Maren Loe

Alice Wong, a woman in a wheelchair with dark hair, poses in a pink and orange outfit and berry lipstick. A headline reads: "Alice Wong, Writer and Relentless Advocate for Disability Rights, Dies at 51." Photo via John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Alice Wong, a writer and activist who was born with muscular dystrophy and who fought relentlessly for equal rights and access for people with disabilities, died on Friday. She was 51. nyti.ms/4r9WqEr

Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to our analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%.

(Published February)

Arduous and Unequal: The Fight to Get FEMA Housing Assistance After Helene An analysis by ProPublica and The Assembly of the more rural counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene shows that the households that got the most aid tended to have the highest incomes.

Income isn’t supposed to play a role in how much housing assistance FEMA gives families.

But in some North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money after Hurricane Helene as those with lower incomes.

With @theassemblync.bsky.social

Acting CDC boss wants to break up MMR vaccine into three shots Jim O’Neill joins President Donald Trump’s call for three distinct measles, mumps and rubella shots, claiming a separation would ‘reduce the risk of side effects’ and ‘maximize parental choice’

The acting CDC Director has no knowledge, training or experience in science/public health. Trump has no knowledge, training or experience in science/public health.

Both are calling to make the MMR vaccine into 3 separate shots, which makes absolutely no scientific or public health sense.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah took down X posts Tuesday making an apparent connection between Gov. Tim Walz and the man accused of shooting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, and blaming “Marxists” for the murders. The change comes after blowback from Sen. Tina Smith and her staffers as well as Minnesota Democratic and Republican lawmakers. One X post said “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” with pictures of Boelter, who is accused of killing Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and shooting Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in the early morning hours of June 14. Boelter also went to the homes of two other state lawmakers that night; one house was empty, and at the other, a police officer pulled up to the house shortly after Boelter arrived, so Boelter left. Another Lee post read, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” with a picture of Boelter.

No elected official Democratic party will be as cruel about Kirk's death as Mike Lee was about the death of Melissa Hortman.

wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/06/17/s...

Pediatric Brain Cancer Group to Lose Federal Funding

Meanwhile, we just spent $280 million on Alligator Alcatraz, which is already being closed down because it violates the law, and we're sending $350 billion in tax breaks over the next 10 years to foreign investors.

This is a truly evil and immoral agenda.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/w...

Cost-cutting tactics The secret bonuses were just one of many maneuvers UnitedHealth devised to track and cut expenses in its nursing home initiative. Internal emails show, for example, that UnitedHealth supervisors gave their teams “budgets” showing how many hospital admissions they had “left” to use up on nursing home patients. The company also monitored nursing homes that had smaller numbers of patients with “do not resuscitate” – or DNR – and “do not intubate” orders in their files. Without such orders, patients are in line for certain life-saving treatments that might lead to costly hospital stays. Two current and three former UnitedHealth nurse practitioners told the Guardian that UnitedHealth managers pressed nurse practitioners to persuade Medicare Advantage members to change their “code status” to DNR even when patients had clearly expressed a desire that all available treatments be used to keep them alive.

UnitedHealth secretly pressured nurses to change patients' records to include DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate) without their consent, so those patients would die instead of being saved with medical interventions that could cost UnitedHealth money.

This is murder.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Policy Notice: Implementation of Standard 15% Indirect Cost Rate

NSF says they’re capping indirect costs at 15%.

Women Are Twice As Likely to Die in Pregnancy in States with Abortion Bans 4.23.25

Well, no surprise here: A new study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI) found that women are 2X as likely to die during pregnancy in states with abortion bans. Twice as likely.

Meanwhile, maternal mortality in pro-choice states fell 21%. jessica.substack.com/p/women-are-...

Trump’s War on Measurement Means Losing Data on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change and More By slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose…

Trump’s halting of data collection could have effects that last far beyond his time in office.

Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Trump Laid Off Nearly All the Federal Workers Who Investigate Firefighter Deaths The cuts, which are part of Trump’s slashing of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases.

NEW: When a firefighter dies, a small team of federal health workers helps pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.

Trump laid off nearly all of them.

She was tracking post-Roe abortions. The government just pulled her funding. Diana Greene Foster, who was behind the landmark Turnaway Study, wanted to study the health and economic impacts of the loss of abortion access.

News: Diana Greene Foster, the MacArthur-winning author of the Turnaway Study, learned her NIH grant — funding a multi-year study on Dobbs' impact — has been pulled. She was told its bc the govt won't study "gender identity."

Her work has shaped our understanding of abortion bans' consequences.

Gutting. Foster's work on the long-term consequences for people who are denied abortions, versus those who receive abortions, was so significant (& rebutted anti-abortion shibboleths like regret).

We talked w/ Diana about her work on this @strictscrutiny.bsky.social ep: crooked.com/podcast/what...

Dr. Craig Spencer said “one reason he is not comfortable saying the outbreak has plateaued in Texas is that he believes the number of cases is likely an undercount”.

Although I appreciate/understand the cautious use of words here, another reason is that this graph is clearly going up and fast.

Graphic: As many as 69 million American women lack access to valid birth certificates

Are you a woman who changed your name when you got married?

Congress is considering a bill that could make it much harder for you to vote.

Call your rep—this is not a drill. indivisible.org/resource/cal...

The Rise of Bhattacharya & Makary Dear AJI Community,  Drs. Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya have been confirmed as Food and Drug Administration commissioner and director of the National Institutes of Health, respectively.  Already...

The FDA & NIH just got new leadership—and it’s raising serious red flags. Corporate media won’t tell you the full story behind Drs. Bhattacharya & Makary, but we’ve been tracking their vaccine-skeptical, COVID-contrarian rise since 2023. By @origgio.bsky.social

sunshine.optout.news/email/7bec03...

America might be the seventh thing he bankrupts with the way he’s running things.

RFK Jr. tells CDC to change its guidance on fluoride in drinking water The nation’s public health agency has long asserted that a little of the mineral in water helps prevent tooth decay. The top health official wants new guidance.

I’m old enough to remember when a political appointee telling a subordinate expert group to reach a specific policy decision would be a weeks’ long scandal

ozens of international students have had their visas revoked in the last few days alone. Since the start of Friday, revocations include — but are by no means limited to — cases at: Central Michigan University: Several current and former students’ visas were stripped without notification, MLive reported. Columbia University: Four international students’ visas were revoked, the Columbia Spectator student newspaper reported. Harvard University: Three students and two alumni saw their visas yanked, according to WCVB. Kent State University: One current student and three recent graduates working under the Optional Practical Training program had their visas yanked, President Todd Diacon wrote. Northeastern University: “Several” students and recent graduates were told by the Department of State that their visas were revoked, the university posted. Ohio State University: Five students’ visas had been revoked as of Friday, The Columbus Dispatch reported. One reached out to the university, which then discovered others’ immigration statuses had also been changed. Stanford University: Four students and two recent graduates had their visas yanked, according to KRON. University of Idaho: Two students had their visas revoked this month, a spokesperson told The Spokesman-Review. University of Kentucky: A “small number” of graduate students had their visas pulled, the institution’s president announced. University of Michigan: Four students’ visas were revoked by the Department of Homeland Security, a spokesperson told WWJ. UC Davis: Seven students and five recent graduates lost their visas without explanation, Chancellor Gary S. May said. UCLA: Six current students and six graduates had their visas revoked, Chancellor Julio Frenk said. UC Santa Cruz: Three students’ visas were terminated without advance notice, Chancellor Cynthia Larive said. UC San Diego: Five students’ visas were terminated without warning, the chancellor’s o…

A long list of universities are seeing their international students' visas get revoked, and the reasons are as opaque as you'd expect from this administration

www.chronicle.com/newsletter/d...

Trump, Hegseth promise record $1 trillion Pentagon budget The surprise announcement comes as the Defense Department prepares to lay off tens of thousands of civilians.

i was told we are drastically cutting costs, everything from cancer research to meals on wheels to weather forecasts, because the country is on the verge of bankruptcy

8) And this one is important.

For all the talk about the powerful pro-Trump media ecosystem, the share of Americans who have heard negative business news coverage of the government has exploded.

Evidently even the podcast bros can’t distract Americans from the realities of the stock market.

Doge eyes cuts to Peace Corps with in-person visit and records access Agency that sends volunteers to countries around world expects ‘additional visits’ from Musk cost-cutting team The Peace Corps is the latest federal agency to be targeted by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”. It appears “Doge” could be eyeing cuts to the agency, which sends US volunteers around the world to work in local communities on health, education and environmental initiatives. “Staff from the Department of Government Efficiency are currently working at Peace Corps headquarters and the agency is supporting their requests,” the agency said in an email to the Guardian on Friday. Continue reading...

Doge eyes cuts to Peace Corps with in-person visit and records access

TCE Is Linked to Heart Defects in Babies, Cancer and Parkinson’s. Republicans in Congress Want to Reverse a Ban on It. The toxic substance, used in dry cleaning and manufacturing, has been linked to a host of serious health problems. A Biden-era ban on the chemical has faced multiple challenges since Trump took…

“We signed up to go fight for our country,” said a military veteran who’s urging Congress not to reverse a ban on TCE.

She says now the attitude seems to be, “‘We don’t care about your health, you’ve already signed on the dotted line.”

Are terminations of NIH grants wasting billions of taxpayer dollars? DOGE argues killing grants saves money, but a Science analysis suggests more than $1.4 billion in sunk research costs may produce few results

Speaking of waste....
@science.org
www.science.org/content/arti...

Exclusive: Trump White House directs NIH to study ‘regret’ after transgender people transition After cancelling nearly all NIH projects studying transgender health, Trump’s team instructs the US biomedical agency to study negative consequences of transitioning.

The White House sometimes directs the NIH to study certain broad topics, such as cancer or women’s health, but the latest directive’s specificity, inflammatory language and focus on a hyper-polarizing topic are unprecedented, NIH employees say.

https://go.nature.com/43xPnfj

“Devastating” is an understatement. For no reason, these cuts eliminate crucial support for those in crisis—as well as families with a member in recovery. Our entire community will suffer.

Donate:
Home of New Vision: homeofnewvision.org/donate-2/

Dawn Farm: dawnfarm.org/donate/

Key House Republican opposes Medicaid cuts Rep. Vern Buchanan told POLITICO's Health Care Summit that Republicans will find savings in Medicaid but won't cut it.

Headline: Key House Republican opposes Medicaid cuts

Content: Key House Republican supports Medicaid cuts via FMAP reductions

www.politico.com/news/2025/04...

"Together, these leaders were in charge of US$9 billion in funding at the NIH."

For comparison: The *entire* budget of NSF is $9 billion.

So NIH just fired the leaders of an entire NSF's worth size of scientific investments.

An FDA worker confirms what I've seen out there.

CDC's entire FOIA office is gone.

The FDA's communications and web office were cut.

"The FDA as we know it is gone."

They’ve laid off the people overseeing one important angle to the bird flu outbreak: the scientists overseeing the safety of pet food. Infected raw pet food has killed numerous cats at this point, even if it was frozen first. But that’s gone now so