ReportWire

Tag: test

  • Contributor: Iran’s crisis is a test of U.S. moral leadership

    Right now, as you read this, Iranian protesters are facing live ammunition in Tehran’s streets. Women risk execution for removing their hijabs. Some 12,000 to 20,000 people are feared dead from the protest crackdown. The regime is vulnerable, weakened by strikes on its nuclear program, facing economic collapse, confronting a population that has repeatedly chosen death over submission. The window to support regime change is open. But it’s closing fast.

    The Trump administration made commitments to the Iranian people. Now, facing the moment of decision, there’s troubling hesitation. This isn’t just another foreign policy challenge: It’s a binary test of whether American leadership still possesses the will to act on its stated principles. Fail here, and we confirm that international relations have lost their moral compass entirely.

    Harvard’s Joseph Nye taught that foreign policy morality requires integrating intentions, means and consequences. Good intentions without adequate implementation produce catastrophic outcomes. We’ve stated our intentions. The question is whether we’ll employ the means — or allow bureaucratic caution and geopolitical calculation to paralyze us until the opportunity passes.

    The Iranian regime is a 47-year totalitarian theocracy that has terrorized its population, sponsored terrorism from Hezbollah to Hamas to the Houthis, supplied drones to Russia for killing Ukrainian civilians and pursued nuclear weapons while declaring itself America’s mortal enemy. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has ordered protesters “put in their place.” The judiciary announced all participants will be tried for moharebeh — “enmity against God” — a capital offense.

    Yet the international left remains conspicuously silent, frozen in power analysis and identity politics. In too many minds around the world, Iranian protesters fail to generate solidarity because their oppressors — the mullahs — are classified as victims of Western imperialism.

    This pattern repeats globally. In Nigeria, 32 Christians are reportedly killed daily — 7,087 killed in the first 220 days of 2025 alone. More than 50,000 in five years. In Sudan, 3,384 civilian deaths in just the first half of 2025. Genocide Watch declares it stage nine: extermination. Only a small fraction of needed humanitarian funding has been committed. Some suffering by Palestinians sometimes generates international outrage. The selective morality is devastating and deliberate.

    Consider the Tudeh Party — Iran’s communist left. As protesters face bullets, they condemn the demonstrations while warning against American imperialism. Some progressive Iranian American academics have dismissed calls for change as Westernized and illegitimate. They use anti-imperialism to silence Iranians demanding their God-given rights. When ideology replaces principle, you get moral blindness masquerading as sophistication.

    The stakes transcend Iran. Since the modern nation-state system was organized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1688, state sovereignty has been the bedrock of international law. But it’s become a shield for regimes that brutalize their populations. The post-1945 American-led international order assumed sovereign states would protect citizens’ basic rights and that the international community would act when they did not. We face a choice: sovereignty conditional on protecting citizens, or cynical realism where might makes right.

    What’s required is clear. First, an unambiguous statement that the U.S. supports the Iranian people’s right to choose their government and will not accept continued mullah rule. Second, escalating sanctions targeting the regime’s economic foundations while ensuring humanitarian aid reaches Iranians. Third, robust communications infrastructure support so protesters can coordinate despite attempts at censorship. Fourth, diplomatic isolation and coalition-building. Fifth, material support for opposition forces sufficient to tilt the balance.

    The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this as a defining test — whether it understands that failure here signals to every authoritarian regime that the West lacks resolve, to every oppressed population that American principles are empty rhetoric, to every ally that American commitments are negotiable.

    If we allow the window to close — if bureaucratic hesitation or fear of opposition paralyzes us — the regime will reconsolidate. It will crush the protests with even greater brutality. It will execute thousands more. And it will emerge convinced that the West lacks the will to oppose it meaningfully. Every adversary will be emboldened. Every ally will question our word.

    But if we act — if we follow through with real support for removing the mullahs — we affirm that moral principles still matter in international affairs. We demonstrate that the Judeo-Christian foundations of American order remain vital and actionable. We show that universal human dignity still commands our allegiance, that freedom is still worth defending at cost and risk.

    The American founders understood rights as flowing from the Creator, not the state. They established a republic acknowledging transcendent moral law as the foundation of human law. Thomas Jefferson recognized that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. The Iranian people are asking us to honor these principles — not abstractly, but concretely.

    Protesters have risen despite knowing the cost. They’ve demanded freedom despite facing torture and execution. They’ve trusted that America stands for something beyond geopolitical calculation. The time for decision is now. Not next month, not after more studies, not when conditions are perfect. Now. And on that decision hangs not only Iran’s fate but also the moral credibility of the entire international order we claim to defend.

    We can support the Iranian people’s efforts to remove the mullahs, or we can watch another opportunity for freedom slip away while we hesitate. History will record which we chose.

    Daniel J. Arbess is founder of Xerion Investments, a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a co-founder of No Labels, a political group promoting bipartisan collaboration.

    Daniel J. Arbess

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  • Photos: SoCal driver finds live great horned owl lodged in car grille. Raptor extraction follows

    A Southern California driver made a startling discovery Sunday morning when they found a live bird of prey stuck in the grille of their car.

    The bird, whose head was peeping out, was a great horned owl, authorities said. An officer with Santa Barbara County Animal Services was called to a residence in the 1000 block of Amethyst Drive in the town of Orcutt around 9:30 a.m. Sunday. At least four firefighters from the Santa Barbara County Fire Department helped with the bird’s rescue, the department told The Times.

    “This is the first time we had an owl, that I’m aware of, entangled in a vehicle,” said Scott Safechuck, a public information officer for the county Fire Department. “Usually it’s a cat, or sometimes we have cattle that get onto the highway.”

    Firefighters carefully cut away portions of the grille as they tried to extract the owl on Sunday.

    (Santa Barbara County Fire Department )

    Authorities do not know how long the owl was stuck but say it may have happened Saturday. The removal operation took about 30 minutes, after which the owl, which had sustained injuries, was taken to the Wildlife Care Network, a wildlife rescue center in Goleta.

    An employee at the wildlife network said that each animal the center helps receives a series of tests, such as CT scans and X-rays, upon arrival. The organization did not immediately provide an update on the owl’s status.

    “It’s infrequent that things like this happen,” Safechuck said. “It’s remarkable the owl was still alive.”

    The great horned owl is considered the largest owl in North America, according to the Santa Barbara Audubon Society. It can weigh as much as 5½ pounds with a wingspan of nearly 5 feet and have large, powerful talons. According to the National Audubon Society, this owl species is not endangered.

    Santa Barbara County Fire assisted Animal Control with the removal of a horned owl in the front grill of a vehicle.

    It took about 30 minutes to free the injured owl, which was taken to a Goleta wildlife rescue, authorities said.

    (Santa Barbara County Fire Department )

    Jasmine Mendez

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  • Supreme Court’s conservatives face a test of their own in judging Trump’s tariffs

    WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court’s conservatives face a test of their own making this week as they decide whether President Trump had the legal authority to impose tariffs on imports from nations across the globe.

    At issue are import taxes that are paid by American businesses and consumers.

    Small-business owners had sued, including a maker of “learning toys” in Illinois and a New York importer of wines and spirits. They said Trump’s ever-changing tariffs had severely disrupted their businesses, and they won rulings declaring the president had exceeded his authority.

    On Wednesday, the justices will hear their first major challenge to Trump’s claims of unilateral executive power. And the outcome is likely to turn on three doctrines that have been championed by the court’s conservatives.

    First, they say the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning. Its opening words say: “All legislative powers … shall be vested” in Congress, and the elected representatives “shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposes and excises.”

    Second, they believe the laws passed by Congress should be interpreted based on their words. They call this “textualism,” which rejects a more liberal and open-ended approach that included the general purpose of the law.

    Trump and his lawyers say his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were authorized by the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA.

    That 1977 law says the president may declare a national emergency to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” involving national security, foreign policy or the economy of the United States. Faced with such an emergency, he may “investigate, block … or regulate” the “importation or exportation” of any property.

    Trump said the nation’s “persistent” balance of payments deficit over five decades was such an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”

    In the past, the law has been used to impose sanctions or freeze the assets of Iran, Syria and North Korea or groups of terrorists. It does not use the words “tariffs” or “duties,” and it had not been used for tariffs prior to this year.

    The third doctrine arose with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and is called the “major questions” doctrine.

    He and the five other conservatives said they were skeptical of far-reaching and costly regulations issued by the Obama and Biden administrations involving matters such as climate change, student loan forgiveness or mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for 84 million Americans.

    Congress makes the laws, not federal regulators, they said in West Virginia vs. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022.

    And unless there is a “clear congressional authorization,” Roberts said the court will not uphold assertions of “extravagant statutory power over the national economy.”

    Now all three doctrines are before the justices, since the lower courts relied on them in ruling against Trump.

    No one disputes that the president could impose sweeping worldwide tariffs if he had sought and won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress. However, he insisted the power was his alone.

    In a social media post, Trump called the case on tariffs “one of the most important in the History of the Country. If a President is not allowed to use Tariffs, we will be at a major disadvantage against all other Countries throughout the World, especially the ‘Majors.’ In a true sense, we would be defenseless! Tariffs have brought us Great Wealth and National Security in the nine months that I have had the Honor to serve as President.”

    Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, his top courtroom attorney, argues that tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security. And if so, the court should defer to the president.

    “IEEPA authorizes the imposition of regulatory tariffs on foreign imports to deal with foreign threats — which crucially differ from domestic taxation,” he wrote last month.

    For the same reason, “the major questions doctrine … does not apply here,” he said. It is limited to domestic matters, not foreign affairs, he argued.

    Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has sounded the same note in the past.

    Sauer will also seek to persuade the court that the word “regulate” imports includes imposing tariffs.

    The challengers are supported by prominent conservatives, including Stanford law professor Michael McConnell.

    In 2001, he and John Roberts were nominated for a federal appeals court at the same time by President George W. Bush, and he later served with now-Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

    He is the lead counsel for one group of small-business owners.

    “This case is what the American Revolution was all about. A tax wasn’t legitimate unless it was imposed by the people’s representatives,” McConnell said. “The president has no power to impose taxes on American citizens without Congress.”

    His brief argues that Trump is claiming a power unlike any in American history.

    “Until the 1900s, Congress exercised its tariff power directly, and every delegation since has been explicit and strictly limited,” he wrote in Trump vs. V.O.S. Selections. “Here, the government contends that the President may impose tariffs on the American people whenever he wants, at any rate he wants, for any countries and products he wants, for as long as he wants — simply by declaring longstanding U.S. trade deficits a national ‘emergency’ and an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat,’ declarations the government tells us are unreviewable. The president can even change his mind tomorrow and back again the day after that.”

    He said the “major questions” doctrine fully applies here.

    Two years ago, he noted the court called Biden’s proposed student loan forgiveness “staggering by any measure” because it could cost more than $430 billion. By comparison, he said, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs will impose $1.7 trillion in new taxes on Americans by 2035.

    The case figures to be a major test of whether the Roberts court will put any legal limits on Trump’s powers as president.

    But the outcome will not be the final word on tariffs. Administration officials have said that if they lose, they will seek to impose them under other federal laws that involve national security.

    Still pending before the court is an emergency appeal testing the president’s power to send National Guard troops to American cities over the objection of the governor and local officials.

    Last week, the court asked for further briefs on the Militia Act of 1908, which says the president may call up the National Guard if he cannot “with the regular forces … execute the laws of the United States.”

    The government had assumed the regular forces were the police and federal agents, but a law professor said the regular forces in the original law referred to the military.

    The justices asked for a clarification from both sides by Nov. 17.

    David G. Savage

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  • Mitt Romney’s sister-in-law dead after possible fall or jump from parking structure, authorities say

    The sister-in-law of former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, Carrie Elizabeth Romney, was found dead near a Santa Clarita shopping mall on Friday.

    Her cause of death remains under investigation. Investigators are speculating, however, that the 64-year-old Valencia resident fell or jumped from a five-story parking structure, according to L.A. County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Nicole Nishida.

    Homicide investigators responded to the 24000 block of Town Center Drive near the Valencia Town Center shopping mall around 9 p.m. Friday, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

    The L.A. County medical examiner is still running tests to confirm the cause of death, Nishida said.

    Romney’s cause of death was listed as deferred on the medical examiner’s website. It could take months for toxicology tests to be completed and information to be updated.

    Mitt Romney served as the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and was the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. He was elected U.S. senator from Utah in 2018 and left office at the end of his term in January.

    Carrie Elizabeth Romney appeared to be the wife of Mitt’s older brother, G. Scott Romney, an attorney who has supported Mitt on the campaign trail over the years.

    Clara Harter

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  • This is ‘a test,’ Obama says of the U.S. under Trump. He gets candid with podcaster Marc Maron

    Former President Obama, speaking on stand-up comedian Marc Maron’s final podcast on Monday, said the Trump administration’s policies are a “test” of whether universities, businesses, law firms and voters — including Republicans — will take a stand for the nation’s founding principles and values.

    “If you decide not to vote, that’s a consequence. If you are a Hispanic man and you’re frustrated about inflation, and so you decided, ah, you know what, all that rhetoric about Trump doesn’t matter. ‘I’m just mad about inflation,’” Obama said. “And now your sons are being stopped in L.A. because they look Latino and maybe without the ability to call anybody, might just be locked up, well, that’s a test.”

    In a more than hourlong discussion with Maron on the wildly popular “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast, the former Democratic president said current events could jolt Americans.

    “It’d be great if we weren’t tested this way, but you know what? We probably need to be shaken out of our complacency,” he said.

    Obama also criticized some Democrats’ messaging as he touched on significant issues facing Californians and discussed the state of the nation’s democracy, core convictions and the weakening of institutional norms.

    After Los Angeles-based Maron joked, “We’ve annoyed the average American into fascism,” Obama responded, “You can’t just be a scold all the time.

    “You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots too, and that life’s messy,” Obama said in the interview, which recently took place in the former president’s Washington, D.C., office.

    Faulting language used by some liberals as “holier than thou,” Obama argued that Democrats could remain true to their principles while respecting those with whom they disagreed.

    “Saying, ‘Right, I’ve got some core convictions [and] beliefs that I’m not going to compromise. But I’m also not going to assert that I am so righteous and so pure and so insightful that there’s not the possibility that maybe I’m wrong on this, or that other people, if they don’t say things exactly the way I say them or see things exactly the way I do, that somehow they’re bad people,’” he said.

    Obama’s remarks come as the Democratic Party faces a reckoning after losing the presidential election in 2024, in part because of declining support from the party’s base, notably minority voters.

    Maron, a comedian and actor, launched his “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast and radio show in 2009. Interviews with guests such as actor Robin Williams, comedian Louis C.K., filmmaker Kevin Smith and “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels often took place at his Highland Park home.

    Obama’s 2015 interview in Maron’s garage became the podcast’s most popular episode at the time — downloaded nearly 740,000 times in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

    On Monday, the former president criticized institutions for capitulating to President Trump’s demands. His words come as USC leaders are debating whether to agree to a White House proposal to receive favorable access to federal funding if they align with Trump’s agenda.

    “If you’re a university president, say, well, you know what? This will hurt if we lose some grant money in the federal government, but that’s what endowments are for,” Obama said. “Let’s see if we can ride this out, because what we’re not going to do is compromise our basic academic independence.”

    Seema Mehta

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  • Commentary: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fat-shames the U.S. military’s top brass as the world burns

    Ukraine and Gaza. China and North Korea. Iran and Russia. There was so much to address Tuesday when 800 generals, admirals and their senior enlisted leaders in the U.S. military were ordered into one location from around the world on short notice.

    The sudden meeting in Quantico, Va., was called by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And it was an unprecedented event for unprecedented times, but not in the way that anyone imagined. Hegseth took aim at the packed room’s waistlines, proclaiming that he no longer wanted to see “fat generals and admirals,” or overweight troops.

    “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” he said to the 800 likely stunned souls in the room. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon leading commands around the country and the world.”

    Flanked by a portly President Trump, he proclaimed, “It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.”

    President Trump joined his Defense secretary in urging his top military brass to shape up.

    (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

    Like a sugary doughnut, the hypocrisy was too tempting to pass up. California Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s X account posted, “I guess the Commander in Chief needs to go!” Newsom also juxtaposed a clip of Hegseth’s speech with a photo of Trump in a McDonald’s restaurant, the president’s stomach protruding over the belt line of his slacks.

    The former Fox News personality turned secretary of Defense initially gave no reason last month when he summoned leaders stationed across the globe to attend the meeting, causing concern and conjecture among military and congressional officials about the purpose of the gathering. Trump told NBC that they would deliver a “good message” about “being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things.”

    That new “positive” messaging? Terminating restrictions on hazing for boot-camp recruits, toughening grooming standards (no more “beardos”), doing away with racial quotas and raising physical standards for everyone in uniform to a “male level.”

    “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape, or in a combat unit with females who can’t meet the same combat-arms physical standards as men, or troops who are not fully proficient on their assigned weapons, platform or task, or under a leader who was the first but not the best,” Hegseth said Tuesday.

    He added that troops will have to meet “gender-neutral, age-normed, male standard, scored 70% ” fitness levels. “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he said. But all will be fat-shamed on an equal basis.

    “Today, at my direction, every member of the joint force, at every rank, is required to take a PT [physical training] test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year, every year of service,” he said.

    Hegseth’s obsession with appearing ripped and manly is nothing new. The 45-year-old has challenged 71-year-old Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to fitness tests in which the men do 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in 10 minutes or less.

    The “Pete and Bobby Challenge,” as Hegseth calls it, was posted on the official HHS YouTube account and circulated widely on social media.

    Hegseth’s deep message to the troops keeping America safe: “It all starts with physical fitness and appearance. If the secretary of war can do regular, hard PT, so can every member of our joint force.”

    Hegseth has repeatedly emphasized that the updated fitness requirements for troops are part of a larger effort to achieve a “warrior ethos” in the U.S. military. Uncle Sam wants YOU! But not until you drop that BMI below 24.9.

    Lorraine Ali

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  • Legal experts say Trump’s indictment of Comey is a test of justice

    WASHINGTON — On a Phoenix tarmac in 2016, former President Clinton and U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch had a serendipitous meeting on a private jet. The exchange caused a political firestorm. At a time when the Justice Department was investigating Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, the appearance of impropriety prompted a national scandal.

    “Lynch made law enforcement decisions for political purposes,” Donald Trump, her Republican rival that year, would later write of the meeting on Twitter. “Totally illegal!”

    It was the beginning of a pattern from Trump claiming political interference by Democrats and career public servants in Justice Department matters, regardless of the evidence.

    Now, Trump’s years-long claim that it was his opponents who politicized the justice system has become the basis for the most aggressive spree of political prosecutions in modern American history.

    “What Trump is doing now with the U.S. attorneys is really in complete opposition to how the people who created those offices imagined what those officials would do — the Founders simply did not envision the office in this way,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis.

    “From the inception of the Justice Department,” he added, “one of the most remarkable things is how it was never used in this way.”

    On Thursday, at Trump’s express direction, federal charges were filed against James Comey, the former FBI director, alleging he gave false testimony before Congress and attempted to obstruct a congressional proceeding five years ago.

    The indictment was secured from a federal grand jury after Trump fired a U.S. attorney with doubts about the strength of the case — replacing him with a loyalist, and telling Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi openly on social media to pursue charges against him and others.

    “JAMES COMEY IS A DIRTY COP,” Trump wrote on social media after the charges were filed. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

    Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017, denies the charges.

    “My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” Comey said in a statement posted online. “We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.

    “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice. But I have great confidence in the federal judicial system,” Comey continued. “And I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”

    Behind the charges against Comey, legal experts see a weak case wielded as a cudgel in a political persecution of Trump’s perceived enemy. Comey is accused of lying about authorizing a leak to the media about an FBI investigation through an anonymous source.

    It is only the latest example. Over the summer, Trump’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, used his position to accuse three of the president’s political foes of mortgage fraud, referring the cases to the Justice Department for potential charges — actions actively encouraged by Trump online.

    “It’s not a list,” Trump said Thursday, asked whether more prosecutions are coming. “I think there will be others. They’re corrupt. These were corrupt radical left Democrats. Comey essentially was Dem — he’s worse than a Democrat.”

    The president’s overt use of the Justice Department as a partisan tool threatens a new era of political persecutions that could well backfire on his own allies. The Supreme Court has made clear that presidents enjoy broad immunity for their actions while in office. But their aides do not. Bondi, Pulte and others, just like Comey, are obligated to provide occasional testimony to House and Senate committees under oath.

    “The Comey indictment is notable for its personalized politicization being so open,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College. “The same actions carried out clandestinely would seem scandalous, because they are — and the fact they were so blatantly advertised does not make them less corrupt.”

    But the Comey case can also be seen as a test of the viability of a prosecution based purely on politics. Already, lawyers for Trump’s other legal targets have said they plan on using his overt threats against them to get cases against their clients thrown out in court.

    This week, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, defended Trump’s vocal advocacy for criminal charges against political foes as a matter of “accountability.”

    “We are not going to tolerate gaslighting from anyone in the media, from anyone on the other side who is trying to say that it’s the president who is weaponizing the DOJ,” Leavitt said.

    “You look at people like [California Sen.] Adam Schiff, and like James Comey, and like [New York Atty. Gen.] Letitia James, who the president is rightfully frustrated with,” she continued. “He wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abused their power, who abused their oath of office to target the former president.”

    But Trump’s accusations against Democrats have routinely failed the tests of inspectors general, journalistic inquiry and public scrutiny.

    When Trump was investigated over potential coordination between his campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 race, he claimed a liberal, “deep state” cabal was behind an inquiry based on, as the special prosecutor’s report concluded, “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”

    And when charged with federal crimes over his handling of highly classified material, and his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, he dismissed the charges as a witch hunt choreographed by President Biden and his attorney general, a claim that had no basis in fact.

    The special counsel investigations against Trump, Kastor said, were “prosecutions, not persecutions.”

    “His claims that the investigations surrounding him are specious — the investigations were appropriate,” Kastor added. “These investigations are not.”

    Michael Wilner

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  • Trump administration moves to make U.S. citizenship harder with revised civics test

    The Trump administration moved again Wednesday to make it harder to gain U.S. citizenship, announcing a slate of changes to the core civics test that immigrants must pass to be naturalized.

    The changes would expand the number of questions immigrants need to be prepared to answer, and increase the number of questions they must answer correctly in order to pass.

    The changes, announced as pending in the Federal Register, would largely revert the test to a similarly longer and harder version that was introduced in 2020 during President Trump’s first term, but was swiftly rolled back under President Biden in 2021.

    The shift follows other Trump administration changes to the process by which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials determine whether prospective citizens are qualified, including enhanced assessments of their “moral character” and whether they ascribe to any “anti-American” beliefs, and intense checks into their community ties and social media networks.

    It also comes amid a broader crackdown on undocumented immigration, and what Trump has said will be the largest “mass deportation” in U.S. history. That effort has been heavily centered in the Los Angeles region, to the consternation of many Democratic leaders and immigration advocacy organizations.

    The new naturalization test, like the short-lived 2020 version, would draw from 128 possible questions and require prospective citizens to answer 12 out of 20 questions correctly in order to pass. Under the current test, which dates to 2008, there are 100 possible questions, and prospective citizens must answer six out of 10 correctly.

    Trump administration officials said the new test “will better assess an alien’s understanding of U.S. history, government, and English language,” and is part of a “multi-step overhaul” of the citizenship process that will ensure traditional American culture and values are protected.

    “We are doing everything in our power to make sure that anyone who is offered the privilege of becoming an American citizen fulfills their obligation to their new country,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

    Immigration advocates cast the change as an attempt by the administration to further impede the legal pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants already deeply rooted in the U.S. They say it is part of a broader, authoritarian campaign by Trump and his administration to vet potential new citizens and other legal immigrants for conservative ideology and loyalty to him — all while the administration aggressively targets people for deportation based on little more than the color of their skin and the work that they do.

    “The Trump administration lauding the privileges of becoming a U.S. citizen — while making it harder to obtain it — rings hollow when you consider that it is also arguing before the Supreme Court that law enforcement can racially profile Latines,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “All this does is make it harder for longtime residents who contribute to this country every day to finally achieve the permanent protections that only U.S. citizenship can offer.”

    Earlier this month, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in a case challenging immigration raids in California that immigration agents may stop and detain people they suspect are in the U.S. illegally based on little more than the color of their skin, their speaking Spanish and their working in fields or locations with large immigrant workforces.

    Last month, USCIS announced that it was ramping up its vetting of immigrants’ social media activity and looking for “anti-American ideologies or activities,” including “antisemitic ideologies.” That announcement followed months of enforcement against pro-Palestinian student activists and other U.S. visa and green card holders that raised alarms among constitutional scholars and free speech advocates.

    Trump administration officials have rejected such concerns, and others about raids sweeping up people without criminal records and racial profiling being used to target them, as part of a misguided effort by liberals and progressives to protect even dangerous, undocumented immigrants for political reasons.

    In announcing the latest change to the naturalization test, Homeland Security said it would make the test more difficult, and in the process ensure that “only those who are truly committed to the American way of life are admitted as citizens.”

    The department also lauded its recent moves to more deeply vet prospective citizens, saying the new process “includes reinstating neighborhood interviews of potential new citizens, considering whether aliens have made positive contributions to their communities, determining good moral character, and verifying they have never unlawfully registered to vote or unlawfully attempted to vote in an American election.”

    In rolling back the first Trump administration’s test — which is very similar to the newly proposed one — USCIS officials under the Biden administration said that it “may inadvertently create potential barriers to the naturalization process.”

    By contrast, the agency under Biden said the 2008 test — the one Trump is now replacing again — was “thoroughly developed over a multi-year period with the input of more than 150 organizations, which included English as a second language experts, educators, and historians, and was piloted before its implementation.”

    Kevin Rector

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  • OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO Sicherheitsschlüssel mit Fingerabdrucksensor im Test

    OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO Sicherheitsschlüssel mit Fingerabdrucksensor im Test

    OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO Sicherheitsschlüssel mit Fingerabdrucksensor im Test

    Heute habe ich ein kleines, aber feines Gadget im Test und zwar den OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO. Hierbei handelt es sich um einen kleinen Sicherheitsschlüssel, mit dem ihr euch an eurem Rechner authentifizieren könnt und der für mehr Sicherheit sorgt. Wie das ganze funktioniert, das schauen wir uns in diesem Testbericht an.

    Werfen wir zuerst einmal einen Blick auf das kleine Gadget. Und wenn ich klein sage, dann meine ich auch klein, denn mit nur 35 x 35 x 10,8mm ist es wirklich superkompakt, passt in jede Tasche und ihr könnt es überall mit hinnehmen. Wir haben hier auf der Vorderseite drei LEDs, einmal für die Bluetooth-Verbindung, dann ein Hinweis wann man seinen Finger auflegen soll für die Fingerabdruckerkennung und dann noch eine Status-LED für den Akku, denn hier ist auch ein 65mAh Akku verbaut. Integriert ist hier auch ein kurzes USB-C Kabel, damit könnt ihr den Sicherheitsschlüssel einfach mit eurem Rechner verbinden. Es geht zwar auch via Bluetooth, aber am einfachsten ist natürlich die USB-Verbindung.

    Dieser Sicherheitsschlüssel kann für die Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung genutzt werden, er bietet euch also zusätzliche Sicherheit neben eurem Passwort. Dadurch dass hier auch noch der Fingerabdruck benötigt wird, werden eure Zugänge zu Anwendungen und Diensten noch sicherer.

    Video

    Einrichtung

    Die Einrichtung des DigiPass FX1 BIO gestaltet sich sehr einfach und schnell, denn unter Windows gibt es hier in den Einstellungen unter Konten und Anmeldeoptionen den Punkt Sicherheitsschlüssel. Hier kann man den DigiPass FX1 BIO dann einfach hinzufügen. Hierzu müsst ihr einfach nur euren Fingerabdruck hinterlegen. Von Fingerabdrucksensoren eures Smartphones oder Notebooks kennt ihr die Einrichtung vielleicht schon, hier müsst ihr einfach nur den Finger mehrfach kurz auf den Sensor legen und auch ein wenig variiren und auch den Fingerrand einscannen. Nach einigen Scans ist der Fingerabdruck dann erfolgreich eingerichtet und ihr könnt direkt loslegen. Auf Wunsch kann man natürlich auch mehrere Finger registrieren.

    Man kann ihn auch kabellos über Bluetooth verbinden, dafür einfach die Taste an der Seite gedrückt halten, dann geht er in den Pairing-Modus über und kann unter Windows gefunden werden. Was aber zu beachten ist, er arbeitet bei der kabellosen Verbindung über Bluetooth langsamer, denn es muss sich ja immer verbunden werden. Deshalb bevorzuge ich die Verbindung über USB-C.

    Praxiseinsatz

    Der DigiPass FX1 BIO wird als Sicherheitsschlüssel für die Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung eingesetzt und wird bereits von vielen Apps unterstützt. So funktioniert er mit einem Microsoft Account, einem Google Account und auch Twitter kann damit geschützt werden. Ihr könnt auch euer Onlinebanking mit N26 damit schützen oder auch einen Passwort-Manager wie 1Password. Einfach schauen ob eure Dienste kompatibel mit einem Fido-Sicherheitsschlüssel sind.

    OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO

    Der DigiPass FX1 BIO ist für alle interessant, denen ein Passwort nicht sicher genug ist. Dank der Zwei-Faktor-Authentifizierung mittels Sicherheitsschlüssel und Fingerabdrucksensor haben wir hier eine Authentifizierung die euren Account besonders sicher macht.

    Mit einem Preis von aktuell 60 Euro ist der Sicherheitsschlüssel mit Fingerabdrucksensor auch für den privaten Anwender interessant der seine wichtigen Accounts effektiv sichern möchte. Aber besonders für Unternehmen ist solch eine Authentifierung mittels Sicherheitsschlüssen besonders wichtig, damit sensible Daten nicht in die falschen Hände gelangen.

    Preis & Verfügbarkeit

    Der Digipass FX1 BIO ist bereits auf dem Markt und hat eine UVP von 59,90 Euro. Falls ihr Interesse habt, dann findet ihr hier den aktuellen Preis und die Verfügbarkeit:

    OneSpan DigiPass FX1 BIO kaufen bei: Amazon *

    Computex 2024: Notebooks mit Snapdragon X Elite Chip – Eine Übersicht

    ASUS Vivobook S15, ein CoPilot+ PC im Test

    Johannes

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  • Nayanthara and Manju Warrier pose for happy photo and it screams a collaboration together

    Nayanthara and Manju Warrier pose for happy photo and it screams a collaboration together

    Manju Warrier is one of the most renowned names in the film industry. The actress who made her debut in 1995 with Sundar Das’ directorial Sallapam is still delivering the finest and most enthralling performances for her fans and cinema-goers.

    The Asuran actor is also known for taking on numerous projects based on women empowerment-related stories or impactful characters that can shake everyone. In a recent update, Manju shared a heartwarming picture along with the Lady Superstar Nayanthara on the joyous occasion of International Women’s Day.

    Manju Warrier’s powerful picture with Nayanthara

    On the cheerful occasion of International Women’s Day, Manju took to the social platform account X and shared a heartwarming picture along with Nayanthara and wrote a wonderful caption while embracing the Lady Superstar’s aura. She tweeted, “We all have a wonder woman inside us. I have one beside me too! Love you loads my Superstar @NayantharaU!Thank you for the picture #parvathisridharan”.

    In the picture, Manju was seen in a yellow color salwar suit while Nayanthara donned a t-shirt and jeans for the photo. Both the stars can be seen smiling while holding each other in a strong and unbreakable bond of unity and powerful image. After the photo surfaced online, fans took to her comments section and showered immense love for both beauties. 

    Taking to the comments section, a fan wrote, “My two superstars in one frame,” while the other one wrote, “Perfect frame for Women’s Day Hope to see you both together soon on bigscreen too.”

    Manju Warrier’s upcoming films

    The Thunivu actor was last seen in the 2023 film, Vellari Pattanam, a social satire-themed flick which was helmed by Mahesh Vettiyar. The film also starred Soubin Shahir, Salim Kumar, and Shabareesh Varma. Manju is currently gearing up for her upcoming political thriller Viduthalai Part II which is a sequel to the 2023 cult-classic film Viduthalai Part I. The film boasts a stellar star which includes Soori, Vijay Sethupathi, Bhavani Sre, Gautham Vasudev Menon, and Prakash Raj in prominent roles. The upcoming thriller is bankrolled by Elres Kumar and Vetrimaaran under the banner of RS Infotainment and Grass Root Film Company in a joint venture. 

    Manju will also feature in TJ Gnanavel’s high-octane thriller Vettaiyan which features Thalaivar Rajinikanth in a lead role. The film also features, Amitabh Bachchan, Fahadh Faasil, Rana Daggubati, Dushara Vijayan, and Ritika Singh in pivotal roles.

    Nayanthara’s upcoming films

    Nayanthara is all set to appear in the sports drama film titled Test, directed by S. Sashikanth. The film boasts a star-studded cast, including R Madhavan, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, and others in key roles. The sports drama is currently under post-production and is scheduled to be released later this year. The Jawan actor is currently on vacation with her better-half Vignesh Shivan and their two adorable kids Uyir and Ulag.

    1137112

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  • Computer grading is here for STAAR essays. Should Fort Worth school leaders worry?

    Computer grading is here for STAAR essays. Should Fort Worth school leaders worry?

    The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, known as STAAR , are a series of state-mandated standardized tests used in Texas schools to assess a student’s achievements and knowledge.

    The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, known as STAAR , are a series of state-mandated standardized tests used in Texas schools to assess a student’s achievements and knowledge.


    Diane Smith

    Star-Telegram

    Having just adapted to a newly reformatted state test, school leaders across Texas are now looking at a new change in how their students are assessed: computer-based scoring.

    The Texas Education Agency rolled out the new “automated scoring engine,” a computer-based grading system, in December, the Dallas Morning News reported. Following the change, about three-quarters of all essay questions will be scored by a computer program rather than human scorers.

    School district leaders in the Fort Worth area say it’s too soon for them to tell whether the new grading system is a cause for concern. But some say they need more information about the new system.

    “I think anytime a computer program is going to take on grading of something of this magnitude, I think it is concerning,” said Jennifer Price, chief academic officer for the Keller Independent School District.

    Automated scoring comes amid STAAR reformat

    The new scoring engine comes amid broader changes to the state test. Last year, the Texas Education Agency rolled out a newly revamped STAAR exam that includes more writing prompts and fewer multiple choice questions than previous versions. State education officials say the new test is designed to more closely mirror instruction students get in the classroom.

    But open-ended responses like essays also take longer to score than multiple choice questions. TEA officials said using computer-based scoring in combination with human scorers allows the agency to score tests and get results back to districts more quickly and cheaply.

    Chris Rozunik, director of the agency’s student assessment division, said the computer program scores exams based on the same rubric that human graders use. The agency is also using human-scored sample papers to train the engine on what to look for in students’ responses, she said.

    Rozunik said the new engine isn’t an AI system with broad capabilities like ChatGPT, but rather a computer-based scoring system with narrow parameters. She noted the agency has used machine scoring for closed-ended questions like multiple choice prompts for years.

    The agency is committed to having human scores evaluate 25% of all essays, she said. The essays graded by humans include those the computer program can’t make sense of, and also a certain number the agency randomly assigns to human scorers, she said.

    The reasons the computer program might kick an essay to human graders are varied, Rozunik said. If a student enters a series of random letters instead of an answer, the computer won’t understand how to evaluate it. But real answers, even good ones, can also baffle a computer program. If a student answers a question in a language other than English, the essay will end up being referred to a human, she said. Likewise, if a student gives an answer that is thoughtful and creative, but doesn’t come in a form the computer recognizes, their answer will go to a human, who will be better able to score it appropriately, she said.

    “We do not penalize kids for unique thinking,” she said.

    The agency is already facing a lawsuit brought by several school districts, including the Fort Worth and Crowley independent school districts, over the state’s A-F accountability system, which is primarily based on STAAR scores. Last October, a state district judge temporarily blocked the agency from releasing that year’s A-F scores.

    Fort Worth school officials want more clarity on scoring change

    Price, the Keller ISD administrator, said she’s worried about what guardrails are in place for the new automated system. State education officials say the exam is no longer a high-stakes test for students, since their performance doesn’t have any bearing on whether they go on to the next grade. But STAAR scores are still a high-stakes matter for school districts, since they’re the main factor in accountability ratings. Those scores can affect how parents perceive their school districts or campuses, ultimately influencing their decision about where to enroll their kids.

    Given those stakes, Price doesn’t think state education officials have given districts enough information about how the new system works. The district has known the change was coming for about a year, she said, but TEA has given districts only limited details about what it would look like.

    Melissa DeSimone, executive director of research, assessment and accountability for the Northwest Independent School District, said she doesn’t have enough data yet to know whether the new scoring system is a cause for concern. So far, TEA has only used the automated engines to score last December’s end-of-course exams. The district has gotten raw scores from that round of testing, she said, but hasn’t yet received students’ responses to test questions. Districts should get those responses sometime in late March, she said. At that point, the district can go through students’ answers and see if they were scored appropriately, she said.

    If the district does find discrepancies between the scores that students received and the quality of their responses, officials can request that those tests be reevaluated by a human score, DeSimone said. The drawback is that those requests cost the district about $50 each if the scores come back the same, she said. The agency waives that fee if human scorers rate the response differently than the computer did.

    District leaders have known that automated scoring was coming since the early part of last year, DeSimone said. The district didn’t adjust any of its test preparation because the automated scoring system is supposed to be based on the same rubric as human scoring, she said.

    Fort Worth ISD officials weren’t available for an interview for this story. In an email, Melissa Kelly, the district’s associate superintendent of learning and leading, said there’s “a significant level of uncertainty” around how the new system will work.

    So far, the district isn’t planning any major changes in response to the new scoring system, Kelly said. District leaders will stay focused on teaching Texas’ state-mandated standards and wait to see what results come out of the scoring change, she said.

    Testing expert says automated scoring is growing

    Kurt Geisinger, director of the Buros Center for Testing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, said the shift to automated grading shouldn’t be a big cause for concern for local school districts. Automated grading of essays is becoming more common across the country, he said, and for the most part, it’s been implemented without major problems.

    A few years ago, Geisinger served as board chairman for the Graduate Review Examinations, an admissions test used for graduate schools across the country. At the time, the testing organization shifted to a hybrid AI-human grading model, where each test would be scored by both a computer and a human, he said. The organization found that the AI program did about as well as the human grader, he said.

    Geisinger said one of the admissions exams in use across the country — he wouldn’t say which test — is graded at least in part using AI. The grading program analyzes essays based on about 40 different criteria, he said. But the three factors that end up being most critical to the final score are the length of the essay, the number of paragraphs and the average word length, he said. That means those tests aren’t so much measuring the quality of writing as a few factors that often correlate with good writing, he said.

    Using those factors as a proxy for judging the quality of writing has some drawbacks, Geisinger said. If a test-taker uses longer words, it can be a sign of a larger vocabulary, he said. But the awkward use of big words makes for bad writing. If an AI system can’t tell whether the test-taker uses those words correctly, it may struggle to tell good writing from bad writing, he said.

    Geisinger said some professors are also concerned about whether creativity in writing gets lost in the shift to AI grading, although he said he hasn’t seen any research to validate those concerns.

    “I’ve heard English scholars say they wonder how someone like James Joyce would do on an AI-scored (test),” he said.

    Related stories from Fort Worth Star-Telegram

    Silas Allen is an education reporter focusing on challenges and possible solutions in Fort Worth’s school system. Allen is a graduate of the University of Missouri. Before coming to the Star-Telegram, he covered education and other topics at newspapers in Stillwater and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He also served as the news editor of the Dallas Observer, where he wrote about K-12 and higher education. He was born and raised in southeast Missouri.

    Silas Allen

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  • Think Twice Before Testing Your Hormones at Home

    Think Twice Before Testing Your Hormones at Home

    Across the internet, a biological scapegoat has emerged for almost any mysterious medical symptom affecting women. Struggling with chronic fatigue, hair loss, brain fog, or dwindling sex drive? When no obvious explanation is at hand, an out-of-whack endocrine system must be to blame. Women have too much cortisol, vloggers and influencers say; or not enough thyroxine, or the wrong ratio of progesterone to estradiol. Social media is brimming with advice from self-proclaimed hormone “gurus” and health coaches; the tag #hormoneimbalance has racked up a staggering 950 million views on TikTok alone.

    Now dozens of start-ups promise to diagnose these imbalances from the comfort of your home. All it takes is the prick of a finger, a urine sample, or a vial of spit. You mail your sample out to a lab or run the test right in your kitchen, no co-pay or doctor visit required. A few days later, you receive a slick lab report and in some cases, a customized treatment plan to alleviate the depression, the insomnia, the feeling of just being off.

    Hormone imbalances can indeed contribute to an array of mental and physical symptoms, and hormone testing overseen by providers is a routine practice in medicine. Doing so remotely could theoretically improve women’s health and access to care. But despite their growing popularity and Amazon-like convenience, at-home hormone tests might cause more problems than they solve. Several women’s-health and hormone specialists told me that remote testing has long been useful for detecting pregnancy and tracking ovulation, but that few, if any, products now for sale have been consistently and rigorously proven to work for broader, newly advertised purposes. Testing kits are marketed as a way of helping women decipher puzzling symptoms or assess their fertility. But experts said that the technology—at least as it stands right now—is unreliable and could have the opposite effect, causing anxiety and confusion instead.

    Mindy Christianson, an ob-gyn and the medical director of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, told me that in the best-case scenario, an accurate home hormone test would lead its users to seek out necessary medical care for real medical problems. That’s what happened to Chrissy Rice, a 38-year-old in Georgia. From 2018 to 2022, Rice experienced a racing heart, panic attacks, skin rashes, fatigue, and stomach pain—but her blood work and cardiac tests kept coming back normal. Her doctor chalked her symptoms up to anxiety and prescribed an anxiolytic medication. Rice wasn’t satisfied, so she skipped the meds and ordered a $249 women’s-health-testing kit from a company called Everlywell. The kit, which uses saliva and finger-prick sampling, claims to check for abnormal hormone levels that may be keeping women from “feeling their best.” When Rice’s results lit up with four abnormal readings, she was “honestly relieved,” she told me: It gave her confidence that her symptoms hadn’t all been in her head. When she brought the results to another provider, he ordered more tests and eventually diagnosed her with an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto’s, for which she’s since been treated.

    Read: No one really understands how to treat menopause

    Rice’s success story relied on a lot of things going right: The test correctly flagged that something about Rice’s body chemistry had gone awry. (In this case, #hormoneimbalance really did apply.) In response, Rice used her results to advocate for appropriate care from a trusted health provider. But not everyone is so lucky.

    Tests like the one Rice took rely on processes that have not yet been rigorously validated in clinical trials. Where traditional hormone testing involves in-person blood draws followed by a highly sensitive and specific process called liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry, home tests typically use dried urine, dried blood, or saliva sampling and a variety of techniques for measuring what’s in those samples. Women have, of course, been peeing on pregnancy-testing sticks since the 1980s. But these tests work well because the target hormone is present at relatively high levels, and should be found only during pregnancy. By contrast, hormones such as estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone—which are commonly targeted by this new wave of start-ups’ tests—regularly circulate throughout the body during various stages of a woman’s life, and are far trickier to measure using the low-volume samples involved in dried urine, dried blood, and saliva tests.

    A handful of small studies from the past three decades (many of which are funded by direct-to-consumer testing companies or conducted by their employees) suggest that these methods may be accurate. Jennifer Conti, an ob-gyn physician and professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine who advises the home-hormone-testing start-up Modern Fertility, told me that the company’s internal data, especially a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2019, convinced her that its technology was useful for consumers who want to make more informed family-planning decisions. “But this idea that at-home testing is a godsend is not true,” Conti said. “It’s something that can be very helpful right now for a certain population of people to open the door and start a conversation.”

    Read: Can genetic counselors keep up with 23andMe?

    Other experts still aren’t confident that the tests are worthwhile. I asked Andrea Dunaif, a professor and specialist in endocrinology and women’s health at Mount Sinai, and Hershel Raff, an endocrinology and molecular-medicine expert at the Medical College of Wisconsin, to review the 2019 study. According to the study’s authors, their findings suggest that Modern Fertility’s finger-stick testing methods can be used interchangeably with traditional blood draws to measure fertility-related hormones. But Dunaif and Raff pointed out a laundry list of methodological issues that they argue limit the power of the findings: The type of assay used isn’t accurate for determining testosterone or estradiol levels in women. Researchers didn’t use appropriate hormone-level ranges to test accuracy. Samples were analyzed within 48 hours—a timeline that doesn’t match up with real-world shipping. (Current leadership and members of Modern Fertility’s clinical-research team declined multiple requests for comment. But Erin Burke, a clinical researcher who co-authored the study and is no longer working for Modern Fertility, said she stands by the data. She told me that the team’s work shows that these testing methods are accurate and precise.)

    Although many experts see minimal data to support their use, at-home tests can still be sold on account of a regulatory loophole: The FDA does not typically review what it calls “low risk general wellness” products before they hit the market. Some endocrinologists advise looking for home hormone tests with a certification from the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments program (which is legally required for every direct-to-consumer testing company) or the College of American Pathologists, both of which ensure that a company’s labs maintain certain quality standards and undergo regular inspections. But Dunaif told me the certifications don’t guarantee precise results. She would never recommend that consumers use a currently available product for testing women’s sex steroid hormones remotely, she said, arguing that people will waste money and likely get information that is either “falsely reassuring or falsely distressing.” (Dunaif recently consulted for Quest Diagnostics, a large clinical-lab chain that doesn’t offer home hormone tests.)

    Charlotte, a New Jersey woman in her mid-30s, experienced the muddle of uncertain results firsthand. (I’m identifying her by only her first name to protect her medical privacy.) In 2021, Charlotte ordered a hormone panel from Modern Fertility after she began experiencing irregular periods. Her results showed an abnormally high level of prolactin, a hormone involved in ovulation and lactation, which made her think she might be infertile. Charlotte spent days scouring the internet for information while she waited to discuss the results with her doctor. When she finally showed her ob-gyn the Modern Fertility report, the doctor was incredulous. She basically dismissed the at-home results out of hand, and instead put Charlotte on progesterone. A few months later, Charlotte got pregnant.

    Read: Women aren’t just small men

    Like Rice’s home test, Charlotte’s helped her start a conversation with a trusted health-care provider and develop a plan. But Charlotte told me that the process wasn’t worth the panic-filled waiting game and desperate Googling. She wishes she’d skipped the home test and consulted her doctor first.

    Even when home hormone tests are accurate, their results are not diagnostic on their own. Drawing a straight line from hormone levels to a diagnosis is impossible without a medical history or physical exam; a user can’t predict her chances of pregnancy, for example, solely based on measurements of her fertility-related hormones. Nor would low levels of, say, estradiol or progesterone be enough to indicate endometriosis. Most people’s symptoms aren’t tied directly to a hormone imbalance, says Stephanie Faubion, the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health and the medical director of the North American Menopause Society. The more than 50 chemical messengers that coordinate all kinds of processes, including metabolism, reproduction, and mood, are constantly fluctuating and difficult to measure with a quick-hit hormone test, Faubion told me; people’s symptoms may be attributable to multiple interrelated factors. “Just checking a hormone level and saying Here’s your problem doesn’t serve women well,” she said. “It’s oversimplifying an issue.”

    Some companies offer physician-reviewed reports, chat services, or phone calls with health providers to clarify any confusion. But Mary Jane Minkin, a gynecologist, menopause expert, and clinical professor at Yale School of Medicine, told me that those services might not be enough to curb misinterpretation, especially if test results aren’t reliable. Minkin worried that users may make drastic lifestyle changes or take off-the-shelf supplements. Christianson, of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, said that a growing number of her patients visit her clinic believing they are infertile or in premature menopause based on abnormal readings, when it’s not true. Others are rushing to freeze their eggs unnecessarily. And Faubion worries that providers, too, might use tests that aren’t evidence-based to make decisions about hormone therapy for patients. Some testing start-ups already offer personalized treatment plans and bioidentical hormone-replacement therapy via telehealth based on a user’s results.

    Other experts had the opposite concern: that women whose home-test results appear normal would miss out on crucial interventions. Christianson told me that she’s seen men skip out on necessary infertility evaluations based on at-home semen tests. Women could end up making similar mistakes. And Dunaif said that women experiencing chronically irregular periods might be falsely reassured by a home hormone test and delay needed treatment for endocrine disorders or polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).

    Read: When missed periods are a metabolic problem

    At-home-hormone-testing companies aim to solve a pressing demand for clarity and control as women address their medical needs. If women have been tempted to blame their hormones for anything that’s wrong, that’s at least partly because they aren’t receiving sufficient guidance from doctors. For decades, female patients have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, and mistreated by their health providers more than male patients have. Far less clinical research has been conducted on women than men, which can make health care a guessing game. A diagnosis for a hormone disorder such as PCOS or endometriosis typically takes consultations with several doctors across two to 10 years. Plus, traditional hormone testing can be expensive, and specialists are difficult to find. Only 1,700 reproductive endocrinologists and 2,000 menopause specialists practice in the United States; fertility clinics are rare outside cities.

    In an ideal world, women wouldn’t feel the need to circumvent their doctors to test their hormones at home. But as it stands, many are desperate for answers, and direct-to-consumer testing companies are responding to their frustrations. Someday, the tests might help point users to the appropriate specialist, provide useful information for women in medical deserts, or enable people to better monitor chronic conditions for which the relevant hormones are simple to measure. But until they are rigorously evaluated, women are left with imperfect choices.

    Ali Pattillo

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  • Quiz: Could You Pass A Police Officer Entrance Exam?

    Quiz: Could You Pass A Police Officer Entrance Exam?

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  • Test

    Test

    Test

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  • No One Really Knows How Much COVID Is Silently Spreading … Again

    No One Really Knows How Much COVID Is Silently Spreading … Again

    In the early days of the pandemic, one of the scariest and most surprising features of SARS-CoV-2 was its stealth. Initially assumed to transmit only from people who were actively sick—as its predecessor SARS-CoV did—the new coronavirus turned out to be a silent spreader, also spewing from the airways of people who were feeling just fine. After months of insisting that only the symptomatic had to mask, test, and isolate, officials scrambled to retool their guidance; singing, talking, laughing, even breathing in tight quarters were abruptly categorized as threats.

    Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point? I feel fine.”

    Although the concern over asymptomatic spread has dissipated, the threat itself has not. And even as our worries over the virus continue to shrink and be shunted aside, the virus—and the way it moves between us—is continuing to change. Which means that our best ideas for stopping its spread aren’t just getting forgotten; they’re going obsolete.

    Read: A negative COVID test has never been so meaningless

    When SARS-CoV-2 was new to the world and hardly anyone had immunity, symptomless spread probably accounted for most of the virus’s spread—at least 50 percent or so, says Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease transmission modeler at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine. People wouldn’t start feeling sick until four, five, or six days, on average, after being infected. In the interim, the virus would be xeroxing itself at high speed in their airway, reaching potentially infectious levels a day or two before symptoms started. Silently infected people weren’t sneezing and coughing—symptoms that propel the virus more forcefully outward, increasing transmission efficiency. But at a time when tests were still scarce and slow to deliver results, not knowing they had the virus made them dangerous all the same. Precautionary tests were still scarce, or very slow to deliver results. So symptomless transmission became a norm, as did epic superspreading events.

    Now, though, tests are more abundant, presymptomatic spread is a better-known danger, and repeated rounds of vaccination and infection have left behind layers of immunity. That protection, in particular, has slashed the severity and duration of acute symptoms, lowering the risk that people will end up in hospitals or morgues; it may even be chipping away at long COVID. At the same time, though, the addition of immunity has made the dynamics of symptomless transmission much more complex.

    On an individual basis, at least, silent spread could be happening less often than it did before. One possible reason is that symptoms are now igniting sooner in people’s bodies, just three or so days, on average, after infection—a shift that roughly coincided with the rise of the first Omicron variant and could be a quirk of the virus itself. But Aubree Gordon, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that faster-arriving sicknesses are probably being driven in part by speedier immune responses, primed by past exposures. That means that illness might now coincide with or even precede the peak of contagiousness, shortening the average period in which people spread the virus before they feel sick. In that one very specific sense, COVID could now be a touch more flulike. Presymptomatic transmission of the flu does seem to happen on occasion, says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University. But in general, “people tend not to hit their highest viral levels until after they develop symptoms,” Gordon told me.

    Coupled with more population-level immunity, this arrangement could be working in our favor. People might be less likely to pass the virus unwittingly to others. And thanks to the defenses we’ve collectively built up, the pathogen itself is also having more trouble exiting infected bodies and infiltrating new ones. That’s almost certainly part of the reason that this winter hasn’t been quite as bad as past ones have, COVID-wise, says Maia Majumder, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

    That said, a lot of people are still undoubtedly catching the coronavirus from people who aren’t feeling sick. Infection per infection, the risk of superspreading events might now be lower, but at the same time people have gotten chiller about socializing without masks and testing before gathering in groups—a behavioral change that’s bound to counteract at least some of the forward shift in symptoms. Presymptomatic spread might be less likely nowadays, but it’s nowhere near gone. Multiply a small amount of presymptomatic spread by a large number of cases, and that can still seed … another large number of cases.

    Read: You probably have an asymptomatic infection right now

    There could be some newcomers to the pool of silent spreaders, too—those who are now transmitting the virus without ever developing symptoms at all. With people’s defenses higher than they were even a year and a half ago, infections that might have once been severe are now moderate or mild; ones that might have once been mild are now unnoticeable, says Seyed Moghadas, a computational epidemiologist at York University. At the same time, though, immunity has probably transformed some symptomless-yet-contagious infections into non-transmissible cases, or kept some people from getting infected at all. Milder cases are of course welcome, Fitzpatrick told me, but no one knows exactly what these changes add up to: Depending on the rate and degree of each of those shifts, totally asymptomatic transmission might now be more common, less common, or sort of a wash.

    Better studies on transmission patterns would help cut through the muck; they’re just not really happening anymore. “To get this data, you need to have pretty good testing for surveillance purposes, and that basically has stopped,” says Yonatan Grad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

    Meanwhile, people are just straight-up testing less, and rarely reporting any of the results they get at home. For many months now, even some people who are testing have been seeing strings of negative results days into bona-fide cases of COVID—sometimes a week or more past when their symptoms start. That’s troubling on two counts: First, some legit COVID cases are probably getting missed, and keeping people from accessing test-dependent treatments such as Paxlovid. Second, the disparity muddles the start and end of isolation. Per CDC guidelines, people who don’t test positive until a few days into their illness should still count their first day of symptoms as Day 0 of isolation. But if symptoms might sometimes outpace contagiousness, “I think those positive tests should restart the isolation clock,” Popescu told me, or risk releasing people back into society too soon.

    Read: People are fed up with rapid tests

    American testing guidelines, however, haven’t undergone a major overhaul in more than a year—right after Omicron blew across the nation, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. And even if the rules were to undergo a revamp, they wouldn’t necessarily guarantee more or better testing, which requires access and will. Testing programs have been winding down for many months; free diagnostics are once again growing scarce.

    Through all of this, scientists and nonscientists alike are still wrestling with how to define silent infection in the first place. What counts as symptomless depends not just on biology, but behavior—and our vigilance. As worries over transmission continue to falter and fade, even mild infections may be mistaken for quiet ones, Grad told me, brushed off as allergies or stress. Biologically, the virus and the disease may not need to become that much more muted to spread with ease: Forgetting about silent spread may grease the wheels all on its own.

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Why Do Rapid Tests Feel So Useless Right Now?

    Why Do Rapid Tests Feel So Useless Right Now?

    Max Hamilton found out that his roommate had been exposed to the coronavirus shortly after Thanksgiving. The dread set in, and then, so did her symptoms. Wanting to be cautious, she tested continuously, remaining masked in all common areas at home. But after three negative rapid tests in a row, she and Hamilton felt like the worst had passed. At the very least, they could chat safely across the kitchen table, right?

    Wrong. More than a week later, another test finally sprouted a second line: bright, pink, positive. Five days after that, Hamilton was testing positive as well. This was his second bout of COVID since the start of the pandemic, and he wasn’t feeling so great. Congestion and fatigue aside, he was “just very frustrated,” he told me. He felt like they had done everything right. “If we have no idea if someone has COVID, how are we supposed to avoid it?” Now he has a different take on rapid tests: They aren’t guarantees. When he and his roommate return from their Christmas and New Year’s holidays, he said, they’ll steer clear of friends who show any symptoms whatsoever.

    Hamilton and his roommate are just two of many who have been wronged by the rapid. Since the onset of Omicron, for one reason or another, false negatives seem to be popping up with greater frequency. That leaves people stuck trying to figure out when, and if, to bank on the simplest, easiest way to check one’s COVID status. At this point, even people who work in health care are throwing up their hands. Alex Meshkin, the CEO of the medical laboratory Flow Health, told me that he spent the first two years of the pandemic carefully masking in social situations and asking others to get tested before meeting with him. Then he came down with COVID shortly after visiting a friend who didn’t think that she was sick. Turns out, she’d only taken a rapid test. “That’s my wonderful personal experience,” Meshkin told me. His takeaway? “I don’t trust the antigen test at all.”

    Read: Should everyone be masking again?

    That might be a bit extreme. Rapid antigen tests still work, and we’ve known about the problem of delayed positivity for ages. In fact, the tests are about as good at picking up the SARS-CoV-2 virus now as they’ve ever been, Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told me. Their limit of detection––the lowest quantity of viral antigen that will register reliably as a positive result––didn’t really change as new variants emerged. At the same time, the Omicron variant and its offshoots seem to take longer, after the onset of infection, to accumulate that amount of virus in the nose, says Wilbur Lam, a professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering at Emory University who is also one of the lead investigators assessing COVID diagnostic tests for the federal government. Lam told me that this delay, between getting sick and reaching the minimum detectable concentration of the viral antigen, could be contributing to the spate of false-negative results.

    That problem isn’t likely to be solved anytime soon. The same basic technology behind COVID rapid tests, called “lateral flow,” has been around for years; it’s even used for standard pregnancy tests, Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago, told me. Oliver Keppler, a virology researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who was involved in a study comparing the performance of rapid tests between variants, says there isn’t really a way to tweak the tests so that they’ll be any more sensitive to newer variants. “Conceptually, there’s little we can do.” In the meantime, he told me, we have to accept that “in the first one or two days of infection with Omicron, on average, antigen tests are very poor.”

    Of course, Hamilton (and his roommate) would point out that the tests can fail even several days after symptoms start. That’s why he and others are feeling hesitant to trust them again. “It’s not just about the utility or accuracy of the test. It’s also about the willingness to even do the test,” Ng Qin Xiang, a resident in preventative medicine at Singapore General Hospital who was involved in a study examining the performance of rapid antigen tests, told me. “Even within my circle of friends, a lot of people, when they have respiratory symptoms, just stay home and rest,” he said. They just don’t see the point of testing.

    Read: COVID science is moving backwards

    Landon recently got COVID for the first time since the start of the pandemic. When her son came home with the virus, she decided to perform her own experiment. She kept track of her rapids, testing every 12 hours and even taking pictures for proof. Her symptoms started on a Friday night and her initial test was negative. So was Saturday morning’s. By Saturday evening, though, a faint line had begun to emerge, and the next morning—36 hours after symptom onset—the second line was dark. Her advice for those who want the most accurate result and don’t have as many tests to spare is to wait until you’ve had symptoms for two days before testing. And if you’ve been exposed, have symptoms, and only have one test? “You don’t even need to bother. You probably have COVID.”

    Zoya Qureshi

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  • CDC to Switch From Daily to Weekly COVID Data Updates

    CDC to Switch From Daily to Weekly COVID Data Updates

    Oct. 8, 2022 — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it will start updating COVID-19 case and death counts on a weekly instead of a daily basis starting Oct. 20.
    “To allow for additional reporting flexibility, reduce the reporting burden on states and jurisdictions, and maximize surveillance resources, CDC is moving to a weekly reporting cadence for line level and aggregate case and death data,” the CDC said Thursday.
    The CDC is still providing daily data on COVID hospitalizations, using information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s unknown if that will change when the National Healthcare Safety Network takes responsibility for the collection of COVID hospital data mid-December, the CDC said.
    The CDC has been publishing daily COVID data for more than two years. The CDC’s COVID community level ratings are already updated once a week, on Thursdays. State and local governments use community level ratings in deciding when and where citizens should be advised to wear masks.
    The change is another sign of a de-escalation in COVID response as the major pandemic statistics drop. The New York Times reported that on Oct. 7 the United States was averaging 40,186 new COVID cases a day (a 26% drop over two weeks), 26,994 COVID-related hospitalizations (an 11% drop), and 380 COVID-related deaths (an 11% drop). Health experts say the case counts are actually higher because many home testing results are not reported to health agencies.
    Earlier this week, the CDC announced it would no longer maintain a list of travel advisories for foreign countries because “fewer countries are testing or reporting COVID-19 cases,” The New York Times reported. Instead, the CDC will publish health notices when only for “a concerning Covid-19 variant” in a particular nation.
    Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical advisor, said Tuesday that COVID cases may rise this winter, especially if a new COVID variant emerges.
    “Although we can feel good that we’re going in the right direction, we can’t let our guard down,” Fauci said in a discussion hosted by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. “We are entering into the winter months, where no matter what the respiratory disease is, there’s always a risk of an uptick.”
     

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