Twitter owner Elon Musk has proposed hosting Twitter Spaces interviews with political candidates of all stripes, reflecting the billionaire’s supposed commitment to ideological neutrality and to promoting Twitter as a true “public square.”
So far, however, Musk appears to be more interested in platforming candidates that align with his own views rather than those who might challenge them. On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.
The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone. But this time, it also deepens doubts about Musk’s claims to open-mindedness — and his willingness to use Twitter as anything other than a tool for his own activism.
Musk, who built much of his early reputation as an entrepreneur on a concern for ensuring humanity’s survival, has opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and spent much of the pandemic railing against Anthony Fauci, the government’s formertop infectious disease expert. Musk has claimed as recently as January that he is “pro vaccines in general” but that they risk doing more harm than good “if administered to the whole population.”
Medical experts widely agree that the broad application of vaccines helps prevent the spread of disease not only by making it less likely for an individual to get sick, but also by creating herd immunity at the societal level. In other words, part of the purpose of vaccines is to administer them as universally as possible so that even if one person falls ill, the infection cannot find other suitable hosts nearby.
For years, Kennedy has pushed back on that consensus, including by invoking Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech in Washington last year. Instagram shut down his account in 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” though the company announced Sunday it has restored Kennedy’s account because he is now running for office. Instagram’s parent, Meta, has also banned accounts belonging to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group.
Kennedy has also attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance. At the start of the pandemic, churches were closed and social distancing was enforced across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, while the government used methods to track cases. (Musk, for his part, also objected to state lockdown orders earlier in the pandemic.)
It’s unclear if Musk has reached out to other candidates. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a CNN poll published last month, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they back President Joe Biden for the top of next year’s Democratic ticket, 20% favor Kennedy and 8% back Williamson. Another 8% say they would support an unnamed “someone else.”
With the national profile and visibility that comes with running for high office, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology and vocal stances against prior Covid policies were already primed to become a topic of the 2024 presidential race. But by putting Kennedy center stage on Twitter, Musk appears poised to promote these views further to his millions of followers.
Musk took a similar tack in sharing a stage with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his White House bid with Musk during a Twitter Spaces event last month plagued by technical glitches. Musk declined to endorse a candidate but has previously tweeted that he would support DeSantis if he ran for president.
As Twitter’s owner, Musk has shared conspiracy theories and welcomed extreme voices back to the platform who had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules in the past. He has also laid off more than 80% of Twitter’s staff, including many who had previously been responsible for content moderation.
All of that, combined now with his direct association with Kennedy, could have significant ramifications both for Twitter as a platform and for Musk’s credibility.
DeSantis at least has the plausible distinction of being a top challenger to former President Donald Trump. But as a marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims, Kennedy and his appearance with Musk could further cement the perception that Twitter actively mainstreams extremism.
That could be the very thing that drives away more moderate candidates from accepting Musk’s “invitation” to appear alongside him.
Six US service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries as a result of attacks from Iran-backed groups in Syria last week.
Four US troops at the coalition base near al Hasakah that was attacked on March 23 by a suspected Iranian drone, and two service members at Mission Support Site Green Village attacked on March 24, have been identified as having brain injuries in screening since the attacks, Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Thursday.
“As standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injuries,” he said. “So these additional injuries were identified during post-attack medical screenings.”
Those screenings are ongoing, he added.
One of the service members has been transferred to Baghdad for further treatment, a US defense official familiar with the matter told CNN, noting that Baghdad has more advanced treatment options and better specialists than remaining on base in Syria.
The other five US service members who have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries are being treated at their facilities.
The news comes a week after the suspected Iranian drone struck a facility housing US personnel, killing an American contractor and wounding five service members. The US responded with precision air strikes on facilities associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which Ryder said Thursday killed eight militants.
The US service members who were wounded in the attacks last week, Ryder said, “all are in stable condition.”
Of the five injured in the original attack on March 23, one other service member is receiving treatment in Germany, while two others and a contractor are being treated in Iraq, and two have returned to duty. The service member who was injured in attacks on March 24 is also receiving medical care and is in stable condition, Ryder said.
In 2020, more than 100 service members were diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries after an Iranian missile attack on the al Asad military base in Iraq. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said at the time that symptoms take time to manifest.
“[I]t’s not an immediate thing necessarily – some cases it is, some cases it’s not,” he said. “So we continue to screen.”
Mild traumatic brain injuries, or concussion, is one of the most common forms of TBI among service members. But TBIs can also be debilitating; veterans described symptoms of dizziness, confusion, headaches, and irritability after sustaining TBIs, as well as changes in personality and balance issues.
On Thursday, Ryder reiterated US officials’ remarks last week that the US “will take all necessary measures to defend our troops and our interests overseas.”
“We do not seek conflict with Iran,” he said, “but we will always protect our people.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
President Joe Biden signed legislation Monday to end the national emergency for Covid-19, the White House said, in a move that will not affect the end of the separate public health emergency scheduled for May 11.
A White House official downplayed the impact of the bill, saying the termination of the emergency “does not impact our ability to wind down authorities in an orderly way.”
The bill to end the national emergency cleared the Senate last month in a bipartisan 68-23 vote and passed the House earlier this year with 11 Democrats crossing party lines to vote for the joint resolution.
“Since Congress voted to terminate the National Emergency earlier than anticipated, the Administration has worked to expedite its wind down and provide as much notice as possible to potentially impacted individuals,” the official said, adding that the country is in a “different place” than it was in January.
The administration has been winding down authorities over the past few months, the official noted.
The official said that “to be clear, ending the National Emergency will not impact the planned wind-down of the Public Health Emergency on May 11” – which enabled the government to provide many Americans with Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines at no charge, as well as offer enhanced social safety net benefits, to help the nation cope with the pandemic and minimize its impact, as CNN previously reported.
“But since Congress moved to undo the National Emergency earlier than intended, we’ve been working with agencies to address the impacts of ending the declaration early,” the official said.
The White House had signaled strong opposition to the bill but said that ultimately, the president would sign it if it came across his desk. The White House had planned end to both emergencies by May 11.
A draft Republican autopsy report on the party’s worse-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections urges GOP candidates to move past complaints about how the 2020 and 2022 elections were run – a clear criticism of former President Donald Trump, who continues to falsely claim his loss was a result of widespread voter fraud.
The report does not mention Trump, the leading contender for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, by name.
But it takes direct aim at his grievances over the 2020 presidential election and false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2022.
Voters’ distaste for relitigating those elections, the draft report states, is among “the obvious lessons of the 2022 election cycle.”
“The Republican candidates in 2022 who delivered results and had a vision for the future did much, much better than those stuck in the past and rehashing old grievances,” the draft report says.
CNN obtained a portion of the draft report, which was expected to be circulated this week at a Republican National Committee meeting in Oklahoma City – however, a source familiar with the presentation said it was likely to be scuttled following reports of its contents.
Some GOP officials bristled at the upbeat nature of the report – and the notable lack of Trump mentions – which was commissioned before the former president widened his lead in 2024 primary polling.
The report urges Republican candidates to offer an “aspirational message” that contrasts with President Joe Biden on issues such as taxes, school choice and border security, and to move past complaints about previous elections.
“America has always been a nation focused on the future. The American people want to move forward and rarely, if ever, are concerned about what happened in the past. The balance of survey data makes it clear that voters are done with the 2020 and 2022 elections. They have no patience for endless conversations relitigating previous elections from Democrats and Republicans,” the draft report states. “Those who don’t heed that lesson from 2022 will be more likely to lose in 2024 and successive cycles.”
The draft report describes “election integrity” as critical, but it also urges Republican campaigns to focus on tactics that Trump and some 2022 candidates eschewed, including mail-in voting.
“Republican campaigns must push our supporters to vote early in person or by mail. Republicans cannot continue to give Democrats a head start,” the draft report says.
Trump and a slew of Trump-backed Republican candidates who lost in 2022 – including Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Senate candidate Blake Masters and Pennsylvania GOP nominee for governor Doug Mastriano – had campaigned on claims of voter fraud. Lake has still not conceded the Arizona governor’s race.
“Republicans have only won the popular vote once in the last eight presidential elections. Clearly, something is not working for us,” the draft report says.
It also describes the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade’s federal protections of abortion rights as politically damaging in the midterm elections.
“It is true: We underestimated the impact of Dobbs, and we failed to defend our position on the sanctity of life even though more Americans agree with us than with Democrats,” the draft report says. “Democrats will continue to engage on this issue, so we must learn our lesson.”
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Monday that bans most abortions after 12 weeks with exceptions for sexual assault, incest and medical emergencies.
The bill does not define “medical emergency” and the legislation includes a clause that will put the rules into immediate effect the day after it is signed.
LB 574, which passed the state’s Republican-controlled unicameral legislature in a 33-15 vote last week, also bans gender-affirming care for people under 19 years old. The abortion amendment was tacked onto the legislation after previous efforts to restrict abortions failed to overcome a filibuster.
The bill only allows medical procedures for transitioning after a “waiting period” and “therapeutic hours” to determine if a person’s gender dysphoria is “long-lasting and intense.” The details of those provisions will be determined by the chief medical officer of Nebraska’s Division of Public Health.
In a statement released after the bill’s passage, Pillen said, “All children deserve a chance to grow and live happy, fruitful lives. This includes pre-born boys and girls, and it includes children struggling with their gender identity. These kids deserve the opportunity to grow and explore who they are and want to be, and they can do so without making irreversible decisions that should be made when they are fully grown.”
The new law reflects ongoing legislative efforts around the US to restrict access to abortion and gender-affirming care. More than a dozen states have moved to restrict gender-affirming care in 2023 and more than 130 bills that target LGBTQ rights, especially health care for transgender patients, have been introduced nationwide this legislative session, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“From North Carolina to Nebraska, extremists so-called leaders continue to restrict access to abortion across the nation,” Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted Monday. “Enough is enough. We need a federal law to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade for women in all 50 states.”
Major medical associations say that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria, the psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth do not align, according to the American Psychiatric Association. But some Republicans have expressed concern over long-term outcomes of the treatments.
Some Nebraskans have expressed displeasure with the bill and many protested and filled the halls of the state Capitol last week as lawmakers spoke, resulting in the arrest of several people on Friday on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to obstructing a government operation.
ACLU of Nebraska executive director Mindy Rush Chipman said in a statement last week that the consequences of the law will be “devastating.”
“To be clear, we refuse to accept this as our new normal. This vote will not be the final word. We are actively exploring our options to address the harm of this extreme legislation, and that work will have our team’s full focus. This is not over, not by a long shot,” Chipman said.
This story has been updated with additional information Monday.
Google has earned more than $10 million over the past two years by allowing misleading advertisements for “fake” abortion clinics that aim to stop women from having the procedure, according to an estimate from a report released Thursday from the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The estimated amount is microscopic compared to the more than $200 billion Google generates from ad sales annually. But the report’s data hints at the broad reach pro-life groups can have by placing these advertisementsin Google results for common phrases searched for by abortion seekers.
Using Semrush, an analytics tool, researchers at the CCDH identified “188 fake clinic websites” that placed ads on Google between March, 2021 and February of this year. CCDH estimates that ads for fake clinics were clicked on by users 13 million times during this period.
Some searching for “abortion clinics near me” on Google instead found results directing them toward so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that may try to talk abortion-seekers out of treatment and offer medically unproven abortion pill reversal techniques, according to the report.
Other Google searches populated by crisis clinic ads included “abortion pill,” “abortion clinic” and “planned parenthood,” the report said, with clinics in states where abortion is legal spending two times as much as those in states with bans.
In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Google faced calls from Congressional Democrats to do more to prevent searches for abortion clinics from returning results for misleading ads – as well as calls from Republican lawmakers to do the opposite. The dueling pressure from lawmakers highlighted how central Google can be for women searching for information on the procedure.
In a statement Thursday, Google said its approach to abortion ads follows local laws and that any advertiser targeting certain keywords or phrases related to abortions must complete a certification to confirm if it does or does not provide abortion services.
“We require any organization that wants to advertise to people seeking information about abortion services to be certified and clearly disclose whether they do or do not offer abortions,” a Google spokesperson told CNN. “We do not allow ads promoting abortion reversal treatments and we also prohibit advertisers from misleading people about the services they offer.”
“We remove or block ads that violate these policies,” the company added.
Google said it does not allow for abortion reversal pill advertisements because the treatment isn’t approved by the FDA. In response to Thursday’s CCDH report, the company told CNN it took “enforcement action” on content violating this policy.
Google has continued to face scrutiny in recent months for the steps it takes to protect abortion seekers’ location data.
Nearly a dozen Senate Democrats wrote to Google in Maywith questions about how it deletes users’ location history when they have visited sensitive locations such as abortion clinics. The letter came after tests performed by The Washington Post and other privacy advocates appeared to show that Google was not quickly or consistently deleting users’ recorded visits to fertility centers of Planned Parenthood clinics.
Google previously declined to comment on the lawmakers’ letter. Instead, it referred CNN to a company blog post that includes abortion clinics on a list of sensitive locations, but did not explain what it means when it claims the data will be deleted “soon after” a visit.
A judge on Monday denied Elizabeth Holmes’ request to remain free while she appeals her conviction, setting the stage for the disgraced Theranos founder to report to prison later this month.
In his order, Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California said Holmes does not pose a danger to the community or a flight risk, but he cast doubt on her appeal. Even if Homes won her appeal, he said, it is unlikely to result in a reversal, or an order for a new trial, for all of the counts on which she was found guilty.
Davila previously ordered Holmes to turn herself into custody on April 27, 2023.
Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last November, after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the failed blood testing startup Theranos. Attorneys for Holmes did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on the ruling.
Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and the former chief operating officer at Theranos, was also found guilty on multiple counts of fraud in a separate trial. He was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison last December. Balwani’s request to remain out of prison during his appeal was also denied, and he has been ordered by Davila to surrender to prison on April 20.
Once valued at $9 billion, Theranos attracted top investors and retail partners with claims that it had developed technology to test for a wide range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. The company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 reported that Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy.
Holmes’ trial was initially delayed multiple times, due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and then because of her pregnancy. Following her sentencing in November, Holmes sought to delay the start of her prison term after giving birth to her second child.
While Davila denied Holmes represented a flight risk, he also addressed the fact that she had previously booked a one-way ticket to Mexico in January 2022.
“Booking international travel plans for a criminal defendant in anticipation of a complete defense victory is a bold move, and the failure to promptly cancel those plans after a guilty verdict is a perilously careless oversight,” Davila wrote in the court filing.
Holmes’ attorneys had previously claimed that Holmes had hoped the verdict would be different when booking the travel plans and that she wanted to make this trip to attend the wedding of friends in Mexico. Davila wrote in court documents that the court accepts Holmes’ “representation that the oneway flight ticket—while ill-advised—was not an attempt to flee the country.”
On a recent Sunday morning, I found myself in a pair of ill-fitting scrubs, lying flat on my back in the claustrophobic confines of an fMRI machine at a research facility in Austin, Texas. “The things I do for television,” I thought.
Anyone who has had an MRI or fMRI scan will tell you how noisy it is — electric currents swirl creating a powerful magnetic field that produces detailed scans of your brain. On this occasion, however, I could barely hear the loud cranking of the mechanical magnets, I was given a pair of specialized earphones that began playing segments from The Wizard of Oz audiobook.
Why?
Neuroscientists at the University of Texas in Austin have figured out a way to translate scans of brain activity into words using the very same artificial intelligence technology that powers the groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT.
The breakthrough could revolutionize how people who have lost the ability to speak can communicate. It’s just one pioneering application of AI developed in recent months as the technology continues to advance and looks set to touch every part of our lives and our society.
“So, we don’t like to use the term mind reading,” Alexander Huth, assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “We think it conjures up things that we’re actually not capable of.”
Huth volunteered to be a research subject for this study, spending upward of 20 hours in the confines of an fMRI machine listening to audio clips while the machine snapped detailed pictures of his brain.
An artificial intelligence model analyzed his brain and the audio he was listening to and, over time, was eventually able to predict the words he was hearing just by watching his brain.
The researchers used the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI’s first language model, GPT-1, that was developed with a massive database of books and websites. By analyzing all this data, the model learned how sentences are constructed — essentially how humans talk and think.
The researchers trained the AI to analyze the activity of Huth and other volunteers’ brains while they listened to specific words. Eventually the AI learned enough that it could predict what Huth and others were listening to or watching just by monitoring their brain activity.
I spent less than a half-hour in the machine and, as expected, the AI wasn’t able to decode that I had been listening to a portion of The Wizard of Oz audiobook that described Dorothy making her way along the yellow brick road.
Huth listened to the same audio but because the AI model had been trained on his brain it was accurately able to predict parts of the audio he was listening to.
While the technology is still in its infancy and shows great promise, the limitations might be a source of relief to some. AI can’t easily read our minds, yet.
“The real potential application of this is in helping people who are unable to communicate,” Huth explained.
He and other researchers at UT Austin believe the innovative technology could be used in the future by people with “locked-in” syndrome, stroke victims and others whose brains are functioning but are unable to speak.
“Ours is the first demonstration that we can get this level of accuracy without brain surgery. So we think that this is kind of step one along this road to actually helping people who are unable to speak without them needing to get neurosurgery,” he said.
While breakthrough medical advances are no doubt good news and potentially life-changing for patients struggling with debilitating ailments, it also raises questions about how the technology could be applied in controversial settings.
Could it be used to extract a confession from a prisoner? Or to expose our deepest, darkest secrets?
The short answer, Huth and his colleagues say, is no — not at the moment.
For starters, brain scans need to occur in an fMRI machine, the AI technology needs to be trained on an individual’s brain for many hours, and, according to the Texas researchers, subjects need to give their consent. If a person actively resists listening to audio or thinks about something else the brain scans will not be a success.
“We think that everyone’s brain data should be kept private,” said Jerry Tang, the lead author on a paper published earlier this month detailing his team’s findings. “Our brains are kind of one of the final frontiers of our privacy.”
Tang explained, “obviously there are concerns that brain decoding technology could be used in dangerous ways.” Brain decoding is the term the researchers prefer to use instead of mind reading.
“I feel like mind reading conjures up this idea of getting at the little thoughts that you don’t want to let slip, little like reactions to things. And I don’t think there’s any suggestion that we can really do that with this kind of approach,” Huth explained. “What we can get is the big ideas that you’re thinking about. The story that somebody is telling you, if you’re trying to tell a story inside your head, we can kind of get at that as well.”
Last week, the makers of generative AI systems, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, descended on Capitol Hill to testify before a Senate committee over lawmakers’ concerns of the risks posed by the powerful technology. Altman warned that the development of AI without guardrails could “cause significant harm to the world” and urged lawmakers to implement regulations to address concerns.
Echoing the AI warning, Tang told CNN that lawmakers need to take “mental privacy” seriously to protect “brain data” — our thoughts — two of the more dystopian terms I’ve heard in the era of AI.
While the technology at the moment only works in very limited cases, that might not always be the case.
“It’s important not to get a false sense of security and think that things will be this way forever,” Tang warned. “Technology can improve and that could change how well we can decode and change whether decoders require a person’s cooperation.”
A bill that would legally protect doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in states where abortion services are outlawed or restricted is now headed to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk after the state legislature passed the legislation on Tuesday.
The bill ensures that doctors, medical providers and facilitators in the state will be able to provide telehealth services to patients out of state, according to anews release from the New York State Assembly.
The new legislation also protects New York health providers from out-of-state litigation, meaning the state will not cooperate with cases prosecuting doctors in New York who provide telehealth abortion or reproductive services to people in other states.
“This bill expands protections for telehealth providers by providing them the same protections afforded to doctors in other states with strong reproductive healthcare shield laws,” according to the news release.
The bill also ensures that New York medical providers, complying with their practice, who offer telehealth services are not subject to professional discipline, “solely for providing reproductive health services to patients residing in states where such services are illegal.”
CNN has reached out to the governor’s office to see if she will sign the legislation.
CNN previously reported Hochul has indicated support for a shield law protecting medical providers of out of state abortion and reproductive services.
Assemblymember Karines Reyes, a registered nurse who sponsored the bill, said she was “proud to sponsor this critical piece of legislation to fully protect abortion providers using telemedicine.”
According to the state assembly’s news release, the bill recognizes the common use of medication abortion drugs, stating that 54% of abortions across the country are now medication abortions.
Speaker of the New York State Assembly Carl Heastie said, “It is our moral obligation to help women across the country with their bodily autonomy by protecting New York doctors from litigation efforts from anti-choice extremists. Telehealth is the future of healthcare, and this bill is simply the next step in making sure our doctors are protected.”
Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law Friday that bans most abortions in the state as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
“This week, in a rare and historic special session, the Iowa legislature voted for a second time to reject the inhumanity of abortion and pass the fetal heartbeat law,” she said in remarks ahead of signing the bill at the Family Leadership Summit.
The law, which is effective immediately, comes after Reynolds ordered a special legislative session last week with the sole purpose of restricting the procedure in the state. But it is already facing a legal challenge after a group of abortion providers in the state filed a suit to try and stop the law.
The bill, which passed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this week, prohibits physicians from providing most abortions after early cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus or embryo, commonly as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
It includes exceptions for miscarriages, when the life of the pregnant woman is threatened and fetal abnormalities that would result in the infant’s death. It also includes exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rapes reported within 45 days and incest reported within 140 days.
While the bill language makes clear it is “not to be construed to impose civil or criminal liability on a woman upon whom an abortion is performed in violation of the division,” guidelines on how physicians would be punished for violating the law are left up to Iowa’s board of medicine to decide – leaving the potential for some vagueness in how the law ought to be enforced in the interim.
Iowa joins a growing list of Republican-led states that have championed sweeping abortion restrictions in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
Reynolds’ push for abortion restrictions in the state comes weeks after Iowa’s Supreme Court declined to lift a block on the state’s 2018 six-week abortion ban, deadlocking in a 3-3 vote whether to overturn a lower court decision that deemed the law unconstitutional.
“The Iowa Supreme Court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said Tuesday in a statement following the bill’s passage. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”
Abortion rights supporters have been speaking out against the abortion ban in the state. National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called the ban the “latest show of abortion extremism from MAGA Republicans.”
“Governor Kim Reynolds just signed a cruel abortion ban into law among a crowd of extremists who cheered as Iowan women’s abortion rights were stripped away,” Harrison said in a statement Friday.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups, including National Right to Life and Iowa Right to Life, praised Reynolds and the law’s supporters in the state legislature for the abortion ban.
“We will continue to advocate for life and will not stop fighting until abortion becomes unthinkable,” Kristi Judkins, executive director of Iowa Right to Life said in a statement. “We want to see lives saved and women no longer placed in harm’s way because of abortion.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
Unlike last year, when the Supreme Court greatly upset liberals by overturning Roe v. Wade, this year’s big rulings by the justices are unlikely to spark a major backlash from the public at large.
This is well reflected in the public polling. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, had become massively popular.
Right before the decision to overturn Roe leaked in May 2022, a Fox News poll found that 63% of registered voters were opposed to such a move while 27% supported it. An ABC News/Washington Post poll put the split at 54% wanting the court to uphold Roe and 28% wanting the decision overturned.
This majority of Americans who wanted abortion to be legal nationally have maintained their stance since the Supreme Court officially struck down Roe in June 2022. Since that time, abortion supporters have won every related measure placed on the ballot across the country – from deep-blue states like California to ruby-red ones like Kentucky.
California is an important state to note because voters there faced a 2020 ballot measure to consider the use of race, sex or ethnicity in government institutions (such as education). A clear majority, 57%, voted against allowing state and local entities to consider such factors in public education, employment and contracting decisions.
When a state that voted for Biden by nearly 30 points is against affirmative action, it shouldn’t be surprising that the nation as a whole is.
A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that 50% of Americans disapproved of certain colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions to increase diversity. Only 33% approved of the practice.
This Pew poll is no outlier. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the court decided its case showed that 52% of Americans approved of the decision, while 32% were opposed.
Some polling before the ruling hadshown even more opposition: 70% of Americans in a recent CBS News/YouGov survey indicated that the Supreme Court should not allow colleges to consider race and ethnicity in admissions.
But perhaps what’s most interesting isn’t how many people are for or against considering race in college admissions. Rather, it’s how many people simply didn’t care enough to pay close attention to the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.
When explicitly given the option, a majority (55%) said in a May Marquette University Law School poll that they hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the case. (Those who had heard enough were against allowing colleges to use race in admissions.)
This is quite different from March 2022, when just 30% of Americans hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the court potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, when asked the same question by Marquette but about the abortion case. (A plurality of those who had heard enough didn’t want the court to overturn Roe.)
It’s hard for an issue to galvanize voters when they aren’t paying attention to it.
The same holds true for Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan that the court blocked. A USA Today/Ipsos poll from April indicated that 52% of Americans were familiar with the case and a mere 16% were very familiar with it. (Those who had student loans were more familiar at 71%, though that’s a fairly low percentage for something that could affect them directly.)
Possibly because of that low familiarity, the percentage of Americans who favor or oppose canceling certain student debt differs greatly depending on how the question is worded. When Marquette didn’t mention Biden or the government specifically in its May poll, a majority (63%) said they favored forgiveness of up to $20,000. It was a much lower 47% in the Ipsos poll.
Surveys that did identify the proposal as Biden’s plan tend to be in the same ballpark, with a split public and a sizable percentage unsure.
The ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 45% approved of the court striking down Biden’s student debt plan, with 40% disapproving. About a sixth (16%) of the public was undecided.
This jibes with polling before the court’s decision was announced. An NBC News poll from last year showed that 43% said Biden’s plan was a good idea compared with 44%, who said it was a bad idea. Just over 10% had no opinion.
The USA Today/Ipsos survey found that 43% of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to allow the government’s student loan forgiveness plan to move forward, while 40% did not. Another 17% had no opinion.
(I should point out that those with student debt were more likely to want government forgiveness in all these surveys, though about 80% of Americans don’t have student loan debt.)
The public was similarly split about the court ruling in favor of the Colorado web designer who refuses to make wedding websites for same-sex couples over religious objections. According to the ABC News/Ipsos poll, 43% of Americans agreed with the court’s decision, 42% disagreed and 14% were undecided.
There was limited polling on this case before the ruling, though none of it indicated massive opposition. A majority (60%) in a Pew poll that specifically mentioned “wedding websites” and “same-sex marriages” indicated they believed business owners should be allowed to refuse services if it violated their religious or personal beliefs.
The polling on Roe v. Wade didn’t look anything like this last year. There were no close splits in opinion. People were consistently against overturning Roe, and they cared a lot about it. This led to a historically strong performance for the party in the White House during the 2022 midterm elections and a major backlash against the Supreme Court.
The current polling on affirmative action in college admissions, Biden’s student loan forgiveness planand allowing people to opt out of certain services to married LGBTQ couples if they believe it goes against their religion suggests that court’s opinions on those issues aren’t likely to have a similar impact.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Elizabeth Holmes won’t be starting her 11-year prison sentence just yet.
The disgraced Theranos founder was previously expected to report to prison on Thursday, but she will remain free a little longer while the court considers a last-minute appeal, according to a filing Tuesday night.
Holmes was sentenced last November after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct blood testing startup. Earlier this month, her request to remain free while she appeals her conviction was denied by a judge, setting her up to report to prison on April 27.
On Tuesday, however, Holmes’ legal team filed an appeal of the judge’s decision. As a result, Holmes can remain free on bail while the latest appeal is considered by the court, as per the court’s rules.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 to focus full-time on Theranos, the health tech startup which claimed to have invented technology that could accurately test for a range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors and was valued at some $9 billion at its peak – making Holmes a paper billionaire.
Her company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 reported that Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy. It also came to light that Theranos was relying on third-party manufactured devices from traditional blood testing companies rather than its own technology.
Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and former COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was indicted alongside Holmes and convicted of fraud in a separate trial. Like Holmes, Balwani’s legal team delayed the start of his prison sentence by roughly a month with an appeal.
Balwani reported to prison last week to serve out his nearly 13-year sentence.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris joined a trio of key reproductive rights activist groups to mark the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision Friday, highlighting what’s expected to be a major Biden campaign plank for the 2024 presidential election.
“MAGA Republicans made clear that they don’t intend to stop with the Dobbs decision. No, they won’t, until they get a national ban on abortion,” Biden said, promising to issue a veto if a national ban is ever passed by Congress.
The Biden administration and campaign have been making an all-hands-on-deck push for reproductive rights messaging this week ahead of Saturday’s anniversary of the ruling that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade, harnessing the moment on an issue that animated voters in 2022 and they believe will do so again in 2024.
“Since that dark June day last year, each of you has worked tirelessly to fight back. In the Dobbs decision, the court, particularly – practically, dared the women of America to be heard,” Biden said.
Biden and Harris held the event with three reproductive rights groups – EMILYs List, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund – that announced they have endorsed the Biden-Harris campaign in the reelection push.
“Your support was critical last time around. And we were so grateful for it,” Biden said, noting the organizing efforts of all three groups and how important that will be for his reelection push.
Along with other recent endorsements from unions and climate activists, the backing of the reproductive rights groups Friday illustrates the central core of Biden’s reelection push.
“Over the last week or so we’ve seen extraordinary support from three of the most important voices in the country coming together to get behind this campaign – organized labor, climate leaders, and all of you,” Biden said at the Mayflower hotel in Washington, DC.
Friday’s event comes after Harris held a roundtable conversation on reproductive rights on MSNBC Tuesday and is also set to give a major speech on the Saturday anniversary in Charlotte, North Carolina.
And first lady Dr. Jill Biden hosted an emotional conversation Tuesday with four women who shared their stories of how the Dobbs decision and subsequent state bans on abortion impacted their own medical care.
“The Dobbs decision was devastating, and Joe is doing everything he can do to fight back,” the first lady said. “But the only way that we can ensure that every woman has the fundamental freedoms she deserves is for Congress to make the protections of Roe v. Wade the law of the land once again.”
While there are limited steps Biden can take at the executive level, he has signed multiple executive orders aimed at shoring up access to abortion rights and called on Congress to codify Roe v. Wade.
On Friday, the president will sign an executive order strengthening access to contraception, the Biden administration told CNN. The executive order directs the secretary of Treasury, secretary of Labor, and secretary of Health and Human Services to consider guidance guaranteeing private health insurance under the Affordable Care Act covers all FDA-approved methods of contraception, in contrast to current guidance, which only mandates coverage for one contraceptive product per FDA category.
But there is no action he can take to restore the nationwide right to an abortion.
Still, the Biden campaign believes that reproductive rights will be a key motivator for voters, with imagery of abortion rights protesters figuring prominently in the first seconds of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign launch video.
In the 2022 midterm elections, about 27% of voters cited abortion as the issue most important to them, according to the preliminary results of the national and state exit polls conducted for CNN and other news networks by Edison Research.
The event also comes as the campaign begins to build coalitions and momentum around key issues important to Democratic voters. Last week, Biden attended an event rolling out an endorsement from four major environmental groups. He also held an event with gun safety activists in Connecticut. And over the weekend, he touted support from leading unions with remarks focused on the economy.
Nearly one year ago, in the moments after the Supreme Court’s historic ruling, Biden said he was stunned by the “extreme” decision.
“With Roe gone, let’s be very clear: The health and life of women in this nation are now at risk,” he warned in remarks at the White House.
Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.
Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.
“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.
That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”
Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”
There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.
But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.
“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”
But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.
The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.
At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.
In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.
As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.
In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)
While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.
“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”
The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.
“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.
Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.
“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.
“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”
In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”
Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.
For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.
Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.
“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”
Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.
Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.
More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.
“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”
Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.
“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.
But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.
Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.
“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.
Americans’ Social Security checks will get a lot smaller in 2034if lawmakers don’t act to address the pending shortfall, according to an annual report released Friday by the Social Security trustees.
That’s because the combined Social Security trust funds – which help support payouts for the elderly, survivors and disabled – are projected to run dry that year. At that time, the funds’ reserves will be depleted, and the program’s continuing income will only cover 80% of benefits owed.
The estimate is one year earlier than the trustees projected last year. About 66 million Americans received Social Security benefits in 2022.
Medicare, meanwhile, is in a more critical financial condition. Its hospital insurance trust fund, known as Medicare Part A, will only be able to pay scheduled benefits in full until 2031, according to its trustees’ annual report, which was also released Friday.
At that time, Medicare, which covered 65 million senior citizens and people with disabilities in 2022, will only be able to cover89% of total scheduledbenefits.Last year, Medicare’s trustees projected that the hospital trust fund’s reserves would be depleted in 2028.
Immensely popular but long troubled, Social Security and Medicare are on shaky financial ground in large part because of the aging of the American population. Fewer workers are paying into the program and supporting the ballooning number of beneficiaries, who are also living longer. Also, health care is becoming increasingly expensive.
Social Security has two trust funds – one for retirees and survivors and another for Americans with disabilities.
Looking at them separately, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to run dry in 2033, at which time Social Security could pay only 77% of benefits, primarily using income from payroll taxes. The date is one year earlier than estimated last year.
The Disability Insurance Trust Fund is expected to be able to pay full benefits through at least 2097, the last year of the trustees’ projection period.
Merging the two trust funds would require Congress to act, but the combined projection is often used to show the overall status of the entitlement.
Social Security’s projected long-term health worsened over the past year because the trustees revised downward their expectations for the economy and labor productivity, taking into account updated data on inflation and economic output.
However, the long-term projection for Medicare’s hospital trust fund’s finances improved, mainly due to lowered estimates for health care spending after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, the program is projected to take in more income because the trustees estimate the number of covered workers and average wages will be higher.
Regardless, the bottom line remains that Medicare is not bringing in enough money to pay the costs it is expected to incur, said Cori Uccello, senior health fellow at the American Academy of Actuaries.
“It’s still not a time to become complacent,” she said. Insolvency “is still less than a decade away.”
The trustees’ reports are the latest warnings to Congress that they will have to deal with the massive entitlement programs’ fiscal problems at some point soon. But addressing their issues is politically challenging. Elected officials arehesitant to suggest any changes that could lead to benefit cuts, even though that could reduce their options in the future.
“With each year that lawmakers do not act, the public has less time to prepare for the changes,” the trustees warned in a fact sheet.
The programs’ shortfalls are back in the spotlight this year as President Joe Biden and House Republicans battle over how to address the nation’s debt ceiling drama and mounting budget deficits. GOP lawmakers want to cut spending in exchange for resolving the borrowing limit, while the White House has said it will not negotiate.
In a memorable moment in his State of the Union address in February, Biden garnered public acknowledgment from congressional Republicans about keeping Social Security and Medicare out of the debt discussions.
But “not touching” Social Security means a hefty cut in benefits within a decade or so.
“Change is inevitable because without changes to current law, both Social Security and Medicare Hospital Insurance would go insolvent, subjecting program participants to sudden and severe payment cuts,” said Charles Blahous, senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and former Social Security and Medicare trustee. “The outstanding question is whether change will be tolerably gradual, or instead highly damaging because it is too long delayed.”
Though Biden has repeatedly vowed to protect Social Security, his latest budget proposal did not include a plan to stabilize its finances.
However, his proposal did call for extending Medicare’s solvency by 25 years or more by raising taxes on those earning more than $400,000 a year and by allowing the program to negotiate prices for even more drugs.
Spending on the entitlement programs is also projected to soar and exert increased pressure on the federal budget in coming years.
Mandatory spending – driven by Social Security and Medicare – and interest costs are expected to outpace the growth of revenue and the economy, according to a Congressional Budget Office outlook released in mid-February.
This story has been updated with additional information.
The Justice Department and a manufacturer of abortion pills have submitted the final round of court briefs in the emergency dispute over whether an appeals court should freeze a judge’s ruling that would suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medication abortion drugs.
Now that the filings have been submitted, the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Court could rule at any time on whether to put a hold on the order from US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Kacsmaryk on Friday night said he was halting the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone but that he was delaying the order by seven days to give the pill’s defenders time to appeal the case. The Justice Department has asked the appeals court to act by 12 p.m. CT Thursday on its request that Kacsmaryk’s ruling be paused, to give the government time to seek a Supreme Court intervention if need be. The 5th Circuit is not obligated to meet that deadline.
The Justice Department wrote in its new filing that Kacsmaryk purported “to be acting in a restrained manner … but there is nothing modest about upending the decades-long status quo by blocking access nationwide to a safe and effective drug.”
“Effectively requiring Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro to cease distribution of mifepristone after more than two decades would upend the status quo, severely harming women, healthcare systems, and the public,” the Justice Department said, referring to the two US manufacturers of mifepristone.
The Justice Department filing pushed back on the assertions by the challengers, made in their filing overnight in the emergency dispute, that the 5th Circuit did not have the authority to hear the appeal of Kacsmaryk’s ruling. The Justice Department also called out Kacsmaryk and the challengers for relying on anonymous blog posts to claim mifepristone is unsafe.
Danco Labroratories, which intervened in the case to defend mifepristone’s approval, wrote in its new filing with the appeals court that if the ruling is not frozen, “women across the nation will face serious, unnecessary health risks from the elimination of access to a drug FDA has repeatedly deemed safe and effective and that is the standard of care.”
In an overnight filing, the anti-abortion doctors who sued to ban medication abortion drugs told a federal appeals court that it should leave in place the ruling that will halt the drug’s FDA approval.
The anti-abortion doctors defended Kacsmaryk’s ruling called it a “meticulously considered” ruling that “paints an alarming picture of decades-long agency lawlessness – all to the detriment of the women and girls FDA is charged to protect.”
Mifepristone has been approved by the FDA for terminating pregnancies for nearly 23 years. Leading medical associations have rebuked the claims by the approval’s legal challengers and by the judge that the drug is unsafe.
YouTube on Tuesday announced a series of changes to how it deals with content related to eating disorders.
The platform has long removed content that glorifies or promotes eating disorders, and YouTube’s Community Guidelines will now also prohibit content that features behaviors such as purging after eating or extreme calorie counting that at-risk users could be inspired to imitate. For videos that feature such “imitable behaviors” in the context of recovery, YouTube will allow the content to remain on the site but restrict it to users who are logged into the site and are over the age of 18.
The policy changes, developed in consultation with the National Eating Disorder Association and other nonprofit organizations, aim to ensure “that YouTube creates space for community recovery and resources, while continuing to protect our viewers,” YouTube’s Global Head of Healthcare Garth Graham told CNN in an interview.
“We’re thinking about how to thread the needle in terms of essential conversations and information that people might have,” Graham said, “allowing people to hear stories about recovery and allowing people to hear educational information but also realizing that the display of that information … can serve as a trigger as well.”
The changes come as social media platforms have faced increased scrutiny for their effects on the mental health of users, especially young people. In 2021, lawmakers called out Instagram and YouTube for promoting accounts featuring content depicting extreme weight loss and dieting to young users. And TikTok has faced criticism from an online safety group that claimed the app served eating disorder related content to teens (although the platform pushed back against the research). They also follow several updates by YouTube in recent years to how it handles misinformation about medical issues such as abortion and vaccines.
In addition to removing or age restricting some videos, YouTube plans to add panels pointing viewers to crisis resources under eating disorder-related content in nine countries, with plans to expand to more areas. And when a creators’ video is removed for violating its eating disorder policy, Graham said YouTube will send them resources about how to create content that’s less likely to harm other viewers.
As with many social media policies, however, the challenge often isn’t introducing it but enforcing it, a challenge YouTube could face in discerning which videos are, for example, pro-recovery. YouTube said it will be rolling out enforcement of the policy globally in the coming weeks, and plans to use both human and automated moderation to review videos and their context.
“These are complicated, societal public health [issues],” Graham said, “I want never to profess perfection, but to understand that we have to be proactive, we have to be thoughtful … it’s taken a while to get here because we wanted to articulate a process that had different layers and understood the challenges.”
Late last year, Facebook-parent Meta quietly phased out certain content labels on its platforms that for much of the pandemic had directed viewers to its central Covid-19 information page, after internal research concluded the labels may be ineffective at changing attitudes or stopping the spread of misinformation, according to a report Thursday by the company’s external oversight board.
Facebook rolled out the labels in early 2021, after coming under criticism for the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platforms during the first year of the pandemic. The company applied the labels to a wide range of claims both true and untrue about vaccines, treatments and other topics related to the virus.
But Meta’s use of the labels began slowing on Dec. 19, and ended completely soon after, the report said, following the internal research. Study results provided to the Meta Oversight Board, a quasi-judicial body, showed that the company’s labels appeared to have “no detectable effect on users’ likelihood to read, create or re-share” claims that had previously been rated as false by third-party fact-checkers or that discouraged the use of vaccines, the report said.
The research focused on Meta’s direct labeling interventions as opposed to labels the company applies to content as part of its third-party fact-checking program. The research found that the more frequently a user was exposed to the labels, the less likely they were to visit the Covid-19 information center, which offers authoritative resources and information linked to the pandemic.
“The company reported that initial research showed that these labels may have no effect on user knowledge and vaccine attitudes,” the report said.
Meta’s internal research on the labels has not been previously released, and the Oversight Board on Thursday called for Meta to publish its findings as part of a broader review of the company’s handling of Covid-19 misinformation.
The new details highlight the struggles platforms have faced in fighting misinformation and could raise broader questions about the efficacy of labeling and directing users to more accurate information. It also comes at a time when some of the biggest social media companies, including Twitter and Meta, are either rolling back their Covid-19 misinformation policies or considering doing so.
Meta should not relax its approach to Covid-19 misinformation as the company has proposed, the Oversight Board added. Until the World Health Organization determines that the pandemic has eased, Meta should instead continue to remove misinformation that violates the company’s policies, rather than shifting toward more lenient treatments such as labeling or downranking misleading information, the board said.
Meta said Thursday it will publicly respond to the Oversight Board’s recommendations within 60 days.
“We thank the Oversight Board for its review and recommendations in this case,” a company spokesperson said. “As Covid-19 evolves, we will continue consulting extensively with experts on the most effective ways to help people stay safe on our platforms.”
In the past, Meta has touted its ability to direct users to the Covid-19 information center. Last July, the company said it had connected more than 2 billion people across 189 countries to trustworthy information through the portal.
Some of those visits occurred through labels that Meta referred to internally as “neutral inform treatments,” or NITs, and “facts about ‘X’ informed treatments,” also known as FAXITs.
The labels were automatically applied to content that Meta’s automated tools determined were about Covid-19, the Oversight Board said. The labels never directly addressed the claims within any given post, but they provided a link to the Covid-19 information center as well as more contextual information, including messages saying that vaccines have been proven safe and effective or that unapproved Covid-19 treatments could cause bodily harm. (Meta provided examples of a NIT and a FAXIT in its July 2022 request for Oversight Board guidance on whether it should relax its Covid-19 misinformation policy.)
The decision to begin phasing out the labels came after Meta’s product and integrity teams ran an experiment studying Meta’s global userbase, the report said. The study found that users who were shown the labels approximately once a month were more likely on average to click through to the Covid-19 information center than users who were shown the labels both more and less frequently.
In light of the results, Meta later told the Oversight Board it would stop using the labels altogether, to ensure they could remain effective in other public health emergencies, according to the report.
While the Oversight Board’s report Thursday did not pass judgment on Meta’s decision to stop using the labels, it urged the company to reevaluate the 80 distinct types of claims that the company considers to be Covid-19 misinformation and therefore subject to removal from its platforms.
Meta should perform the reassessments regularly, the Oversight Board said, consulting with public health officials to determine which claims on Meta’s banned list continue to be false or misleading and worthy of removal. Meta should also publish a record of when and how it updates that list, the board added.
Nearly a dozen Senate Democrats wrote to Google this week with questions about how it deletes users’ location history when they have visited sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, expressing concerns that the company may not have been consistently deleting the data as promised.
The letter dated Monday and led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren and Mazie Hirono seeks answers from Google about the types of locations Google considers to be sensitive and how long it takes for the company to automatically delete visit history.
The letter comes after tests performed by The Washington Post and other privacy advocates appeared to show that Google was not quickly or consistently deleting users’ recorded visits to fertility centers of Planned Parenthood clinics.
“This data is extremely personal and includes information about reproductive health care,” the senators wrote. “We are also concerned that it can be used to target advertisements for services that may be unnecessary or potentially harmful physically, psychologically, or emotionally.”
Concerns about the security of location data have spiked in Washington since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, opening the door to state laws restricting or penalizing abortion-seekers. Under those laws, privacy advocates have said, states could potentially compel tech companies to hand over location data that might reveal whether a person has illegally sought an abortion.
“Claiming and publicly announcing that Google will delete sensitive location data, without consistently doing so, could be considered a deceptive practice,” the senators added, implying that Google’s conduct could be grounds for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, which is authorized to police unfair and deceptive business practices.
Google declined to comment Wednesday on the lawmakers’ letter, instead referring CNN to a blog post that answers some but not all of the senators’ questions.
Google defines sensitive locations as “including counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics, and others,” according to an update to the blog post dated May 12. “If you visit a general purpose medical facility (like a hospital), the visit may persist.”
The blog post does not, however, address the senators’ request for Google to explain what it means when it claims the data will be deleted “soon after” a visit.
Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former Theranos CEO, has “limited financial means” and should not be forced to pay $250 a month to victims of her crimes after she is released from prison, her lawyers argued in a court filing on Monday.
The move from Holmes’ attorneys comes after federal prosecutors said in a separate filing last week that “clerical errors” had resulted in no payment schedule being set for Holmes’ restitution after she is released from prison. Holmes and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were previously ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to victims of their crimes.
Holmes reported to prison late last month in Texas to serve out her more than 11-year sentence. She was convicted early last year on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the failed blood-testing startup Theranos.
Federal prosecutors asked that once Holmes is on supervised released, criminal monetary penalties should be paid monthly in the amount of $250, or at least 10% of her wages, whichever is greater.
In the latest filing, Holmes’ attorneys argued “there is no basis in the record for the payment structure in the government’s request,” but did not object to her being asked to start paying $25 per quarter as part of her restitution while she is in prison.
Holmes, once a paper billionaire, could hold a job at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, with hourly wages ranging from $0.12 to $1.15, according to the prison’s handbook.
Theranos once claimed to have invented technology that could test for a range of conditions using a few drops of blood. It was valued at some $9 billion at its peak and raised money from a long list of prominent investors. Then it all began to unravel after a damning Wall Street Journal report cast doubt on the company’s claims.
As part of the original restitution order, some $125 million is owed to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, as well as millions in payments to other Theranos investors.
