Politics

The Supreme Court is set to hear one of the most important trans rights cases in history on Wednesday, with the nation's highest court set to decide whether a state-level ban on gender-affirming care for minors is an unconstitutional form of sex discrimination.

The ban in question, passed by Tennessee's Republican-led legislature in the form of SB1, prevents doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormone treatment or surgery to minors experiencing gender dysphoria. The same medications can be prescribed to cisgender teens who go through puberty too early or too late, but not for those who feel uncomfortable with their assigned gender.

The Federal Trade Commission said it has reached a proposed settlement with Evolv Technologies due to allegations that the company "made false claims about the extent to which its AI-powered security screening system can detect weapons and ignore harmless personal items."

The company claims that its technology can screen for weapons in a noninvasive way. But federal officials say its claims are "misleading."

Evolv Technologies provides weapon detectors for over 1,000 schools, in addition to sports venues, hospitals, and casinos. The company says that its detectors are used to screen over 700,000 children and school visitors throughout the U.S. daily for weapons.

In downtown Seattle, total office vacancy is now around 35%, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE, and rents are softening. That’s even worse than during the Great Recession, when downtown Seattle office vacancy reached around 21%.

Hours later, the alleged victim’s husband was still waiting for her return. Worried, he’d searched the sports bar, but it was empty. Around 2 A.M., he texted her, saying, “Holy smokes lady . . . I don’t remember the last time you were socializing at nearly 2:00 am.” She responded oddly, typing, “Hahaha I know. I gotta make sure that fo”—dropping off mid-sentence. He responded, “Doing ok? My love? Worried about you.”

A few hours before dawn, the alleged victim returned to the hotel room that she was sharing with her husband and kids. She told police later that she couldn’t recall much of what had happened. But two days later she started to have frightening flashbacks and nightmares. She told police that she hazily recalled Hegseth taking her phone and blocking the door as she tried to leave. She recalled him on top of her, with his dog tags in her face. She recalled saying no a lot. Four days after the alleged assault, she went to a hospital and asked for a rape exam. She said that she thought someone might have slipped a drug into her drink and sexually assaulted her. She brought in the clothes she’d worn that night. According to the police report, she had developed an infection that could have resulted from a new sexual partner. She declined to name her alleged assailant. The nurse was legally required to report the incident to the police, who opened a criminal investigation. At that point, the alleged victim identified her assaulter as Hegseth.

“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Patel said in a September interview on the “Shawn Kelly Show.” “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.”

The Cuban government has been fooling U.S. sanctions by concealing the true nature of the company that handles money sent by Cuban-Americans to their families on the island, a Miami Herald investigation shows.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions in 2020 on the Cuban military, banning it from handling the remittances from the U.S., and the Biden administration has kept the sanctions in place. The Cuban government pretended to create a new company independent of the military to handle the millions of dollars sent yearly to the island through Western Union and Miami-based money-transfer agencies. But in reality, secret documents reviewed by the Herald show the new company has been controlled by the Cuban military all along.

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out a defamation lawsuit against Fox News by a former Donald Trump supporter who said he received death threats when the network aired false conspiracy theories about his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Raymond Epps, a former Marine, was falsely accused by Fox of being a government agent causing trouble near the Capitol that day so that it would be blamed on Trump fans.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Hall in Delaware granted, without comment, Fox's motion to dismiss the case.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Monday in a dispute over the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of two companies’ applications to sell flavored liquids for use in e-cigarettes. A federal appeals court in Louisiana set aside the FDA’s orders denying applications by Triton Distribution and Vapetasia, complaining that the agency had sent those companies and other makers of e-cigarette products “on a wild goose chase.”

• Eroding privacy- AI systems collect, process and transfer vast amounts of data, eroding people’s privacy in ways that may not be immediately obvious but have long-term implications. For example, facial recognition systems can track people in public and private spaces, effectively turning mass surveillance into the norm.

• Undermining autonomy- AI systems often subtly undermine your ability to make autonomous decisions by manipulating the information you see. Social media platforms use algorithms to show users content that maximizes a third party’s interests, subtly shaping opinions, decisions and behaviors across millions of users.

• Diminishing equality- AI systems, while designed to be neutral, often inherit the biases present in their data and algorithms. This reinforces societal inequalities over time. In one infamous case, a facial recognition system used by retail stores to detect shoplifters disproportionately misidentified women and people of color.

• Impairing safety- AI systems make decisions that affect people’s safety and well-being. When these systems fail, the consequences can be catastrophic. But even when they function as designed, they can still cause harm, such as social media algorithms’ cumulative effects on teenagers’ mental health.

Categorizing the types of algorithmic harms delineates the legal boundaries of AI regulation and presents possible legal reforms to bridge this accountability gap. Changes I believe would help include mandatory algorithmic impact assessments that require companies to document and address the immediate and cumulative harms of an AI application to privacy, autonomy, equality and safety – before and after it’s deployed. For instance, firms using facial recognition systems would need to evaluate these systems’ impacts throughout their life cycle.

Another helpful change would be stronger individual rights around the use of AI systems, allowing people to opt out of harmful practices and making certain AI applications opt in. For example, requiring an opt-in regime for data processing by firms’ use of facial recognition systems and allowing users to opt out at any time.

Lastly, I suggest requiring companies to disclose the use of AI technology and its anticipated harms. To illustrate, this may include notifying customers about the use of facial recognition systems and the anticipated harms across the domains outlined in the typology.

While Meta is already a part-owner of 16 existing networks, this new cable project would be entirely owned by the company — allowing it full control to prioritize traffic to its own products and services. That would bring Meta in line with Google’s efforts, which privately owns a handful of cable routes and has invested in 33 others.

The release of Americans deemed wrongfully detained in China has been a top agenda item in each conversation between the U.S. and China, and Wednesday’s development suggests a willingness by Beijing to engage with the outgoing Democratic administration before Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January.

In the first major update to assisted living and residential care regulations in more than 15 years, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services has proposed significantly increasing staffing requirements, among other changes.

The proposed updates follow an investigation by The Maine Monitor and ProPublica into the state’s largest residential care facilities. It found dozens of violations of resident rights, including incidents of abuse and neglect, as well as more than 100 cases in which residents wandered away from their facilities and hundreds of medication and treatment violations.

As part of the news organizations’ investigation, one facility owner called the current staffing requirement “scary,” “unsafe” and “completely inadequate.” Experts, advocates and providers said requiring higher staffing levels, better training and more nursing care would help address these problems.

Now that the MOU is signed, authorized members of the Trump transition team can have access to agency and White House employees, facilities and information because it has "agreed to important safeguards to protect non-public information and prevent conflicts of interest, including who has access to the information and how the information is shared," said Saloni Sharma, a spokeswoman for the White House.

While the White House would have preferred that the Trump transition team sign the GSA agreement, it decided that a disruption in the transfer of power would be more risky.

In the 1990s, the FCC developed the Universal Service Fund as a way to aid telecom expansion while also providing increased digital access for low-income communities. The program is funded by charging telecoms fees (the telecoms then ostensibly pass on some of the cost incurred to paying customers) and then using the revenue from those fees to provide internet access to families, schools, healthcare providers, libraries, and other organizations who qualify for it.

However, a right-wing non-profit called Consumers’ Research recently sued the FCC, claiming that its method of funding the redistributive program was “unconstitutional.” A cursory scan of the organization’s website reveals the prevalence of a familiar “free-market” ideology and, humorously, a portal where members of the public can report “woke” workplace practices.

Separately, conservative political commentator and activist Robby Starbuck has been going after corporate DEI policies, calling out individual companies on the social media platform X. Several of those companies have subsequently announced that they are pulling back their initiatives, including Ford, Harley-Davidson, Lowe's and Tractor Supply.

But Walmart, which employs 1.6 million workers in the U.S., is the largest one to do so.

De la Torre is the ultra-wealthy former CEO of the now-bankrupt hospital chain Steward, once the largest for-profit health care company in the country. Steward and de la Torre have been accused of being "health care terrorists" and practicing "third-world medicine" that killed and maimed patients as executives extracted millions in payouts, stripping the company of assets.

In September, de la Torre was held in criminal contempt of Congress for failing to abide by a congressional subpoena to attend a Senate hearing over the alleged corruption.

The execution of a search warrant last week is a clear sign that a sprawling federal corruption and fraud investigation against Steward and de la Torre is escalating. According to people close to the investigation who spoke with the Globe, federal prosecutors have a two-pronged probe, including investigating potential fraud and embezzlement in the US, and also potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it unlawful to bribe foreign government officials to obtain or retain business.

But on March 6, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily expanded Medicare’s telehealth coverage to all specialties. That expansion, renewed in 2022, is set to expire at the end of the year, impacting more than 65 million Americans.

Multiple bills have been introduced in the 118th Congress to preserve Medicare telehealth provisions and continue allowing people on Medicare to use telehealth flexibly, but all still await votes in both the House and Senate. Perhaps the likeliest to pass, the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024, introduced by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), received widespread, bipartisan support from members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its subcommittee on health.