance is “kind of groundbreaking.”
“And what we hope is that over years to come, maybe the bar will get heightened and that it won’t be a 540 it’ll be a 550, it’ll be a continuous moving benchmark because the soldiers will become more fit,” she said.
For the next year, soldiers will have the option of using the previous measuring methods if they fail the tape test under the new regulations. If a soldier fails both, they have the option of requesting another assessment using specific machines that use X-ray or other methods to measure body fat.
Soldiers who still weigh outside the required standard for their gender and height are enrolled in the Army Body Composition Program, which is meant to help them lose weight and get back within standards. Army regulations say they will be provided “exercise guidance” by a fitness trainer in the unit and meet with a registered dietitian.
Soldiers who fail to get within standards after six months can be separated from the service.
McClung said Wednesday that those who had been inaccurately passing would not be “necessarily separated from the Army.”
“We want to help them,” she said, “we want to put them on a health promotion track, work with some dietitians and some trainers, and bring them up to standards.”
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.”
