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  • Harris becomes first woman to deliver commencement address at West Point | CNN Politics

    Harris becomes first woman to deliver commencement address at West Point | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday became the first woman to deliver a commencement address at the graduation ceremony at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, warning graduates they were “an increasingly unsettled world where long standing principles are at risk.”

    In the history-making speech, Harris discussed themes of global security and prosperity, arguing that America’s democratic ideals “inspire billions.”

    “In the face of all these challenges, America plays a singular role of leadership,” the vice president told the graduates. “Cadets, global security and global prosperity depend on the leadership of the United States of America. And a strong America remains indispensable to the world.”

    Taking aim at Russian aggression in Ukraine, Harris called Moscow’s unprovoked invasion “an attack on international rules and norms that have served as the foundation of international security and prosperity for generations.” She also slammed China for “modernizing its military and threatening both the freedom of the seas and rules of international commerce.”

    Harris’ comments come as President Joe Biden is seeking a second White House term next year. To date, the pair has leaned heavily on a message of saving democratic values at home and strengthening alliances abroad, even as relations with Russia and China remain contentious.

    During Biden’s trip to the G7 summit earlier this month, the group of industrialized nations agreed to counter China’s “malign practices” and “coercion” and pledged to choke off Russia’s ability to finance and fuel its war.

    “To the Class of 2023: You join the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen,” Harris said Saturday. “And in years to come, I promise you, you will be tried, and you will be tested.”

    “And I am so very confident that you will rise to each occasion. Whatever comes your way. You are ready. And you are ready because you are true leaders of character.”

    Harris previously made history in 2021 as the first woman to give a commencement address at the US Naval Academy. Last year, she spoke at the US Coast Guard Academy’s graduation ceremony.

    Biden is expected to address graduates at the US Air Force Academy on June 1.

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  • Proud Boys members ordered to pay over $1 million in ‘hateful and overtly racist’ church destruction civil suit | CNN Politics

    Proud Boys members ordered to pay over $1 million in ‘hateful and overtly racist’ church destruction civil suit | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Members of the right-wing extremist group, the Proud Boys, have been ordered to pay more than a million dollars as part of a civil suit judgment involving the destruction of property in December 2020 at the predominantly Black campus of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.

    DC Superior Court Judge Neal E. Kravitz approved Friday’s default judgment against Proud Boys members Joseph R. Biggs, Enrique Tarrio, Jeremy Bertino and John Turano, as well as the group’s limited liability corporation.

    In a blistering order, Kravitz described the “highly orchestrated” and “hateful and overtly racist conduct” from members of the Proud Boys during the “attack” on the Metropolitan AME church, in which a Black Lives Matter sign owned by the church was allegedly destroyed.

    CNN has reached out to attorneys for Tarrio and Biggs for comment on the judgment, and is attempting to locate attorney information for the other named defendants.

    A request for comment on the judgment has also been made to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

    According to Kravitz’s order, on December 12, 2020, several people in Proud Boys regalia “leaped over Metropolitan AME’s fence, entered the church’s property, and went directly to the Black Lives Matter sign. They then broke the zip ties that held the sign in place, tore down the sign, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it while loudly celebrating. Many others then jumped over the fence onto the church’s property and joined in the celebration of the sign’s destruction.”

    Describing the target of the attack, Kravitz wrote, “For generations, the leaders of Metropolitan AME and the members of its congregation have vocally and publicly supported movements for civil rights and racial justice,” adding, “Church leaders and congregants view supporting the Black Lives Matter movement as a continuation of the church’s mission of advocacy for civil rights and racial justice.”

    In his rebuke of the Proud Boys, the judge wrote that the group has “incited and committed acts of violence against members of Black and African American communities across the country. They also have victimized women, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and other historically marginalized people.”

    The church sought compensatory damages as part of the civil suit, in part to repair the sign and increase security in the wake of the attack and due to “ongoing threats,” the order said.

    “The ultimate goal of this lawsuit was not monetary windfall, but to stop the Proud Boys from being able to act with impunity, without fear of consequences for their actions,” the plaintiff’s co-counsel, Arthur Ago, said in a statement after the judgment. “And that’s exactly what we accomplished.”

    In July 2021, Tarrio, the group’s leader, pleaded guilty to property destruction in a criminal case involving the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner at a different, predominately Black church in Washington, and also pleaded guilty to attempted possession of a high-capacity magazine, a violation of local gun control laws. He was later sentenced to more than five months in jail for those crimes.

    In May, Tarrio and Biggs were also among a group of four Proud Boys members found guilty of seditious conspiracy by a jury in Washington for their roles in attempting to forcibly prevent the peaceful transfer of power from President Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 election.

    This headline has been updated.

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  • US Supreme Court faces ‘outright defiance’ from Alabama | CNN Politics

    US Supreme Court faces ‘outright defiance’ from Alabama | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    It was a legitimate surprise when the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court ordered Alabama’s conservative-dominated state government last month to redraw its congressional map and include either a second majority-Black congressional district or something quite close to it.

    It may be equally surprising that Alabama appears to have said no.

    Instead of simply complying with the Supreme Court’s order in the Allen v. Milligan case, Alabama’s legislature redrew the congressional map to lower the Black voting-age population in the existing Democratic seat held by Rep. Terri Sewell from about 55% to just over 50% and then increased a second district’s Black population percentage to about 40%.

    The new map approved by Alabama’s legislature and governor will go before federal courts for review in August, so this story is far from over.

    And it will combine with fights over congressional maps in other states, especially New York, in such a way that control of the House could very much be at stake.

    Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, seemed to defend the legislature’s insolence in the face of the federal courts’ orders when it approved the new map Friday.

    “The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups,” she said in a statement.

    CNN’s Dianne Gallagher noted in her report that the old congressional map was invalidated by a three-judge federal district court panel that included two judges nominated to the bench by former President Donald Trump.

    They concluded the plan by which Alabamians selected their congressional delegation in 2022 likely violated the Voting Rights Act because Black voters have “less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.”

    Before the 2022 midterm election, the US Supreme Court had tabled action on Alabama’s map, which helped Republicans win the barely there four-seat House majority they currently hold.

    Gallagher and CNN’s Tierney Sneed wrote last month that the Allen v. Milligan decision could have consequences for other states and reignite a series of lawsuits in multiple states.

    “Outright defiance of the Supreme Court’s order,” is how Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, described the new map to CNN’s Dana Bash Monday.

    “In this moment, it is up to our federal courts to protect Black voters and also to protect their own authority here,” she later added.

    The background here is that Alabama’s population is about 27% Black, but the Black population in the state is focused on a number of counties that are overwhelmingly African American – an area known as the state’s Black Belt, although it is named for the area’s fertile soil. The interest of giving the voters of the Black Belt, many of whom are Black, representation in Congress, is all over the Supreme Court’s decision.

    Coincidentally, earlier this year, President Joe Biden named Alabama’s Black Belt, site of many key moments in the Civil Rights Movement, as a National Heritage Area.

    To Nelson, the math suggests that since Black Alabamians represent about a quarter of the state’s population, they should get representation from more than one of the seven lawmakers representing Alabama in Congress.

    But the issue is larger than simple math since Alabama, both historically and currently, is marked by polarized voting conditions.

    “This is a mandate by civil rights laws to make sure that there’s fairness in our systems, that Black voters and other voters who have been historically discriminated against have an opportunity to have representatives who will speak to their interests and give voice to their concerns,” she said.

    Alabama had asked the Supreme Court to essentially nullify Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, something many court watchers thought the conservative majority was primed to execute.

    But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined liberals on the court to throw out the Alabama map.

    The Supreme Court also rejected out of hand the idea that the Gulf Coast area represents a community of interest on par with the Black Belt. The new map, according to the state attorney general’s office, still tries to keep the Gulf Coast community together in a single district.

    In a statement, the attorney general’s office argued the new map is fair and complies with the principles of the Voting Rights Act and seeks to unite the Black Belt counties.

    The other political story here is that, like most congressional districts nationwide, not one of the districts in which Alabamians voted in the 2022 midterm elections was even relatively competitive. The only winning candidate who got less than two-thirds of the vote was the Democrat, Sewell. And she still got more than 63% of the heavily Democratic district.

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  • Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

    Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    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.

    People rallied during a

    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.

    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.

    “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.”

    16 TikTok app STOCK

    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.

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  • Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

    Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    About 2,100 Afghan refugees remain held in a sprawling compound in the United Arab Emirates more than 18 months after they were evacuated from Afghanistan largely by private groups working with the State Department.

    They are what’s left of as many as 20,000 Afghans who were hastily relocated to the camp during the chaotic weeks surrounding the US withdrawal after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Several thousand were brought there by the State Department directly from Kabul and have since been relocated to the US or Canada.

    But thousands more, including those still stuck in the UAE, were evacuated weeks later, and sometimes from hundreds of miles away from Kabul, by private groups working to get as many out of Afghanistan as possible.

    Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that the private evacuation efforts, though well-intentioned, contributed at times to an already chaotic situation – though they also say that the frenzy of the withdrawal created unclear communication and expectations.

    Consequently, thousands of Afghans evacuated by private groups were left in a legal limbo with seemingly no clear path to the US – or anywhere else. And though the effort to resettle them has picked up in recent months, refugees inside the compound known as Emirates Humanitarian City, or EHC, are restless after almost two years of waiting inside a camp they are barred from leaving.

    Without a visa, they’re not allowed inside the country.

    When they first arrived in the UAE in August 2021, Afghan evacuees were housed across dozens of buildings in the gated compound. Afghans were separated in rooms with their families across multi-level buildings divided by a common outdoor space.

    They were supposed to be there for a few days. But that’s now approaching two years for the more than 2,000 people who remain there. The State Department says it continues to process refugees out of EHC “on an ongoing basis.” One American Marine veteran closely involved said that a family or two leave each week, bound mostly for the US and Canada, as well as Australia, with some scattered across Europe.

    At that pace it could still take more than a year to empty out the entire population of evacuees who remain at the compound.

    Their plight has gained recent attention from human rights groups, who say the refugees are being held arbitrarily by the UAE and have been subject to a host of abuses, including poor medical care and being held in “prison-like” conditions.

    A report put out by Human Rights Watch in March said Afghan asylum seekers have been “locked up for over 15 months in cramped, miserable conditions with no hope of progress on their cases” and are “facing further trauma now, after spending well over a year in limbo.”

    In a statement to CNN, a UAE official said the refugees at EHC have “received a comprehensive range of high-quality housing, sanitation, health, clinical, counseling, education, and food services to ensure their welfare.”

    The official said the UAE “continues to do everything it can to bring this extraordinary exercise in humanitarian resettlement to a satisfactory conclusion. We understand that there are frustrations and this has taken longer than intended to complete.”

    “The UAE remains committed to this ongoing cooperation with the US and other international partners to ensure that Afghan evacuees can live in safety, security, and dignity,” the official added.

    Allegations similar to those raised by the HRW report were described in an appeal to the United Nations submitted last fall by an independent American attorney, who alleged “widespread human rights abuses,” including inadequate health and mental health care, “constant” surveillance and “restricted access” to government officials working their cases.

    In a statement to CNN, Mara Tekach, State Department coordinator for Afghan relocation efforts, said that while the department is aware of the Human Rights Watch report, the US government “is not aware of any verified allegations of human rights violations at EHC.”

    CNN has not independently verified those allegations.

    One refugee still stuck at EHC who spoke to CNN described extreme frustration over a seemingly hopeless situation. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, said he worries about the effect the ordeal is having on his young daughter.

    “My daughter, from months ago until now, sometime when she starts talking, I can feel the pain in her voice,” he said.

    The man showed CNN what appeared to be documentation that he was recommended for a Special Immigrant Visa by a US contractor with whom he worked in Afghanistan for almost two years. It was unclear whether that documentation is sufficient for what the State Department has required. He told CNN his daughter is growing anxious to leave.

    “She says, ‘You have [taken] me somewhere that I cannot see anywhere, I cannot go outside,’” the man said. “She’s asking me every time, frequently, ‘When are we going to get out of here?’”

    During the chaotic weeks of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of American military veterans rushed to help evacuate as many Afghans as possible.

    Among them was US Marine veteran Pete Lucier, who worked with a coalition of veterans’ groups known collectively as the #AfghanEvac coalition. Lucier said he is proud of much of the work that veteran and civilian volunteers did in helping Afghans flee the Taliban, which has since reinstated many of the draconian laws it had in place before the US and allied forces invaded after 9/11.

    Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, to flee the Taliban which had gained control of Afghanistan

    Still, Lucier admitted there have been shortcomings, telling CNN that even well-intentioned veterans’ groups and individuals ended up “sometimes, unfortunately, making things worse for vulnerable and at-risk people.”

    Many of the individuals involved in evacuating Afghans had a “lack of familiarity with international law and the requirements of international travel,” Lucier said. “Broadly, I think EHC represents and embodies many of those challenges.”

    Dina Haynes, an international human rights lawyer and a professor at New England Law school in Boston, echoed those thoughts, saying that what has happened at EHC is “not a surprise at all to anybody who has paid attention” to the US immigration system.

    “The only people that it was a surprise to were those new people that showed up thinking that they could fly people out and land them somewhere and get the US government to help,” Haynes said.

    EHC is one of a few locations around the world where evacuated Afghans are still waiting to be processed for visas to the US or elsewhere. There are Afghans in Albania and Pakistan who were relocated there by private groups, as well as Afghans who were evacuated by the US government and are still being processed at Camp As-Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, according to the State Department.

    Operated and funded by the UAE government, the EHC compound was first built in Abu Dhabi’s industrial Mussafah area to receive quarantine evacuees stranded in China following the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands were evacuated to the compound as part of a wider regional humanitarian call to assist.

    That was in part due to an agreement made in August 2021 between UAE officials and Joseph Robert III, a former US Marine and son of a wealthy real estate investor with connections in the country.

    Robert’s group, the Black Feather Foundation, joined the #AfghanEvac coalition made up of roughly 200 nonprofits in November 2021. Robert told CNN that relationships with UAE officials who were close with his late father helped secure the agreement to bring Afghans to UAE, sealed by a memorandum of understanding, which, according to Robert, stated that the UAE would receive and temporarily house Afghan refugees until they were able to move on to a third country.

    The EHC compound was not specifically part of the agreement, Robert told CNN, but was chosen by the UAE because of its capacity.

    This undated photo from the Emirates News Agency, the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates, shows the Emirates Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

    CNN visited the compound in August 2021, during the first days when Afghans were arriving. Afghans awaiting security and medical screenings were kept in assigned rooms until they were called for processing.

    UAE officials and US embassy personnel were present at the main center at EHC, where dozens of Afghan men and women sat awaiting information on their next destination. It was not immediately clear who was processing information from the evacuees.

    Robert said he has seen no signs of the alleged abuse taking place at EHC, which, he said, he visits every few weeks. He blames the US for not swiftly processing people out of EHC despite originally taking advantage of the extra hands that brought them there.

    “The US government was using us at every turn when it benefited them,” Robert said. “And then when it came time to do the work on the back end, to process them out, they tried to leave us high and dry.”

    Before going to Afghanistan in August 2021, Robert said he first flew to the UAE, where he had several meetings with officials about lining up commitments to take in refugees, as well as provide planes. When he finally landed at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on August 20, 2021, things began to change immediately.

    “It became just an on-the-fly, ad hoc assistance operation,” Robert said, adding that, suddenly, “our planes were being loaded with just people from the airport that the US would have evacuated.”

    Afghan refugees arrived at EHC in three distinct groups. The first two groups were evacuated from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in August 2021 by both the State Department and private groups working independently. The third group of Afghans were brought to EHC over the next two months by private groups, including Robert’s Black Feather Foundation, from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city roughly 260 miles from Kabul.

    The EHC resident who spoke to CNN said he was flown out of Mazar-i-Sharif with his family after attempting to get through crowds of people at the Kabul airport during the evacuation in August 2021. Despite concerns about traveling from Kabul, especially with the possibility of running into the Taliban on the way, the resident said he thought it might his best chance “to get myself and my family out of the danger zone.”

    Afghans climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan's 20-year war, as thousands of people mobbed the city's airport trying to flee the group's feared hardline brand of Islamist rule.

    Robert told CNN the manifests for those flights were submitted by other organizations either directly to him or through other members of his team. Robert said he then submitted the manifests to the UAE government, which ran them through its own security systems.

    It is almost entirely this group of people – those evacuated after August 2021 – that remains stuck at EHC, both the State Department and Robert said. In her responses to CNN, Tekach said the State Department “had limited information” about refugees who came on those separate flights. She also emphasized that that the place where people were evacuated from “is not a determining factor as to whether” they qualify for relocation and resettlement.

    Toward the end of October 2021, Robert said it was clear to him that the State Department was “not going to continue processing” any more people brought to the UAE since the evacuation had ended.

    “That’s where things with State Department started to unravel,” he said. “They processed only those that came on their aircraft, not even the ones that came on our aircraft alongside theirs during the [noncombatant evacuation]. As one State Department official told me, ‘Not our plane, not our problem.’”

    Tekach told CNN that the State Department paused processing in November 2021 “in support of US public health priorities” and began relocating individuals in March 2022.

    Still, Lucier told CNN that the US government and State Department likely were not clear enough in their communication about what private organizations could or could not do, leading to much of the confusion and at-times chaotic interference that occurred.

    Robert expressed frustration over security concerns the State Department has raised about the Afghans at EHC, saying that for the most part the evacuees are “able to provide everything they needed” in terms of paperwork and documents, including reference letters from US employers while in Afghanistan.

    While he acknowledged that there were shortcomings and mistakes made in the broader evacuation effort by private groups, Robert also said that was in part due to a “US government plan that was nonexistent.”

    All in all, Robert said volunteers were still able to evacuate “tens of thousands of individuals, despite the US government’s inability to appropriately evacuate them in the first place.”

    Joe Robert, lower left, sitting at EHC with Aziz, an interpreter, kicked off a group effort of US veterans to help evacuate Afghans to the UAE.

    Asked how many State Department officials have access to EHC and how frequently they are at the compound working to process people out, the State Deaprtment’s Tekach said US officials have access to the compound “for a number of purposes, including gathering information to work on case processing and to support the well-being of the Afghan population at the facility.”

    Robert said that over the past six months, an average of three to five State Department personnel have come to EHC twice a week. After early frictions, Robert said his relationship with US government personnel who deal with EHC is “in a much better place now.”

    Despite the delays, Robert said they’re slowly making progress in resettling the Afghans still at EHC.

    “Having 20,000 people pass through the walls of EHC, and we’re down to the last 2,000 – that’s a rather remarkable effort, although things didn’t go as smoothly as we’d planned or hoped,” he said.

    “Even though everyone wants it to be faster, things are moving at a rather steady and consistent pace, and everyone’s still actively doing everything they can to find suitable pathways for people and accommodate families, and find other opportunities if a previous one falls through. Everyone is working tremendously hard to do what is right by these people,” Robert said.

    As the US and others work to process Afghans out, Human Rights Watch is still trying to bring attention to their plight.

    “They’re still in this facility, which was never designed to hold people for this long,” said Joey Shea, the lead researcher on HRW’s recent report. “And they’ve been effectively imprisoned after an extremely traumatic experience of fleeing a Taliban takeover.”

    Shea said the clearest solution is through the US government.

    “There just needs to be more resources put by the US government to make sure that these asylum and humanitarian parole and other applications are processed quickly,” she said.

    At EHC, the current resident who spoke to CNN described how happy he was to have been evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021. Aside from marrying “the love of my life” and having children, he said that leaving Afghanistan was “the best day of my life.”

    “When the plane took off, I couldn’t fit in my own skin because of the happiness that I had,” he said emotionally. “This is a new life that I began to live with my family. I was happy and proud I could do something for my wife, my kids.”

    The recommendation letter he received from his US employer says he is “completely trustworthy, intelligent, and a faithful employee” and the “kind of person who will make a valuable contribution and service to the US, if allowed to immigrate.”

    But the longer he and his family languish at EHC, he said, the harder it is to explain his work with the US.

    “‘What will happen to us? Why are we abandoned by the US?’” he said his wife asks him. “My wife tells me that maybe it was not right that you worked for the US government.”

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  • One of Asia’s top female entrepreneurs is stepping down at Grab, the ride-hailing company she helped found | CNN Business

    One of Asia’s top female entrepreneurs is stepping down at Grab, the ride-hailing company she helped found | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    One of Southeast Asia’s most well-known female entrepreneurs is to step down from her operational roles at Grab, the ride-hailing giant she helped found more than a decade ago.

    Tan Hooi Ling, a former chief operating officer who currently leads the firm’s technology and corporate strategy teams, will move to an advisory role by the end of the year, the company said Thursday. She will also give up her seat on the board.

    Her exit leaves Grab’s Chief Executive Officer Anthony Tan the tough task of reversing years of losses amid increasingly fierce competition in the ride-hailing and food delivery markets, all without the help of the woman who helped him co-found the company in 2012.

    “Grab has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. The impact we create is a reflection of who we are as a team, and I am humbled to have been able to walk alongside Anthony and the many amazing Grabbers who share the same values and work ethic to build something that improves lives in Southeast Asia,” a statement from the company quoted Tan Hooi Ling as saying.

    After being founded as a ride-hailing company by the two Tans – who are both from Malaysia but are unrelated – Grab quickly soared to become Southeast Asia’s most valuable private company. It acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business in 2018, and has since expanded into a variety of other services, including food delivery, digital payments and even financial services.

    But Grab has faced intensifying competition from Southeast Asia rivals, including Singapore’s Sea Ltd, Indonesia’s GoTo Group, and Berlin-based Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda.

    Grab, which unlike some of its competitors avoided mass layoffs during the coronavirus pandemic, posted an annual loss of $1.74 billion in 2022. That was a 51% improvement on the year before, according to its annual report.

    In 2021, the company merged with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, backed by Altimeter Capital in a deal that would pave the way for a New York listing and value Grab at nearly $40 billion.

    Before that, Grab had heavyweight backers including Japan’s SoftBank

    (SFTBF)     and China’s ride-hailing startup, Didi Chuxing.

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  • Meta lowers the minimum age for its Quest headsets from 13 to 10 | CNN Business

    Meta lowers the minimum age for its Quest headsets from 13 to 10 | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Facebook-parent Meta plans to lower the minimum age for its virtual reality headsets from 13 years old to 10 years old, despite pressure from lawmakers not to market its VR services to younger users.

    Parents will be able to set up accounts for children as young as 10 years old on Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest 3 headsets starting later this year, the company said in a blog post Friday.

    Preteens will be required to get a parent’s approval to set up an account and download apps onto the device, according to the company. Meta said it will also use children’s ages to “provide age-appropriate experiences” such as recommending suitable apps.

    “There’s a vast array of engaging and educational apps, games, and more across our platform, the majority of which are rated for ages 10 and up,” Meta said in the post.

    The company’s push to lower the minimum age comes as Meta and other social media companies face growing scrutiny over their impact on young users, including their potential to harm teens’ mental health or lead them down harmful content rabbit holes.

    Parents and lawmakers have also specifically raised alarms about the use of VR — and the future version of the internet Meta calls the “metaverse” — by teens and children.

    Earlier this year, two Democratic senators urged Meta to suspend a plan to offer Horizon Worlds, the company’s flagship VR app, to teens between the ages of 13 and 17, arguing the technology could harm young users’ physical and mental health. The lawmakers, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, called Meta’s plan “unacceptable” in light of the company’s “record of failure to protect children and teens,” in a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    But in April, Meta forged ahead with its plan to allow teens as young as 13 in the United States and Canada to use Horizon Worlds, prompting additional outcry from lawmakers and civil society groups.

    Parents told CNN last year about instances of discovering their children were viewing violent and disturbing content in VR and struggling to come up with ways to keep their kids safe.

    Meta is attempting to address some of parents’ concerns.

    In its Friday blog post, Meta said parents will be able to set time limits and enforce breaks for their preteens on the headsets. The accounts of users under 13 will be set to private and have their active status hidden on apps by default unless parents choose to change those settings. Meta also makes it possible to cast content from its VR headsets to a TV or phone screen, so parents can watch what their kids are seeing.

    Meta said it will not serve ads to users in this age group, and that parents can choose whether their child’s data can be used to improve the company’s services. Meta added on Friday that Horizon Worlds will remain restricted to users 13 and older in the United States and Canada (and 18 and older in Europe) when it allows preteens to create parent-manged accounts on the headsets later this year.

    Meta’s headset and Horizon Worlds represent Zuckerberg’s vision for a next-generation internet, where users can interact with each other in virtual spaces resembling real life. The company has so far struggled to attract a mainstream audience for these products.

    Update: This story has been updated to reflect Meta’s plan to continue restricting Horizon Worlds to users 13 and older.

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  • DeSantis and his team unleash on Rep. Donalds for questioning Florida’s new Black history standards | CNN Politics

    DeSantis and his team unleash on Rep. Donalds for questioning Florida’s new Black history standards | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday accused Rep. Byron Donalds – the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation – of aligning himself with Vice President Kamala Harris by critiquing the state’s new standards for teaching Black history.

    Donalds tweeted Wednesday that the new standards are “good, robust, & accurate.” But the two-term congressman added that a new requirement for middle school students to be taught that slaves learned skills they later benefited from “is wrong & needs to be adjusted.” He added that he has “faith that (Florida Department of Education) will correct this.”

    In the face of that seemingly gentle criticism, DeSantis’ administration and online allies unloaded on Donalds, who has backed former President Donald Trump over his home state governor for the 2024 nomination. Jeremy Redfern, the spokesman for the governor’s office, called Donalds a “supposed conservative.” Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, replied to Donalds’ tweet: “Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?” DeSantis’ Education Commissioner Manny Diaz tweeted that Florida would “not back down … at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman.”

    DeSantis joined the pile on during his Iowa bus tour, telling Donalds to “stand up for your state.”

    “You got to choose: Are you going to side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets or are you doing to side with the state of Florida?” he said.

    Responding to the blowback to his remarks, Donalds on Twitter called the online attacks aimed at him “disingenuous” and said DeSantis supporters were “desperately attempting to score political points,” adding that that is why he is “proud to have endorsed” Trump.

    “What’s crazy to me is I expressed support for the vast majority of the new African American history standards and happened to oppose one sentence that seemed to dignify the skills gained by slaves as a result of their enslavement,” he wrote on Twitter.

    This week’s clash with Donalds is the latest example of how the DeSantis campaign’s failure to win support from key members of his state’s GOP has come back to bite him as he runs against Trump. Last week, Rep. Greg Steube, who has also endorsed Trump, put DeSantis on blast over property insurance rates in the state continuing to soar.

    “The result of the state’s top elected official failing to focus on (and be present in) Florida,” Steube said, tweeting out a headline that linked the sharp rise in premiums to DeSantis’ time in office.

    The war of words between two Florida Republicans this week is all the more remarkable because of how closely aligned Donalds and DeSantis once appeared.

    Donalds introduced DeSantis and his family at the governor’s election night victory party last year, heaping praise on the man he called “America’s governor.” He played DeSantis’ 2018 election opponent, Democrat Andrew Gillum, during debate preparation. DeSantis had also formed a close alliance with Donalds’ wife, a school choice advocate who received a plum appointment to the Florida Gulf Coast University board of trustees.

    But there was a notable break in their relationship in April when Donalds endorsed Trump over DeSantis. Donalds had previously stated publicly he would wait on an announcement until the field was set. The decision stunned DeSantis’ political operation, which had clearly underestimated the governor’s failures to build a rapport with fellow Republicans. Ultimately most Florida Republicans in the House lined up behind Trump.

    The back and forth with Donalds stems from the new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state’s public schools, which were approved earlier this month by the Florida Board of Education. While education and civil rights advocates have decried many elements of the new standards as whitewashing America’s dark history, much of the national attention has focused on one passage that clarifies middle school students should learn “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

    Amid intense objections to the language, Harris responded by holding a press conference in Jacksonville where she accused Florida’s leaders of “creating these unnecessary debates.”

    “This is unnecessary to debate whether enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said. “Are you kidding me? Are we supposed to debate that?”

    DeSantis and state education officials have fiercely defended the new standards in recent days. Redfern and others have pointed to similar language that appeared in the course framework for a new Advanced Placement African American Studies course piloted by the College Board. Florida was widely criticized by Democrats for blocking the course from being taught in state public schools.

    According to one document, the AP course intended to teach students: “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, American Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

    The College Board said Thursday it “resolutely” disagrees with the notion that enslavement was beneficial for African Americans after some compared the content of its course to Florida’s recently approved curriculum.

    On Thursday, DeSantis said the state standards are “very clear about the injustices of slavery in vivid detail.”

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  • Should parents decide what their kids do online? These states think so | CNN Business

    Should parents decide what their kids do online? These states think so | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In the future, when teenagers want to sign up for an account on Facebook or Instagram, they may first need to ask their parent or guardian to give their consent to the social media companies.

    That, at least, is the vision emerging from a growing number of states introducing — and in some cases passing — legislation intended to protect kids online.

    For years, US lawmakers have called for new safeguards to address concerns about social platforms leading younger users down harmful rabbit holes, enabling new forms of bullying and harassment and adding to what’s been described as a teen mental health crisis.

    Now, in the absence of federal legislation, states are taking action, and raising some alarms in the process. The governors of Arkansas and Utah recently signed controversial bills into law that require social media companies to conduct age verification for all state residents and to obtain consent from guardians for minors before they join a platform. Lawmakers in Connecticut and Ohio are also working to pass similar legislation.

    On the surface, providing more guardrails for teens is a step forward that some parents may welcome after years of worrying about the potential harms kids face on social media. But some users, digital rights advocates and child safety experts say the wave of new state legislation risks undermining privacy for teens and adults, puts too much burden on parents and raises serious questions about enforcement.

    Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy for nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNN he worries about government interference where “the state is telling families how to raise their children” and said it could “trample on the rights of every resident.”

    “Requiring people to get government approval by sharing their private identification before accessing social media will harm everyone’s ability to speak out and share information, regardless of their age,” he added. “Young people should not be used as pawns to fight big tech, and we are disappointed that first Utah, and now Arkansas, are implementing such overbroad laws.”

    Parents have long worried about privacy risks from their kids using social media, but the state legislation raises a new set of privacy concerns, experts say.

    In Arkansas, for example, the law will rely on third-party companies to verify all users’ personal information, such as a driver’s license or photo ID. (The legislation in Arkansas also appeared to contain vast loopholes and exemptions benefiting companies, such as Google and presumably its subsidiary, YouTube, that lobbied on the bill.)

    The impact on privacy is even more stark for teens in some of these states. In addition to requiring parental consent, Utah’s law, for example, will give parents access to “content and interactions” on their teens’ accounts.

    Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a fellow at the NYU School of Law, said the bills are problematic because users in these states will no longer remain anonymous, which could lead to fewer people of all ages expressing themselves and seeking information online.

    He believes teens in the LGBTQ+ community will be most impacted by potentially “outing them to homophobic or transphobic parents and cutting them off from their digital community.”

    Lucy Ivey, an 18-year-old TikTok influencer who attends Utah Valley University, echoed those concerns.

    “With a new law like this, they may now be intimidated and discouraged by the legal hoops required to use social media out of fear of authority or their parents, or fear of losing their privacy at a time when teens are figuring out who they are,” Ivey told CNN when the Utah law passed.

    Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise, Speaker: Raising Kids in the Digital Age, argued teens need to learn how to function in online communities because that is the expectation both going into college and in their professional life.

    “Keeping them off online communities until, in some cases, when they’re finishing their first year of college — but can still have jobs or drive — is backward, if they can’t even have an Instagram or a Discord account where their mom isn’t reading every message.”

    Instead, she believes teens need better digital literacy in schools with a heightened social-emotional component.

    “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.”

    Heitner also said the bills should focus on holding companies more accountable rather than putting the onus on parents to either keep teens off platforms or constantly feel the pressure to police or oversee their activity.

    “Not all parents are passionate, kind and supportive of their kids, and even the ones who are don’t have the capacity or time to deal with the 24/7 nature of social media,” said Heitner. “It’s an unfair burden.”

    Given that the bills are unprecedented, it’s unclear how exactly social media companies will adapt and enforce it.

    Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research, said minors could “steal” identities — such as from family members who don’t use social media — to create accounts that they can access and use without oversight. VPNs could also complicate matching IP addresses to the states of the users, he said.

    Facebook-parent Meta previously told CNN it has the same goals as parents and policymakers, but the company said it also wants young people to have safe, positive experiences online and keep its platforms accessible. It did not address how it would comply with the legislation.

    In a statement provided to CNN, a TikTok spokesperson said it is “committed to providing a safe and secure platform that supports the well-being of teens, and empowers parents with the tools and controls to safely navigate the digital experience.” Representatives from Snap did not respond to a request for comment.

    But even if legislative steps from Utah, Arkansas and other states prove to be flawed, Inouye says “these early efforts are at minimum bringing attention to these issues.”

    Heitner said she is most encouraged by a small but growing number of school districts and families, and one Pennsylvania county, which have filed lawsuits against social media companies for their alleged impact on teen mental health. “These efforts are more productive than putting this on parents,” she said.

    The Arkansas legislation is expected to take effect in September and Utah’s bill aims to be implemented next year. But bills like these could “face years of litigation and injunctions before they ever take effect,” Cahn said.

    “Hopefully Congress will act before then to implement real protections for all Americans,” he said.

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  • Newsom’s vow to appoint a Black woman to the Senate looms large amid Feinstein health concerns | CNN Politics

    Newsom’s vow to appoint a Black woman to the Senate looms large amid Feinstein health concerns | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    As California Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped on stage at the state Democratic Party Convention this weekend, Vilma Dawson applauded with the visible faith of someone who had supported him through multiple elections and a recall campaign.

    Dawson does not expect her loyalty to Newsom will be tested in a politically fraught decision that may lie ahead – selecting a successor to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, should the 89-year-old, who has already announced she’s not running for reelection in 2024, resign before the end of her term.

    “I’m sure Governor Newsom has a plan to appoint an African American female,” said Dawson. Pausing to consider her words, she continued, “I don’t think the governorship is where he’s going to stop his political career. People have long memories as to whether they can trust someone to support, shall we say, promises that they made.”

    In 2021, Newsom had said, “The answer is yes,” when asked on MSNBC if he would nominate a Black woman for Feinstein’s seat.

    After Feinstein was absent from the Senate for months due to a shingles diagnosis that resulted in complications of Ramsay Hunt syndrome and encephalitis, California Democrats gathered for their state convention with her health top of mind.

    “We do believe that Governor Newsom will keep his promise. We have known him to be a man of his word,” said Kimberly Ellis, a Democratic strategist and activist in California.

    Ellis is part of an effort by Democratic Black women lobbying Newsom on the Senate choice, should he have to make it. Ellis described the effort as “putting our shoulder to the wheel – really trying to ensure that we get the best qualified person to lead us at this moment in time.”

    Two Black women have served in the US Senate – Carol Moseley Braun, who served from 1993 to 1996, and Kamala Harris, who left to join the Biden administration as vice president. Currently, there are no Black women senators.

    Citing battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Ellis said, “Black women are the margin of victory. We get it done. [Newsom] knows that just like many in the country know that. And so, we have no doubt that he will indeed appoint a Black woman. The only question that’s on the table is which Black woman.”

    Ellis thinks Rep. Barbara Lee should be first on Newsom’s list, calling her sentiment “Barbara or bust.”

    Lee has already declared her candidacy for the seat in 2024.

    Greeting supporters at her booth at the party convention meeting, Lee said her campaign would be fueled by a “multi-generational, multi-racial, progressive coalition.”

    Calling the lack of Black women representation in the US Senate “outrageous,” Lee declined to press Newsom on any possible nomination choice. “I’m not going to get involved in his process,” she said. “He made a commitment. But I’m focused on this campaign. I am running to win this election.”

    But choosing Lee wouldn’t be a simple choice for Newsom. The US Senate race is already underway, with three sitting members of Congress representing various factions of the Democratic Party in the race.

    Lee’s rivals include Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter.

    Schiff is both a state and nationally known figure as the lead prosecutor in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. He also has been endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose involvement in the Senate race has opened up political intrigue.

    Pelosi’s eldest daughter, Nancy Corinne Prowda, was reported and later pictured around Feinstein as she returned to the Senate. The Pelosi and Feinstein families have been close friends for decades, but a Pelosi family member so closely assisting Feinstein led to further speculation about the political dealings around the Senate seat.

    “You can’t help but think about how it could impact your campaign,” Schiff said about Feinstein’s future and the wildcard it presents. “She’ll make a decision that she feels is consistent with her health and what’s best for the state.”

    Regarding the noise surrounding a possible Newsom appointment, Schiff said he was doing his best to ignore it. “My father gave me some very good advice, which is focus on the things you can control, not the things you can’t. I do think that ultimately, voters want to decide this race and they want that choice to make. And I think they will have that choice.”

    Porter, a favorite of California and national progressives, said, “I assume that Governor Newsom will keep his promise, but I can’t speak for him or what he’s thinking about,” adding that she was grateful for Feinstein’s return to Washington.

    But she stressed that the campaign is about the future. “It’s not just about the next six months. It’s about the next six years and the next 60 years for California.”

    At an event honoring Black women at the state party convention, Patrice Marshall McKenzie of Pasadena called herself “cautiously optimistic, but not confident” that Newsom would deliver. “I’m trying to keep my expectations moderate so that there’s not an issue of being disappointed if there’s under deliverance.”

    Under-deliverance, for several Black women Democrats, would mean nominating a caretaker in the seat – either a non-political appointee or a politician who pledges not to run in 2024.

    Tracie Stafford, a Democratic activist from Sacramento, said she was bracing herself for disappointment should Feinstein step aside before the election.

    “The reality is, unfortunately, that there have not been ramifications for not keeping promises to specifically Black people and Black women,” she said.

    “The reality is, where else are we going to vote? What else do we have, but our Democratic Party and our Democratic elected officials? We are absolutely between a rock and a hard place.”

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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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  • Fixing Social Security involves hard choices | CNN Politics

    Fixing Social Security involves hard choices | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    There’s a reason why politicians have long shied away from addressing Social Security’s massive financial problems. The commonly proposed solutions involve cutting benefits or raising taxes, which would spark an outcry from a range of powerful constituents, including senior citizens and the business community.

    The situation, however, is only growing more critical. The combined Social Security trust funds are projected to run dry in 2034, according to the latest annual report from the entitlement program’s trustees that was released last week. 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. It’s a vital lifeline for many of them. Some 42% of elderly women and 37% of elderly men rely on the monthly payments for at least half their income, according to the Social Security Administration.

    Though congressional Republicans’ drive to cut spending amid debt ceiling negotiations this year has prompted renewed interest in the entitlement’s finances, little is likely to happen, experts say. The insolvency date is still too far in the future.

    The last time Congress enacted a major overhaul, in 1983, Social Security was only months away from being able to pay full benefits. At that time, Democratic lawmakers who controlled the House agreed with Senate Republicans and then-GOP President Ronald Reagan to increase payroll taxes and gradually raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67, among other reforms.

    While President Joe Biden has promised to strengthen Social Security and defend it from any cuts by Republicans, he has yet to lay out a concrete vision for protecting the program. It was not included in his annual budget proposal this year, though he did suggest a financial fix for Medicare, which is facing its own solvency issues.

    Asked about the president’s plan, the White House said that the budget “clearly states his principles for strengthening Social Security.”

    “He looks forward to working with Congress to responsibly strengthen Social Security by ensuring that high-income individuals pay their fair share, without increasing taxes on anyone making less than $400,000,” said Robyn Patterson, assistant press secretary at the White House.

    A multitude of proposals have been floated over the years to address Social Security’s shortfall, many of which have multiple measures.

    Several options focus on saving the entitlement program money, though left-leaning advocates and senior citizen groups are quick to point out that these moves are actually benefit cuts that they would strenuously oppose.

    One common proposal is raising the retirement age. Currently, Americans can start collecting Social Security benefits at 62, though doing so would reduce their lifetime payments by as much as 30%.

    The full retirement age, which had been 65 for much of the program’s existence, is slowly rising to 67 for Americans born in 1960 or later.

    Some policymakers advocate for raising the full retirement age to 70 for future retirees, bringing it more in line with changes in life expectancy. That would mean those retiring earlier than that would get smaller monthly checks than under current law.

    Doing so could wipe out about a third of the Social Security trust fund’s 75-year deficit.

    Last year, the conservative Republican Study Committee released a budget plan that called for raising the full retirement age for future retirees at a rate of three months per year until it is increased to 70 for those born in 1978. It would then link the retirement age to future increases in life expectancy, as well as adjust the number of working years included in benefit calculations to 40 years, up from 35 years.

    Other options include reducing benefits for higher-income Americans, which was also included in the Republican Study Committee’s budget plan.

    New retirees’ Social Security benefits are one-third higher today than they were for folks who retired 20 years ago, even after accounting for inflation, according to Andrew Biggs, senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Plus, the maximum Social Security benefit in the US is two to three times higher than the maximum retirement benefit in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

    Biggs supports placing a cap on the maximum benefit that the highest-earning retirees can receive. The maximum benefit this year is about $43,000 and will rise to $59,000 by 2050, he said. Though such a cap would only solve about 10% to 15% of the long-term solvency gap, Biggs argues it’s one step, and it only affects those who he says don’t depend on the benefits.

    “We’re going way, way beyond a pure safety net program,” Biggs said at a recent webinar hosted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a government watchdog group. “Here we’re looking at a retirement program for middle income and upper income people.”

    Other suggestions that have been floated include changing the formulas that determine the benefits Americans get upon retirement or the annual cost-of-living adjustment retirees receive to slow the growth of payments.

    The main way to bring more money into the Social Security system is to increase the amount of payroll taxes collected.

    A proposal popular among Democrats and left-leaning experts is to lift the wage cap so that higher-income earners have to shell out more in payroll taxes.

    The Social Security tax rate of 6.2% is levied on both employers and employees, for a total rate of 12.4%. However, in 2023, it’s only applied to annual wages of up to $160,200. (By contrast, Medicare’s 2.9% total payroll tax rate is applied to all wages, and higher-income Americans are subject to an additional 0.9% Medicare tax.)

    When payroll taxes for Social Security were first collected in 1937, about 92% of earnings from jobs covered by the program were subject to the payroll tax, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By 2020, that figure had fallen to about 83% as income inequality has increased.

    Several congressional Democrats have floated proposals to raise the amount of wages subject to the payroll tax. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut wants to apply the payroll tax to wages above $400,000, which he says would extend the program’s solvency by nine years.

    Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, introduced a bill earlier this year that would make multiple changes to Social Security, including subjecting all income above $250,000 to the payroll tax and applying it to investment and business income. They say their reforms would extend the entitlement’s solvency for 75 years.

    But changing the wage cap could also alter the fundamental design of Social Security, in which retirees’ benefits are tied to the amount of taxes they paid into the system while working.

    For instance, the proposal from Sanders and Warren would not credit the additional taxed earnings toward benefits. That would increase the beneficial impact on solvency but would also raise resistance among some advocates who believe the link between taxes and benefits should be maintained.

    Another option is raising the payroll tax rate. Increasing it to a total of 16% would just about assure 75 years of solvency, said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

    Most lawmakers, however, would not find that type of tax hike very palatable, particularly not Republicans who control the House.

    While experts disagree on the best way to address Social Security’s shortfall, one thing they are generally united on is that waiting will only result in having to employ harsher solutions. But that isn’t spurring elected officials to action.

    “Nobody’s acting as if that’s something they’ve got to take seriously,” Biggs said. “So I’ll just be honest and say I’m worried about how this thing plays out.”

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  • Plaintiffs in high-profile redistricting case urge judges to toss out Alabama’s controversial congressional map | CNN Politics

    Plaintiffs in high-profile redistricting case urge judges to toss out Alabama’s controversial congressional map | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Civil rights groups representing plaintiffs in a high-profile congressional redistricting case are urging a federal court in Alabama to reject a controversial new map crafted by the Republican-dominated legislature, saying it perpetuates a violation of the nation’s landmark voting rights law.

    In a late-night court filing Friday, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and multiple attorneys asked a three-judge panel to direct an official to devise a new map that complies with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

    The plaintiffs in the case said legislators who drew and approved the maps didn’t comply with a court mandate to create a second congressional district where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.

    Instead, they argued, lawmakers were “focused on pleasing national leaders whose objective is to maintain the Republican Party’s slim majority in the US House.”

    State officials, who have defended the map as fair, have until August 4 to respond to the new filings.

    The dispute has drawn national attention after critics accused Alabama legislators of openly defying the US Supreme Court and its directive to give Black voters more political power in the state.

    And the outcome of the legal battle in Alabama – along with court skirmishes in several other states over congressional redistricting – could help determine whether Republicans retain their slim majority in the House after next year’s elections.

    In this case, the Republican supermajority in the Alabama legislature approved a new map on July 21, weeks after the US Supreme Court said that an existing map – with just one majority-Black congressional district out of seven in a state where Black residents make up 27% of the population – likely violated the decades-old federal voting law by diluting the voting power of Black residents. The high court, by a 5-4 majority, affirmed a lower court decision that had ordered the state to redraw the congressional maps to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”

    But the map approved this month and signed into law by Alabama’s GOP Gov. Kay Ivey instead boosted the share of Black voters in the majority-White 2nd Congressional District from roughly 30% to nearly 40%. It also reduced the Black voting-age population in the state’s only majority-Black district to around 50% from about 55%.

    Voting rights experts say the state has a history of racially polarized voting, making it harder for candidates favored by Black voters to win in a district where Black residents account for less than 50% of the voting-age population.

    “The new CD2 … does not provide Black voters a realistic opportunity to election their preferred candidate in any but the most extreme situations,” the plaintiffs argued in the new filings.

    In Alabama, most Black voters have supported Democrats. If the federal judges approve a map with a second majority-Black district, that could result in two Democrats representing the state in the House.

    House Republicans hold just a narrow edge on Democrats, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alabama case has given Democrats fresh optimism that their side will prevail in legal fights aimed at increasing the share of Black voters in congressional districts in Louisiana, Georgia and several other states.

    In a sign of the high political stakes, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has weighed in on the debate and told reporters that he spoke to Alabama lawmakers as they met for the special session to redraw the map to comply with the court order.

    The Justice Department filed a so-called “statement of interest” on Friday but did not side with any party in the dispute. The agency outlined factors the judges should consider in its analysis and called on the court to impose its own map if it determines that the one drawn by lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act.

    A court hearing on objections to the legislature’s map is set for August 14.

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  • Opinion: Utah’s startling new rules for kids and social media | CNN

    Opinion: Utah’s startling new rules for kids and social media | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book, “Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Reclaim It,” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, recently signed two bills into law that sharply restrict children’s use of social media platforms. Under the legislation, which takes effect next year, social media companies have to verify the ages of all users in the state, and children under age 18 have to get permission from their parents to have accounts.

    Parents will also be able to access their kids’ accounts, apps won’t be allowed to show children ads, and accounts for kids won’t be able to be used between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. without parental permission.

    It’s about time. Social networks in the United States have become potentially incredibly dangerous for children, and parents can no longer protect our kids without the tools and safeguards this law provides. While Cox is correct that these measures won’t be “foolproof,” and what implementing them actually looks like remains an open question, one thing is clear: Congress should follow Utah’s lead and enact a similar law to protect every child in this country.

    One of the most important parts of Utah’s law is the requirement for social networks to verify the ages of users. Right now, most apps ask users their ages without requiring proof. Children can lie and say they’re older to avoid some of the features social media companies have created to protect kids — like TikTok’s new setting that asks 13- to 17-year-olds to enter their passwords after they’ve been online for an hour, as a prompt for them to consider whether they want to spend so much time on the app.

    While critics argue that age verification allows tech companies to collect even more data about users, let’s be real: These companies already have a terrifying amount of intimate information about us. To solve this problem, we need a separate (and comprehensive) data privacy law. But until that happens, this concern shouldn’t stop us from protecting kids.

    One of the key components of this legislation is allowing parents access to their kids’ accounts. By doing this, the law begins to help address one of the biggest dangers kids face online: toxic content. I’m talking about things like the 2,100 pieces of content about suicide, self-harm and depression that 14-year-old Molly Russell in the UK saved, shared or liked in the six months before she killed herself last year.

    I’m also talking about things like the blackout challenge — also called the pass-out or choking challenge — that has gone around social networks. In 2021, four children 12 or younger in four different states all died after trying it.

    “Check out their phones,” urged the father of one of these young victims. “It’s not about privacy — this is their lives.”

    Of course, there are legitimate privacy concerns to worry about here, and just as kids’ use of social media can be deadly, social apps can also be used in healthy ways. LGBTQ children who aren’t accepted in their families or communities, for example, can turn online for support that is good for their mental health. Now, their parents will potentially be able to see this content on their accounts.

    I hope groups that serve children who are questioning their gender and sexual identities and those that work with other vulnerable youth will adapt their online presences to try to serve as resources for educating parents about inclusivity and tolerance, too. This is also a reminder that vulnerable children need better access to mental health services like therapy — they’re way too young to be left to their own devices to seek out the support they need online.

    But, despite these very real privacy concerns, it’s simply too dangerous for parents not to know what our kids are seeing on social media. Just as parents and caregivers supervise our children offline and don’t allow them to go to bars or strip clubs, we have to ensure they don’t end up in unsafe spaces on social media.

    The other huge challenge the Utah law helps parents overcome is the amount of time kids are spending on social media. A 2022 survey by Common Sense Media found that the average 8- to 12-year-old is on social media for 5 hours and 33 minutes per day, while the average 13- to 18 year-old spends 8 hours and 39 minutes every day. That’s more time than a full time-job.

    The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that lack of sleep is associated with serious harms in children — everything from injuries to depression, obesity and diabetes. So parents in the US need to have a way to make sure their kids aren’t up on TikTok all night (parents in China don’t have to worry about this because the Chinese version of TikTok doesn’t allow kids to stay on for more than 40 minutes and isn’t useable overnight).

    Of course, Utah isn’t an authoritarian state like China, so it can’t just turn off kids’ phones. That’s where this new law comes in requiring social networks to implement these settings. The tougher part of Utah’s law for tech companies to implement will be a provision requiring social apps to ensure they’re not designed to addict kids.

    Social networks are arguably addictive by nature, since they feed on our desires for connection and validation. But hopefully the threat of being sued by children who say they’ve been addicted or otherwise harmed by social networks — an outcome for which this law provides an avenue — will force tech companies to think carefully about how they build their algorithms and features like bottomless feeds that seem practically designed to keep users glued to their screens.

    TikTok and Snap didn’t respond to requests for comment from CNN about Utah’s law, while a representative for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the company shares the goal to keep Facebook safe for kids but also wants it to be accessible.

    Of course, if social networks had been more responsible, it probably wouldn’t have come to this. But in the US, tech companies have taken advantage of a lack of rules to build platforms that can be dangerous for our kids.

    States are finally saying no more. In addition to Utah’s measures, California passed a sweeping online safety law last year. Connecticut, Ohio and Arkansas are also considering laws to protect kids by regulating social media. A bill introduced in Texas wouldn’t allow kids to use social media at all.

    There’s nothing innocent about the experiences many kids are having on social media. This law will help Utah’s parents protect their kids. Parents in other states need the same support. Now, it’s time for the federal government to step up and ensure children throughout the country have the same protections as Utah kids.

    Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988. The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you and your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States. En Español: Linea de Prevencion del Suidio y Crisis: 1-888-628-9454.

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  • The government wants to change how it collects race and ethnicity data. Here’s what you need to know | CNN Politics

    The government wants to change how it collects race and ethnicity data. Here’s what you need to know | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    If you’ve filled out a survey at any point in the last 25 years, chances are you were asked two questions about your race and ethnicity: Whether you are of Hispanic or Latino descent, and then separately, if your race is White, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American or another race.

    A new proposal aims to change that, merging the two questions into one and adding a new category for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent. That would alter how the government – and by extension, the research community studying Americans’ demographics, opinions, voting habits and behaviors – measures and reports on the race and ethnicity of the American public.

    The proposal put forth by a working group of government statisticians and methodologists is at least partly an effort to reduce the share of Americans choosing a nebulous “some other race” category that is required to be included in the decennial census and the American Community Survey, two of the key government studies measuring American demographics.

    While some researchers say the proposed changes would improve the accuracy and depth of the data available on race and ethnicity, others – particularly those who advocate for the Afro-Latino community – fear the plan would make it harder to understand racially driven inequalities in the US.

    Decisions about what gets measured and how reach far beyond the numbers that appear on the Census Bureau’s website: Data gathered through these questions drives the way racial disparities in housing, health care and employment are understood and tracked, how congressional districts are drawn, and how the resources of some government programs are allocated and assessed. It can affect policymaking at the federal, state and local levels.

    “The simple fact is that if your community is not visible in the statistics, you are functionally invisible when it comes to political representation,” said Thomas Wolf, the deputy director of the democracy program at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU law school.

    The public comment period on the changes closes on April 27 after being extended. Nearly 18,000 comments had already been submitted on the Federal Register notice page as of Sunday morning. Once the comment period ends, the standards will be in the hands of the nation’s chief statistician, Dr. Karin Orvis. Final decisions on the standards are expected by the summer of 2024.

    Here’s what to know about the proposals.

    The Office of Management and Budget sets standards for both the wording of questions and the types of data government agencies and surveys must collect when they are gathering information about Americans’ racial and ethnic identities.

    The existing standards, which have been in place since 1997, call for one question asking whether respondents have Hispanic or Latino background followed by a second question on racial identity, with options for American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and White.

    Because of a congressional law passed in 2005, the decennial census and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey are also required to include a “some other race” category in the second question.

    Over time, the Census Bureau has seen a notable increase in the number of people choosing that option. In the 2020 census, “some other race” was the second-largest racial group with 49.9 million people opting for it. That trend has raised questions about whether the two separate questions accurately capture the racial makeup of the country.

    “The ‘some other race’ category is intended to be a residual category for people who do not identify with any of the minimum OMB categories,” Merarys Rios-Vargas, the chief of the ethnicity and ancestry branch of the Census Bureau’s population division, said during a webinar on the proposed changes hosted by the NALEO Education Fund last month. “But when the residual category is the second-largest response group, changes need to be made, and we have identified a solution with the combined question.”

    If implemented, the new standards would merge collection of race and ethnicity information into a single question, expand the categories used to measure race and ethnicity, and mandate the collection of more detailed information on race and ethnicity whenever possible.

    The proposed combined question measuring a respondent’s race or ethnicity includes seven broad categories: White, Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Middle Eastern or North African, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Respondents can choose multiple categories from that list. The congressionally mandated “some other race” category would also continue for the decennial census and ACS.

    Under the existing standard, respondents of Middle Eastern or North African, or MENA, descent were typically considered racially White. Census Bureau research conducted in 2015 suggested that without a distinct MENA category, roughly 12% of people who otherwise had been identified as MENA chose “some other race,” but that dipped to just 3% with the addition of a separate MENA category.

    The proposed changes would also require the collection of more detailed information on national or tribal origin within each of the major racial or ethnic categories. An example provided by the working group includes checkboxes for some common subgroups (such as Italian under White, Puerto Rican under Hispanic or Latino, Korean under Asian, etc.) as well as an open-ended box in which respondents could write in any additional detail they wanted to share.

    The proposed standards result from a review launched by the Office of the Chief Statistician of the United States last year, building on work conducted in the previous decade by the Census Bureau, the OMB and others. A working group of federal experts put together the proposed changes, and the OMB released the working group’s proposals for public comment in late January.

    Part of the challenge in formulating these questions is that race itself is more a social than a scientific matter. As the Census Bureau puts it, the categories “generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”

    Because the questions used in government work set the standard for much other research, they can affect the way Americans classify their own racial and ethnic identity.

    “The way that we talk about race in this country has been very much shaped by the way we ask about it,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center.

    A Pew survey in January 2020 asking respondents to describe their race or ethnicity without offering categories found that about 8 in 10 gave responses that fit within the OMB’s race or ethnicity categories. When the same participants were separately asked about their race and ethnicity using questions from the 2020 census, nearly all respondents were consistent across the two formats, but the mismatch was significantly larger for those of Hispanic or Latino heritage.

    The government’s working group noted that a “large and increasing percentage of Hispanic or Latino respondents” to both the Census and the ACS are skipping the race question outright or choosing “some other race.”

    Recently released data from the 2020 census made public by the Census Bureau shows that 43.6% of the Hispanic population either skipped the race question or reported being “some other race” alone during the decennial count. The Census Bureau contends that its research shows this is because “a large proportion of the Hispanic population does not identify with any of the current Office of Management and Budget race categories.”

    Wolf, of the Brennan Center, noted the challenge that type of mismatch could present to the usefulness of the data.

    “If someone’s self-identification doesn’t map onto the categories that federal law recognizes, the data does not really help people activate and protect their civil rights,” he said.

    Researchers outside the government are largely dependent on the OMB standards to frame questions on race and ethnicity in a way that allows comparisons with the gold-standard government studies that track American demographics. Some of these researchers are concerned that respondents who do not see themselves represented in the data may be less inclined to participate in surveys. Insights Association, a professional organization for market researchers, conducted testing on how to ask about race and ethnicity in a way that respondents prefer and found that a single question with more detailed response categories received the most positive feedback.

    Cindy Neumann, the director of research for the Insights Association, said, “Where [respondents] feel that they’re included, we feel that they’re going to be a little bit more willing to participate in research, and engage a bit more.”

    A 2015 test by the Census Bureau found that a combined question on race and ethnicity decreased the share of respondents choosing “some other race” or skipping the question entirely. For Hispanic respondents, a significantly higher share identified as Hispanic alone under the combined format, suggesting they could be less likely to select one of the race categories also offered in a combined question than they would have using separate questions.

    Some are concerned that the proposed standards aren’t measuring the right information.

    Many of the public comments submitted in response to the proposals or shared during a series of town halls OMB hosted in March have focused on the language used in the Black or African American category. A movement has emerged to add a category to measure those who are descended from enslaved people in the United States separately from people of African or Caribbean descent. The comments submitted reflect disagreement about the specific language and structure that would best capture the community, but suggestions have included adding categories for American Descendants of Slavery, American Freedmen, or Foundational Black American, separating Black American from African American, and adding a separate question asking whether a person is a descendant of enslaved people. Each could measure a part of the population that some feel is unrecognized under the current standards.

    Among advocates for the Afro-Latino community, researchers worry that asking about Hispanic or Latino ethnicity within the same question as race could minimize the detail available about the racial makeup of the Latino community.

    “If I, for example, a Black Latina, want to mark my Latinoness but also say that I’m a Black woman, then I have to choose Latino as my race and Black as my race and then I’m counted as multi-racial,” said Danielle Clealand, an associate professor at the University of Texas who studies Afro-Latino identity. “What it does is turn many of us who identify as Black or White or Native American as multi-racial, and that is not how we self-identify.”

    Critics of the proposal say multiple questions are necessary to measure race, ethnicity and national origin, since a single question could muddy the measurement of those identifiers, even if responses related to each of those concepts are available for respondents to choose.

    “You don’t measure two concepts with one question, and so by putting Hispanic ethnicity and race into one question, you are risking a huge undercount not only of racially stigmatized groups but also of the overall Latino origin population,” said Nancy López, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico who directs and co-founded the school’s Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice.

    “It’s not going to help us know how you are treated, and if there’s an injustice that needs to be rectified,” she said.

    The components of race and ethnicity that can affect how a person experiences the world may not be evident in their answers, according to critics of the proposal. A person’s racial or ethnic self-identification may not match the way they are perceived and treated by others, or may not align with their national origin or ethnic heritage. If the questions ultimately used in the government standards aren’t clear about which aspects they measure, their utility could be diminished, the critics say.

    The stakes are extremely high. In making any changes to the way race and ethnicity are measured, the working group and the chief statistician will need to strike a balance between reflecting the ways Americans choose to identify themselves with fulfilling the need for data that allows the government to enforce its own laws.

    “Does this allow us to do the things that the census is intended to do – voting rights, civil rights, allocation of congressional districts,” said Lopez from Pew. “Race and ethnicity is central to the work of folks who are in those spaces.”

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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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  • 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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  • Why Anne Hathaway and other women are saying enough to the haters | CNN

    Why Anne Hathaway and other women are saying enough to the haters | CNN

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    Some pop culture moments, as they age, feel more and more like bouts of collective madness. Why did everyone hate Anne Hathaway all of those years ago? Around 2013, despite winning a slew of awards for her role in “Les Miserables,” it seemed the actress couldn’t catch a break. Despite a lack of scandal or outright offensive behavior, she was “the star we love to loathe,” ” the bad kind of theater kid,” “the kind of person who inexplicably bugs people.”

    Since then, the criticism has all but faded from public consciousness, a half-remembered Hollywood fever dream akin to the time everyone ragged on Taylor Swift for writing about her exes or that one 2009 concert when everyone called a perfectly normal-looking Jessica Simpson fat.

    Hathaway hasn’t forgotten, though, and she’s not the only one reminding people that ruthless celebrity criticism – a treasured and lucrative Hollywood pastime – is not as fashionable as it once was.

    At Elle’s 2022 Women in Hollywood event this week, Hathway commented on the bygone “Hathahate” with painful intimacy, saying the outward hatred only increased her inner hatred of herself.

    “When your self-inflicted pain is suddenly amplified back at you, it’s a thing,” she said. The experience taught her to not “hold space” for such language, for herself or anyone else. She also urged others to do the same.

    “You can judge behavior. You can forgive behavior or not,” she said. “But you do not have the right to judge – and especially not hate – someone for existing.”

    Hathaway’s discussion of mental health highlights a relatively new addition to the conversation. Stars have been speaking out against bullying for quite some time, but it has only been in the past few years that we have seen abundant conversations about how fame affects their mental health.

    In her new memoir “Making a Scene,” actress Constance Wu writes about struggling with her identity, and balancing the person she is with the person she thought she had to be to make it in the entertainment business.

    “I write about wanting to be the cool girl in my 20s, not wanting to make a scene,” she told Shondaland. “Because I thought that’s what would make me cool and loved and valued. But it doesn’t work because it’s not authentic.”

    Wu also writes about the sexual harassment she endured on her sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat.”

    “I endured all this sexual harassment and intimidation and abuse the first two years of the show, but then once it was a success, I no longer talked to my abuser, and I was able to continue my job professionally and even joyfully,” she says. “So, I thought I handled it. But I realized that repressed abuse and feelings don’t go away just because you will them to.”

    While the particulars of being a celebrity may be remote to most people, working through trauma and contending with damaging expectations are universal experiences. By discussing these issues head-on, women like Hathaway and Wu are indicating a sea change in celebrity culture.

    Of course, ruthless celebrity gossip isn’t just a favorite pastime of the masses. It’s a lucrative cog in the Hollywood machine. Entire franchises, like Bravo’s “Real Housewives” series, are built around the sport of pitting women against each other in rivalries both real and imagined. But in the same way that some stars are pulling the curtain back on the real effects of bullying and criticism, others are severing these traditions closer to the root.

    Hailey Bieber and Selena Gomez defused longstanding rumors and hate by posing together at the 2022 Academy Museum Gala.

    Social media had a minor meltdown recently when Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber posed together for the first time at the Academy Museum Gala. To those outside the sphere of Hollywood gossip, this means absolutely nothing. But to those in the know – those that know Gomez is the longtime ex of Bieber’s husband, Justin Bieber, the moment was close to iconic.

    The two women have long been pitted against each other by fans, with Gomez cast as the one that got away and Bieber as the usurping, second-best wife. They have both used their platforms to warn against online hate and harassment, but the proxy feud fueled by their fans has been insistent.

    To see them together, then, was as monumental as a photo op with, say, Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie would have been in the early 2000s, when everyone was “Team Aniston” or “Team Jolie” following the former’s divorce from Brad Pitt.

    In the present media environment, it isn’t necessarily unusual for famous women to show some solidarity with each other, or get personal about the damaging effects of fame. What’s remarkable is seeing fans so eager for and receptive to these developments.

    The comments on photographer Tyrell Hampton’s Instagram post of Gomez and Bieber paint a clear picture of this:

    “Is this what world peace feels like?”

    “Everyone wants them to hate each other so badly, and for what?”

    “I’m proud of them.”

    They’re not dissimilar to the social media reactions that followed Hathaway’s recent comments.

    “Why did everyone hate Anne Hathaway for no reason?”

    “They were just being haters.”

    It’s one thing for stars to reveal how cruel the churn of celebrity gossip can be. More often, we are seeing fans listen and agree, interrogating their own role in these obsessions. Together, both sides of the screen are searching for a more positive relationship with fame.

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  • The crisis pregnancy center next door: How taxpayer money intended for poor families is funding a growing anti-abortion movement | CNN

    The crisis pregnancy center next door: How taxpayer money intended for poor families is funding a growing anti-abortion movement | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A few blocks from the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, America’s battle over abortion is playing out under one roof.

    On one side of a squat single-story office building, a Planned Parenthood clinic offers reproductive health care and refers patients for abortions. Next door is a branch of Pregnancy Decision Health Center, a crisis pregnancy center that offers counseling and support for pregnant women – but also works to dissuade them from terminating their pregnancies and has been accused of promoting misinformation about abortion.

    Of the two neighboring organizations, only Planned Parenthood provides medical services such as Pap smears, birth control and STD treatments.

    But the crisis pregnancy center is the one receiving money from the state government. Ohio has funneled nearly $14 million in taxpayer funds to the center and others like it over the last decade, according to government records – even as state leaders have cut funding that previously went to Planned Parenthood for programs such as breast and cervical cancer screenings. 

    Ohio isn’t alone. More than a dozen states devote some of their budget to funding crisis pregnancy centers, a CNN review found. About half of those states distribute federal money intended to help needy families to the centers.

    Some of the organizations that receive money have been accused of spreading abortion misinformation or using the funds to advocate anti-abortion causes instead of helping women. 

    “Public dollars should go to promoting public health,” said Ashley Underwood, the director of Equity Forward, an abortion rights advocacy group. Crisis pregnancy centers, she said, “solely exist to deter people from getting abortion services.”

    Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, a wave of abortion restrictions has swept the country, leaving millions of women with easier access to crisis pregnancy centers than abortion care. Crisis pregnancy centers far outnumbered abortion clinics across the US even before the court’s ruling, and anti-abortion groups are now planning to expand. 

    Pregnancy center leaders and their state government allies say the organizations deserve taxpayer funds because they provide pregnant women with resources like free diapers and ultrasounds. But some of the centers also lie to women about the safety and potential risks of abortion, according to multiple studies, abortion rights activists, and women who have been to the centers. 

    That kind of deception isn’t typical in any other area of health care, said Dr. Amy Addante, an Illinois OB-GYN who performs abortions and has been a vocal critic of crisis pregnancy centers.

    “The purpose of these centers is to try to stop someone from having an abortion,” said Addante. “I cannot think of any other medical decision or any other aspect of health care where there is a group of individuals whose only intent is to stop you from receiving that health care.”

    Big open windows invite patients and passersby into the waiting room at the Pregnancy Decision Health Center (PDHC). With velvety green chairs, leafy plants, and a coffee station that greets visitors as they come in the door, the crisis pregnancy center could pass for an upscale dental office or spa.

    Outside, PDHC’s sign towers over the neighboring Planned Parenthood, literally casting a shadow over the clinic’s entrance. Inside, the contrast is even starker: Planned Parenthood’s waiting room looks run-down – old chairs crowd the small space, faded informational posters cover the walls, and daylight is blocked by signage on the windows and mirrored doors meant to protect patients’ privacy.

    Multiple times a week, patients looking for Planned Parenthood mistakenly walk through PDHC’s doors, according to a Planned Parenthood clinician, Jennifer, who asked CNN not to use her last name out of security concerns. Some patients have told Planned Parenthood that PDHC employees told them abortion wasn’t safe or said PDHC tried to delay them and make them late for their Planned Parenthood appointments.

    Lillian Williams is the vice president of health services of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.

    “They’ve provided an array of misinformation, whether it’s about abortion care or even about contraceptive services,” said Lillian Williams, the vice president of health services of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.

    Ayla Krueger, a 23-year-old Columbus resident, visited PDHC earlier this month with a friend who was seeking an STD test. She said that during their hour-and-a-half visit, an employee claimed that condoms were only 50% effective, the spread of STDs could only be prevented if people followed “God’s plan” of avoiding sex before marriage, and that if a woman who has an STD gets an abortion, “your STDs travel up your cervix into your organs and could kill you.”

    “I was dumbfounded,” Krueger said of the encounter. “My heart was breaking, thinking about girls who don’t understand what they’re walking into there… and possibly getting coerced.”

    Experts said that the center’s rhetoric was not medically accurate. “We do worry about ascending infections in abortions and pregnancy, but the risk is really, really low,” said Dr. Jonas Swartz, an OB-GYN and professor at Duke University Medical Center. “Crisis pregnancy centers regularly overstate the risk of abortions and this is just one example of that.”

    The center also offers “abortion pill reversal,” according to its website, annual reports and pamphlets at the office. Abortion reversal is a medically dubious, unproven treatment that purports to undo a medication abortion but has been denounced by medical groups and found to be dangerous by researchers. A clinical trial that attempted to study abortion reversal was halted prematurely in 2019 when several participants suffered hemorrhaging.

    Kathy Scanlon, PDHC’s president, declined an interview request and didn’t respond to CNN’s questions about Krueger’s allegations or abortion pill reversal.

    “Every woman deserves care and compassion when facing an unexpected pregnancy,” Scanlon wrote in an email, adding that the center provides “practical pregnancy care and support ranging from free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to parenting education classes and much-needed baby items” such as diapers and car seats.

    Anti-abortion signs sit on a table during the Ohio March for Life in Columbus.

    Research has found that crisis pregnancy centers commonly disseminate misinformation. A study released last year by The Alliance, an abortion rights advocacy group, found that almost two-thirds of crisis pregnancy centers in nine states promoted false or biased information about abortion on their websites. That included false claims that abortions increased the risk of cancer or infertility.  More than a third of clinics also advertised that they offered abortion pill reversal – and state-funded clinics were more likely than privately-funded ones to offer the unproven procedure and less likely to offer prenatal care, according to the study. 

    Similarly, a 2012 academic study of crisis pregnancy centers in North Carolina found that 86% of centers promoted false or misleading medical information on their websites. 

    Crisis pregnancy center leaders say they are working to help women. Peggy Hartshorn, who founded the Columbus center and is now the chair of Heartbeat International, one of the largest global networks of crisis pregnancy centers, said the allegations that the groups spread misinformation are “a false narrative.”

    She said that the information her centers provide to clients is “very well-researched, medically referenced – we document everything with multiple sources.”

    “Deep down in their hearts, women do not want to have abortion,” Hartshorn said. “Pregnancy centers are good for America, they really are.”

    In Ohio, a new six-week abortion ban that went into effect after the Supreme Court decision, is currently on hold amid court battles. The Planned Parenthood clinic near Ohio State University doesn’t perform abortions – it refers patients to a Planned Parenthood surgical center on the other side of town that does.

    The waiting room in the Planned Parenthood near campus.

    That facility, too, has a state-funded crisis pregnancy center operating across the street. On a recent afternoon, a handful of protesters lined the clinic’s fence with signs depicting bloody fetuses and shouted “you are already a mother” and “abortion is murder” whenever a patient came within earshot. One protester – wearing a reflective vest and holding a clipboard, similar to Planned Parenthood volunteers – tried to direct patients away from the abortion clinic and to the crisis pregnancy center across the street. The center told CNN the protesters weren’t affiliated with their organization.

    It’s not rare for pregnancy centers to operate near abortion clinics. More than 100 pregnancy centers around the country are located within 200 meters of an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood location, according to a CNN analysis. Some – in states like Delaware, Indiana and Michigan – are next door to clinics. 

    Abortion rights advocates say the intention is to mislead women and block them from accessing abortion.  

    “The purpose of co-locating near a legitimate provider is to intercept someone seeking legitimate health care and divert them into walking through their doors instead,” said Tara Murtha, the co-author of a report about pregnancy centers and a spokesperson for the Women’s Law Project. “It’s basically an obstacle course and a systemic barrier to abortion care.”

    Despite the groups’ apparent spreading of misinformation, at least 18 states have funded crisis pregnancy centers with taxpayer money, according to a CNN review of government records and statements from state agencies. The largest is Texas, which has sent more than $200 million to the groups over the last decade. 

    More than a half-dozen states bankroll crisis pregnancy centers at least partly with funds from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a federal welfare program. Those federal funds are sent to states as a block grant, which gives state officials wide latitude in how to spend it, including on programs like “alternatives to abortion” grants for crisis pregnancy centers. 

    Research has shown that a smaller percentage of poor families are now receiving cash assistance from the TANF program than in previous decades.

    While about 68% of families with children in poverty received cash assistance through TANF in 1996, when the program was created, that percentage declined to just 21% by 2020, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. The percentage was even lower in some of the GOP-dominated states that use TANF funding to support crisis pregnancy centers, such as Texas and Louisiana.

    “When you look at successes in reducing poverty by strengthening the safety net, cash assistance is the most effective way to help families,” said Aditi Shrivastava, who co-authored the study. “We are seeing states spend less of their money directly on cash assistance, and we don’t think that is what the program should be doing.”

    In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, some states are piloting new efforts to fund crisis pregnancy centers. Lawmakers in Arkansas and Iowa approved state funding for such groups for the first time this year.

    The states have argued that crisis pregnancy centers deserve taxpayer funding because they provide services to pregnant women in need. 

    “If we are going to be the most pro-life state in the union, we have to be prepared when those mothers come to a facility and they need help,” Arkansas state Rep. Robin Lundstrum said at a legislative hearing about the state’s new program earlier this year.

    In Columbus, Pregnancy Decision Health Center is receiving more than $528,000 from the state government in the current fiscal year, according to government records. All of that comes from federal TANF funds. The funding amounts for about a fourth of the center’s total revenue, while the rest comes from private donations, according to the group’s most recent tax records available.

    People participate in the Ohio March for Life.

    Despite the large amounts of money, there’s little oversight of how the taxpayer dollars are being used. 

    Many of the appropriations are written into spending bills passed by GOP-dominated state legislatures. Pennsylvania, for example, has sent more than $70 million over the last decade to crisis pregnancy centers through Real Alternatives, an anti-abortion group that distributes state funding to crisis pregnancy centers. 

    A 2017 report by the state auditor general found that Real Alternatives used hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it received from Pennsylvania “to fund its activities in other states,” in what the auditor said was an example of the group “siphoning funds intended to benefit Pennsylvania women.” Real Alternatives denied the allegations in a statement, saying that they had “no basis in fact or law.”

    Michigan, which had contracted with Real Alternatives to distribute funding for crisis pregnancy centers, canceled its contract after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed the funding for it in 2019. In a letter about the veto, Whitmer thanked a watchdog group that had issued a report accusing the organization of only helping a fraction of the pregnant women it had agreed to support.

    Real Alternatives, which also receives TANF money from Indiana, said the Michigan report was “riddled with inaccuracies, distortions, half-truths and defamatory statements.”

    A bill in the Ohio legislature that would have required crisis pregnancy centers receiving state funding to provide their clients with only medically accurate information died in committee in multiple recent legislative sessions. The state’s GOP legislative leaders did not respond to requests for comment.

    Meanwhile, some of the same red states that have bankrolled crisis pregnancy centers have stripped funding from Planned Parenthood. In Ohio, for example, the group never received state funding for abortions, but for years it received money for other services like cancer screenings, STD prevention and treatment, and sex education for teens.

    In 2016, however, Ohio lawmakers banned the state from funding any organization that performs abortions, and the law went into effect after it was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2019. That meant that Planned Parenthood affiliates in Ohio lost about $600,000 a year in state funding, and led to the cancellation of some of their non-abortion health programs.

    While Planned Parenthood does receive some additional reimbursements through Ohio’s Medicaid program for providing non-abortion health care to people on Medicaid plans, it no longer receives state grants.

    Planned Parenthood also lost additional federal funding under Title X, a program that funds birth control and reproductive health services, under a Trump administration rule. But the organization started receiving that money again this year after the Biden administration reversed the rule.

    Maria Gallo, a sexual and reproductive health epidemiologist at Ohio State University, said that state funding for crisis pregnancy centers shows how conservative lawmakers prioritize anti-abortion rhetoric over medical care for women.

    “It’s dangerous in part because they are legitimizing (crisis pregnancy centers),” Gallo said. “They are legitimizing that as a source of medical care when they’re not licensed medical facilities.”

    Crisis pregnancy centers drastically outnumber abortion clinics in the United States. There were 790 abortion clinics operating in 2021, compared with about 2,600 crisis pregnancy centers, according to a database compiled by Reproaction, an abortion-rights group.

    That disparity is only likely to grow in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Hartshorn, the chair of Heartbeat International, said the organization has created an online training program to help people open new pregnancy centers, especially in places without existing ones.

    “We need more people, we need more places, and we need more paths to pregnancy health,” Hartshorn said.

    Thank you notes are displayed in the Planned Parenthood in Columbus.

    A study by the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy found that the groups have taken in more and more money in recent years: They received over $1 billion in revenue in 2019, the most recent year data was available, compared to about $771 million in 2015. 

    Several women who went to state-funded crisis pregnancy centers told CNN they felt misled and manipulated by the groups, and disturbed that they were getting taxpayer money.

    Last year, a woman who asked to be identified by her middle name, Eve, had just lost her job when she suspected she might be pregnant. She and her boyfriend went to Women’s Care Center in Columbus after finding the group on Google. Money was tight, and she chose the center – which is receiving more than $700,000 from the state of Ohio in the current fiscal year – because it promised free pregnancy testing. 

    Eve’s test was positive, and she asked the staff about an abortion. She said they handed her a pamphlet that warned her the procedure could cause infertility – though abortion doesn’t typically affect a person’s ability to become pregnant in the future. For three hours, Eve said the staff pressured her to carry the pregnancy to term.

    “It became very clear that they were against abortion really quickly,” said Eve, who left the center feeling upset and later got an abortion. The center didn’t respond to questions about Eve’s visit but said in an email they are “absolutely committed to accuracy, excellence and transparency in all we do.”

    One day, Eve said she hopes to have kids. But at the time, she didn’t feel financially or emotionally stable enough to have a baby.

    “Nobody wants to make a decision to have an abortion,” Eve said. “And they made me feel really guilty and bad about it.”

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