Tag: demographic groups

Gen Z and Millennials are scrimping. Boomers? Living it up | CNN Business

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New York
CNN Business
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Baby Boomers are living it up, splurging on cruises and restaurants. Younger Americans are struggling just to keep up.

Bank of America internal data shows a “significant gap” in spending has opened recently between older and younger generations.

While Baby Boomers and even Traditionalists (born 1928-1945) are ramping up spending, Gen X, Gen Z and Millennials are cutting back as they grapple with high housing costs and looming student debt payments.

“It’s fairly unusual,” David Tinsley, senior economist at the Bank of America Institute, told CNN in a phone interview.

Overall, household spending dipped 0.2% year-over-year in May, according to the bank’s card data — but the generational breakdown showed a more varied picture.

Spending increased by 5.3% for Traditionalists and 2.2% for Baby Boomers. In contrast, spending fell by about 1.5% for younger generations.

If not for the aggressive spending by Boomers, Tinsley said, overall consumer spending would have been even more negative.

So, what is going on?

Older Americans are ramping up spending as they benefit from a spike in Social Security payments.

Starting in January, Social Security recipients received an 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment, the biggest increase since 1981. That increase — caused directly by high inflation — is boosting the average retirees’ monthly payments by an estimated $146.

Bank of America spending data shows a noticeable bump in spending by households that received the cost-of-living boost.

However, the bank noticed the spending surge by older Americans is happening among high-income households too. And those consumers are less likely to be impacted by the spike in Social Security payments.

“That can’t be the whole story,” Tinsley said of the cost-of-living adjustments.

To explain the drop in spending by younger Americans, Bank of America pointed to high housing costs. In recent years, rental rates spiked, home prices soared and mortgage rates surged.

Younger Americans are also much more likely to move than older ones.

“The people who do move are really facing quite significant cost increases,” said Tinsley.

Bank of America has noted that older consumers are spending on travel, including hotels, airfare and cruises, now that the Covid emergency is over.

Due to Covid fears, older generations held back on travel during the pandemic, but now they are “splurging,” Tinsley said.

Beyond the high cost of living, Bank of America said many younger Americans are also likely bracing for the return of a significant monthly expense: student debt.

The bipartisan debt ceiling deal included a provision that specifically prevented the Biden administration from extending the pause on federal student loan payments.

The student debt freeze, in effect since March 2020 when the Covid pandemic erupted, is expected to conclude by the end of August.

That is particularly painful to younger consumers. Americans are sitting on $1.6 trillion of student debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and the vast majority of that student debt is held by those under the age of 49.

For millions of Gen Z and Millennials, the return of student debt payments will mean less money for spending on restaurants and vacations.

Some consumers may be starting to pull back on spending ahead of that change, Tinsley said: “It’s coming down the tracks pretty fast now.”

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June 12, 2023
Missing children found after 40 days in Amazon survived like ‘children of the jungle,’ Colombian president says | CNN

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CNN
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Four young children have been found alive after more than a month wandering the Amazon where they survived like “children of the jungle,” according to Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro.

“Their learning from indigenous families and their learning of living in the jungle has saved them,” Petro told reporters on Friday, after announcing on Twitter that they had been found 40 days after they went missing following a plane crash that killed their mother.

Petro said the children were all together when they were found, adding they had demonstrated an example of “total survival that will be remembered in history.”

“They are children of the jungle and now they are children of Colombia,” he added.

Revealing their discovery earlier in the day, the Colombian president had tweeted an image that seems to show search crews treating the children in a forest clearing, along with the words: “A joy for the whole country!”

Their grandmother, María Fátima Valencia, said she was “going to hug all of them” and “thank everyone” as soon as they were reunited in their home city of Villavicencio, where they live.

“I’m going to encourage them, I’m going to push them forward, I need them here,” she said.

The children, who appear gaunt in the photos, are being evaluated by doctors and will be taken to the town of San Jose del Guaviare. They are expected to receive further treatment in Bogota, the capital, according to Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez.

“We hope that tomorrow they will be treated at the military hospital,” he said, while praising the Colombian military and indigenous communities for helping find them.

Petro said the children were weak, needed food and would have their mental status assessed. “Let the doctors make their assessment and we will know,” he added.

Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, age 13, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 9, Tien Ranoque Mucutuy, 4, and infant Cristin Ranoque Mucutuy were stranded in the jungle on May 1, the only survivors of a deadly plane crash.

Their mother, Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia, was killed in the crash along with two other adult passengers: pilot Hernando Murcia Morales and Yarupari indigenous leader Herman Mendoza Hernández.

The children’s subsequent disappearance into the deep forest galvanized a massive military-led search operation involving over a hundred Colombian special forces troops and over 70 indigenous scouts combing the area.

For weeks, the search turned up only tantalizing clues, including footprints, a dirty diaper and a bottle. Family members said the oldest child had some experience in the forest, but hopes waned as the weeks went on.

At some point during their ordeal, they’d had to defend themselves from a dog, Petro said.

He called the children’s survival a “gift to life” and an indication that they were “cared for by the jungle.”

The Colombian president said he had spoken with the grandfather of the children who said that their survival was in the hands of the jungle which ultimately chose to return them.

The grandfather, Fidencio Valencia, said he and his wife had endured many sleepless nights worrying about the children.

“For us this situation was like being in the dark, we walked for the sake of walking. Living for the sake of living because the hope of finding them kept us alive. When we found the children we felt joy, we don’t know what to do, but we are grateful to God,” he said.

The children’s other grandfather, Narcizo Mucutuy, said he wants his grandchildren to be brought back home soon.

“I beg the president of Colombia to bring our grandchildren to Villavicencio, here where the grandparents are, where their uncles and aunts are, and then take them to Bogota,” he said.

Indigenous leader Lucho Acosta, the coordinator of indigenous scouts, credited the “extra effort” of search and rescue teams and local authorities to find the children in a statement on Friday.

“They all added a little effort so that this Operation Hope could be successful, and we can hope the kids will emerge alive and stronger than before. We have been hoping together with the strength of our ancestors, and our strength prevailed,” he said.

“We never stopped looking for them until the miracle came,” the Colombian Defense Ministry tweeted.

During a press conference Friday evening, Petro said he hoped to speak with the children on Saturday.

“The most important thing now is what the doctors say, they have been lost for 40 days, their health condition must have been stressed. We need to check their mental state too,” he said.

Petro, who was previously forced to backtrack after mistakenly tweeting that they had been found last month, described the children’s 40-day saga as “a remarkable testament of survival.”

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June 9, 2023
A Black mother of 4 was shot and killed by a neighbor. Her family wants the woman who shot her arrested | CNN

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CNN
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A mother of four was shot and killed in Florida following a longtime feud with a neighbor who had complained about the victim’s children playing outside, authorities and a family attorney said.

Deputies responded to a trespassing call Friday night and found one woman suffering from a gunshot wound, Marion County, Florida, Sheriff Billy Woods said in a Monday news conference.

The victim was identified by family attorneys as AJ Owens.

The shooter, also a woman, “engaged” with Owens’ children and threw a pair of skates, hitting the children, the sheriff said.

Following that interaction, one of the children went back inside their home and told their mother, who went to the neighbor’s home “to confront the lady,” the sheriff said.

According to the shooter, there was “a lot of aggressiveness” from both sides, as well as threats being made, and Owens was ultimately shot through the door, Woods said. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital, authorities said.

The woman who fired at Owens has been cooperating with law enforcement, the sheriff added. No arrest has been made in the case.

Authorities have not named the shooter or shared any identifying information. But civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of the attorneys representing the family, identified her as a White woman, according to a news release from his office Monday.

In a separate news conference held by Owens’ family attorneys, the victim’s mother said the neighbor who shot her daughter had called the family, including the children, racial slurs.

The neighbor’s door “never opened,” when Owens, who was Black, tried to confront her, and she was shot through the door, Pamela Dias, the victim’s mother said.

“My daughter, my grandchildren’s mother, was shot and killed with her 9-year-old son standing next to her. She had no weapon, she posed no imminent threat to anyone,” Dias said.

“What I’m asking is for justice,” she added. “Justice for my daughter.”

In Monday’s news conference, authorities pleaded for calm and patience as they investigated the shooting, worked to recover possible video footage and interview the children who witnessed the incident. The sheriff also asked for anyone with information to come forward.

While responding to criticism about how long the investigation and a possible arrest is taking, the sheriff referenced the state’s “stand your ground” law. The law allows people to meet “force with force” if they believe they or someone else is in danger of being seriously harmed by an assailant.

“What a lot of people don’t understand is that law has specific instructions for us in law enforcement,” he said. “Any time that we think, or perceive or believe that that might come into play, we cannot make an arrest, the law specifically says that.”

“What we have to rule out is whether the deadly force was justified or not before we can even make the arrest,” he said.

Authorities had received reports from the two neighbors dating back to at least January 2021, the sheriff said. Those reports included calls from the shooter complaining about Owens’ children, the sheriff said, adding that it was “children being children,” either being on someone’s property or playing in front of the multiplex.

“Here’s what I wish: I wish our shooter would have called us instead of taking actions into her own hands. I wish Ms. Owens would have called us, in hopes we could have never got to the point in which we are here today,” he said.

“Pray for those children. Pray for each and every one of them,” Woods added. “Their life has changed.”

The sheriff vowed to Owens’ family and friends that his office “is going to do everything to bring justice.”

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June 5, 2023
Kathleen Folbigg: Mother who served 20 years for killing her four babies pardoned | CNN

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Brisbane, Australia
CNN
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A woman condemned as Australia’s worst female serial killer has been pardoned after serving 20 years behind bars for killing her four children in what appears to be one of the country’s gravest miscarriages of justice.

New South Wales Attorney General Michael Daley intervened to order Kathleen Folbigg be freed, based on the preliminary findings of an inquiry that had found “reasonable doubt” as to her guilt for all four deaths.

Daley told a news conference Monday that he had spoken to the governor and recommended an unconditional pardon, which had been granted, and she would be released from Clarence Correctional Center the same day.

“This has been a terrible ordeal for everyone concerned and I hope that our actions today can put some closure on this 20-year-old matter,” said Daley, who added that he had informed Craig Folbigg, the babies’ father, of his decision. “It will be a tough day for him,” he said.

Kathleen Folbigg was jailed in 2003 on three counts of murder and one of manslaughter following the deaths of her four babies over a decade from 1989. In each case, she was the person who found their bodies, though there was no physical evidence that she had caused their deaths.

Instead, the jury relied on the prosecution’s argument that the chances of four babies from one family dying from natural causes before the age of 2 were so infinitesimally low as to be compared to pigs flying.

They also noted the contents of her diary, which contained passages that in isolation at the time were interpreted as confessions of guilt.

As recently as 2019, an inquiry into her convictions found there was no reasonable doubt she had committed the crimes. But another inquiry began last year after new scientific evidence emerged that provided a genetic explanation for the children’s deaths.

In her closing submissions, Sophie Callan, the lead counsel assisting the inquiry, said that “on the whole of the body of evidence before this inquiry there is a reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt.”

She also told the inquiry that in its closing submissions, the NSW director of public prosecutions had indicated she was also “open to the Inquiry to conclude there is reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt.”

Folbigg was just 20 years old when she married Craig Folbigg, who she’d met in her hometown of Newcastle on the northern New South Wales coast.

Within a year she fell pregnant with Caleb, who was born in February, 1989 and lived only 19 days. The next year, the Folbiggs had another son, Patrick, who died at eight months. Two years later, Sarah died at 10 months. Then in 1999, the couple’s fourth and longest lived child, Laura, died at 18 months.

The police investigation into the deaths of all four children began the day Laura died, but it was more than two years before Folbigg was arrested and charged. By then, the couple’s marriage had fallen apart, and Craig was cooperating with police to build a case against her.

He handed police her diaries, which prosecutors argued contained the deepest thoughts of a mother tortured by guilt for her role in her children’s deaths.

Examination of the babies’ remains failed to find any physical evidence they’d been suffocated, but without another plausible reason to explain their deaths, suspicion focused on Kathleen, their primary carer.

In 2003, as he sentenced Folbigg to 40 years in prison, Judge Graham Barr recalled her troubled past. Folbigg’s father had killed her mother when she was just 18 months old, and she had spent many of her formative years in foster care.

According to court documents, Barr said Folbigg’s prospects of rehabilitation were “negligible.”

“She will always be a danger if given the responsibility of caring for a child,” he said. “That must never happen.”

That initial conviction ruling now stands in stark contrast to the latest inquiry, which looks set to paint a far different picture of Folbigg as a loving mother who was devastated and confused by the successive deaths of her babies.

As he ordered her release Monday, Daley distributed a memorandum of the findings by retired judge Tom Bathurst, who said after reviewing the evidence he was “unable to accept … the proposition that Ms Folbigg was anything but a caring mother for her children.”

In the case of the two girls – Sarah and Laura – Bathurst found there was a “reasonable possibility” a genetic mutation known as CALM2-G114R “occasioned their deaths,” and that Sarah may have died from myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, identified during her autopsy.

In the case of Patrick, who had an unexplained ALTE, an apparent life-threatening event, when he was 4 months old and died at 8 months, Bathurst found that it’s possible his death was caused by an underlying neurogenic disorder.

During Folbigg’s 2003 trial, the prosecution used “coincidence and tendency” evidence to allege that Folbigg had also killed Caleb. In other words, that having been allegedly responsible for the deaths of three children, it was likely she killed him, too.

However, Bathurst found that the reasonable doubt over Folbigg’s role in his siblings’ deaths meant that the prosecution’s case against her for Caleb’s murder “falls away.”

In relation to her diaries, Bathurst said the “evidence suggests they were the writings of a grieving and possibly depressed mother, blaming herself for the death of each child, as distinct from admissions that she murdered or otherwise harmed them.”

Bathurst also expressed doubts about evidence from Craig Folbigg, who had claimed his wife had been “ill-tempered” with their children and had “growled at them from time to time.”

“The balance of evidence … (was) that she was a loving and caring mother,” wrote Bathurst, whose full report will be released at a later date.

Folbigg’s case has been compared to that of Lindy Chamberlain, who swore a dingo took her baby Azaria from the family’s campsite at Uluru in 1980.

The case polarized public opinion and Chamberlain was jailed before evidence emerged that she was telling the truth.

In 1986, Azaria’s matinee jacket was found half-buried in the dirt, prompting officials to free Chamberlain, later known as Chamberlain-Creighton. Two years later, a court overturned her conviction, and in 2012 a coroner ruled that a dingo was indeed to blame for Azaria’s death.

Like Chamberlain-Creighton, Folbigg’s release from prison could be the start of a long process to clear her name.

Daley told reporters Monday that Folbigg’s pardon only meant she did not have to serve the rest of her sentence, and that it would be up to the Court of Criminal Appeal to quash her convictions.

He said it was too early to talk about compensation, as that would require Folbigg to initiate civil proceedings against the New South Wales government, or to approach it seeking an ex-gratia payment.

Daley acknowledged that after 20 years of believing Folbigg’s guilt, some people may not accept her innocence.

“There will be some people who have strong views. There’s nothing I can do to disavow them of those views, (and) it’s not my role to do that,” he said.

But he suggested the events of the past two decades should elicit some compassion for a woman who has lost so much.

“We’ve got four little bubbas who are dead. We’ve got a husband and wife who lost each other. A woman who spent 20 years in jail, and a family that never had a chance. You’d not be human if you didn’t feel something,” he said.

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June 4, 2023
How could four children survive a plane crash in the Amazon? A new report offers clues | CNN

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CNN
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One month after four children vanished into the Colombian Amazon, a preliminary report by the country’s Civil Aviation Authority offers clues to how they could have survived the devastating airplane crash that killed every adult onboard.

The extraordinary story of the missing children has drawn intense interest across Colombia and internationally, as a massive military-led search operation continues in the forest.

The ill-fated flight on May 1 carried pilot Hernando Murcia Morales, Yarupari indigenous leader Herman Mendoza Hernández, an indigenous woman named Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia, and her four children, the eldest 13 years old and youngest just 11 months.

Soon after the early morning take-off from the remote community of Araracuara, the pilot radioed to air traffic control that he would look for an emergency landing spot, according to the report.

“…Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, 2803, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, I have the engine at minimum, I’m going to look for a field,” he said.

The pilot later updated that the engine had regained power, and continued on his way – only to hit trouble again less than an hour later: “…Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, 2803, 2803, The engine failed me again… I am going to look for a river… I have a river on the right…”

This time the problem did not improve.

Air traffic control later tracked the plane veering right, the report said. Then it went off the radar.

Despite air and water searches that immediately followed the incident, per the report, the plane would not be found until more than two weeks later – time that may yet prove significant in the fates of the plane’s passengers, as investigators continue to probe the crash and its aftermath.

Five days after the plane’s disappearance, the Colombian military deployed special forces units to search the ground on May 6. Ten days later, on the night of May 16, they finally spotted the wreckage.

The three adults were found dead at the scene. But all four children were missing entirely – leading rescuers to presume that they had survived, evacuated the plane and were trekking the jungle on their own, and spurring a renewed search effort.

Investigators’ photos of the crash scene show the raised tail of a small plane painted in still-crisp blue and white, its nose and front smashed into the jungle terrain. The report says the plane likely first hit the trees of the dense forest, tearing the engine and propeller off, followed by a vertical drop to the forest floor.

“Detailed inspection of the wreckage indicated that, during tree landing, there was a first impact against the trees; this blow caused the separation of the engine with its cover and propeller from the aircraft structure,” the report says. “Due to the strong deceleration and loss of control in the first impact, the aircraft fell vertically and collided with the ground.”

Though it notes that forensic examinations are ongoing, the report suggests that the adults seated in the front of the plane cabin suffered fatal injuries from the crash. “The diagram of injuries caused by the accident registered fatal injuries in the occupants located in positions 1 (Pilot), 2 (male adult occupant) and 3 (female adult occupant).

But the rear seats, where the older children were located, were less affected by the impact, according to the report, offering a potential explanation for their survival and signs of life – including a baby bottle, a used diaper, and footprints – later found in the jungle by search and rescue teams.

Two of three seats occupied by the children remained in place and upright despite the crash, according to the report, while one child’s seat came loose from the plane structure.

The infant may have been held in the mother’s arms, according to the report.

The children “were not located in the area of the accident, and there were no signs that they had been injured, at least not seriously. For this reason, an intense search began in order to find them,” it says.

A total of 119 Colombian special forces troops and 73 indigenous scouts have so far been deployed to comb the area, according to the report.

Relatives have previously said that the children knew the jungle well – but worried whether they would understand that the outside world had not given up on them.

“Maybe they are hiding,” said Fidencio Valencia, the children’s grandfather, speaking to Colombia’s Caracol TV earlier this month.

“Maybe they don’t realize that they are looking for them; they are children.”

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June 2, 2023
Utah toddler hit in the head by a stray bullet while playing in a fenced area of day care, police say | CNN

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CNN
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A 2-year-old boy is recovering at a Utah hospital after being hit in the head by a stray bullet while playing with other children outside in the fenced area of a day care, police said.

Police have identified a man who was shooting birds with a .22 caliber air rifle in an area west of the day care, which is located in Spanish Fork. The man is cooperating with investigators and will be identified only if formal charges against him are filed, according to the Spanish Fork Police Department.

On Monday, several children were playing “in the vinyl fenced area” staffed by two adults when a child “appeared to stumble and was seen bleeding from the face,” police said. The day care notified the parents who then brought their child to the hospital for treatment, police said.

“Detectives are continuing to investigate where the bullet may have been shot from and why,” Spanish Fork police said in a statement Tuesday. “It appears this was a tragic accident. Open fields are directly west of the daycare and it is believed the round may have come from that area.”

At the hospital, doctors discovered a small caliber bullet lodged in the toddler’s head and he was then transferred to Primary Children’s Hospital where he’s currently in stable condition and improving, according to a Wednesday update from police.

When the investigation is completed, the case will be handed over to Spanish Fork city prosecutors for review of any charges, police said.

“I still feel like I’m in shock,” said Lane Mugleston, who owns the day care with his wife, told CNN affiliate KSLTV. “We are absolutely surprised. We are dumbfounded that this would happen in Spanish Fork.”

Mugleston told KSLTV that at first, the staff didn’t think the child was injured by a stray bullet.

“Initially, we thought he just had tripped and hit his head,” he said.

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May 27, 2023
Amid rounds of dueling backlash, Dodgers apologize to drag charity group after uninviting them from Pride Night event | CNN

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CNN
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The Los Angeles Dodgers have apologized and extended a new invitation to a drag group after earlier disinviting them from the team’s upcoming Pride Night at Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers had initially intended to honor the Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag group that leads charity and activism efforts in the city, with a Community Hero Award at their Pride event on June 16. But after a wave of conservative backlash against the drag group’s use of Catholic imagery and other religious garb, the team removed the Sisters from their list of honorees last week.

The decision to rescind the invitation prompted another round of criticism – this time from LGBTQ advocates, fans and allies who expressed disappointment that the team had acquiesced to pressure from anti-LGBTQ critics.

On Monday, the Dodgers reversed course again, announcing in a statement that they will include the Sisters, after all.

“After much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Los Angeles Dodgers would like to offer our sincerest apologies to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, members of the LGBTQ+ community and their friends and families,” the MLB team said.

The drag group confirmed that they will accept the Community Hero Award.

On Monday, two board members of the organization met with Dodgers President and CEO Stan Kasten as well as heads of Los Angeles LGBTQ community organizations and local government officials, where a “full apology and explanation was given to us by the Dodgers staff which we accept,” the Sisters said in a statement.

The Sisters said they believe the apology is sincere. “In the future, if similar pressures from outside our community arise, our two organizations will consult and assist each other in responding” alongside other LGBTQ community members, the group’s statement said.

Among those who balked at the Sisters’ recognition were Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio and Bill Donahue, the president of the Catholic League, an organization that says it protects religious and civil rights.

Donahue in a statement called the Sisters an “obscene anti-Catholic group” and dismissed the Pride event as “rewarding hate speech.”

The Sisters said the ordeal has been “an opportunity for learning with a silver lining.”

“Our group has been strengthened, protected and uplifted to a position where we may now offer our message of hope and joy to far more people than before. With great love and respect, we thank each person and each organization that have spoken up for us,” their statement said.

The Dodgers said they “will continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves, find ways to strengthen the ties that bind and use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodgers family.”

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May 22, 2023
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, enters the 2024 GOP primary | CNN Politics

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CNN
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South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Monday formally entered the Republican presidential primary, promising to take on “the radical left” and bring faith and conservative, business-friendly policies to the White House, as he seeks to upend a contest that has so far been dominated by coverage of former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to enter the fray in the coming days.

The most prominent Black figure in the Republican Party, Scott addressed supporters at his alma mater, Charleston Southern University, in his hometown of North Charleston.

“I’m the candidate the far-left fears the most. You see, when I cut your taxes, they called me a prop. When I refunded the police, they called me a token. When I pushed back on President Biden, they even called me the ‘n-word,’” Scott said. “I disrupt their narrative. I threaten their control. The truth of my life disrupts their lies.”

Following the announcement, Scott heads to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina – states he frequented on his “Faith in America” tour in the run-up to his announcement – before returning to the Hawkeye State next week for GOP Sen. Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” gathering.

Scott, 57, is no stranger to pathbreaking campaigns. In 2010, he became the first Black Republican elected to the US House of Representatives from South Carolina in more than a century. Years later, after being appointed to his Senate seat (he won a special election to retain the seat), Scott made history as the first Black US Senator from his native South Carolina.

Ahead of his entry into the presidential race, senior campaign officials briefed reporters on their view of the path forward, acknowledging he will need to win over support from Trump and DeSantis, but vowing – in a veiled dig at both – that his candidacy will strike a more optimistic tone and condemn the culture of victimhood and grievance that, as his aides described it, has taken over both parties.

“Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing,” Scott said. “Victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness? I choose freedom and hope and opportunity.”

Trump and his team will avoid going after Tim Scott for now, two sources close to the former president told CNN. The directive from Trump has been to stay away from attacks on the South Carolina senator at the moment.

Last week, the Trump-aligned super PAC, MAGA, Inc., weighed in on Scott’s looming announcement, but used it to level an attack on DeSantis, not Scott.

The former president used that approach on Monday as he wished Scott “good luck” while taking a shot at DeSantis.

“Good luck to Senator Tim Scott in entering the Republican Presidential Primary Race. It is rapidly loading up with lots of people, and Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable. I got Opportunity Zones done with Tim, a big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck Tim!,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The South Carolina senator received a boost on Sunday, less than 24 hours before his kick-off event, when news broke that his colleague Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, planned to endorse him.

“I think he’d be a great candidate. I’m excited about it. I’ve been encouraging him,” Thune previously told CNN. “I think he’s getting a lot of encouragement from his colleagues. He’s really well thought of and respected.”

Cory Gardner, the former Republican senator from Colorado and leader of Scott’s aligned super PAC, also argued that his old colleague posed a unique threat to liberal Democrats.

“I think they’re terrified of him, and he’s right to say that, because he defies every narrative they have,” Gardner said. “And this is exciting for conservatives who believe that they have a candidate who carries their values, can implement their values and do so in a way that will make all Americans proud.”

In pictures: Presidential candidate Tim Scott

A senior campaign official said Scott will continue to invest resources and time in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, as the campaign ramps up.

Though Scott hails from South Carolina, they won’t count on it as a firewall, according to one senior campaign official, who emphasized Scott will have to compete as a top-tier candidate in other early primary and caucus states like New Hampshire and Iowa.

Even before the official launch, Scott revealed plans to pluck from his deep campaign coffers – with millions now transferred over from his Senate account – through a series of big-dollar ad buys in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The initial $5.5 million TV ad buy – including broadcast, cable satellite and radio – will air statewide starting Wednesday and run through the first GOP debate in August.

During the same period, Scott will also launch a seven-figure digital ad campaign.

“The biggest thing going for Tim Scott right now is $22 million in the bank. He is getting ready to spend $6 million in Iowa and New Hampshire that will garner tremendous name ID, and it’s gonna be a key factor that many of the other candidates are not doing right now,” said Dave Wilson, a South Carolina conservative strategist and former president of the Palmetto Family Council.

Though he is only officially entering the race now, Scott has already gotten caught in the churn of the campaign season. Shortly after announcing an exploratory committee last month, he was tripped up by questions over his position on a potential national abortion ban.

After initially sidestepping the matter and refusing to say whether he would back a 15-week ban, Scott told WMUR he would support restrictions beginning at 20 weeks. Days later, though, Scott said in an interview with NBC News that he “would literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation that they can get through Congress.”

Pressed on what precisely that meant, given he had applauded DeSantis for signing a six-week ban in Florida, Scott demurred – saying it was a decision for the states to make.

“I’m not going to talk about six (weeks) or five or seven or 10,” Scott said.

Back at the senator’s home church near Charleston, there are hundreds of worshipers that see him most weekends.

“I’ve heard him talk about hope and opportunity for 25 years. It’s who he is. It’s a part of his story. And so I don’t think he’s going to change,” said Greg Suratt, founding pastor of Seacoast Church.

“I think a misconception that people might have about him is that his niceness, his humility, translates as weakness. And they don’t know the Tim Scott I know, I would like to kind of see it as an iron fist in a velvet glove,” Suratt added, noting that even people who disagree with his politics tend to like him as an individual.

Scott’s faith and his humble beginnings will be a central theme in his campaign, an aide said. Scott grew up in a single parent household in North Charleston, where his mother worked long hours to keep their family afloat.

“Think about the kid whose grandmother has to open the stove to heat the home in the middle of the winter. I think to myself, it kind of feels like that now,” Scott said at a town hall in New Hampshire this month. “So many people with our energy prices doubling in just the last couple years, are experiencing a crisis similar to the one that I had when I was just a kid.”

On his listening tour, Scott said that between the ages of 7 and 14, he “kind of drifted,” failing world geography, civics, English and Spanish in his freshman year of high school. But through the “tireless” encouragement of his mother and mentor, the late John Moniz, a Chick-fil-A manager, Scott says he was able to graduate from Charleston Southern University. He would eventually open his own insurance agency affiliated with Allstate.

Scott credits Moniz with teaching him that anyone can “succeed beyond their circumstances” if they take responsibility for themselves – a message he repeated in North Charleston.

“John taught me that anyone, from anywhere, at any time, can rise above their wildest expectations and imagination,” Scott said after giving roses to Moniz’s widow and his own mother at the beginning of his speech. “But first, I had to take responsibility for myself. He told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and to blame myself.”

Scott’s political career began in 1995, when he ran in a special election to the Charleston City Council, winning a seat he would keep for nearly 15 years. After one term as a state lawmaker, Scott won a US House seat representing South Carolina’s 1st district.

Fellow presidential candidate and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley then appointed Scott to the US Senate in 2012 to fill a vacancy left by Sen. Jim DeMint’s retirement. He retained the seat in a 2014 special election, was re-elected to a full term in 2016 and later won for a third time last year.

“To every single mom who struggles to make ends meet, who wonders if her efforts are in vain, they are not,” Scott said after being appointed by Haley.

During his time in the Senate, Scott has amassed a strictly conservative voting record, but has also led bipartisan police reform talks alongside New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat.

Those talks have gone on for years now, beginning in the summer of 2020 with then-California Sen. Kamala Harris also involved, but hopes for a comprehensive deal were effectively abandoned in 2021. (The conversations reportedly continue, but there is no legislation currently in the offing.)

In 2017, his “Investing in Opportunity Act,” which had some Democratic support, was included in the controversial Republican tax cut bill. The provision called for the establishment of “Opportunity Zones,” which would create tax incentives for businesses that invested in parts of the country struggling with poverty and stalled economies.

“I was one of the lead authors of the Republican tax reform bill that slashed taxes for families, brought jobs and investment back from overseas, and created my signature legislation, the ‘Opportunity Zones,’ that’s brought billions of dollars into the poorest communities that have been left behind,” Scott said in his speech. “That was just one bill. Imagine what we could do with an entire agenda.”

Still, Democrats in South Carolina welcomed Scott to the race with harsh words about his political record – and an attempt to tie him to the GOP’s far right.

“We know how dangerous Tea Party extremist Tim Scott is,” South Carolina Democratic Party chair Christale Spain said in a statement. “From promising to sign the most conservative abortion ban possible as president, to doubling down on his role as ‘architect’ of the 2017 GOP tax scam that pushed tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy at the expense of working families, Scott has proven himself to be just as MAGA as the rest of the 2024 field.”

Though Scott has expressed more openness to working with Democrats than most Republicans in Washington, he also owns one of the most conservative voting records in Congress. He rarely broke with Trump during the latter’s presidency, though he did criticize Trump’s response to White supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

“What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority,” Scott told Vice News at the time. “And that moral authority is compromised.”

Scott largely backed off that line, though, after a meeting with Trump in the White House.

“(Trump) was certainly very clear that the perception that he received on his comments was not exactly what he intended with those comments,” Scott told CBS News.

This story has been updated with additional reporting and reaction.

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May 22, 2023
A transgender girl misses her high school graduation after Mississippi judge denies emergency plea to permit her to go in a dress and heels | CNN

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CNN
—

A transgender teen in Mississippi missed her high school graduation after a federal judge denied a motion requesting she be allowed to wear a dress and heels under her robe.

The 17-year-old, identified in court documents by her initials “L.B.,” did not attend her Gulfport high school graduation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. She opted to miss the ceremony when she was told she had to wear boy’s clothes to attend, telling CNN she would “rather stand up for what’s right than be humiliated.”

The family has asked for the teen’s full name to be withheld for privacy and safety reasons.

On May 9, less than two weeks before graduation, L.B. says she was pulled into Harrison Central High School Principal Kelly Fuller’s office and asked what she was going to wear for graduation.

“I told her I was going to wear a white dress, then she told me I was not going to be allowed to wear a dress, and I would have to wear boy clothes,” L.B. said. “And she stated that the Superintendent called her asking about what students would wear to graduation.”

As far as she knows, no other students were asked the same question.

L.B. says she has attended Harrison Central High School as a girl for the past four years. She attended prom wearing a blue sparkly dress without any objection from the school. “I was being me, and I felt very accepted at the time,” she said. “I felt very understood. I felt that I had a great support system at that school.”

L.B. and her parents, Samantha Brown and Henry Brown, filed the federal lawsuit Thursday, demanding Harrison County School District allow the teen to wear what she wishes during Saturday’s graduation ceremony from Harrison Central High School.

Attorneys with the ACLU of Mississippi are representing the family.

The Browns cited a violation of their child’s civil rights, accusing the school district of discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and violating the teen’s First Amendment rights, according to the complaint.

On Friday, the day before graduation, a federal judge in Gulfport, Mississippi, denied a motion filed by L.B.’s family requesting she be allowed to wear her dress and heels at the high school graduation.

The teen had picked out a dress and heels to wear with the traditional cap and gown in accordance with the school’s dress code for female students, according to a media release from the ACLU.

“Our client is being shamed and humiliated for explicitly discriminatory reasons, and her family is being denied a once-in-a-lifetime milestone in their daughter’s life,” ACLU spokesperson Gillian Branstetter told CNN in an email. “No one should be forced to miss their graduation simply because of who they are.”

Samantha Brown, L.B.’s mother, explained that after the conversation with the principal, they learned the dress code policy throughout the school year was different from the policy for graduation.

A commencement participation agreement is included within the court documents. It shows L.B. and her mother signed the document on March 14, 2023, agreeing to follow conditions required for participating in the graduation ceremony.

The Harrison County School District’s policy on graduation states: “Students are expected to wear dress shoes, dress clothes (dresses or dressy pant-suit for girls and dress pants, shirt, and tie for the boys).” The policy does not mention dress code rules for LGBTQ students or specify students must dress according to their sex assigned at birth.

“Graduation school dress policy is girls have to wear white dresses and boys wear a white button up shirt with a tie and black pants and socks with black dress shoes,” Brown said. “This has never been an issue before. We felt like we were abiding by the dress code according to what she identifies as.”

CNN has reached out to the Harrison County School District and Harrison Central High School for comment.

L.B. called the news “unexpected and shocking,” saying, “I couldn’t understand why they would change it so suddenly.”

“You’ve been allowing me to be this way, be myself, and express myself this way for so long. And it wasn’t even a thought in my mind that they would do this to me,” she told CNN.

“This is a celebration of my high school, this is a celebration of my finish line,” L.B. said. “For me to be forced into something that I’m not, it wouldn’t have been fun for me at all…this kind of injustice is not okay.”

“We have to do better as a community, as a country, as a state, as a city, as a county, we have to do better,” the teenager added.

Brown said the ruling from the judge on Friday was hurtful and caused humiliation for her daughter, stating her opinion that it would have been more of a “distraction and shock to her peers and other teachers to show up like that, other than the way she usually dresses.”

“She’s a good student, she made it to the finish line … that should be more of the things the children should be worried about rather than whether they will be targeted by what they identify as,” Brown said.

Brown said they will be evaluating their legal options moving forward. “We’re going to continue to speak on this and continue to fight for what we feel is right,” she added.

According to court documents, the school policy states that “a high school graduation ceremony is a sacred and inspirational ritual which is intended to be surrounded with decorum of dignity, grace, solemnity, reverence, pomp and circumstance.”

“Students whose attire does not meet the minimum dress requirements may not be allowed to participate in the graduation exercises,” the policy states.

“My graduation is supposed to be a moment of pride and celebration and school officials want to turn it into a moment of humiliation and shame,” L.B. said in the ACLU release. “The clothing I’ve chosen is fully appropriate for the ceremony and the superintendent’s objections to it are entirely unfair to myself, my family, and all transgender students like me. I have the right to celebrate my graduation as who I am, not who anyone else wants me to be.”

Fact check: Why state lawmakers around the country keep citing junk science

The student has been openly transgender since she began attending the school as a freshman, according to the complaint, and her identity has been known to her classmates, teachers, and administrators.

Mitchell King, the superintendent of Harrison County School District, testified in court documents that the district relies on birth certificates to record whether students are male or female.

The complaint describes a phone conversation between Samantha Brown and King, in which King says L.B. “is still a boy,” therefore “he needs to wear pants, socks, and shoes, like a boy.”

The complaint also notes L.B. attended the school’s prom last year wearing a formal dress and high-heeled shoes, without any issues or repercussions.

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May 21, 2023
New York lawmaker connected to nonprofit accused of lying about homeless vets being pushed out of hotel for migrants says he’s no longer affiliated with foundation | CNN

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CNN
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A New York state assemblyman and former volunteer spokesperson for the nonprofit accused of lying about homeless veterans being pushed out of a hotel to make room for migrants is no longer affiliated with the foundation, he told CNN.

Republican State Assemblyman Brian Maher said in a statement to CNN he was devastated and disheartened” to learn claims homeless veterans were pushed out of the hotel to make room for migrants were false.

On Friday, CNN reported two homeless men said they were part of a group of 15 who were offered money to pose as veterans and say they were asked to leave the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh, New York. They claimed Sharon Toney-Finch, a nonprofit leader who houses the homeless, was the person who allegedly offered the money and never paid up.

Toney-Finch is the founder and chairman of the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, which helps veterans in need of living assistance. On Friday, she denied the allegations to CNN, saying she never offered money to homeless men to say they had to leave the hotel.

CNN reached out to Toney-Finch on Saturday regarding Maher’s statement and did not receive an immediate response.

The situation elevated tensions between the area and New York City, as earlier this week a New York state Supreme Court judge granted a temporary restraining order blocking New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to send asylum seekers to Orange County, where Newburgh is located.

Maher said in his statement Saturday, “I am devastated and disheartened upon a conversation with Sharon Toney-Finch at approximately 3:15 p.m. Thursday, May 18, where I learned that the information regarding the YIT Foundation about homeless veterans being displaced is false. Their gross misrepresentation of the facts surrounding our homeless veterans is appalling.”

“The YIT Foundation purports to protect and support veterans, but the dishonest claims and fabrication of the facts by YIT does enormous harm to our homeless veterans by creating mistrust,” the statement continued.

On Friday, Toney-Finch said, “I never promised to pay anybody,” adding that she only told Maher that she had homeless veterans who were displaced, not that it was because of asylum seekers.

Maher, who was a volunteer spokesperson for the nonprofit, said he is “no longer affiliated in any capacity with YIT nor offering it any more of my help.”

The state assemblyman called for an investigation into the nonprofit by the New York State Attorney General’s office and the Orange County District Attorney “based on the new information that came to light today,” his statement said.

A spokeswoman for New York State Attorney General Letitia James told CNN Friday the office is reviewing the details of the incident to determine whether they will open a formal investigation.

“While I believed Sharon was telling the truth, I do want to apologize for those that have been negatively impacted since this news broke,” Maher wrote in the statement.

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May 20, 2023
San Francisco announces inaugural Drag Laureate, the first position of its kind in the country | CNN

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San Francisco
CNN
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D’Arcy Drollinger, a veteran of San Francisco’s vibrant drag scene, has been named the city’s first-ever Drag Laureate and will become an ambassador for San Francisco’s drag and LGBTQ+ community for an 18-month term, Mayor London Breed’s office announced Thursday.

The position is the first of its kind in the country.

“While drag culture is under attack in other parts of the country, in San Francisco we embrace and elevate the amazing drag performers who through their art and advocacy have contributed to our City’s history around civil rights and equality,” Breed said in a news release.

Drollinger says she’s “proud to live in a city that is pioneering this position while other parts of the US and the world might not be supportive of Drag. This role will build bridges and create partnerships, while elevating and celebrating the Art of Drag.”

Drag, according to Drollinger, is a way for many people who “aren’t allowed to sparkle in their real lives and as their true selves” to find refuge, she told CNN.

Breed officially announced the creation of the Drag Laureate program in her June 2022 city budget, but the concept was first introduced in August 2020 in a report from San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage Task Force, a city-supported task force which reviewed community feedback on LGBTQ+ needs and concerns.

Among other strategies, the task force recommended improving partnerships between city agencies and community organizations to expand creative programs for LGBTQ+ artists, including the “creation and funding of LGBTQ+ artist residency opportunities.”

Finding spaces for queer creatives is an issue Drollinger understands intimately, as she opened the popular Oasis cabaret and nightclub in 2015 to provide a mid-size venue space for both local and touring drag performers. The survival and success of Oasis, through the pandemic, was vital for San Francisco’s drag community.

“It’s important to have a space that’s for everyone, and Oasis has become a bit of a hub,” Drollinger said.

Drag has a rich history in San Francisco, both as an appreciated art form and protest medium. Dating back to the 1950s, nightclubs such as the Black Cat and Finocchio’s drew both queer and straight audiences. The Compton Cafeteria riots in the city’s Tenderloin district became one of the first notable acts of queer protest in 1966 – three years before New York City’s famed Stonewall riots.

Drollinger, a San Francisco native, has always been drawn to the city’s vibrant creative queer scene.

“There’s something in the water. What I find exciting about San Francisco, it still remains that there is a willingness to experiment here that I haven’t found in many other places. People are willing to workshop things and play around with stuff purely for the joy of making art,” Drollinger said.

She commends the city for spearheading efforts to promote drag, especially at a time when drag performance is under attack. By making the Drag Laureate an official city position, provided with a $55,000 stipend, Drollinger says San Francisco sends a message of the “legitimacy” of drag.

“(San Francisco) is not asking for a volunteer. They’re asking us to be a diplomat and show up and be a part of the city.”

Before Per Sia, one of the Drag Laureate applicants, began dressing in drag, they fell in love with the art form as a photographer, capturing images of drag queens in South Central Los Angeles and San Francisco. They loved the extravagance and celebrity-like personas drag queens embodied but felt too shy and nervous to do drag themselves.

The first time Per Sia dressed in drag was 16 years ago on a dare, to perform in San Francisco’s Castro District. The experience was revelatory and they haven’t looked back.

“After I [performed], there was this sense of joy, this empowerment that I have never felt before, and I just fell in love with it,” Per Sia said.

They balance drag performance with their second career as an arts educator. Per Sia, who jokes that they get to “teach the little kids” during the day and “perform in front of the big kids” at night, sees drag as a tool to educate people, on top of entertaining them.

They combine these two careers as a regular for Drag Story Hour, a program where drag queens read stories to children to promote self-expression. They’ve read for San Francisco Public Library events and Oakland Pride, and Per Sia enjoys teaching children about “thinking outside of the box” through these story hours.

“When you’re a little kid, it’s all about using your imagination, glittering everything and using all the colors, but at some point all of that gets taken away,” Per Sia said. “The benefit of drag is that you teach kids that there’s other ways of living.”

Drag has always been a part of Drollinger’s life, but it was a slow process for her to embrace drag as her “work clothes” until she was in her 40s. She credits drag for helping her find her community and identity.

“So many people that find drag, they find it when they aren’t allowed to sparkle in their real life, and their fabulousness is squashed,” Drollinger said. “Drag is a way to let so much of that out.”

The appointment of the Drag Laureate comes at a time when public drag performances and transgender expression are being threatened by conservative lawmakers across the country.

“San Francisco’s commitment to inclusivity and the arts are the foundation for who we are as a city,” Breed wrote in a November statement. “Drag artists have helped pave the way for LGBTQ+ rights and representation across our city, and they are a part of what makes our city so special.” [[pending updated comment from mayor’s office TK]]

Legislation banning or restricting drag has been gaining momentum in many Republican-led states. GOP lawmakers have claimed that drag performances expose children to sexual themes and imagery that are inappropriate, though many drag performances take place in age-restricted locations or require parental consent to attend.

In March 2023, Tennessee became the first state to pass a law banning drag performances on public property and in locations where children can view the performances.

Drollinger feels the effects of the national pushback against her work, even in a city known for progressive values. She’s spent more money on security at Oasis to ensure the audience and performers feel safe, she told CNN.

“Creating these kinds of laws, demonizing trans people and the LGBTQ+ community, what they’re doing is inciting violence,” Drollinger said. “It’s terrifying. They want to erase my community and erase us.”

Both Per Sia and Drollinger hope that by pioneering the Drag Laureate position, San Francisco will establish a model of tolerance for others to follow.

“Important things happen here in San Francisco, and the world takes notice. Having this position for someone like me or anyone who applied is so special, but also, it’s showing the world that drag is powerful, and it deserves a place,” Per Sia said.

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May 19, 2023
This 1960s trailblazer of erotic pop art died just as she was finding fame | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Untold Art History investigates lesser-known stories in art, spotlighting pioneering artists who were overlooked during their lifetimes, as well as uncovering new insights into influential artworks that radically shift our understanding of them.

CNN
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Throughout Evelyne Axell’s short but radical career, the Belgian artist revered the female body in psychedelic hues rendered in gleaming enamel. Nude women recline in acid green or cerulean blue fields under open skies; in one portrait, bodies and landscape become indistinguishable, with rings of colors forming the volume of a perm and tufts of grass the pubic hair.

She delighted in double meanings. Axell’s most famous artwork, of a woman licking an ice cream cone, could be both a summery advertisement or an explicit pornographic scene. She named another painting, of red heels on a gas pedal, “Axell-ération” — an implied self-portrait, like many of her works.

But the young actor-turned-Pop artist, who was working in the 1960s and early ’70s and had been trained by the famed surrealist artist René Magritte, had her career cut short. In 1972, only a handful of years into painting, she died in a car crash and faded into relative obscurity. Only in the past decade as curators have revisited the pop art movement beyond celebrated male artists — such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton — has Axell arisen as one of the many women co-opting mass media to engage with the social structures and politics of the ‘60s.

“If you asked almost anybody to name a woman pop artist, you would probably get a blank stare,” said Catherine Morris, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, which hosted the touring show “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968” in 2011. The landmark group show featured Axell and contemporaries including Pauline Boty and Chryssa.

“(If this) period of emergence of women Pop artists had even been a couple of years later, we probably would have been more aware,” Morris continued, pointing to the 1970s as a turning point for women artists in the wake of second-wave feminism. “This whole group of women who covered this decade were dramatically overlooked.”

Since “Seductive Subversion,” which first exhibited at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Axell’s work has been included in a host of significant group shows that take a more expansive, international view of pop art and foreground women. And in 2021, she achieved a significant posthumous milestone, with the Museum of Modern Art in New York adding “Axell-ération” to its collection. But institutional solo exhibitions remain few and far between, with retrospectives hosted by Museum Abteiberg in western Germany and the remote Swiss Alps art center Muzeum Susch 10 years apart. (Perhaps, in part, because of her limited output.)

Now, two of Axell’s playful, erotic artworks— both painted with her signature application of enamel on plexiglass — are poised to make history at Christie’s, in her first major New York sale. “Paysage” a dreamy pastoral nude, is expected to surpass her record of $140,000, set in 2017, with a high estimate of $200,000; “L’Amazone”, a sensual blue-ombre hued portrait, could also come close at $120,000. But such sales for Axell are infrequent, according to Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art.

“She made very little work — she was 37-years-old when she died,” Friedlander said in a phone call. “So, in a way, the market doesn’t have enough to know what to do with her. These (paintings) are very special and very rare.”

The decade following Axell’s death saw the emergence of a number of women artists who unabashedly expressed female sexuality, painting and photographing their own bodies, and subverting erotic or pornographic imagery. Artists such as Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter believed that feminism should be inclusive of sexual agency, but as Morris explained, they faced criticism for doing so.

“The feminist artists who emerged in the 1970s and into the 1980s and 90s were very much taken to task by orthodox feminism in relationship to them utilizing their own sexuality, their own bodies, their own beauty,” she said.

Axell might have been part of this crucial wave; curators and scholars are still unpacking her prescient feminist ideas, and the paradisical world she set them in. Instead, she hid her identity, signing her works with only her last name, after facing derision from male art critics, according to the exhibition at Muzeum Susch. Her stylistic approach — a mix of pop art influences and dreamy surrealist settings — is still underrecognized, according to Morris.

“She acts as a historical bridge (between surrealism and pop art),” she said. “And I think that that’s something that’s dramatically unexplored.”

Skilled at challenging expectations around her own beauty, sexuality and sense of self in her work, Axell was also politically engaged, producing portraits of the African American activist Angela Davis and a painting responding to the Kent State campus shootings in 1970.

“Despite all aggressiveness, my universe abounds above all in an unconditional love for life,” Axell said in her only interview in 1970, according to a publication by Muzeum Susch. “My subject is clear: nudity and femininity experiment in the utopia of a bio-botanical freedom; that means a freedom without frustration nor gradual submission, and that tolerates only the limits that it sets itself.”

One of Morris’ favorite works, shown at the Brooklyn Museum, embodies this spirit: an abstracted view of a woman’s torso, the curves of her body like peaks and valleys, her vulva covered in a real tuffet of green fur. Called “Petite fourrure verte” or “Small green fur,” the intimate perspective was based on a photograph Axell’s filmmaker husband, Jean Antoine, had taken of her.

“It’s from 1970, just a couple years before her death,” Morris said. “So for me, it really epitomizes what would have been — what was to come.”

Top image: “Axell-ération” from 1965.

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May 17, 2023
The demographic makeup of the country’s voters continues to shift. That creates headwinds for Republicans | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Demographic change continued to chip away at the cornerstone of the Republican electoral coalition in 2022, a new analysis of Census data has found.

White voters without a four-year college degree, the indispensable core of the modern GOP coalition, declined in 2022 as a share of both actual and eligible voters, according to a study of Census results by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in electoral turnout.

McDonald’s finding, provided exclusively to CNN, shows that the 2022 election continued the long-term trend dating back at least to the 1970s of a sustained fall in the share of the votes cast by working-class White voters who once constituted the brawny backbone of the Democratic coalition, but have since become the absolute foundation of Republican campaign fortunes.

As non-college Whites have receded in the electorate over that long arc, non-White adults and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Whites with at least a four-year college degree, have steadily increased their influence. “This is a trend that is baked into the demographic change of the country, so [it] is likely going to accelerate over the next ten years,” says McDonald, author of the recent book “From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

From election to election, the impact of the changing composition of the voter pool is modest. The slow but steady decline of non-college Whites, now the GOP’s best group, did not stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency in 2016 – nor does it preclude him from winning it again in 2024. And, compared to their national numbers, these non-college voters remain a larger share of the electorate in many of the key states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential race (particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and control of the Senate (including seats Democrats are defending in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.)

But even across those states, these voters are shrinking as a share of the electorate. And McDonald’s analysis of the 2022 results shows that the non-college White share of the total vote is highly likely to decline again in 2024, while the combined share of non-Whites and Whites with a college degree, groups much more favorable to Democrats, is virtually certain to increase. The political effect of this decline is analogous to turning up the resistance on a treadmill: as their best group shrinks, Republicans must run a little faster just to stay in place.

Especially ominous for Republicans is that the share of the vote cast by these blue-collar Whites declined slightly in 2022 even though turnout among those voters was relatively strong, while minority turnout fell sharply, according to McDonald’s analysis. The reason for those seemingly incongruous trends is that even solid turnout among the non-college Whites could not offset the fact that they are continuing to shrink in the total pool of eligible voters, as American society grows better-educated and more racially diverse.

Given that minority turnout fell off, the fact that the non-college White share of the total 2022 vote still slightly declined “has to be a huge cause for concern for Republicans at this point,” says Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic political targeting firm. If more of the growing pool of eligible minority voters turn out in 2024, he says, “it is not unreasonable to expect” that the non-college White voters so critical to GOP fortunes could experience an even “steeper decline” in their share of the total votes cast next year.

That prospect remains a central concern for the dwindling band of anti-Trump Republicans who fear that the former president has dangerously narrowed the GOP’s appeal by identifying it so unreservedly with the cultural priorities and grievances of working-class White voters, many of them older and living outside of the nation’s largest and most economically productive metropolitan areas.

McDonald’s “data support what is self-evident: that Trumpism peaked in 2016, and that it leads to a dead end,” says former US Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “We saw this in 2018 when Republicans lost the House; we saw it in 2020 when they lost the presidency and the Senate, and we saw it in last year when Republicans were supposed to have big gains in both chambers and [did not]. All of these failures can be attributed to Trumpism. These data just confirm what is visible to the naked eye.”

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, says these slow but steady long-term changes in the electorate leave him convinced that the ceiling for Trump’s potential support in 2024 is no more than 46% of the vote. But Democrats, he believes, still face the risk that the clear majority in the electorate opposed to Trumpism will not turn out in sufficient numbers or splinter to third-party options if they do. Both dangers, he argues, are most pronounced for the diverse younger generations that have never found President Joe Biden very inspiring and have not received sufficient messaging and organizing attention from Democrats.

The political impact of those younger voters, he warns, could be blunted by the proliferation of red state laws making it more difficult to vote and Democrats focusing too much “on chasing this mythical [White] swing voter that doesn’t look like that Millennial or Gen Z voter we are relying on.”

Overall voter turnout in 2022 was high compared to almost all previous midterms, but below the peak reached in 2018, when a greater share of eligible voters turned out than in any midterm election since 1914, according to McDonald’s calculations.

Turnout last year fell most sharply among minorities: while 43% of all eligible non-White voters showed up in 2018, that slipped to just 35% last year, McDonald calculates. Turnout among eligible college-educated White voters also dropped from an astronomical 74% in 2018 to just over 69% last year. White voters without a four-year college degree actually came closest to matching their elevated 2018 performance, slipping only slightly from just over 45% then to about 43% last year.

But turnout is only one of the two factors that shape how large a share of actual voters each group comprises, which is the number that really matters in determining election outcomes. The other factor is how large a share of the pool of potential eligible voters each group represents. Turnout, in effect, is the numerator and the share of eligible voters the denominator that combined produce the share of the total vote each group casts during every election.

As McDonald found, the long-term trends in the eligible voter pool – the denominator in our equation – continued unabated in 2022. Whites without a college degree fell to just over 41% of eligible potential voters. That was down 3.2 percentage points from their share of the eligible voter population in 2018 – which was itself down exactly 3.2 percentage points from their share in 2014. In turn, from 2014 to 2022, college-educated White voters slightly increased their share of the eligible voter pool and minorities significantly increased from 30.5% then to nearly 35% now.

Netting together both the turnout results and these shifts in the eligible voter pool, McDonald found that working-class White voters in 2022 declined as a share overall, whether compared either to the last few midterm elections or the most recent presidential contests.

In 2022, Whites without a college degree cast 38.3% of all votes, he found. That was down from 39.3% in 2018 and more than 43% in 2014, according to his calculations. That finding also represented a continued decline from just over 42% of the vote when Trump won the 2016 presidential election and 39.9% in 2020 – the first time non-college Whites had fallen below 40% of the total presidential electorate in Census figures.

Whites with at least a four-year college degree were the big gainers in 2022: McDonald found they cast nearly 36% of all votes last year, compared to a little over-one-third in both 2018 and 2014 and a little less than that in the 2020 presidential year. Burdened by lower turnout, the non-White share of the total vote slipped to just over one-fourth, down slightly from 2018, but still higher than in the 2014 midterms. The minority share of the total vote was considerably larger in 2020, reaching nearly three-in-ten in Census figures.

All of this extends very consistent long-term trends. Census data analyzed by the non-partisan States of Change project show that non-college Whites have fallen from around two-thirds of the total vote under Ronald Reagan, to about three-fifths under Bill Clinton, to less than half under Barack Obama, to the current level of just under two-fifths. Over those same decades, college-educated Whites have grown from about two-in-ten to three-in-ten voters, while minorities have increased from a little over one-in-ten then to nearly three-in-ten now.

Other respected data sources differ on the share of the total vote comprised by these three big groups: the Pew Validated Voter study and the estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, both put the share of the vote cast in 2020 by non-college Whites slightly higher, in the range of 42-44%.

But both also show the same core pattern as the Census results do, with the share of the total vote cast by those non-college Whites declining by about two percentage points every four years. The Edison Research exit polls conducted for a consortium of media organizations, including CNN, changed its methodology in a way that makes long-term comparisons impossible. But, similarly to McDonald, the exits found the non-college White share of the total vote declining to 39% in 2022 from 41% in 2018, with minorities also slightly falling over that period, and college-educated Whites growing.

The trend lines that McDonald documented for last year suggest it’s a reasonable prediction that non-college Whites will again decline as a share of total voters by two points over the period from 2020 to 2024. That would push their share of the national 2024 vote down to below 38%, with more minority voters likely filling most of that gap and the college-educated Whites growing more modestly to offset the rest.

McDonald says the basic dynamic reconfiguring the voting pool is that many Baby Boomers and their elders are aging out of the electorate. That’s both because more of them are dying or they are reaching an advanced age where turnout tends to decline, either for infirmity or other obstacles. Those older generations are preponderantly White (about three-fourths of seniors are White), and fewer have college degrees, which were not as essential to economic success in those years, McDonald points out. Meanwhile, a larger share of young adults today hold four-year degrees, and the youngest generations aging into the electorate every two years are far more racially diverse. According to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank, young people of color now comprise almost exactly half of all Americans who turn 18 and age into the electorate each year.

“We are right now at the teetering edge of the influence of the baby boomers,” says McDonald. “They are just starting to enter those twilight years in their turnout rates, while other [more diverse] groups are maturing. So we are right at that cusp – that critical point of where things are going to start changing.”

The impact of these changes on the outcomes of elections, as McDonald says, is very incremental, “like the proverbial frog in the boiling water.” One way to understand that dynamic is to assume that Whites without a college degree on the one hand, and minorities and college-educated Whites on the other, all split their vote at roughly the same proportions as they have in recent elections. If the former group declines as a share of the electorate by two points from 2020-2024 and the latter groups increase by an equal amount, that change alone would enlarge Biden’s margin of victory in the two-party vote from 4.6 percentage points to 5.8, Bonier calculates. Republicans would need to increase their vote share with some or all of those groups just to get back to the deficit Trump faced in 2020 – much less to overcome it.

Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic electoral analyst who has become a staunch critic of his party, argues exactly that kind of shift in voting preferences could offset the change in the electorate’s composition – and create a real threat for Biden. Even though Biden is aggressively highlighting his efforts to create blue-collar jobs through “manufacturing and infrastructure projects that are starting to get off the ground,” Teixiera recently wrote, a “sharp swing against the incumbent administration by White working-class voters seems like a very real possibility.”

Teixeira, now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also maintains Democrats face the risk Republicans can extend the unexpected gains Trump registered in 2020 with non-White voters without a college degree, especially Hispanics.

Curbelo, the former congressman, shares Teixeira’s belief that Democratic liberalism on some social issues like crime is creating an opening for Republicans to gain ground among culturally conservative Hispanics. “If they are not careful, they can jeopardize their potential gains from Republicans doubling down on Trumpism by alienating themselves from minority voters who may identify with some of the [Democrats’] economic policies but who do not necessarily identify with the party’s victimhood narrative about minorities,” Curbelo says.

Still, Curbelo warns that Republicans are unlikely to achieve the gains possible with minority voters so long as they are stamped so decisively by Trump’s polarizing image. And polling has consistently found that while many non-college Hispanic voters hold more moderate views on social issues than college-educated White liberals, those minority voters are not nearly as conservative as core GOP groups, like blue-collar Whites or evangelical Christians.

As Teixeira has forcefully argued in recent years, such demographic change doesn’t ensure doom for Republicans or success for Democrats. Among other things, that change is unevenly distributed around the country, and the small state bias of both the Electoral College and the two-senators-per-state rule magnifies the influence of sparsely populated interior states where these shifts have been felt much more lightly.

Yet, even so, the long-term change in the electorate’s composition, along with the Democrats’ growing strength among white-collar suburban voters, largely explains why the party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.

And even though Whites without a college degree exceed their share of the national vote in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, their share of the vote is shrinking along the same trajectory of about 2-3 points every four years in those states too, according to analysis by Frey. Meanwhile, in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, more rapid growth in the minority population means that blue-collar Whites will likely comprise a smaller portion of the eligible voter pool than they do nationally.

Trump, with the exception of his beachhead among blue-collar minorities, has now largely locked the GOP into a position of needing to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups, particularly non-college Whites. It’s entirely possible that Trump or another Republican nominee can meet that test well enough to win back the White House in 2024, especially given the persistent public disenchantment with Biden’s performance. But McDonald’s 2022 data shows why relying on a coalition tilted so heavily toward those non-college Whites becomes just a little tougher for the GOP in each presidential race.

While Trump or another Republican certainly can win in 2024, Bonier says, “he has reshaped the party in such a way that they have a very narrow path to victory.”

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May 15, 2023
Florida teacher says she is under investigation after showing 5th grade class Disney movie with gay character | CNN

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A fifth-grade teacher said she is being investigated by the Florida Department of Education after she showed her students “Strange World,” a 2022 animated Disney movie featuring a character who is biracial and gay.

Jenna Barbee is a teacher in Hernando County’s Winding Waters K-8 school. “I am the teacher that’s under investigation with the Florida Department of Education for indoctrination for showing a Disney movie,” Barbee said in a TikTok post over the weekend.

In the post, Barbee explained she played the Disney movie to a class which was partially full after a day of standardized testing. She also said she had previously-signed permission slips from all the parents, allowing the students to watch a movie rated PG.

According to Barbee, a parent then complained and reported her to the state Department of Education.

The parent who reported her, who is also a member of the Hernando County School District Board, complained to the principal about the movie not being appropriate for students, according to Karen Jordan, spokesperson for Hernando County Schools. Jordan also provided CNN with a copy of the announcement from the school district to parents.

“Yesterday, the Disney movie ‘Strange World’ was shown in your child’s classroom,” the school district said. “While not the main plot of the movie, parts of the story involves a male character having and expressing feelings for another male character. In the future, this movie will not be shown. The school administration and the district’s Professional Standards Dept is currently reviewing the matter to see if further corrective action is required.”

The complaint is part of Florida’s controversial legislation, signed last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis, banning certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. DeSantis and other supporters pushed the measure as a form of “parental rights,” while opponents said it tried to erase LGBTQ people from schools and dubbed the law “Don’t Say Gay.”

The law initially banned instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade or in a way deemed not age-appropriate for all other grades, but it has since been expanded to limit such information all through high school. Teachers who violate the state policy can be suspended or have their teaching licenses revoked.

Disney was among those who spoke out against the law last year, spurring DeSantis and Florida Republicans to retaliate against the entertainment company by targeting their control over the land in and around its theme parks.

The animated film “Strange World,” released last year, told the story of a family of explorers and starred the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Lucy Liu. The movie also featured Disney’s first-ever out-gay character, voiced by comedian Jaboukie Young-White.

On May 9, Barbee addressed the school board members during public comment at a meeting. In attendance was the parent who had complained, school board member Shannon Rodriguez, she acknowledged during the meeting.

“A school board member, an elected official of power, who was supposed to be nonpartisan, is allowed to present to the public that she is Christian and that God appointed her to the board. And yet it is indoctrinated that I showed a Disney movie. I’m a first-year teacher,” said Barbee.

The teacher told district board members the movie was in no way sexual and was tied to the current lesson plan of the environment and ecosystems.

Barbee claimed in the meeting Rodriguez “came to my school took me away from my students to tell me how bad and wrong I was.”

At the end of the school board meeting, Rodriguez said she called the state department of education regarding the incident, which prompted the state investigation. She said her daughter is in Barbee’s class.

She said at the district meeting Barbee broke school policy because she did not get the specific movie approved by school administration and said the teacher is “playing the victim.”

“It is not a teacher’s job to impose their beliefs upon a child: religious, sexual orientation, gender identity, any of the above. But allowing movies such as this assist teachers in opening a door, and please hear me, they assist teachers in opening a door for conversations that have no place in our classrooms,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said “as a leader in this community, I’m not going to stand by and allow this minority to infiltrate our schools … God did put me here,” she said.

CNN has reached out to Rodriguez and Hernando County School District and the Florida Department of Education for comment.

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May 15, 2023
2 dead, 5 injured following shooting involving teens in Yuma, Arizona | CNN

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Police in southwestern Arizona are investigating a fatal weekend shooting that left two people dead and five others injured, including teenagers, authorities said Sunday.

Victims ranged from 15 to 20 years old in the shooting that happened Saturday night at a gathering in a residential area of Yuma, according to the Yuma Police Department.

Officers responded shortly before 11 p.m. local time and found several gunshot victims who were all male, police said in a statement.

Two of the victims – 19-year-old and 20-year-old men – were taken to the Yuma Regional Medical Center, where they were both pronounced dead.

The 19-year-old victim was transported to the hospital before police arrived at the scene, and the Yuma Fire Department took the 20-year-old victim to the hospital, the statement said.

A 16-year-old boy was also taken to the same medical center and later flown to Phoenix with life-threatening injuries.

The injuries of the remaining gunshot victims aged 15, 16, 18 and 19 were not life-threatening, authorities said.

Several off-duty officers who happened to be in the area also responded to the shooting, police said.

Investigators were interviewing several witnesses Sunday, said Yuma Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Lori Franklin, CNN affiliate KYMA reported.

A suspect has not yet been taken into custody as authorities continue their investigation, according to the statement.

The shooting marks the 33rd mass shooting of May 2023, and more than 215 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

CNN and the GVA define a mass shooting as one in which four or more people were either injured or killed, excluding the shooter.

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May 14, 2023
A law that cancels cancel culture? This country is considering it | CNN

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Cancel culture, the online trend of calling out people, celebrities, brands and organizations – rightly or wrongly – for perceived social indiscretions or offensive behaviors, has become a polarizing topic of debate.

To some, it’s an important means of social justice and holding powerful figures to account. But to others, it’s often “misused and misdirected” and has become a form of mob rule.

But one country wants to put an end to the deeply contested online phenomena by introducing what legal experts and observers say would be the world’s first law against cancel culture – raising alarm among rights activists who fear that such legal powers could be used to stifle free speech.

Over the past year, Singapore’s government has been “looking at ways to deal with cancel culture,” a spokesperson told CNN – amid what some say is a brewing culture war between gay rights supporters and the religious right following the recent decriminalization of homosexuality in the largely conservative city-state.

Authorities said they were “examining existing related laws and legislation” after receiving “feedback” from conservative Christians who expressed fears about being canceled for their views by vocal groups online.

“People ought to be free to express their views without fear of being attacked on both sides,” law minister K Shanmugam said in an interview with state media outlets in August.

“We should not allow a culture where people of religion are ostracized (or) attacked for espousing their views or their disagreements with LGBT viewpoints – and vice versa,” he added.

His comments came ahead of the historic repealing of a colonial-era law that criminalized gay sex – even if it was consensual.

“We cannot sit by and do nothing. We have to look at the right boundaries between hate speech and free speech in this context,” Shanmugam said. “There could be wider repercussions for society at large where public discourse becomes impoverished… so we plan to do something about this.”

In a statement to CNN, his law ministry said the impact of online cancel campaigns could be “far reaching and severe for victims.”

“(Some) have been unable to engage in reasonable public discourse for fear of being attacked for their views online… and may engage in self censorship for fear of being made a target of cancel campaigns,” a ministry spokesperson said.

The first thing any law tackling cancel culture must do, would be to define the act of canceling – an extremely complex challenge according to legal experts, given how contentious cancel culture can be.

The phrase first originated from the slang term “cancel,” referring to breaking up with someone, according to the Pew Research Center, and later gained traction on social media. The Center published a study around the cancel phenomenon in 2021 which revealed deep public division across demographic groups in the United States – from the very meaning of the phrase as well as what cancel culture represents.

According to Eugene Tan, an associate law professor from the Singapore Management University (SMU), there remains “no accepted definition” of canceling and as such, any proposed law would have to be “very clearly defined and worded.”

“What does it mean when a person claims to be canceled? How would alleged victims show proof of being canceled?” said Tan, who once served as a nominated member of the Singapore Parliament.

“All too often, incidents are interpreted, described or remembered by people in different ways. The lack of precision could result in the law being over inclusive, covering acts which it shouldn’t,” added Tan. “But if the definition is limiting, the law could be under inclusive and not cover crucial acts when it should,” said Tan.

Given how most cancel cases take place online, the new law would also have to be specially drafted with the internet in mind and likely involve cooperation from social media giants, lawyers in Singapore told CNN.

“A cancel law will have to involve the platforms on which people typically discuss or propagate anything related to cancellation and where materials are published,” said Ian Ernst Chai, a lawyer who once served as a deputy public prosecutor in Singapore’s Attorney General’s Chambers.

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok could possibly be asked to police users or comply with court orders to a certain extent, Chai said – and this could also include taking down posts and tweets deemed to be “in infringement of the law.”

Special legal mechanisms would also be needed to identify perpetrators (‘cancelers’), said other legal experts. “With cancel culture, things can spread immediately online and people’s reputations can be ruined in a matter of hours,” said criminal lawyer Joshua Tong.

“It is clear that traditional legal processes are not suitable for cancel scenarios and a different process must be used. The (new) law could contain sections like intervention mechanisms to stop cancel campaigns before they gather steam,” added Tong.

In Singapore’s case, there are also already several laws governing the internet which include an anti fake news bill – punishable with fines of up to 50,000 Singapore dollars ($38,000) or possible prison sentences of up to five years – as well as laws governing cyberbullying and doxing.

So a cancel law would have to be one that’s very distinct in nature.

The drafting of new laws could take months or even years and would have to be passed in Parliament, Singapore legal experts said.

While the government did not provide further details when asked about what a new law dealing with cancel culture would look like or when it could be expected – critics have raised concerns over what they say could result in further restrictions on freedom of speech and expression in Singapore.

“It sounds like yet another intimidation tactic by the government against those on the ground trying to raise their voices to demand accountability and change,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch.

“If a person or a group says hateful and discriminatory things against gay and trans people for example, others should be allowed to call them out and rebut what was said – this isn’t ‘cancel culture’, it’s social discourse and any modern, democratic society should be able to handle that without overbearing state interference.”

Free speech advocate Roy Ngerng said a law against cancel culture would be “dangerous.”

In 2015, Ngerng was sued for defamation by the Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong over a critical blog post he had written about the country’s national pensions plan. Ngerng lost his job at a national hospital as a result and said he was also harassed online.

“The government’s strategy has been systematic from the beginning – canceling people like activists, journalists and opposition politicians who they deem disagreeable,” he told CNN.

“They have adapted laws for use during the Internet era and perhaps seeing how fast conversations move on social media has prompted them to create a new law to stamp out cancel culture – prevent conversations from moving too quickly,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be worried about conversations being canceled – we should be more worried about the government coming up with new laws and ways to cancel Singaporeans.”

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May 12, 2023
FDA advisers vote unanimously in support of over-the-counter birth-control pill | CNN

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Advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Wednesday in support of making the birth-control pill Opill available over-the-counter, saying the benefits outweigh the risks.

Two FDA advisory panels agreed that people would use Opill safely and effectively and said groups such as adolescents and those with limited literacy would be able to take the pill at the same time every day without help from a health care worker.

The advisers were asked to vote on whether people were likely to use the tablet properly so that the benefits would exceed the risks. Seventeen voted yes. Zero voted no or abstained.

Opill manufacturer Perrigo hailed the vote as a “groundbreaking” move for women’s health.

“Perrigo is proud to lead the way in making contraception more accessible to women in the U.S.,” Murray Kessler, Perrigo’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “We are motivated by the millions of people who need easy access to safe and effective contraception.”

The FDA doesn’t have to follow its advisers’ advice, but it often does. It is expected to decide whether to approve the over-the-counter pill this summer.

If it’s approved, this will be the first birth-control pill available over the counter in the United States. Opill is a “mini-pill” that uses only the hormone progestin.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Dr. Margery Gass of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine thanked the FDA for its consideration of switching Opill to an over-the-counter product.

“I think this represents a landmark in our history of women’s health. Unwanted pregnancies can really derail a woman’s life, and especially an adolescent’s life,” she said.

The FDA has faced pressure to allow Opill to go over-the-counter from lawmakers as well as health care providers.

Unwanted pregnancies are a public health issue in the US, where almost half of all pregnancies are unintended, and rates are especially high among lower-income women, Black women and those who haven’t completed high school.

In March 2022, 59 members of Congress wrote a letter to FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf about OTC contraception.

“This is a critical issue for reproductive health, rights, and justice. Despite decades of proven safety and effectiveness, people still face immense barriers to getting birth control due to systemic inequities in our healthcare system,” the lawmakers wrote.

A recent study showed that it’s become harder for women to access reproductive health care services more broadly – such as routine screenings and birth control – in recent years.

About 45% of women experienced at least one barrier to reproductive health care services in 2021, up 10% from 2017. Nearly 19% reported at least three barriers in 2021, up from 16% in 2017.

Increasing reproductive access for women and adolescents was a resounding theme among the FDA advisers.

“We can take this opportunity to increase access, reduce disparities and, most importantly, increase the reproductive autonomy of the women of our nation,” said Dr. Jolie Haun of the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital and the University of Utah.

Dr. Karen Murray, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Nonprescription Drugs, said the agency understands the importance of “increased access to effective contraception” but hinted that the FDA would need more data from the manufacturer.

Some of the advisers and FDA scientists expressed concern that some of Perrigo’s data was unreliable due to overreporting of “improbable dosing.”

Murray said the lack of sufficient information from the study poses challenges for approval.

“It would have been a much easier time for the agency if the applicant had submitted a development program and an actual use study that was very easy to interpret and did not have so many challenges. But that was not what happened for us. And so the FDA has been put in a very difficult position of trying to determine whether it is likely that women will use this product safely and effectively in the nonprescription setting,” she said. “But I wanted to again emphasize that FDA does realize how very important women’s health is and how important it is to try to increase access to effective contraception for US women.”

Ultimately, the advisers said, they don’t want further studies of Opill to delay the availability of the product in an over-the-counter setting.

“I just wanted to say that the improbable dosing issue is important, and I don’t think it’s been adequately addressed and certainly leads to some uncertainty in the findings. But despite this, I would not recommend another actual use study this time, and I think we can make a decision on the totality of the evidence,” said Kate Curtis of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Curtis said she voted yes because “Opill has the potential to have a huge positive public health impact.”

Earlier in the discussion, Dr. Leslie Walker-Harding of the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital said the pill is just as safe as many other medications available on store shelves.

“The safety profile is so good that we would need to take every other medicine off the market like Benadryl, ibuprofen, Tylenol, which causes deaths and people can get any amount of that without any oversight. And this is extremely safe, much safer than all three of those medications, and incorrect use still doesn’t appear to have problematic issues,” she said.

Dr. Katalin Roth of the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences also emphasized the safety of the pill over the 50 years it has been approved as a prescription drug in the US.

“The risks to women of an unintended pregnancy are much greater than any of the things we were discussing as risks of putting this pill out out over-the-counter,” she said. “The history of women’s contraception is a struggle for women’s control over their reproduction, and we need to trust women.”

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May 10, 2023
7 dead after car plows into a crowd in front of a Texas shelter that was housing migrants | CNN

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A driver plowed into a group outside a shelter that had been housing migrants in a Texas border town on Sunday, leaving seven people dead – including several immigrants – and others injured, authorities say.

Authorities in Brownsville, Texas say they got a call around 8:30 am CT about a Land Rover that hit multiple people who were waiting at a bus stop across the street from the Bishop Enrique San Pedro Ozanam Center, a non-profit homeless shelter that has been helping house migrants.

The crash left seven dead and others injured, Martin Sandoval, a Brownsville police spokesperson, told CNN. Sandoval added that several migrants were among the dead and Border Patrol was working to confirm the identities of the victims. It’s unclear whether the crash was intentional.

CNN interviewed migrants staying at the center in December. At the time, the center’s director told CNN that migrants from all over the world were beginning to stay at the shelter and they were seeing an uptick in stays. The shelter is equipped to house and feed 200 people, according to its website.

Witnesses at the scene detained the driver until officers arrived, Sandoval said during a Sunday news conference. He said the driver of the vehicle received medical care and has been arrested on a reckless driving charge. “More than likely” there will be other charges added, Sandoval said.

Police have not released the name of the driver, but say it was a Hispanic man, Sandoval told CNN. Brownsville police are investigating with the help of Border Patrol, he added.

Sandoval said authorities are still investigating whether the crash was intentional or accidental. He said witnesses described seeing the driver ignore a red light, drive up on a curb and run over a group of people waiting at the bus stop. Police are checking the driver’s toxicology, Sandoval added.

The shelter has been housing immigrants while they wait for more permanent housing, he said.

Brownsville, Texas is located on the southern tip of Texas, just across the Rio Grande River. The town’s population is nearly 95% Hispanic or Latino, according to the 2022 census.

The crash happened just days before a Trump-era immigration restriction dubbed Title 42 is set to expire. The pandemic-era policy allowed immigration agents to swiftly return migrants to their home countries. Officials have predicted a rise in immigration in coming weeks when the restrictions are lifted Thursday.

Victor Maldonado, the director of the Ozanam Center, told CNN that about 20 to 25 migrants were sitting on the curb waiting for a bus across the street from the shelter. He said surveillance video captured the deadly wreck with footage showing a vehicle driving very quickly, crashing about 30 feet from where the migrants were sitting and then losing control.

Police took Maldonado’s copy of the surveillance video, he said.

The migrants were from Venezuela and had arrived at the shelter about two or three days ago, Maldonado said.

Maldonado said after the crash, he and a staff member at the shelter ran outside to find a very graphic scene, with body parts spread across the area.

“I’ve got a staff [member] who is in shock,” Maldonado said, adding that he, too, was in shock.

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May 7, 2023
Breast density changes over time could be linked to breast cancer risk, study finds | CNN

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Breast density is known to naturally decrease as a woman ages, and now a study suggests that the more time it takes for breast density to decline, the more likely it is that the woman could develop breast cancer.

Researchers have long known that women with dense breasts have a higher risk of breast cancer. But according to the study, published last week in the journal JAMA Oncology, the rate of breast density changes over time also appears to be associated with the risk of cancer being diagnosed in that breast.

“We know that invasive breast cancer is rarely diagnosed simultaneously in both breasts, thus it is not a surprise that we have observed a much slower decline in the breast that eventually developed breast cancer compared to the natural decline in density with age,” Shu Jiang, an associate professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and first author of the new study, wrote in an email.

Breast density refers to the amount of fibrous and glandular tissue in a person’s breasts compared with the amount of fatty tissue in the breasts – and breast density can be seen on a mammogram.

“Because women have their mammograms taken annually or biennially, the change of breast density over time is naturally available,” Jiang said in the email. “We should make full use of this dynamic information to better inform risk stratification and guide more individualized screening and prevention approaches.”

The researchers, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, analyzed health data over the course of 10 years among 947 women in the St. Louis region who completed routine mammograms. A mammogram is an X-ray picture of the breast that doctors use to look for early signs of breast cancer.

The women in the study were recruited from November 2008 to April 2012, and they had gotten mammograms through October 2020. The average age of the participants was around 57.

Among the women, there were 289 cases of breast cancer diagnosed, and the researchers found that breast density was higher at the start of the study for the women who later developed breast cancer compared with those who remained cancer-free.

The researchers also found that there was a significant decrease in breast density among all the women over the course of 10 years, regardless of whether they later developed breast cancer, but the rate of density decreasing over time was significantly slower among breasts in which cancer was later diagnosed.

“This study found that evaluating longitudinal changes in breast density from digital mammograms may offer an additional tool for assessing risk of breast cancer and subsequent risk reduction strategies,” the researchers wrote.

Not only is breast density a known risk factor for breast cancer, dense breast tissue can make mammograms more difficult to read.

“There are two issues here. First, breast density can make it more difficult to fully ‘see through’ the breast on a mammogram, like looking through a frosted glass. Thus, it can be harder to detect a breast cancer,” Dr. Hal Burstein, clinical investigator in the Breast Oncology Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the new study, said in an email. “Secondly, breast density is often thought to reflect the estrogen exposure or estrogen levels in women, and the greater the estrogen exposure, the greater the risk of developing breast cancer.”

In March, the US Food and Drug Administration published updates to its mammography regulations, requiring mammography facilities to notify patients about the density of their breasts.

“Breast density can have a masking effect on mammography, where it can be more difficult to find a breast cancer within an area of dense breast tissue,” Jiang wrote in her email.

“Even when you take away the issue of finding it, breast density is an independent risk factor for developing breast cancer. Although there is lots of data that tell us dense breast tissue is a risk factor, the reason for this is not clear,” she said. “It may be that development of dense tissue and cancer are related to the same biological processes or hormonal influences.”

The findings of the new study demonstrate that breast density serves as a risk factor for breast cancer – but women should be aware of their other risk factors too, said Dr. Maxine Jochelson, chief of the breast imaging service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who was not involved in the study.

“It makes sense to some extent that the longer your breast stays dense, theoretically, the more likely it is to develop cancer. And so basically, it expands on the data that dense breasts are a risk,” Jochelson said, adding that women with dense breasts should ask for supplemental imaging when they get mammograms.

But other factors that can raise the risk of breast cancer include having a family history of cancer, drinking too much alcohol, having a high-risk lesion biopsied from the breast or having a certain genetic mutation.

For instance, women should know that “density may not affect their risk so much if they have the breast cancer BRCA 1 or 2 mutation because their risk is so high that it may not make it much higher,” Jochelson said.

Some ways to reduce the risk of breast cancer include keeping a healthy weight, being physically active, drinking alcohol in moderation or not at all and, for some people, taking medications such as tamoxifen and breastfeeding your children, if possible.

“Breast density is a modest risk factor. The ‘average’ woman in the US has a 1 in 8 lifetime chance of developing breast cancer. Women with dense breasts have a slightly greater risk, about 1 in 6, or 1 in 7. So the lifetime risk goes up from 12% to 15%. That still means that most women with dense breasts will not develop breast cancer,” Burstein said in his email.

“Sometimes radiologists will recommend additional breast imaging to women with dense breast tissue on mammograms,” he added.

The US Preventive Services Task Force – a group of independent medical experts whose recommendations help guide doctors’ decisions – recommends biennial screening for women starting at age 50. The task force says that a decision to start screening earlier “should be an individual one.” Many medical groups, including the American Cancer Society and Mayo Clinic, emphasize that women have the option to start screening with a mammogram every year starting at age 40.

“It’s also very clear that breast density tends to be highest in younger women, premenopausal women, and for almost all women, it tends to go down with age. However, the risk of breast cancer goes up with age. So these two things are a little bit at odds with each other,” said Dr. Freya Schnabel, director of breast surgery at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center and professor of surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York, who was not involved in the new study.

“So if you’re a 40-year-old woman and your breasts are dense, you could think about that as just being really kind of age-appropriate,” she said. “The take-home message that’s very, very practical and pragmatic right now is that if you have dense breasts, whatever your age is, even if you’re postmenopausal – maybe even specifically, if you are postmenopausal – and your breasts are not getting less dense the way the average woman’s does, that it really is a reason to seek out adjunctive imaging in addition to just mammography, to use additional diagnostic tools, like ultrasound or maybe even MRI, if there are other risk factors.”

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May 2, 2023
Big banks are bidding for troubled First Republic as FDIC deadline looms | CNN Business

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New York
CNN
—

Federal regulators are holding an auction for ailing regional bank First Republic, a person familiar with the matter tells CNN.

Final bids are due for First Republic Bank at 4 p.m. ET on Sunday, the source said.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the independent government agency that insures deposits for bank customers, is running the auction.

Neither First Republic nor the FDIC were immediately available for comment.

Shares of First Republic

(FRC) plunged from $122.50 on March 1 to around $3 a share as of Friday on expectations that the FDIC would step in by end of day and take control of the San Francisco-based bank, its deposits and assets. But that never happened.

The FDIC had already done so with two other similar sized banks just last month — Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — when runs on those banks by their customers left the lenders unable to cover customers’ demands for withdrawals.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that JPMorgan Chase and PNC Financial are among the big banks bidding on First Republic in a potential deal that would follow an FDIC seizure of the troubled regional bank.

PNC declined to comment. JPMorgan did not respond to requests for comment.

“We are engaged in discussions with multiple parties about our strategic options while continuing to serve our clients,” First Republic said in a statement Friday night.

If there is a buyer for First Republic, the FDIC would likely be stuck with some money-losing assets, as was the case after it found buyers for the viable portions of SVB and Signature after it took control of those banks.

A kind of shotgun marriage, arranged by regulators who didn’t want a significant bank to end up in the hands of the FDIC before it was sold, occurred several times during the financial crisis of 2008 that sparked the Great Recession. Notably, JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns for a fraction of its earlier value in March of 2008, and then in September bought savings and loan Washington Mutual, soon after Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch.

The failure of Washington Mutual in 2008 was the nation’s largest bank failure ever. First Republic, which is bigger than either SVB or Signature Bank, would be the second largest.

Soon after collapses of SVB and Signature in March, First Republic received a $30 billion lifeline in the form of deposits from a collection of the nation’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase

(JPM), Bank of America

(BAC), Wells Fargo

(WFC), Citigroup

(C) and Truist

(TFC), which came together after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen intervened.

The banks agreed to take the risk and work together to keep First Republic flush with the cash in the hopes it would provide confidence in the nation’s suddenly battered banking system. The banks and federal regulators all wanted to reduce the chance that customers of other banks would suddenly start withdrawing their cash.

But while the cash allowed First Republic to make it through the last six weeks, its quarterly financial report Monday evening, with the disclosure of massive withdrawals by the end of March, spurred new concerns about its long-term viability.

The financial report showed depositors had withdrawn about 41% of their money from the bank during the first quarter. Most of the withdrawals were from accounts with more than $250,000 in them, meaning those excess funds were not insured by the FDIC.

Uninsured deposits at the bank fell by $100 billion during the course of the first quarter, a period during which total net deposits fell by $102 billion, not including the infusion of deposits from other banks.

The uninsured deposits stood at 68% of its total deposits as of December 31, but only 27% of its non-bank deposits as of March 31.

In its earnings statement, the bank said insured deposits declined moderately during the quarter and have remained stable from the end of last month through April 21.

Banks never have all the cash on hand to cover all deposits. They instead take in deposits and use the cash to make loans or investments, such as purchasing US Treasuries. So when customers lose confidence in a bank and rush to withdrawal their money, what is known as a “run on the bank,” it can cause even an otherwise profitable bank to fail.

First Republic’s latest earnings report showed it was still profitable in the first quarter — its net income was $269 million, down 33% from a year earlier. But it was the news on the loss of deposits that worried investors and, eventually, regulators.

While some of those who had more than $250,000 in their First Republic accounts were likely wealthy individuals, most were likely businesses that often need that much cash just to cover daily operating costs. A company with 100 employees can easily need more than $250,000 just to cover a biweekly payroll.

First Republic’s annual report said that as of December 31, 63% of its total deposits were from business clients, with the rest from consumers.

First Republic started operations in 1985 with a single San Francisco branch. It is known for catering to wealthy clients in coastal states.

It has 82 branches listed on its website, spread across eight states, in high-income communities such as Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Napa Valley, California; in addition to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Outside of California, branches are in other high-income communities such as Palm Beach, Florida; Greenwich, Connecticut; Bellevue, Washington; and Jackson, Wyoming.

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April 30, 2023