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Tag: families and children

  • Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis respond to ‘false’ accusations from former nanny in joint statement | CNN

    Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis respond to ‘false’ accusations from former nanny in joint statement | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis have released a joint statement regarding the highly publicized end of their relationship.

    The former couple, who were together from 2011 until 2020 and share two children, spoke out on Monday in response to a story published by The Daily Mail, in which a woman described as a former nanny for the two stars divulged alleged private details about the time leading up to and around their split.

    “As parents, it is incredibly upsetting to learn that a former nanny of our two young children would choose to make such false and scurrilous accusations about us publicly,” their joint statement provided to CNN read. “Her now 18 month long campaign of harassing us, as well as loved ones, close friends and colleagues, has reached its unfortunate apex.”

    “We will continue to focus on raising and protecting our children with the sincere hope that she will now choose to leave our family alone,” the statement concluded.

    The unnamed woman, whose claims have not been verified by CNN, spoke with the British outlet about the couple’s interactions amid Wilde’s relationship with Harry Styles, with whom she was working on the set of her film, “Don’t Worry Darling.”

    Wilde previously told Vanity Fair that her relationship with Sudeikis, with whom she shares daughter Daisy, 5, and son Otis, 8, ended long before her romance with Styles began.

    The couple’s separation has been, at times, contentious.

    The “Booksmart” director has previously addressed being served legal documents by Sudeikis’s legal team regarding custody of their children while presenting her latest movie at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, calling the move “vicious.”

    A source with knowledge of the matter told CNN at the time that Sudeikis “had no prior knowledge of the time or place that the envelope would have been delivered” and called it “inappropriate.”

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  • Kaley Cuoco expecting first child with boyfriend Tom Pelphrey | CNN

    Kaley Cuoco expecting first child with boyfriend Tom Pelphrey | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Kaley Cuoco’s next role is a big one – mom.

    The “Flight Attendant” star announced on Tuesday via Instagram that she’s expecting her first child, a girl, with boyfriend Tom Pelphrey.

    The child is due in 2023, the former “Big Bang Theory” star shared, adding that she feels “beyond blessed and over the moon.”

    Pelphrey, an actor known for his work on shows like “Ozark” and “Iron First,” wrote to Cuoco in his own Instagram post: “Love you more than ever.”

    The pair have been dating since earlier this year.

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  • Do your little kids love horror? They’re not alone | CNN

    Do your little kids love horror? They’re not alone | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Some kids cling to security blankets. Others clutch a well-loved stuffed animal or good luck charm to feel safe and confident.

    Kayla Lopez’s kids, meanwhile, just need to pull on their Michael Myers masks to feel invincible.

    “I don’t really know of anybody that likes horror as much as them, honestly,” she said.

    Dominic, 6, and his 8-year-old sister Aubriella are hooked on horror, running around their home in the mask Myers dons in the “Halloween” series to discreetly dispatch his victims. It’s a sight that’s extra hilarious when juxtaposed against their short stature, delightful giggles and footie pajamas.

    Lopez documents their scary shenanigans on TikTok: Sometimes Dominic will hide under beds dressed like Pennywise the Dancing Clown from “It” or reveal a hockey mask à la Jason of “Friday the 13th” beneath his beloved Myers facade. Oftentimes, Aubriella and her little brother will just stare at their mother from underneath their creepy rubber masks. Attempting to scare each other has become a treasured family pastime.

    The Lopez kids aren’t the only youngins interested in the macabre: Briar Rose Beard, a cherubic 3-year-old from Florida, recently enchanted the internet by falling in love with a Halloween prop baby doll named Creepy Chloe and toting the demonic-looking doll everywhere. The Sumner family of Idaho, whose matriarch Kailee posts on TikTok as @sumcowkids, recently went viral when their youngest member, still in the babbling stages of babyhood, was filmed growling at his older sister in a decrepit witch mask.

    Adorable kids and horror paraphernalia seem like an incongruous pairing. But a child’s interest in horror is “almost always a harmless fascination,” said Coltan Scrivner, a research scientist at the Recreational Fear Lab at Denmark’s Aarhus University.

    “It’s normal for children to want to explore the boundaries of their own fears and what society deems as acceptable,” said Scrivner, who studies horror media and fear, among other “scary” subjects. “This is one way for them to learn about those boundaries.”

    Just as some children play dress-up with princess gowns or Jedi robes, Dominic and Aubriella get a kick out of dressing up like horror characters – usually Myers. It’s a daily activity for the siblings, safe within the confines of their home.

    “Scary experiences are only fun if they are couched in the context of play,” Scrivner said. “That is, we have to be scared but also be sure we are safe.”

    Getting into scary stuff at a young age isn’t usually cause for alarm, Scrivner said – young horror fans are braver than most children their age, to be sure, but they’re really just exploring the complexities of their world, which is scary enough in real life.

    “By exploring scary things from a safe place, children can also learn more about how they respond to feelings of fear and anxiety,” he said.

    Child horror buffs aren’t that different from us older folks, either: Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association and professor emeritus at Temple University, said that humans are naturally fascinated with horror, both real and fictional. Hence the true crime boom, the horror genre’s continued success and the popularity of authors like Stephen King.

    Aubriella pushes her younger brother Dominic in a baby bouncer, both wearing Michael Myers masks.

    “It’s pretty amazing that we have Halloween,” he said, referring to the holiday as a “national day of horror.” “It bespeaks, in my view, the deep human interest in the dark side of life. There’s no doubt we’re interested in that.”

    The Lopez kids have what Farley calls “type-T personalities” – the “T” stands for thrill-seeking. While most of us are at least slightly interested in the scary, only “T” types will actively engage with it, whether it’s riding a mammoth roller coaster or marathoning horror films. “White-bread behavior,” as Farley puts it, isn’t interesting to the “T” types, who seek adventure and aren’t afraid to take risks, he said.

    Another reason some kids might prefer the company of vampires and zombies to, say, the animated cast of “Paw Patrol” or the Muppet neighbors on “Sesame Street,” is so they earn a badge of bravery among their peers, said Glenn Sparks, a Purdue University professor who studies the social impact of mass media, including scary movies.

    When a young child overhears friends, parents or other loved ones discuss how terrifying a film was, they might try to brave it themselves to prove their courage.

    “Some children may be more willing to expose themselves to potentially scary things, perhaps because of the gratification they think they will experience from being able to conquer those things,” Sparks said.

    For as long as her kids have loved him, Myers has been an irreplaceable member of the Lopez family, so much so that the kids watch his films regularly – on Wednesday, they had a living room matinee screening of “Halloween Kills.”

    Of course, now that her children’s love of all things “Halloween” is documented online, some parents have accused her of exposing her children to horror too young.

    Dominic and Aubriella don masks from two of their favorite franchises,

    But introducing kids to horror at a young age doesn’t have to traumatize them – it can even make them more resilient people, said Stephen Graham Jones, a bestselling horror author of books including “The Only Good Indians” and “My Heart is a Chainsaw,” as well as a professor of distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

    When Jones’ children expressed an interest in the genre, he started them on the family-friendly “Monster House” and Tim Burton’s twisted fairytale, “Edward Scissorhands,” movies that aren’t necessarily scary but nod to the horror genre. Eventually, they worked their way up to horror comedies and gorier fare. But the point he imparts on his children, he said, isn’t to take away negative messages from slasher flicks in which the villain wins – it’s to emulate the heroes.

    “I don’t want to teach them that cruelty is to be lauded,” Jones told CNN. “What I want them to learn instead is that if you’re vigilant, if you fight, if you stand up for your crew, then you can make it through whatever this ordeal might be.”

    Even the most dedicated cosplaying kids have limits: Coral DeGraves, a 9-year-old horror fan, makes regular appearances at fan conventions in impressive costumes inspired by the fearsome Pinhead of “Hellraiser” or a demented version of Ronald McDonald, among other scary icons. But her mother, Cheyenne, says that Coral still isn’t ready to see some of the gorier films she nods to. Her parents screen films before sharing them with her, and for some of the more intense films, they’ll at most share clips of characters for inspiration rather than the entire, blood-soaked feature.

    Horror doesn’t define DeGraves’ child’s life, either: When Coral isn’t playing an adorably frightening Pennywise or possessed doll, she enjoys learning about backyard critters or meeting with her Girl Scout troop.

    “I never found it difficult to support her interest in horror,” Cheyenne DeGraves told CNN. “In fact, the more she learns and creates on her own, I’m even more happy to support her.”

    It can be isolating for Dominic and Aubriella Lopez to feel like the only horror fans among their young friends, their mother said. (Lopez recalled Dominic’s third birthday, when he shocked his friends by excitedly unwrapping a Chucky doll, his favorite gift.) They’ve learned to filter themselves around their pals so as not to scare the other kids and save it for when they’re home, where their horror habits aren’t questioned.

    But now that it’s October, and the rest of the US seems to embrace the same fanaticism for scary stuff that the Lopez kids celebrate year-round, Dominic and Aubriella are excited to share their fandom without freaking out their fellow children, Lopez said.

    “They know that around Halloween is the time that Michael (Myers) and Chucky and all things horror come out – that means it’s all okay to be ourselves, go all out,” Lopez said.

    For Halloween this year, the Lopez family is still narrowing down a potential list of costumes. Aubriella is thinking of dressing like Anabelle, the haunted (and haunting!) doll introduced in “The Conjuring.” As for Dominic, well, you can guess – he’s already asked his mother for a new Myers mask to add to their growing collection.

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  • A single mom’s 4 kids had to fend for themselves when tragedy struck. How a chance encounter years ago saved their future | CNN

    A single mom’s 4 kids had to fend for themselves when tragedy struck. How a chance encounter years ago saved their future | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    On a dark autumn evening almost four years ago, Janie Yoshida was driving her daughter home from high school play rehearsal when she noticed a teenager walking by himself next to a busy road.

    Tre Burrows, it turned out, was also in the play at Somerset Academy Canyons High School in Boynton Beach, Florida.

    “I pulled over to the side of the sidewalk and rolled the window down and said, ‘Hey, where do you live? I’ll take you home,’” Janie recalled.

    The 17-year-old kept insisting he was fine, until Janie put on “my mom’s voice” and demanded: ‘“Get in the car.”

    The polite young man with the gregarious smile complied. But, Janie soon learned, he led a life more challenging than she imagined – one in which she’d soon play a far bigger role.

    “He wanted me to drop him off at a main intersection. And I said, ‘Of course not. Just show me where you live.’ And he goes, ‘No, I can walk the rest of the way,’” Janie recalled.

    Reluctantly, Tre directed Janie to where he and his family were living.

    A motel.

    “I tried to play it off, like no big deal,” Janie recalled. But in reality, “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God … just terrible.’”

    From that point on, Janie gave Tre a ride every day after play rehearsal. Sometimes, she would make up an excuse to get fast food along the way, just to make sure Tre had a hot meal.

    “‘I don’t want to cook tonight,’” she’d tell him. “’Let’s just go through the drive thru.’”

    Then one day, Tre let slip another detail about his family life.

    “‘I’m gonna save this (meal),’” he told Janie, “’and split it with my sisters’” – one older and two younger, all together at the motel.

    Tre’s mother, it turned out, had been working two jobs and hanging by a thread to support her four children against immeasurable odds.

    Despite the financial challenges, Cindy Dawkins worked tirelessly to give her kids everything they needed. She had every meal ready, even without a kitchen. She helped with homework. Instead of asking her older ones to work part-time to support the family, she encouraged extracurricular activities such as track or school theater.

    Eventually, Tre told Janie why he’d been so nervous about telling anyone where he lived.

    “He didn’t want anybody to know because he was worried that the Department of Children and Families would come and take them away from his mom,” Janie said. “That’s just heartbreaking.”

    Janie asked to meet this matriarch – and was floored by her work ethic and strength.

    And as much as he loved his mom, Tre had no idea how much she sacrificed for her children.

    Soon, immense tragedy would force him to learn.

    A native of the Bahamas, Cindy moved to the US for what seemed like a promising career in the hospitality industry. But an avalanche of “bad luck on top of bad luck” fell on her, Janie said, including a layoff and a divorce.

    She ended up waitressing at two restaurants – one during the day, the other at night.

    “For the longest (time), she was working two jobs just to keep us afloat, paycheck to paycheck,” said Tre, now 21.

    “And she did all of that with a smile on her face because she didn’t want us to know exactly how hard it was to do all that.”

    But despite working two jobs, Cindy couldn’t get an apartment on her own because of a prior eviction. So she and her children moved into the motel, which cost far more per month than an apartment.

    The late Cindy Dawkins, with her daughter Zoe Clarke, moved to the US from the Bahamas.

    For three years, Cindy raised her four children in a motel room while working multiple jobs.

    Behind the omnipresent smile she put on for her kids, though, Cindy was struggling.

    She lamented that “‘in three years, I haven’t been able to make a home-cooked meal,’” Janie recalled.

    “She was like, ‘I don’t have a moment to myself or any privacy except when I’m in the shower. So if I’m going to break down, I’m going to cry, it’s going to be in the shower,’” Janie recalled.

    “‘And I’ve got to put my face back on, walk out of the bathroom in front of the kids and make sure that they don’t see it from me because I have to make them think everything’s OK.’”

    The family’s bad luck culminated the day Tre missed play rehearsal.

    The next day, Janie asked if he had been sick.

    “‘They kicked us out of the hotel because my mom couldn’t pay,’” Janie recalled him telling her.

    Janie went home and told her husband: “We need to get this family an apartment. I’m going tomorrow.”

    And as readily as she’d opened her car door to Tre that first time, “we just rented an apartment for them,” she said.

    With Janie’s name on the lease, the family of five moved into a two-bedroom apartment – mom in one bedroom, her four children sharing the other.

    Cindy meticulously paid the rent and utilities “earlier or on time – always,” Janie said.

    She got a raise at one of her restaurant jobs, Tre said, allowing her to quit her second job and spend more time with her kids.

    But that cherished time with her children would be short-lived.

    With a new home and better pay, Cindy and her kids eagerly anticipated celebrating her 50th birthday last summer.

    “We were planning on going up to Orlando a few days before and then spend her birthday up there,” Tre said.

    “We noticed that she started getting sick literally the day that we got there. As soon as we arrived, she went to bed and went to sleep and was just sleeping the entire time.”

    Cindy spent her birthday, August 1, in bed with severe Covid-19. The disease ravaged her body so quickly, “I didn’t even get to see her after she went into the hospital,” Tre said.

    On August 7, 2021 – six days after her birthday – Cindy died.

    Disbelief exacerbated her children’s agony.

    “She didn’t have any prior illnesses. … We just didn’t think anything like that would happen because we were healthy,” Tre said.

    “We were seeing the news (about) all the people passing away from Covid, but you never really understand exactly how bad it is until you experience it firsthand. We weren’t thinking this would completely uproot our lives.”

    Tre said his mother did not get vaccinated, in part due to rumors about side effects.

    “We didn’t want to do this and then (have it) potentially cause us to get sick,” Tre said. “We know better than that now. But I guess that was the reasoning behind her not getting” vaccinated.

    Tre and his siblings joined a growing group of children no one wants to be part of: the orphans of Covid. More than 212,000 US children have lost one or both parents to Covid-19, according to estimates from Imperial College London. And the number of children robbed of their parents keeps rising.

    “It never crossed my mind,” Tre said, “that me and my older sister would be the ones taking care of our little sisters.”

    Tre was the first to hear from the doctor his mother had passed. He rushed to the hospital and told his older sister, Jenny Burrows, now 25, to get there immediately.

    When Jenny arrived, “We cried for hours,” Tre recalled. “Our little sisters were at home (sleeping). Then we gathered ourselves and we tried to figure out, ‘OK, how are we going to tell our sisters?’”

    They woke up heir siblings Zoe Clarke, then 15, and Sierra Clarke, then 12. The most horrific nightmare had just turned into reality.

    The late Cindy Dawkins, with daughter Sierra Clarke, worked multiple jobs to support her children.

    But Tre and Jenny didn’t have time to mourn. Their minds were racing:

    “‘OK, are we about to get kicked out of the apartment we’re staying in because we can’t afford the bills?

    “‘How are we going to move on from this home?

    “‘How are we going to get the girls … everything they need for school?’”

    And the biggest question of all: Will the younger children get taken away?

    Despondent, overwhelmed and tasked with planning a funeral, Tre told Janie his mother passed.

    “I just lost it. I couldn’t believe it,” Janie said. “It was devastating.”

    She realized the siblings quickly needed help – and not just financially.

    They needed to learn how to parent on the fly.

    So once again, like she did all those years back from the driver’s seat, Janie went into mom mode.

    Without a living legal guardian, the children’s greatest fear was getting separated. Maybe the younger siblings would get taken away into state custody and foster care. Or maybe they would be sent to the Bahamas to live with relatives.

    Janie helped Jenny get to work on Priority No. 1: Becoming the younger girls’ legal guardian. It was one of the myriad legal complications that followed their mother’s death.

    “Another thing that’s helping us tremendously is we were able to get the girls set up with Social Security benefits from my mom,” Tre said, which will help support Sierra and Zoe until they turn 18.

    Janie and her husband also paid the remaining six months on the apartment’s lease. And she started a GoFundMe account, with an initial goal of paying for Cindy’s funeral expenses.

    Then just as Janie had stepped in as a stranger to help Tre’s hard-working but struggling family, hundreds more strangers did the same.

    The crowdsourcing fund grew so popular, it yielded enough for a down payment on a house so the children wouldn’t have to worry about getting evicted. Any extra funds likely will go toward Sierra’s and Zoe’s college education in the coming years.

    Janie also taught the older siblings about car insurance, credit and other life skills they would need to know immediately, now that they had dependents.

    Tre Burrows, left, and Jenny Burrows, right, became unexpected parents after their mom Cindy Dawkins died from Covid-19.

    The hardest part of being both a brother and a parent to younger siblings is “definitely the mental aspect of all of that,” Tre said.

    “The attitude stuff is a big thing for teenagers. They’re teenagers. Like getting chores done, getting your homework done, the attitude that comes with all that … basically, everything that goes with raising a 16- and 12-year-old,” he said.

    He and Jenny try to balance it all “while also making sure they don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, since Mom isn’t here, now you think you’re the boss and you can do all this stuff?’”

    And Tre tries to balance tough love with “not being too harsh with them, obviously, because we all just went through a horrible situation.”

    Tre and Jenny also now juggle a daily marathon of jobs, their own schooling and taking care of their sisters’ basic needs, their education and their mental health.

    Tre works at a computer repair company and has started training to become an emergency medical technician and firefighter. And Jenny, a dental assistant, wants to finish training to become a dental hygienist.

    The older siblings devised a plan for how to finish their education while paying the bills and taking care of the girls.

    “When I was going through EMT school … my sister would drop them off at school. I would pick them up, and (then) I would head to school. That was our plan,” Tre said.

    “And my sister would be the one at home with them, making sure they’re getting their homework done, making sure they’re OK mentally. And obviously I would help with that whenever I’m not in school. And basically I would get through that, get through the fire academy, doing the same thing,” he said.

    “And then once I’m done with schooling, the roles will kind of be reversed. So I’ll be the one that’s dropping them off, and I’ll be home with them (while) my sister’s at school, getting her career situated.”

    It’s a daunting task. But it’s nothing compared to what his own mother did, Tre said.

    “My biggest (concern) was just making sure I can fill her shoes,” he said. “I never really understood exactly how much she was doing until now, when my sister and I are the ones who have to do it.”

    Tre is also immensely grateful to the countless strangers who helped him and his siblings find a home and stay together.

    And it all traces to Janie giving him a ride home from school that dark autumn evening.

    “Without her,” he said, “we wouldn’t know what we would have done.”

    And Janie has learned from Cindy’s children, she said. Perhaps they inherited their mother’s fortitude.

    “I know they have the same instinct inside of them, just like their mom did – that hey, even if it sucks, let’s get up and make the best of it,” she said.

    “They’re my inspiration now.”

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  • Thailand’s day care massacre unites families and a country in grief | CNN

    Thailand’s day care massacre unites families and a country in grief | CNN

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    Uthai Sawan, Thailand
    CNN
     — 

    Smears of dried blood still stained the wooden floor of a classroom in northeastern Thailand on Friday, a day after the country’s worst massacre unfolded in perhaps one of the most unlikely places.

    At the Child Development Center Uthai Sawan, school bags sat uncollected on colored shelves, and photos of children smiled from the wall, clipped into place with pegs near cardboard cut-outs of ladybirds.

    Outside, sobbing parents sat on blue plastic chairs in a makeshift shed, nursing their grief and clinging to each other and their children’s blankets and bottles, any reminder of life, as officials finalized plans for a visit from the country’s top leaders.

    More than 20 young children ages 2-5 lost their lives in this classroom during nap time on Thursday when a former policeman armed with a knife and handgun forced his way inside and slashed them in their sleep.

    In a strange mix of grief and grandeur, at the center’s front door, a red carpet had been rolled out for the delivery of a floral wreath, a gift from the Royal Highness Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana Rajakanya, the King’s youngest daughter.

    Later Friday, the King and Queen visited the injured survivors and their families at Nong Bua Lam Phu Hospital in a rare appearance, a source with direct knowledge of the king’s schedule told CNN.

    Their visit followed that of the country’s prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, who earlier met with families at the relief center set up by the government, visited hospitalized victims and laid flowers outside the day care.

    Thailand is accustomed to the underlying tensions that come in a nation governed by leaders of a military coup, but violence of the type perpetrated on Thursday is rare. The last mass death in the southeast Asian country was two years ago, when a former soldier went on a rampage at a military site before targeting shoppers at a mall in Nakhon Ratchasima Province, known as Korat, further south.

    In that case, the shooter was said to have erupted after an argument with another soldier over a land-selling commission fee. In this case, the motive is unclear but after terrorizing the childcare center, Panya Kamrab, a 34-year-old former policeman drove home and shot his wife and child, before taking his own life.

    The total death toll was 36, including Panya’s wife and two-year-old stepson, who normally attended that day care center, but who wasn’t there when the officer came searching for him. The toddler’s death takes the number of children killed to 24.

    Drugs don’t seem to have played a direct role – a forensic examination conducted by Udon Hospital found no evidence Panya used drugs in the 72 hours before the massacre.

    National police chief Pol. Gen. Damrongsak Kittiprapas said authorities believe Panya thought his wife would leave him, and she reported having a fight with him and phoning his mother for help.

    Nopparat Phewdam sat outside the day care center on Friday with other parents, though she lost her brother in the attack. Unlike others there, Nopparat knew the killer. She said he was a frequent customer to her convenience store and often came in with his stepson. “He seemed polite and spoke softly,” she said.

    Noppart Phewdam told CNN she lost her brother in the massacre.

    Details of the massacre have been slow to emerge, but the accounts given so far describe a man armed to kill, who didn’t hesitate to attack innocent children, and even shot dead a pregnant staff member who was a month away from giving birth.

    One staff member said Panya entered the center around noon, while two other staff members were having lunch. They heard sounds “like fire crackers” and saw two colleagues collapse on the floor. “Then he pulled another gun from his waist…I didn’t expect he would also kill the kids,” they said.

    Pol. Gen. Damrongsak said the suspect went to the day care center when he couldn’t find his wife and stepson at home. He crashed his vehicle on the way and shot three teachers before entering the building.

    Most of the deaths were the result of “stabbing wounds,” local police chief Major General Paisan Luesomboon told CNN. First responders told CNN of the grim scene that awaited them – most injuries were to the head, they said.

    In the any community, the loss of 36 people in one atrocity would be keenly felt, but the deaths of so many young children in a small rural area has shaken the village of around 6,300 people.

    Distraught families sat side by side outside the center, united in grief, as they waited Friday for details of government support.

    This couple lost their four-year-old son in the massacre.

    They included the heavily pregnant mother of four-year-old Thawatchai Siphu, also known as Dan, who was too distraught to speak. Dan’s grandmother, Oy Yodkhao, told CNN the family had been excited to welcome a new baby brother.

    Now their joy is drowned in loss and disbelief that someone could murder innocent children.

    “I couldn’t imagine there would be this kind of people,” said Oy. “I could not imagine he was this cruel to children.”

    Also sitting in numb grief were Pimpa Thana and Chalermsilp Kraosai, the parents of talkative twin boys, Weerapat and Worapon, who were yet to celebrate their fourth birthday – with two children, their family had been complete.

    Pimpa said her mother had phoned her to tell her there’d been a shooting at the day care center. “At that time I was not aware that my children were dead, my husband kept the news from me. I know it after I returned home.”

    Rows of small toddler-sized coffins in white and pale pink were laid on the ground as police retrieved the bodies from the classroom Thursday.

    Across the country on Friday, people wore black and flags flew at half-staff at government buildings, as thoughts turned to what lessons could be learned from a massacre within the walls of a classroom.

    A Thai officer lays a wreath of flowers from the royal family to mourn those killed at a child care center in the country's north.

    Gregory Raymond from Australian National University says he sees parallels between the mass shooting in 2020 and what happened Thursday at the day care center. Both perpetrators had served as officers in a country with a strong policing and military presence.

    “These are young men. They appear to have become alienated in some way. And they had access to weapons,” he said.

    It’s not known what mental issues Panya had been suffering, though it was believed he had a long-term drug problem – a perennial issue in the country, especially near its northern borders and the Golden Triangle, a global hub for illicit drugs.

    Last year, officials seized a record amount of methamphetamine – nearly 172 tons – in East and Southeast Asia in 2021, including the first haul of over 1 billion methamphetamine tablets.

    “There’s a lot of manufacturing going on in the Mekong sub region, and there’s also a lot of trafficking through Thailand,” said Raymond. “So all of that means that there’s more people who are developing problems with methamphetamine, and I think that has to be seen as a pretty significant cause of what’s happened here.”

    The mix of drugs and mental health issues among the forces is a problem Thailand needs to address, he added.

    “Thailand might have to start to think more about how it manages mental health amongst professionals, particularly those who have access to guns, or who have become used to having used to having violence as a kind of tool for their occupation.”

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  • White House seeks to tackle food insecurity at first hunger conference since 1969 | CNN Politics

    White House seeks to tackle food insecurity at first hunger conference since 1969 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Groceries cost 13.5% more than they did a year ago. Nearly 25 million adults live in households where there isn’t always enough to eat. Some 40% of food banks saw increased demand this summer.

    At a time when the affordability of food is in the spotlight, the Biden administration is hosting a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health on Wednesday with the goal of combating food insecurity and diet-related diseases.

    Overall, food insecurity has declined since former President Richard Nixon convened the first and only White House conference on food, nutrition and health in 1969, which led to nationwide expansions of the food stamp and school meals programs and the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, among other changes. General economic growth and the reduction in poverty have also contributed to the improvements in food security in recent decades.

    However, the Covid-19 pandemic and soaring inflation have increased the attention paid to food insecurity in the US over the past two years. The Biden administration released a 44-page playbook on Tuesday aimed at the “bold goal” of ending hunger by 2030 and increasing healthy eating and physical activity to reduce diet-related diseases.

    Among the key proposals: expand free school meals to 9 million more children by 2032; allow more people to qualify for food stamps; broaden the Summer Expanded Benefit Transfer program to more kids; increase funding for nutrition programs for senior citizens; and improve transportation to and from grocery stores and farmer’s markets, among other initiatives. Many of the efforts would need approval from Congress.

    President Joe Biden announced at the conference more than $8 billion in private and public sector commitments as part of the administration’s call to action.

    “In America, no child, no child should go to bed hungry,” Biden told those gathered at the conference Wednesday. “No parent should die of disease that can be prevented.”

    More than 100 organizations have made commitments, including hospitals and health care associations, tech companies, philanthropies and the food industry.

    At least $2.5 billion will be invested in start-up companies that are focused on solutions to hunger and food insecurity, according to the White House. More than $4 billion will be dedicated toward philanthropic efforts to improve access to nutritious food, promote healthy choices and increase physical activity.

    The President also urged Congress to make permanent the enhancement to the child tax credit, which was only in effect last year. Parents used the additional monthly funds to buy food and basic necessities, which Biden said helped cut child poverty in half and reduced food insecurity for families by 26%.

    Congress has poured billions into special pandemic assistance programs aimed at enabling struggling Americans to have enough food to feed themselves and their families – even as millions of jobs were lost in 2020.

    “That’s why it’s so consequential that at the onset of the Covid-19 recession, the combination of fiscal support to households – whether it is from the economic impact payments, unemployment insurance, refundable tax credits, enhanced SNAP benefits or pandemic EBT – all combined to prevent an increase in food insecurity over the past two years,” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

    The pandemic aid, particularly a temporary enhancement to the child tax credit, helped keep kids fed last year, Bauer and anti-hunger advocates maintain.

    Food insecurity among children fell in 2021, reversing a spike during the first year of the pandemic, according to a recent US Department of Agriculture report. Some 6.2% of households with children were unable at times to provide adequate, nutritious food for their kids last year, compared with 7.6% in 2020, the report found. Last year’s rate was not significantly different than the 2019 share.

    And the prevalence of food insecurity in the families who have kids dropped to 12.5% last year, the lowest since at least 1998, the earliest year that comparable records exist.

    But elderly Americans living alone and childless households both experienced an increase in food insecurity last year, the report found.

    Overall, the share of households contending with food insecurity remained statistically the same in 2021 as the year before.

    This lack of improvement in general food insecurity despite the surge in federal spending on food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, is a red flag for Angela Rachidi, senior fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

    “When the solution is always ‘let’s just spend more on SNAP or spend more on school lunch or WIC,’ I think that that’s not always the best use of federal dollars,” she said.

    Rachidi would like to see more of an emphasis on nutrition and healthy eating, which are among the pillars of the White House conference.

    “Many more people in the US die from diet-related disease than die from hunger,” she said, noting the health problems caused by obesity, diabetes and other conditions.

    The pandemic aid that helped keep Americans afloat has largely been exhausted, and Congress has shown little appetite to dole out more assistance – even as high inflation is squeezing many families.

    The share of people who say they live in households where there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last seven days has climbed to 11.5%, according to the most recent US Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey conducted in late July and early August.

    That’s up from the 10.2% recorded by the survey in late December and early January, just after the final monthly child tax credit payment was distributed. The share had been even lower in the late summer and early fall of 2021, when the monthly installments were being sent.

    Meanwhile, shopping in the supermarket is taking a bigger bite out of people’s wallets. Egg prices have skyrocketed nearly 40% over the past year, while flour is 23% costlier. Milk and bread are up 17% and 16% respectively, while chicken is nearly 17% more expensive.

    Starting next month, it will be a little easier for those in the food stamp program to afford groceries because the annual inflation adjustment will kick in. Beneficiaries will see an increase in benefits of 12%, or an average of $26 per person, per month. This comes on top of last year’s revision to the Thrifty Food Plan, upon which benefits are based, which raised the average monthly payment by $36 per person.

    Still, the upward march in prices has driven more people to food pantries, which are also struggling to stock the shelves amid higher prices.

    Some 40% of food banks reported seeing an increase in the number of people served in July compared with June, according to a survey conducted by Feeding America, which has more than 60,000 food pantries, meal programs and partner agencies in its network. The average increase was about 10% more people. Another 40% said demand remained about level.

    Many food pantries don’t have the resources to meet this increased demand, said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, Feeding America’s CEO, noting that she’s seen sites with nearly empty shelves but long lines out the door.

    The network provided 1.4 billion fewer meals in the fiscal year ending June 30 than the year before.

    The USDA announced earlier this month that it will provide nearly $1.5 billion in additional funding for emergency food assistance, which will help alleviate the supply shortages at food banks and pantries.

    However, Feeding America feels more should be done. It recently surveyed nearly 36,000 people for their recommendations to end hunger. Many felt that food stamp benefits should be increased and eligibility should be expanded. Nearly half felt their communities need more food pantries, grocery stores and fresh food.

    The recent infusion of federal funds will help pantries distribute more food, though it doesn’t completely close the gap. And it will take time for the supplies to arrive, Babineaux-Fontenot said.

    “Today, people are going to be looking for ways to feed themselves and their family, and there will be scarce resources for them to do that,” she said.

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  • First US senator to give birth in office offers heartfelt Mother’s Day message: ‘You’re what keeps this country strong’ | CNN Politics

    First US senator to give birth in office offers heartfelt Mother’s Day message: ‘You’re what keeps this country strong’ | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the first sitting US senator to give birth while in office, offered a heartfelt Mother’s Day message on Sunday, celebrating moms nationwide for “growing the next generation for our nation.”

    “Hang in there, sister. We’re in this together, and nobody has perfect work-life balance, everybody struggles, and so do the best that you can,” the Democrat told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    “You’re what keeps this country strong.”

    Duckworth and her husband, Bryan Bowlsbey, are the parents of two daughters, Abigail and Maile. Abigail was born while Duckworth was serving in the US House as a Chicago-area congresswoman.

    In 2018, after giving birth to Maile, Duckworth became the first US senator to cast a vote on the floor with her newborn by her side.

    Her vote came just one day after the Senate changed long-standing rules to allow newborns on the chamber floor during votes. The rule change, voted through by unanimous consent, was done to accommodate senators with newborn babies and lets them bring children under 1 year old onto the Senate floor and breastfeed them during votes.

    “It feels great,” Duckworth told reporters at the time. “It is about time, huh?”

    The Illinois Democrat on Sunday spoke about Democratic efforts to pass legislation to address rising child care costs.

    “Families spend as much as a quarter to half of their income on child care, and there’s no way for working families to survive under those burdens,” Duckworth said.

    “We keep trying,” she added when asked by Bash about finding bipartisan solutions.

    Duckworth is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was a helicopter pilot during the Iraq War. She was the first female double amputee from the war after suffering severe combat wounds when her Black Hawk helicopter was shot down.

    Duckworth served in the Obama administration as an assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs. She was first elected to the US House in 2012 and the Senate four years later.

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  • ‘There is no universal school safety solution.’ Nashville attack renews debate over how best to protect students | CNN

    ‘There is no universal school safety solution.’ Nashville attack renews debate over how best to protect students | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Semiautomatic gunfire echoed in the hallways of The Covenant School, making a distinct noise teachers there would not soon forget.

    That was more than 14 months ago – before three children and three adults were gunned down on Monday in the stately stone school connected to Covenant Presbyterian Church, atop a tree-shrouded hill just south of downtown Nashville.

    The active shooter training session ended with live gunfire intended to familiarize school staff with real gunshots if they ever heard them.

    “Blanks don’t sound the same. They just don’t,” said security consultant Brink Fidler, whose firm conducted the exercise.

    A bullet trap the trainers wheeled around captured the rounds of a semiautomatic pistol and an AR-15-style rifle loaded with real ammunition.

    When a handful of teachers heard the very first shot of Monday’s rampage they initially mistook it for the din of ongoing construction at the building.

    “But then they said, ‘When we heard a few more after that we all knew because we had heard it before,” said Fidler, a former police officer who did a walk-through of the elementary school with Nashville officials on Wednesday – two days after another massacre in America renewed questions about what schools are doing to protect children and staff against mass murder.

    As investigators work to determine the motive for the carnage, students, parents and school leaders across the country are again asking what more can be done to secure schools in the era of active shooter drills, lockdowns and widespread anxiety amid recurring mass shootings.

    Fortified school buildings and entrance doors, glass panes coated in bullet-resistant laminate, locked classrooms and heavy surveillance have became a part of life in places where children are supposed to feel inspired to learn.

    A funeral service for Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, the first victim to be laid to rest, was held Friday, which would have been the final school day before Easter break for the 200 or so private school students.

    The shooter was a former Covenant School student, who also killed William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, both 9; Katherine Koonce, the 60-year-old head of the school; Cynthia Peak, a 61-year-old substitute teacher; and Mike Hill, a 61-year-old custodian.

    Police fatally shot the 28-year-old attacker – who was armed with an AR-15 military-style rifle, a 9 mm Kel-Tec SUB2000 pistol caliber carbine, and a 9 mm Smith and Wesson M&P Shield EZ 2.0 handgun – inside the school about 14 minutes after the shooter fired through locked glass doors to enter the building.

    The AR-15 and 9 mm pistol caliber carbine appeared to have 30-round magazines, according to experts who reviewed photos and video released by police.

    Officers were on scene at 10:24 a.m. and fatally shot the attacker three minutes later, police said.

    “The shooter, confronted in the second floor lobby, didn’t even have a chance to get to the classrooms,” said CNN analyst Jennifer Mascia, a writer and founding staffer of The Trace, a non-profit focused on gun violence. “That is something that is very reassuring to parents across the country. However, as we see, even a robust police response is not enough.”

    The attack was the 19th shooting at an American school or university in 2023 in which at least one person was wounded, according to a CNN count. It was the deadliest since the May attack in Uvalde, Texas, left 21 dead. There have been 42 K-12 school shootings since Uvalde, where the gunman fired 100 or so rounds before police breached a classroom more than an hour later and killed the attacker to end the siege.

    Once again, children, their parents and school leaders are left struggling with how to stop and handle mass shootings even though such incidents are rare and schools are still quite safe.

    “What a lot of school leaders have learned is don’t react quickly. You’ve got a lot of pressure to do something right away but it’s really better to be thoughtful,” said Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit school safety firm that has evaluated security at thousands of schools.

    “You should assume that you don’t have a good picture of what really happened and what didn’t. Be very skeptical about claims that this saves lives or people died because of that. In Tennessee no one will have a really accurate picture of what happened there for months.”

    Coping with the nightmare scenario of a school shooting is now part of the mission to educate and counsel children.

    It’s been 24 years since the Columbine High School mass shooting left 13 people dead in 1999. And more than a decade since a gunman shot his way through glass at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed six adults and 20 children.

    “We keep repeating the same mistakes because people don’t know what the same mistakes are,” Fidler said. “School resource officers are a great part of the solution. Security laminate – great part of the solution. Cameras – great part of the solution. But if the people in the building don’t know what to do, none of that other stuff means anything.”

    Audrey Hale shot throught the doors at The Covenant School to gain entry.

    Mass shootings have helped fuel a multibillion dollar school security industry in recent years – ranging from high-tech surveillance systems to weapon scanners and hand-held emergency panic devices to immediately alert law enforcement and lock down schools.

    “The message is really simple and it has been since before Nashville,” said Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, who was scheduled to speak about school security this weekend at the annual conference of the National School Boards Association in Orlando, Florida. “One of the worst times to make knee jerk policy and administrative actions is after a high profile incident like this when you’re in a highly emotional state.”

    Experts said school officials should not give in to political pressures to take steps that are likely to be ineffective and wasteful of limited resources.

    “We’ve been in schools where, on the positive side, almost every staff member has a two-way walkie talkie, which is good,” Trump said. “And we’ve been in other schools, sometimes in the same district, where they’re sitting in a charger and the principal says, ‘Well, we have them but I prefer to not use them.’ “

    He added, “When security works, it works because of people. When it fails, it fails because of people.”

    Dorn said he has been inundated with emails since Monday from companies “I’ve never heard of,” with offers of technology they claim will heighten security in schools.

    “The three things that every school leader better pay a lot of attention to is, we have limited time, energy and budget for safety,” Dorn said. “So we can’t afford to waste any of that. We can’t spend our budget or training time on something that we don’t have pretty good evidence actually bears fruit. With the caution that nothing’s going to be 100 percent. This idea that we’re gonna stop all school shootings; there’s just, no country has been able to do that.”

    Dorn and others pointed to a 2016 school safety technology report from Johns Hopkins University that found there was insufficient evidence to show devices such as weapons detectors and high-tech alarms and sensors helped curb mass shootings.

    “There is no universal school safety solution – no one technology will solve all school safety and security issues,” the researchers wrote. “The sheer number of schools and school districts across the country – with different geography, funding, building construction and layout, demographics, and priorities – make each one different.”

    Pictures of the victims killed in the mass shooting at The Covenant School are fixed to a memorial by Noah Reich from the non-profit Classroom of Compassion near the school on Wednesday.

    Fidler and others said more resources should be devoted to educating and training students and school staff on recognizing and responding to threats.

    “I can’t tell you how many of our school clients still have classroom doors that are not lockable from inside the classroom,” he said.

    Referring to training and preparation for catastrophic school events like a mass shooting, Fidler said: “As a society we suck at this – which is terrible, but we do.”

    On Wednesday, two days after the massacre, Fidler did a walk-through of the blood-stained school corridors with investigators. “It was hard, man. I’m struggling,” the law enforcement veteran of nearly 20 years said Saturday. “Some of that blood belonged to people I know.”

    Fidler found that upon recognizing they were under attack teachers and staff relied on their training.

    The shooter fired multiple rounds into several classroom doors but didn’t hit any students inside “because the teachers knew exactly what to do, how to fortify their doors and where to place their children in those rooms,” Fidler said.

    “Their ability to execute, literally flawlessly, under that amount of stress while somebody is trying to murder them and their children, that is what made the difference here,” he said.

    “These teachers are the reason those kids went home to their families.”

    Koonce, the head of the school, had been adamant about training school staff on how to respond during an active shooter situation, Fidler said.

    “She understood the severity of the topic and the severity of the teachers needing to have the knowledge of what to do in that situation,” he said.

    “Katherine went to find out what was happening” when she was shot, Fidler said. “You know, Katherine Koonce, I could have had a lasso around her waist and she would drag me down the hall. She was going to go find out what’s going on and try and figure out what’s best for her students… She went right to it.”

    Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake could not confirm how Koonce died but said, “I do know she was in the hallway by herself. There was a confrontation, I’m sure. You can tell the way she is lying in the hallway.”

    Fidler said teachers covered windows. They shut off lights. Unused medical kits sat on desks.

    “Countless teachers had their bleeding control kits out, staged and ready to treat people in their classroom,” he recalled.

    “The fact that they had the wherewithal to do that. ‘Ok, I’ve got my kids secure. I’ve got the door locked and barricaded.’ And now, as a teacher, to have the wherewithal to remember the last piece, the medical, because we can potentially save a lot of people. They crushed it. They were able to perform under that amount of stress… They were able to recall all this information and put it into practice.”

    The six shooting victims were trapped in hallways and killed, Fidler said.

    “How many teachers in America could walk into their classroom right now and throw a tourniquet on the table and put that on? How many of them could do it?”

    His message for anxious parents: “Ask questions. Find out what your kids’ school is doing or not doing. And don’t stop asking until something’s done.”

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  • Meta opens up its Horizon Worlds VR app to teens for the first time, prompting outcries from US lawmakers | CNN Business

    Meta opens up its Horizon Worlds VR app to teens for the first time, prompting outcries from US lawmakers | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Meta is forging ahead with plans to let teenagers onto its virtual reality app, Horizon Worlds, despite objections from lawmakers and civil society groups that the technology could have possible unintended consequences for mental health.

    On Tuesday, the social media giant said children as young as 13 in Canada and the United States will gain access to Horizon Worlds for the first time in the coming weeks.

    The app, which is already available to users above the age of 17, represents Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for a next-generation internet, where users can physically interact with each other in virtual spaces resembling real life.

    “Now, teens will be able to explore immersive worlds, play games like Arena Clash and Giant Mini Paddle Golf, enjoy concerts and live comedy events, connect with others from around the world, and express themselves as they create their own virtual experiences,” Meta said in a blog post.

    Zuckerberg has pushed to spend billions developing VR hardware and software, even as Meta has scaled back significantly in other parts of its business. Last year alone, the company spent nearly $16 billion in its Reality Labs segment and warned investors not to expect profitability from that unit anytime soon.

    Tuesday’s expansion reflects Meta’s attempt to capture early adopters in a key demographic. But it immediately triggered criticism from lawmakers who had pleaded with the company to postpone its plan.

    “Meta is despicably attempting to lure young teens to Horizon Worlds in an attempt to boost its failing platform,” said Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who last month, along with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, urged Zuckerberg to reconsider letting teens use the app.

    Lawmakers have previously raised alarms about the impact of some of Meta’s other products, including Instagram, on younger users.

    “Meta has a record of abject failure to protect children and teens, and yet again, this company has chosen to put young users at risk so that it can make more money,” Markey said, accusing Meta of “inviting digital disaster.”

    “I’m calling on the company to reverse course and immediately abandon this policy change,” Markey added.

    Those calls were echoed earlier this month by dozens of civil society groups who wrote in an open letter that Meta’s VR offerings could expose users to new privacy risks through the collection of biometric and other data; new forms of unfair and deceptive marketing; and abuse or bullying.

    Meta said in its announcement that in opening up Horizon Worlds to teens, the company would provide protective guardrails, such as by using default settings to make teenage users’ profiles and activity less visible to other users and by applying content ratings to potentially mature virtual spaces. Meta added that its safety controls were developed with input from parents and online safety experts.

    “I hope no one is assuming there is any inclination on our part to simply open the floodgates,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, told CNN during a recent tech demonstration at the company’s Washington offices. “Clearly we can’t do that. We have to build experiences which are tailored to the unique vulnerabilities of teens.”

    Meta’s announcement Tuesday came as other US government officials said they were beefing up scrutiny of social media’s potential effects on mental health.

    The Federal Trade Commission is “actively working” on hiring in-house psychologists to address concerns linking social media use to teen mental health harms, said Alvaro Bedoya, an FTC commissioner.

    In recent weeks, members of the FTC have been consulting with public health officials and medical professionals to understand the available scientific evidence on the matter, Bedoya told lawmakers on a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee.

    “There is evidence that some uses of social media do, in fact, hurt certain groups of teenagers and children,” Bedoya said, though he cautioned that there were important nuances and caveats in the research. “This is not some moral panic. There is a ‘there’ there.”

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  • Meta is giving parents more visibility into who their teens are messaging on social media | CNN Business

    Meta is giving parents more visibility into who their teens are messaging on social media | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Meta is adding new safeguards and monitoring tools for teens across its social platforms: parental controls on Messenger, suggestions for teens to step away from Facebook after 20 minutes, and nudges urging young night-owl Instagrammers to stop scrolling.

    The features announced Tuesday come as Meta

    (META)     and other social media platforms face heightened pressure from lawmakers over the impact that their platforms have on younger users, who can be just 13 when they sign up for Meta

    (META)    ’s apps.

    Messenger, Meta’s instant-messaging app, is adding parental supervision tools for the first time that are similar to those that exist on Instagram already: Parents and guardians can see how much time their teens spend on the chat tool, view and receive updates on their contacts list, and get notified if their teen reports someone.

    Another new feature is the ability for parents and teens to have discussions directly through notifications if their accounts are synced up.

    “We heard from parents and teens about the value they’re seeing from how a two-way dialogue can foster and encourage discussions,” Diana Williams, who oversees product changes for youth and families at Meta, told CNN in an interview.

    On Facebook, Meta will start to nudge teen users to take time away from the app after 20 minutes.

    Instagram will add introduce a new nudge that suggests teens close Instagram if they’re scrolling Reels videos for too long during nighttime hours. The effort builds on existing Instagram features like Quiet Mode, which temporarily holds notifications and lets people know if you’re trying to focus.

    In addition, Instagram is testing a feature that limits how people interact with non-followers. Users must now send an invite to connect with someone if they’re not a follower, and they cannot call the recipient or send photos, videos or voice messages or make calls until the user accepts their request. The feature aims to cut down on unwanted content from strangers, particularly for women, the company said.

    It’s the latest in a series of new tools and guardrails for teens from Meta, following the release of leaked internal documents that found Instagram can negatively impact the mental health of its young users. Instagram, for example, has since introduced an educational hub for parents with resources, tips and articles from experts on user safety.

    The company said it’s also taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens and will actively nudge them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been dwelling on any type of content for too long.

    Few changes have been made to Facebook and Messenger until now. Facebook does, however, have a Safety Center that provides supervision tools and resources, such as articles and advice from leading experts.

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  • Judge who suspended abortion pill failed to disclose interviews that discussed social issues | CNN Politics

    Judge who suspended abortion pill failed to disclose interviews that discussed social issues | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The federal district judge who first suspended the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the so-called abortion pill mifepristone failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation process two interviews on Christian talk radio where he discussed social issues such as contraception and gay rights.

    In undisclosed radio interviews, Matthew Kacsmaryk referred to being gay as “a lifestyle” and expressed concerns that new norms for “people who experience same-sex attraction” would lead to clashes with religious institutions, calling it the latest in a change in sexual norms that began with “no-fault divorce” and “permissive policies on contraception.”

    Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal district judge, made the unreported comments in two appearances in 2014 on Chosen Generation, a radio show that offers “a biblical constitutional worldview.” At the time, Kacsmaryk was deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit religious liberty advocacy group known before 2016 as the Liberty Institute, and was brought on to the radio show to discuss “the homosexual agenda” to silence churches and religious liberty, according to the show’s host.

    Federal judicial nominees are required to submit detailed paperwork to the Senate Judiciary Committee ahead of their confirmation process, including copies of nearly everything they have ever written or said in public, in order for the committee to evaluate a nominee’s qualifications and personal opinions. Neither interview is listed in the paperwork Kacsmaryk provided to the Senate during his judicial nomination process, which first began in 2017.

    The radio interviews were not included in the 22 media works Kacsmaryk disclosed, which included three radio appearances and 19 written pieces.

    A spokesperson for Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN the interviews weren’t in their archived files from Kacsmaryk’s confirmation, which included all paperwork submitted for his nomination.

    In a statement sent to CNN, Kacsmaryk said he did not locate the interview when searching for media to disclose and he did not recall the interview.

    “I used the DOJ-OLP manual to run searches for all media but did not locate this interview and did not recall this event, which involved a call-in to a local radio show,” he told CNN. “After listening to the audio file supplied by CNN, I agree that the content is equivalent to the legal analysis appearing throughout my SJQ and discussed extensively during my Senate confirmation hearing. Additionally, the transcript supplied by CNN appears to track with the audio and accurately recounts my responses during the phone call—when quoted in full.”

    The Washington Post reported last week that Kacsmaryk removed his name in 2017 from a pending law review article criticizing protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions during his judicial nomination process, a highly unusual move for a judicial nominee.

    Kacsmaryk did not respond to the Post’s request for comment, but a spokesperson for his old employer First Liberty claimed Kacsmaryk’s name had been a “placeholder” on the article and that Kacsmaryk had not provided a “substantive contribution,” despite the final version being almost identical to the one submitted under Kacsmaryk’s name according to the Post.

    Kacsmaryk later submitted supplemental material in 2019 to the committee to reflect interviews and events he participated since in 2017, but neither of the 2014 radio interviews were included.

    Democratic senators grilled Kacsmaryk on his positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights during both his nomination hearing and in written questions in 2017.

    While Kacsmaryk worked at First Liberty, one of his colleagues, general counsel Jeff Mateer, was also nominated for a federal judgeship. But Mateer came under scrutiny in 2017 for comments unearthed during his confirmation process in which he once compared the US to Nazi Germany on Chosen Generation – the same radio program Kacsmaryk appeared on and whose interviews he did not disclose.

    Mateer’s nomination was later rescinded; Kacsmaryk was later confirmed in 2019.

    The interviews were shared by Kacsmaryk’s employer, the Liberty Institute, at the time on social media. A guest from First Liberty appeared once a week, according to the show’s radio host in the broadcast and archives available online.

    In one interview from February 2014, in response to a question on the “homosexual agenda,” Kacsmaryk expressed concerns that new social norms surrounding “same-sex marriage” and “people who experience same-sex attraction” would lead to clashes with religious institutions.

    “I just want to make very clear, people who experience a same-sex attraction are not responsible individually or solely for the atmosphere of the sexual revolution,” Kacsmaryk said. “You know it. It’s a long time coming. It came after no-fault divorce. It came after we implemented very permissive policies on contraception. The sexual revolution has gone through several phases. We just happen to be at the phase now where same sex marriages is at the fore.”

    “But through that progression or regression, I think you can see five areas where there will be a clash of absolutes between the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage and the revisionist, redefined vision of marriage that you saw in last term’s Supreme Court opinions,” he said before outlining those areas as over tax exempt statuses, adoption services, federal government programs, and discrimination at universities.

    He appeared on the program to discuss the federal government’s view of same-sex marriage and opponents of it following the court ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. The host suggested opponents of same-sex marriage could be viewed as “hostile” enemies of the government in line with al-Qaeda, which Kacsmaryk agreed with.

    “Yeah, and I can speak from immediate firsthand experience,” he said, citing his work formerly in the Justice Department. “That is very much in vogue now in the federal government to characterize opposition to same sex marriage and related issues as irrational prejudice at best and a potential hate crime at worse,” he continued.

    “It really has infused the entire federal service top to bottom as the administration has declared that they will join this culture war, that there’s one side that is destined to win and that you’re on the wrong side of history in the federal government if you are on an opposing side,” he added.

    Kacsmaryk also appeared on the program in July 2014 to discuss an executive order signed by then-President Barack Obama that banned federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity which did not exempt faith-based groups.

    Kacsmaryk linked changes in Democrats’ views on the issue of religious freedom to the “emergence of this very powerful constituency in the LGBT community,” which he said the Obama administration made campaign promises to fulfill. Kacsmaryk said religious organizations entering into contracts with the federal government would have risk under the executive order and face a “real burden” for dissenting from “the new sexual orthodoxy” on gay rights.

    The new rules, Kacsmaryk suggested, were poorly written and didn’t differentiate between gay people who lived “celibate” lives and those who made being gay “a lifestyle,” in a discussion of how religious groups would comply with the new rules.

    “If you look at the letter that was issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, they point out that the category sexual orientation is problematic because it’s not defined,” he said. “Most Abrahamic faith traditions will draw a distinction between someone who experiences the same sex attraction but is willing to live celibate and somebody who experiences the same sex attraction and makes it a lifestyle and seeks to sexualize that lifestyle. Those are two different categories that most Abrahamic faith traditions recognize.”

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  • New Iowa law restricts gender identity education, bans books with sexual content | CNN Politics

    New Iowa law restricts gender identity education, bans books with sexual content | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a sweeping bill into law Friday that will restrict education about gender identity and sexual orientation and ban books with certain sexual content from school libraries, as well as require schools to notify parents if their child asks to use a new name or pronoun.

    Iowa is just one of several Republican-led states to pass laws strengthening what advocates often describe as “parental rights” over the past few years.

    The controversial movement, which critics argue is aimed at limiting the rights of LGBTQ and other marginalized students, emerged as a top issue for the national Republican Party during the Covid-19 pandemic and is expected to play a key role during the 2024 election cycle.

    The Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization, likened Iowa’s parental rights law to legislation enacted in Florida last year that opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.” The Florida law banned certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom and set off a social and political firestorm.

    Iowa state Sen. Ken Rozenboom, chair of the education committee, has said that the parental rights bill “matches up with what most schools are doing now.”

    “But we need to rein in those schools that believe that ‘the purpose of public education is to teach [students] what society needs them to know.’ We must put parents back in charge of their children’s education,” he wrote in his newsletter in March.

    Iowa has passed several new laws this year addressing parents’ rights. In March, Reynolds signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, as well as a law that makes it easier for families to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private K-12 schools regardless of their income.

    The new Iowa law, also known as SF 496, touches on a range of education-related issues.

    It prohibits instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation to students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

    The law also requires school administrators to notify parents if their child “requests an accommodation” related to their gender identity, including using a name or pronoun that is different than the one “assigned to the student in the school district’s registration forms or records.”

    When it comes to books, the law puts restrictions on school libraries for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The libraries can only have books deemed “age-appropriate,” which, according to the law, excludes any materials with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

    School employees found to be in repeated violation of some of these provisions could face disciplinary action, according to the law.

    Similar laws restricting what books are allowed in libraries have recently gone into effect in other states, including Florida, Missouri and Utah.

    “Vague language in the laws regarding how they should be implemented, as well as the inclusion of potential punishments for educators who violate them, have combined to yield a chilling effect,” according to a report published in April by PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend free expression and tracks book bans.

    Laws like the one in Florida give incentives to teachers, media specialists and school administrators to proactively remove books from shelves, the report said.

    There were more book bans across the country during the fall 2022 semester than in each of the prior two semesters, according to PEN America. The bans were most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina.

    About one-third of the titles banned are books about race or racism or feature characters of color. About 26% of the titles have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

    “Those children tell us all the time that finding books that reflect their experiences and answer questions they would never ask adults is lifesaving for them,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation.

    The past year has brought an escalation to the book ban movement, with many state lawmakers introducing legislation that could have an impact on what’s available at public and school libraries.

    “We’re looking at over 31 bills that oppose some kind of restriction on the ability of librarians to create collections that serve the needs of every student or attempt to censor books based on one group’s opinion,” Caldwell-Stone added.

    There are at least 62 “parental rights” bills that have been introduced in 24 states this year, according to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

    Most have yet to become law. But last year, six bills were signed by governors – two in Florida, two in Arizona and one each in Georgia and Louisiana.

    Many of the bills focus on parents’ right to know what their children are learning in classrooms, particularly around issues of race and gender.

    The Republican-controlled US House passed its own “Parents Bill of Rights” bill in March, though the Senate is not expected to take up the legislation.

    Overall, a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced this year. Some focus on education, but others concern health care, bathroom access and drag performances.

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  • Buttigieg says Supreme Court case was designed for ‘clear purpose of chipping away’ at LGBTQ equality | CNN Politics

    Buttigieg says Supreme Court case was designed for ‘clear purpose of chipping away’ at LGBTQ equality | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings out of religious objections, saying the case was designed “for the clear purpose of chipping away” at LGBTQ equality.

    “It’s very revealing that there’s no evidence that this web designer was ever even approached by anyone asking for a website for a same-sex wedding,” Buttigieg, the first out Cabinet secretary confirmed by the Senate, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, in a 6-3 opinion, ruled Friday for Lorie Smith, the Colorado web designer, on free speech grounds, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing, “All manner of speech – from ‘pictures, films, paintings, drawings, and engravings,’ to ‘oral utterance and the printed word’ – qualify for the First Amendment’s protections.”

    Smith said in court filings that a man had inquired about her services for his same-sex wedding. But as CNN previously reported, the man in question says that he never reached out to Smith – and that he’s straight and married to a woman.

    “There’s something in common between this Supreme Court ruling and what we’re seeing happening in state legislatures across the country, which is kind of a solution looking for a problem,” Buttigieg said Sunday. “In other words, sending these kinds of things to the courts and sending these kinds of things to state legislatures for the clear purpose of chipping away at the equality and the rights that have so recently been won in the LGBTQ+ community.”

    Two contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination took a different stance on the Supreme Court ruling in separate interviews Sunday on “State of the Union.”

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the decision “protects all of our First Amendment rights,” adding that “the government doesn’t have the right to tell a business the nature of how they need to use their expressive abilities.”

    Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd acknowledged that the ruling made him “uncomfortable because we’re protecting speech that I don’t agree with. And I don’t agree with an anti-LGBTQ sentiment.”

    “But we have to be protecting the speech even if we don’t like or agree with the speech. That’s a foundational element in our country,” Hurd said.

    In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that the court’s decision in the Colorado case would be more far-reaching.

    “The decision’s logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity,” she wrote.

    “The decision threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services,” Sotomayor said, adding that “a website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example.”

    Christie pushed back Sunday on that characterization.

    “What Sonia Sotomayor … was saying in her opinion was that … this decision could be used to deny people of LGBTQ backgrounds the ability to access this business. That’s simply not true,” he told Bash.

    “They can access this business. They just can’t force the owner to do something that is against her personal religious beliefs. And so, if they want to come in and they want a web design for their business, they want a web design for a charity, they want a web design for anything else that they’re doing, they could certainly do that,” he added.

    Meanwhile, Buttigieg was asked about a recent video shared by a campaign Twitter account for Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential bid that attacked rival Donald Trump over his past promises to protect LGBTQ rights and highlighted measures championed by the Florida governor to curb such protections.

    After cautioning that he was “going to choose my words carefully, partly because I’m appearing as secretary, so I can’t talk about campaigns,” Buttigieg said the bigger issue when sees such videos was: “Who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off?”

    “I just don’t understand the mentality of somebody who gets up in the morning thinking that he’s going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America,” the secretary said.

    The DeSantis campaign has come under criticism for marking the end of Pride Month by re-posting the video from the DeSantis War Room Twitter account. Both Christie and Hurd on Sunday also criticized the sharing of the video.

    In response to the online criticism, Christina Pushaw, the rapid response director for the DeSantis campaign, said Pride Month was “unnecessary, divisive, pandering.”

    “Opposing the federal recognition of ‘Pride Month’ isn’t homophobic,” Pushaw said in a tweet. “We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either.”

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  • Why there won’t be a backlash against the Supreme Court this time | CNN Politics

    Why there won’t be a backlash against the Supreme Court this time | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court handed down several key rulings this past week that dismayed liberals. Chief among them was the court’s decision to disallow colleges and universities from using race or ethnicity as a specific factor in admissions. The court also found that President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan was unconstitutional and that a Colorado web designer could refuse to create websites that celebrate same-sex weddings over religious objections.

    Unlike last year, when the Supreme Court greatly upset liberals by overturning Roe v. Wade, this year’s big rulings by the justices are unlikely to spark a major backlash from the public at large.

    This is well reflected in the public polling. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, had become massively popular.

    Right before the decision to overturn Roe leaked in May 2022, a Fox News poll found that 63% of registered voters were opposed to such a move while 27% supported it. An ABC News/Washington Post poll put the split at 54% wanting the court to uphold Roe and 28% wanting the decision overturned.

    This majority of Americans who wanted abortion to be legal nationally have maintained their stance since the Supreme Court officially struck down Roe in June 2022. Since that time, abortion supporters have won every related measure placed on the ballot across the country – from deep-blue states like California to ruby-red ones like Kentucky.

    California is an important state to note because voters there faced a 2020 ballot measure to consider the use of race, sex or ethnicity in government institutions (such as education). A clear majority, 57%, voted against allowing state and local entities to consider such factors in public education, employment and contracting decisions.

    When a state that voted for Biden by nearly 30 points is against affirmative action, it shouldn’t be surprising that the nation as a whole is.

    A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that 50% of Americans disapproved of certain colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions to increase diversity. Only 33% approved of the practice.

    This Pew poll is no outlier. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the court decided its case showed that 52% of Americans approved of the decision, while 32% were opposed.

    Some polling before the ruling had shown even more opposition: 70% of Americans in a recent CBS News/YouGov survey indicated that the Supreme Court should not allow colleges to consider race and ethnicity in admissions.

    But perhaps what’s most interesting isn’t how many people are for or against considering race in college admissions. Rather, it’s how many people simply didn’t care enough to pay close attention to the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.

    When explicitly given the option, a majority (55%) said in a May Marquette University Law School poll that they hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the case. (Those who had heard enough were against allowing colleges to use race in admissions.)

    This is quite different from March 2022, when just 30% of Americans hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the court potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, when asked the same question by Marquette but about the abortion case. (A plurality of those who had heard enough didn’t want the court to overturn Roe.)

    It’s hard for an issue to galvanize voters when they aren’t paying attention to it.

    The same holds true for Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan that the court blocked. A USA Today/Ipsos poll from April indicated that 52% of Americans were familiar with the case and a mere 16% were very familiar with it. (Those who had student loans were more familiar at 71%, though that’s a fairly low percentage for something that could affect them directly.)

    Possibly because of that low familiarity, the percentage of Americans who favor or oppose canceling certain student debt differs greatly depending on how the question is worded. When Marquette didn’t mention Biden or the government specifically in its May poll, a majority (63%) said they favored forgiveness of up to $20,000. It was a much lower 47% in the Ipsos poll.

    Surveys that did identify the proposal as Biden’s plan tend to be in the same ballpark, with a split public and a sizable percentage unsure.

    The ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 45% approved of the court striking down Biden’s student debt plan, with 40% disapproving. About a sixth (16%) of the public was undecided.

    This jibes with polling before the court’s decision was announced. An NBC News poll from last year showed that 43% said Biden’s plan was a good idea compared with 44%, who said it was a bad idea. Just over 10% had no opinion.

    The USA Today/Ipsos survey found that 43% of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to allow the government’s student loan forgiveness plan to move forward, while 40% did not. Another 17% had no opinion.

    (I should point out that those with student debt were more likely to want government forgiveness in all these surveys, though about 80% of Americans don’t have student loan debt.)

    The public was similarly split about the court ruling in favor of the Colorado web designer who refuses to make wedding websites for same-sex couples over religious objections. According to the ABC News/Ipsos poll, 43% of Americans agreed with the court’s decision, 42% disagreed and 14% were undecided.

    There was limited polling on this case before the ruling, though none of it indicated massive opposition. A majority (60%) in a Pew poll that specifically mentioned “wedding websites” and “same-sex marriages” indicated they believed business owners should be allowed to refuse services if it violated their religious or personal beliefs.

    The polling on Roe v. Wade didn’t look anything like this last year. There were no close splits in opinion. People were consistently against overturning Roe, and they cared a lot about it. This led to a historically strong performance for the party in the White House during the 2022 midterm elections and a major backlash against the Supreme Court.

    The current polling on affirmative action in college admissions, Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and allowing people to opt out of certain services to married LGBTQ couples if they believe it goes against their religion suggests that court’s opinions on those issues aren’t likely to have a similar impact.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • There aren’t enough facilities to treat all kids hooked on opioids | CNN Politics

    There aren’t enough facilities to treat all kids hooked on opioids | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    After writing several previous newsletters on the stunning rise in opioid overdoses in the US, including among adolescents, I thought it was worth taking a look at what happens after an overdose, particularly for adolescents.

    I talked to Dr. Sivabalaji Kaliamurthy about what he’s encountering. A child and adolescent addiction psychiatrist who is board certified in general psychiatry, child psychiatry and addiction psychiatry, Kaliamurthy is also the director of the addiction clinic at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC.

    He told me that his clinic, which he set up in early 2022, has gone from getting one or two opioid use referrals per month to eight or more per month now, a year later.

    He particularly wanted to discuss some major news: The opioid overdose antidote naloxone, sold as Narcan, got approval from the US Food and Drug Administration on March 29, the day we talked, to be sold over the counter.

    Excerpts from our conversation, edited for flow, are below.

    WOLF: What is your reaction to Narcan being available over the counter?

    KALIAMURTHY: When I do an evaluation (of a patient), regardless of the substance use, you’re always talking about naloxone, brand name Narcan. …

    The message that I present parents with is always that it’s kind of like having a fire extinguisher at home. You hope you never need to use it, but you’re glad that you have it if you need to use it.

    Access is important. There are some controversies around increasing access to naloxone and fears that this may encourage more substance use. We have scientific research looking into this very specific question.

    And overall, there’s one study that came out this month that found that across 44 states where they increased access to naloxone for adolescents, it did not increase the rates of substance use in this population. And in some states, it actually decreased opioid use among adolescents. …

    The FDA approved the over-the-counter sale of naloxone, specifically the brand Narcan, because of how easily it can be administered. Naloxone also comes in other formulations, like injections, but Narcan is a nasal spray. We’re hoping that it will be out later this summer.

    The challenge remains how much is it going to cost? On average, it can cost anywhere between $50 to $100 right now. If it becomes over-the-counter, we don’t want insurances to stop covering [it].

    It will be interesting to see how the manufacturer goes about introducing it over the counter.

    WOLF: You said it’s like a fire extinguisher. Should everybody have it, or just people whose kids have demonstrated addictive behavior?

    KALIAMURTHY: Everyone should have it. Naloxone is not a treatment; it is more of an antidote. It reverses opioid overdoses, and the person who has the opioid overdose is never the one who’s going to use it somewhere in the community.

    WOLF: I’ve reported on a surge in overdoses. What are you seeing at Children’s?

    KALIAMURTHY: We are seeing an increase in the number of kids presenting to the hospital after experiencing an opioid overdose, and in general, opioid overdose deaths in the DMV (Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia) region have significantly increased in the last two years. That aligns with a national trend we are seeing with regards to opioid overdoses.

    WOLF: Is there a profile for who these kids are? Do they share any traits?

    KALIAMURTHY: Yes. Let me talk about the kids we do see for opioid-related concerns first.

    At Children’s National, children often present after experiencing an overdose or having a medical complication because of using these M30, or the fake Percocet pills. We’ve had kids come in following conditions such as preliminary hemorrhage, where they were bleeding into their lungs, and overdose is not the only concern.

    Apart from that, we also have had kids presenting actively using these pills. They haven’t overdosed yet but they’re asking for help to stop using these pills.

    Some things that we have noticed, and this is the trend across the DMV region … the kids who are presenting to treatment, these are kids who are motivated to stop – they predominantly identify as Hispanic in ethnicity. Most of them have Medicaid for insurance.

    A lot of them, you know, they come to us – the average age is about 16, 16½ and their first use of opioids, these pills, was about a year ago. So the average first use was about 15 to 15½ years of age. They are really struggling, and they want to get better.

    KALIAMURTHY: Another common trait: cannabis use is quite common in this population. Pretty much every patient that I’ve come across started off around age 12 using cannabis products. This includes the flower and bud, vapes or edibles. Soon they transition to using the M30 pills.

    There are various different reasons, one of which is just access. A lot of other kids are using it. They’re using it in schools. They try it, they like it, and then it escalates and they stop using other substances.

    Most of these kids start off with crushing and try it nasally by snorting it and then they transition to smoking. What they do is they put these pills on a piece of aluminum foil, heat it up and inhale the fumes that come up. We haven’t had anyone come in who reported using any of these pills intravenously.

    WOLF: How is treatment for adolescents different than treating adult users who are seeking help?

    KALIAMURTHY: We have to take into consideration their developmental age and the psychological development that’s happening in adolescence, which is very different from adults.

    Oftentimes, this is the first point of entry into opioid use for these kids. Fentanyl, which is one of the most powerful opioids of abuse out there, is the first point of entry into opioid use for these children.

    Where for adults, they might have been prescribed pain medications. Or they might have started on opioids through other routes and might have used less potent products before transitioning to fentanyl.

    KALIAMURTHY: Historically, adolescents were not always the most motivated to seek treatment for substance use. What we would see was they would start off with experimenting, there would be a problem, it would take a few years and they’re adults by the time they’ve entered treatment and they’re trying different things to treat themselves before they enter treatment.

    With adolescents, now we are seeing that they can tell that they need help, and they are motivated and they are entering treatment.

    We have to take into account the presence of parents or guardians, how the school system interacts with them, what else do they do in their communities. There’s an increased association of violence and legal trouble that some of these patients end up in that we need to address while treating them. And these are some differences when it comes to treating adolescents versus adults.

    WOLF: One local community’s opioid response coordinator stressed to me that lack of availability of treatment is a real problem. Is that something that you agree with?

    KALIAMURTHY: Absolutely. That is a real problem at this point, because there is a huge discrepancy between the number of kids who need treatment and the available resources.

    The challenge is we can limit access and prevent these kids from getting the pills. But then you have a huge population of kids who are dependent on these pills, who can’t tolerate withdrawal symptoms, who have what we call opioid use disorder. That is going to perpetuate the problem if we’re not treating them. We need to do more in terms of increasing access to care for these kids.

    WOLF: Can you illustrate that capacity issue for me, through numbers or data? Or is it more anecdotal?

    KALIAMURTHY: Treatment is across different realms.

    For example, when a child is using these pills, and they have a problem with substance use, they need to go and be evaluated by a professional who has expertise in both addressing and evaluating mental health and addiction problems. And we don’t have very many people being able to do that.

    KALIAMURTHY: The first-time response is usually a counselor or social worker, sometimes physicians.

    But generally, there’s very little expertise in the pediatric health space with regards to addressing substance use-related problems. Screening is the point of entry.

    KALIAMURTHY: Then, say they need detox beds. Once they’ve entered treatment, we want to help them get through those initial days when their body is kind of adjusting to not using these pills, and we refer to that as detox.

    At Children’s National Hospital, when the kids come to the emergency room, we are not able to admit them for detoxes all the time. Sometimes we do end up admitting them.

    This depends on the availability of beds. The number of pediatric beds is very small to begin with. And beds may not always be available when somebody presents to the emergency room detox.

    And then there’s who is on call? Who’s available to treat these kids? I spoke about the lack of expertise in general, across the pediatric health space, so all that will determine whether a child is able to get access to detox services.

    That’s the detox part of treatment, which can be anywhere between two to five days.

    Detox doesn’t always mean somebody needs to be admitted. I also do outpatient detox where we are helping kids stop by providing them with medications and guiding their parents or guardians and the child on how to go through detox.

    KALIAMURTHY: Once you go through detox, depending on the extent of the problem, a child may require admission to a rehabilitation facility for anywhere between a month to six months.

    When we look at the number of facilities in the DMV region that provide this kind of rehab, I don’t think Virginia has any, DC doesn’t have any, Maryland has two. One is Sandstone Treatment Center, which is a private institution. The other is a treatment center, which is closer to Baltimore. There’s a limitation on who they can take.

    WOLF: Let me interrupt you. In a region that has millions of people, there are only two facilities that will take adolescents for one to six months’ treatment for substance use?

    KALIAMURTHY: Yes. For substance use.

    WOLF: Is that just a function of there’s more demand for those kinds of facilities among older people who are more likely to face addiction problems? Is that something the system is pivoting to address right now?

    KALIAMURTHY: It’s unclear. The system wants to help, but the challenge is historically adolescents are not always the most eager and motivated to get help.

    When we look at treatment programs, that didn’t exist in the past. They often relied on the judicial system, where some of these kids might have been mandated to treatment.

    Now we know that substance use disorders are chronic disorders and mandates don’t always work. Courts have stopped mandating treatment, because it’s like you mandate it for a month and then they come out and then what happens? There’s a lot of issues with mandating treatment.

    Now, most of the programs that were present prior to the pandemic also shut down during the pandemic because the needs also declined.

    This is not financially lucrative. That’s one reason why they’re having a huge issue with finding systems and having the county or the state take over with regards to creating the system.

    WOLF: I cut you off there. You were moving from the one-to-six-month facility to the next step in the process.

    KALIAMURTHY: So the next step is really engaging these kids in treatment. Not all kids require one to six months. Some kids might be OK with just completing detox and engaging in regular outpatient level of care. This might involve what we call intensive outpatient combined with medication.

    Which is where I would come in. A lot of what I do is provide medications for addiction treatment. These medications, the first part is for the detox to help with the child’s symptoms, but once you go through withdrawals, you can still have significant cravings to go back to using.

    The challenge, again, is the number of facilities. There are more options for intensive outpatient, but again, they are packed. The wait times to get in are longer now, and some of them are just virtual-only options, which may be good for some kids, but some kids might need more inpatient help.

    KALIAMURTHY: After this step, we have regular outpatient therapy and recovery support services, which is also lacking.

    The recovery support services are services which help kids get back on track academically. Catch up with your credit, get up on your grades and form a healthy, functioning resume. Get help finding part-time jobs. Keep these kids engaged in activities outside of school so that they are less likely to go back to the path that they were on which led to the substance use.

    WOLF: What’s your message to parents who are trying to keep an eye on their kids?

    KALIAMURTHY: Let’s look at the national-level data that we have collected up to 2021. Substance use is actually on the decline.

    Which is interesting because what is happening is that even though substance use among kids is on the decline – that’s both in middle school and high school – the substances that kids are using have become so much more potent.

    Take cannabis, which if you measure the potency by the percentage of THC content, has gone up significantly. The average THC percentage in the ’60s and ‘70s was like 2-5%. And now it’s like 20-25%. And kids are more likely to use what they call the concentrates, which is like 80% or more THC.

    When I talk to parents, the first thing I’m telling them about is the landscape of different substances that are out there, and kids are more likely to start off with cannabis or alcohol before they transition to the M30 pills.

    KALIAMURTHY: If you think about modifiable and non-modifiable risks, some risks just cannot be changed. These are things like genetics, family history and also if a child has a history of any traumatic experiences. Those are not things you can necessarily change. There are modifiable risk factors, like if a child has ADHD, they’re more likely to be at risk for developing substance use problems.

    If there are untreated mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, they’re more likely to have problems. We know that. The kids who identify as LGBTQ+, they also tend to have more risk factors in terms of initiating substances that transition into a problem.

    But also, we need to rethink how families address substances in the household. Kids learn by modeling they see from adults in their life and also the direct conversations we have. What are their values as a family around use of substances? These are not just legal and illegal – all substance use can have some harm. And early initiation is going to lead to more likelihood of having a problem.

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  • Teachers are on the front lines of a battle to change how teens use social media | CNN Business

    Teachers are on the front lines of a battle to change how teens use social media | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    A high school English class may not sound like the typical forum for educating kids on the risks of social media, but that hasn’t stopped Jennifer Rosenzweig.

    Each school year, the 10th graders in her class at Scarsdale High School in New York watch “The Social Dilemma,” a 2020 documentary about the harms of social media. She also teaches her students about how companies can manipulate algorithms to make platforms addictive and is part of the school’s leadership team that hosts related social media training sessions for teachers and parents.

    Rosenzweig argues the subject is so important that it should be discussed in all courses.

    “It’s really important to give students lots of opportunities to talk about, think about, write about how social media affects their lives,” she said. “They just happened to be born in a really complicated, overstimulating and demanding time – and we handed them these devices without knowing what effect they would have.”

    Rosenzweig is one of a growing number of educators who find themselves on the front lines of a fight to change how students use social media, both in schools and at home, after rising concerns about the impact these services can have on the mental health of teens. And recently, there has been a push for more schools to effectively follow their example and develop programs to help educate students on the dangers of social media.

    As part of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s watershed report last month on the “profound risks” of social media for teens, he recommended policymakers push for “digital and media literacy curricula in schools” that help students “recognize, manage, and recover from online risks” such as harassment, abuse and “excessive social media use.”

    Other politicians have suggested the same. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an education bill that prohibits students from accessing certain social media platforms on school Wi-Fi and requires instruction on the negative impacts of social media.

    These efforts come amid heightened bipartisan pressure from lawmakers for social media companies to do more to protect their youngest users. But in the absence of any new federal legislation, the burden falls on parents and schools, the latter of which faces significant challenges to address the issue.

    Schools must grapple with limited resources, students who develop online habits at a very young age and staff who may not be well versed to discuss the ins and outs of algorithmic rabbit holes and cyberbullying.

    At the Roycemore School in Evanston, Illinois, conversations around the impact of social media are happening in the classroom on a daily basis, according to Chris English, the head of school.

    Teachers openly remind students how their social media history lives on and how it can be perceived among colleges and employers, English said. Teachers also discuss how dopamine plays a role in why teens feel the need to keep checking platforms as well as general best practices.

    “We are always thinking about the social-emotional learning component … and how it applies to social media use,” said English, referring to teaching kids skills to manage their feelings and relationships.

    Chris English, head of school at The Roycemore School in Evanston, Illinois, said the school has seen success from participating in the

    As with other education efforts, however, he believes social media literacy campaigns are much easier to do when class sizes in school are lower, allowing teachers to put more significant time and energy into each student.

    The Roycemore school is one of hundreds of schools across the US leaning on programs such as The Organization for Social Media Safety to provide digital literacy assemblies to students. The organization offers practical steps to address the varying dangers they may encounter on social media, from bullying and hate to trafficking and pressured sexting, as well as how algorithms can push problematic content to young users. The program is part of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) curriculum.

    “Many students don’t even understand most of these dangers,” said Marc Berkman, director of The Organization for Social Media Safety. “They can’t protect themselves from the dangers if they don’t know what they are.”

    Devorah Heitner, author of “Screenwise, Speaker: Raising Kids in the Digital Age,” previously told CNN that schools of all sizes should embrace digital literacy because teens need to learn how to properly function in online communities, as that is the expectation both going into college and in their professional lives.

    “Literacy should not just be ‘don’t look at pornography’ or ‘stay off bad sites’ or ‘don’t cyberbully;’ that’s so limited,” she said. “It should also be understanding how algorithms work, how teens can respond or what to do when feeling excluded, or if they’re feeling insecure. We need to help kids with all these things.”

    The Organization for Social Media Safety provides parent workshops and community guidelines for guardians to reference as issues surface. Although Berkman said he’s encouraged by more teachers talking to students about the dangers of social media, he advises them to undergo formal training on the subject because it’s “not a check the box exercise” and requires “up to date knowledge on the rich landscape of how teens are using” these platforms.

    Digital literacy is not only playing out in high schools. Gillian Feldman, principal of Brawerman Elementary School in Los Angeles, said the school works with the Organization of Social Media Safety to provide educational sessions for parents of pre-teen and younger students to help them navigate social platforms.

    “Our kids are 12 when they leave our school, but they’re already using Fortnite and Roblox and other platforms which have social media components, with the ability to chat, post and Like things on these games,” Feldman said. “The [sessions] have been eye opening for parents and help them set better parameters for kids.”

    Feldman said the school is also taking a social-emotional approach to teaching its young students about social platforms, such as how they shouldn’t rely on “someone else’s approval to fill up your own [emotional] bucket.”

    While trying to teach students to develop a better relationship with technology, some schools are also pushing for them to ditch their devices entirely — at least during school hours.

    In September, Rosenzweig and her colleagues at Scarsdale High School introduced “Off and Away for the Day,” an effort that encourages students to keep smartphones in their book bags during the day.

    During free periods, the students are allowed to listen to music, podcasts or meditation apps but phones must be out of sight during class. Students can “briefly check phones if needed” during homeroom or lunch but not scroll social media or play games.

    A poster for Scarsdale High School's

    The decision came after teachers at Scarsdale High School observed a correlation between screen time and declining reading abilities and focus among its students. The school is currently working to develop consequences and formal guidelines, she said.

    “I would never claim that everyone is supportive of this initiative, and yes, students do roll their eyes about it for sure,” Rosenzweig said. “But what I do strongly claim is that when you speak to students for more than five minutes about this topic, they appreciate that we are talking about it and really do want the help.”

    English’s school has also embraced the “Away for the Day” policy, where students put smartphones out of sight while on campus. It’s part of a bigger grassroots movement of the same name developed by the co-producers of the 2016 documentary “Screenagers,” which looks at the lives of teens growing up in the digital age.

    Students are told to keep phones out of sight during the school day at The Roycemore School.

    Sabine Polack, who spoke to CNN in 2021 about how her 14-year-old daughter was struggling with depression and had contemplated suicide stemming from pressures around social media, is now an advocate of the “Away for the Day” movement to create phone free schools.

    “It’s especially relevant now that we have the Surgeon General issuing advisories which includes calling for ‘tech free spaces’ as a tool to help mitigate the mental health crisis our children are facing,” said Polack, who is on the board of nonprofit Fairplay, which aims to protect kids from harmful marketing and excessive screentime.

    Rosenzweig said she aims to expand “Off and Away” to other schools in the Scarsdale School District and is hopeful it can be a leading force making a change in their community and beyond.

    “Schools have so much power,” Rosenzweig said. “We are with these kids five days of the week and we can make those days look like whatever we can look like.”

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  • Arkansas governor signs sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage | CNN Business

    Arkansas governor signs sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed a sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage, in the latest example of states taking more aggressive steps intended to protect teens online.

    But even as Sanders signed the bill into law on Wednesday afternoon, the legislation appeared to contain vast loopholes and exemptions benefiting companies that lobbied on the bill and raising questions about how much of the industry it truly covers.

    The legislation, known as the Social Media Safety Act and taking effect in September, is aimed at giving parents more control over their kids’ social media usage, according to lawmakers. It defines social media companies as any online forum that lets users create public profiles and interact with each other through digital content.

    It requires companies that operate those services to verify the ages of all new users and, if the users are under 18 years old, to obtain a parent’s consent before allowing them to create an account. To perform the age checks, the law relies on third-party companies to verify users’ personal information, such as a driver’s license or photo ID.

    “While social media can be a great tool and a wonderful resource, it can have a massive negative impact on our kids,” Sanders said at a press conference before signing the bill.

    Utah finalized a similar law last month, raising concerns among some users and advocacy groups that the legislation could make user data less secure, internet access less private and infringe upon younger users’ basic rights.

    The push by states to legislate on social media comes after years of mounting scrutiny of the industry and claims that it has harmed users’ well-being and mental health, particularly among teens.

    Despite its seemingly universal scope, however, the new law, also known as SB396, includes numerous carveouts for certain types of digital services and, in some cases, individual companies. And although its sponsors have said the law is specifically meant to apply to certain platforms, including TikTok, parts of the legislative language appear to result in the exact opposite effect.

    In the final days of negotiation over the bill, Arkansas lawmakers approved an amendment that created several categorical exemptions from the age verification requirements. Media companies that “exclusively” offer subscription content; social media platforms that permit users to “generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment”; and companies that “exclusively offer” video gaming-focused social networking features were exempted.

    Another amendment carved out companies that sell cloud storage services, business cybersecurity services or educational technology and that simultaneously derive less than 25% of their total revenue from running a social media platform.

    Sen. Tyler Dees, a lead co-sponsor of the legislation, explained in remarks on the Arkansas senate floor on April 6 that the exemptions and tweaks to the bill, some of which he said were made in consultation with Apple, Meta and Google, were intended to shield non-social media services from the bill’s age requirements and to focus attention on new accounts created by children, not existing adult accounts.

    “There’s other services that Google offers … like cloud storage, et cetera,” Dees said. “So that’s really the intent of carving out — like LinkedIn, that is a social – I’m sorry, that is a business networking site, and so that’s the intent of those bills.”

    Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is apparently exempt from SB396 under a provision that carves out companies that provide “career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services.”

    Other lawmakers have questioned whether the legislation — which has now become law — exempts a giant of the social media industry: YouTube, whose auto-play features and algorithmic recommendation engine have been accused of promoting extremism and radicalizing viewers.

    The confusion over YouTube appears to stem from the carveout for businesses that offer cloud storage and that make less than 25% of their revenue from social media.

    What is unclear is whether YouTube is subject to SB396 because it is a distinct company within Google whose revenue comes almost entirely from operating a social media platform, or whether it is not covered because YouTube is a part of Google and Google is exempt because it derives only a small share of its revenues from YouTube.

    In response to questions by CNN, Dees said SB396 targets platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but omitted any mention of Google and declined to answer whether YouTube specifically would be covered by the law.

    “The purpose of this bill was to empower parents and protect kids from social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat,” Dees said in a statement. “We worked with stakeholders to ensure that email, text messaging, video streaming, and networking websites were not covered by the bill.”

    In remarks at Wednesday’s bill signing, Sanders told reporters that Google and Amazon are exempted from the law, implying that YouTube will not be subject to the age verification requirements imposed on other major social media sites.

    Meanwhile, Dees’ statement appeared to contradict the language in SB396 that purports to exempt any company that “allows a user to generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative” — content that can be commonly found on TikTok, Snapchat and the other social media platforms Deese named.

    According to Meta spokesperson, “We want teens to be safe online. We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including tools that let parents and teens work together to limit the amount of time teens spend on Instagram, and age-verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences.”

    Meta “automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram, we’ve further restricted the options advertisers have to reach teens, as well as the information we use to show ads to teens… and we don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders,” according to the spokesperson, who added: “We’ll continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues.”

    Spokespeople for Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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  • Reporters’ notebook: An intensely personal trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau | CNN Politics

    Reporters’ notebook: An intensely personal trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    This week, we traveled to Poland to help commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews revolted against their Nazi oppressors, who had forced them to live behind barbed wire walls in horrific conditions.

    We also participated in the March of the Living, an annual two-mile walk from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, where Nazis brought Jews from all over Europe to be starved, humiliated, terrorized and murdered in gas chambers.

    For both of us, this trip was intensely personal.

    I thought I knew what was in store for me visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had been there some years back when I was working on a report for CNN about my family history – I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. I had heard my parents, both Polish Jews, speak of their painful experiences surviving the war. But I never knew my grandparents because all four of them were rounded up by the Nazis and killed during the Holocaust.

    But this time was different. As our expert guide showed us the Auschwitz gas chamber, I mentioned that I had learned a few years earlier that my dad’s parents were killed at Auschwitz. Our guide said that Polish Jews were largely killed in the very gas chamber we were standing in. He pointed out the gas chamber and the adjacent crematorium, where their bodies were burned and the remains then discarded in a pit. It was the first time I realized that I was standing right where my paternal grandparents had been murdered. Tears came to my eyes.

    My father had told me much about my grandparents, Isaac and Chaya Blitzer. They were very religious and truly wonderful people who had lived and raised their six children nearby. I wish I had known them.

    I never knew my mother’s parents, Wolf and Chaya Zylberfuden, either. My mom always spoke so lovingly of them. They were rounded up elsewhere in Poland and sent to a labor camp, where they were forced to make ammunition for Nazi soldiers. The conditions there were awful, and they soon died of typhoid fever, which was spreading around the area.

    I proudly carry the names of my two grandfathers – Wolf Isaac Blitzer.

    And now a new generation is carrying on the lessons of the Holocaust. At the annual March of the Living, thousands of people – Jews and non-Jews, young and old – come from all around the world to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to honor and remember those who were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. They also come to learn and then to educate others about the horrors of the Holocaust.

    On this visit, I learned more and deepened my understanding of what my grandparents, parents and their siblings endured during the Holocaust. And as I did, I kept thinking about how important it is for all of us to educate ourselves about this horrible history to make sure we never forget. It is especially vital today in light of increasing antisemitism and Holocaust denialism. As the child of Holocaust survivors, it is hard to comprehend that there are truly evil people out there spreading lies that none of this ever happened.

    That’s why I was so moved by what I saw during our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    I had never been to Auschwitz before. I was never actually sure that I wanted to visit this place that represented the depths of hell for the 1.1 million people murdered by the Nazis there, including my own great-grandparents.

    I am now so glad that I went.

    Since I was a little girl, I have heard about the horrors of the Nazi atrocities, not just from the history books but also from my own grandfather Frank Weinman, who along with my grandmother Teri Vidor Weinman, were among the few to escape.

    They miraculously got to America in October 1941, thanks to Frank’s brother Charles, who was living in Chicago and had convinced his boss to put up the exorbitant sums of money the America government then required for Jewish refugees like my grandparents to get US visas to flee Nazi persecution.

    Grandma Teri and her family were Hungarian Jews, and her parents, Rudolph and Matilda Vidor, along with her sister Magda, were safe from Hitler’s wrath until 1944, when he invaded Hungary.

    Before visiting Auschwitz, I knew that they had been killed there.

    But having our expert guide tell my brother David and me exactly where and how was numbing.

    We saw a freight train exactly like the one they were shoved into with little to no water or food, traveling for days from Hungary to camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. We stood on the train tracks the Germans built to bring them into Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    The main railway building is pictured on the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 25, 2021.

    We saw what was left of what was likely the gas chamber where they were murdered and informed that because of their ages – both were in their 50s and not considered strong enough for hard labor – they probably were killed within a hour of arriving.

    It was a lot to take in, and it will take a while for my brother and me to process it all.

    But for both of us, our immediate takeaway was one of defiance – that our mere existence is proof that Hitler did not succeed in his quest to annihilate our family just because we are Jews.

    For years, not knowing exactly when or how her parents were killed, my Grandma Teri chose April 19, the day of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited on the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

    This week, my brother and I got to say Kaddish just steps from where they died.

    May their memory be a blessing.

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  • Nearly 5 million kids might miss out on food assistance if these states don’t act by Friday | CNN Politics

    Nearly 5 million kids might miss out on food assistance if these states don’t act by Friday | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Nearly 5 million children in eight states could lose out on some extra funds for food unless their state officials sign up for a federal relief program by Friday.

    The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer program, known as P-EBT, is providing $120 over the summer to families whose children qualify for free or reduced-price meals or attend schools in low-income areas where all students receive free meals.

    While the vast majority of states are participating in the program this summer, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Texas have yet to join.

    The funding is crucial for families who are having trouble affording groceries, housing, utilities and other necessities, which are all more expensive now, advocates say. Many of these parents depend on the free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch program during the school year, but only about 1 in 7 eligible kids receive meals over the summer.

    “For a lot of families that are struggling, the summer is the hungriest time of the year,” said Lisa Davis, senior vice president at Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign.

    The P-EBT program was launched in the spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced schools to close. The funds provided parents with money to buy groceries to make up for the meals their children were missing in school.

    Congress renewed the measure several times, most recently in December as part of the fiscal 2023 spending package. But this final extension cut the benefit to help offset the cost of a permanent summer EBT program that starts next year. Lawmakers also limited it to school-age children – younger kids are not eligible this summer because the Covid-19 public health emergency has ended.

    Last summer, families received $391 – providing a total of $13.7 billion in benefits to 35 million kids, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

    Alaska and South Dakota were the only states not to participate, while Idaho only provided the funds to younger children in day care programs, said Kelsey Boone, a senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center.

    Some states have said they don’t have the capacity to administer the summer program this year, according to Boone. However, she points out that each of the eight states participated in the summer P-EBT program either in 2021 or 2022, or both years.

    Mississippi opted not to sign up for this summer’s program now that the Covid-19 public health emergency has ended, the state’s Department of Human Services said.

    “Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) was a supplemental benefit for households with students who temporarily lost access to free or reduced-price school meals due to pandemic-related school closures or distance learning,” the agency said. “Existing pre-pandemic summer feeding programs continue to operate across Mississippi school districts.”

    Alaska, meanwhile, decided not to apply for the summer benefits because of staffing constraints, said Gavin Northey, child nutrition program manager at the state’s Department of Education & Early Development.

    Agencies in the other six states did not return requests for comment.

    Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has urged the states that have yet to sign up for the summer program to do so, noting in a tweet in June that “hunger doesn’t take a break when school is out for the summer.”

    “I encourage these governors to enroll their states and ensure millions of children can receive the nutritional benefits essential to our nation’s economic health and security,” he tweeted.

    In Texas, at least 3.7 million children would be eligible for the summer P-EBT program, said Mia Medina, senior program manager for No Kid Hungry Texas. Some 40% of parents of children in public school experienced food insecurity, including skipping meals or running out of food, in the past 12 months, according to a poll the nonprofit group commissioned earlier this year.

    Last summer, about 3.5 million children in the Lone Star State received a total of more than $1.4 billion in benefits, according to Gov. Greg Abbott’s office.

    Families in Montana are also having a tougher time affording food, said Lorianne Burhop, chief policy officer at the Montana Food Bank Network. Some local pantries are seeing record demand, and parents are visiting multiple times a month.

    Some 32,000 children received a total of $12.5 million in summer P-EBT benefits last year, according to the state Department of Public Health and Human Services. But this year, officials said they were concerned about administering the program and about whether it was needed, according to Burhop.

    “Our state is really missing a key opportunity to help Montana families keep food on the table,” she said.

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  • Who says romance is dead? Couples are using ChatGPT to write their wedding vows | CNN Business

    Who says romance is dead? Couples are using ChatGPT to write their wedding vows | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    When Elyse Nguyen was nearing her wedding date in February and still hadn’t started writing her vows, a friend suggested she try a new source of inspiration: ChatGPT.

    The AI chatbot, which was released publicly in late November, can generate compelling written responses to user prompts and offers the promise of helping people get over writer’s block, whether it be for an essay, an email, or an emotional speech.

    “At first we inputted the prompt as a joke and the output was pretty cheesy with personal references to me and my husband,” said Nguyen, a financial analyst at Qualcomm. “But the essence of what vows should incorporate was there – our promises to each other and structure.”

    She made edits, changed the prompts to add humor and details about her partner’s interests, and added some personal touches. Nguyen ultimately ended up using a good portion of ChatGPT’s suggestions and said her husband was on board with it.

    “It helped alleviate some stress because I had no prior experience with wedding vows nor did I know what should be included,” Nguyen said. “Plus, ChatGPT is a genius with alliteration, analogies and metaphors. Having something like, ‘I promise to be your partner in life with the enthusiasm of a golfer’s first hole in one’ in my back pocket was comical.”

    Nearly five months after ChatGPT went viral and ignited a new AI arms race in Silicon Valley, more couples are looking to it for help with wedding planning, including writing vows and speeches, drafting religious marriage contracts, and setting up websites for the special day.

    Ellen Le recently created some of her wedding website through a new Writer’s Block Assistant tool on online wedding planning service Joy, which was one of the first third-party platforms to incorporate ChatGPT’s technology. (Last month, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, opened up access to the chatbot, paving the way for it to be integrated into numerous apps and services.)

    Le, a product manager at a startup, said she used the feature to draft an “about us” page and write directions from San Francisco to her Napa Valley wedding. The Writer’s Block Assistant tool helps users write vows, best man and maid of honor speeches, thank you cards and wedding website “about us” pages. It also lets users highlight personal stories and select the style or tone before pulling it into a speech.

    “I started drafting my vows and when I typed in how we met, it produced this very delightful story,” Le said. “Some of it was inaccurate, making up certain details, but it gave me a helping hand and something to react to, rather than just spending 10 hours thinking about how to get started.”

    Le said her fiance, who often uses ChatGPT for work, is considering using AI to help with his vows too.

    Joy co-founder and CEO Vishal Joshi, who studied artificial intelligence and electrical engineering at NIT Rourkela in India, said the company launched Writer’s Block Assistant in March after it conducted an internal study that found most of its users were somewhat overwhelmed with getting started on writing vows and speeches, and wished they had help. He said the company has already seen thousands of submissions since launching the tool.

    “Almost two decades ago, AI enthusiasts like myself and my research peers had only dreamt of mass market adoption we are seeing today, and we know this is just the true beginning,” Joshi said. “Just like smartphones, if applied well, the positive impact of AI on our lives can far outshine the negatives. We’re working on responsibly innovating using AI to advance the wedding and event industry as a whole.”

    Michael Grinn and Kate Gardiner used viral AI tool ChatGPT to write the Ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, for their June wedding.

    ChatGPT has sparked concerns in recent months about its potential to perpetuate biases, spread misinformation and upend certain livelihoods. Now, as it finds its way into marriage ceremonies, it could raise more nuanced questions about whether people risk losing something by injecting technology into what is supposed to be a deeply personal and, for many, spiritual moment in life.

    Michael Grinn, an anesthesiologist with practices in Miami and New York, was experimenting with ChatGPT when he asked it to produce a traditional Ketubah – a Jewish marriage contract – for his upcoming June wedding.

    Grinn and his fiance Kate Gardiner, the founder and CEO of a public relations firm, then requested it make some language changes around gender equality and intimacy. “At the end, we both looked at each other and were like, we can’t disagree with the result,” he said.

    Editing took about an hour, but it still shaved hours off what otherwise could have been a lengthy process, he said. Still, Grinn plans to write his own vows. “I want them to be less refined and something no one else helped me with.”

    He does, however, plan to use ChatGPT for inspiration for officiating his best man’s wedding. “It mostly comes down to time because I’ve been working so much,” he said, “and this is so efficient.”

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