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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI use for elementary and middle school students on Wednesday.  The decision, which comes a week before New York City public schools begin the year, “includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI.” Elementary and middle school students—about 600,000 students in total—will receive screen-time […]

For the past few weeks I have been getting really into Friday Night Lights, the acclaimed early-2000s soap about a high-school football team in rural Texas. It’s not my typical TV fare, but when it feels like the world is imploding, there’s something comforting about watching Coach Taylor—with his small-town good looks and unshakable moral compass—inspire a locker room of downtrodden athletes with the words: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

Emissions from Sasol’s flagship Secunda plant are linked to about 1,000 premature deaths annually, a study by a Finland-based nonprofit suggests.

Health care has emerged as the chief priority for Democrats should the party wrest control of the House and Senate this November.In an interview with NBC News published Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four policy goals that he believed would attract “uniform Democratic support.”“We have to reverse the Medicaid cuts. We should extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries said. “We should restore congressional authority as it relates to tariffs, because the Trump tariffs are making life more expensive for the American people. And we should end, decisively, if it’s still going on, Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East.”But there’s still a long road ahead. Virginia Representative Don Beyer told the network that while there’s consensus that the party’s first post-election bill should focus on affordability, there’s little agreement on exactly what that should look like.“In the affordability debate, nothing’s more central to it than health care,” Beyer told NBC News. “My expectation is that it’ll very much be about affordability one way or the other.”Yet a growing contingent of Democrats—including the party’s emerging cohort of democratic socialists—want the party to aim higher on health care than the low-hanging fruit of reversing Trump’s unpopular cuts.New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a rumored 2028 presidential candidate—said it would “absolutely not” be enough to restore Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.“Of course, we need to take immediate action on those ACA subsidies and making sure that we lower those prices immediately,” Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News. “But it doesn’t fix the deeper systemic issue that has led health care to be one of the primary drivers of inflationary costs over the last decade, frankly.”“We need to be doing a lot more to take on corporate power, to break up a lot of these monopolies that are rolling up—Big Pharma, insurance, private equity entering the space of health care unchecked,” she continued. “I think there’s a lot here for us to really dig in on, to work on.”Successfully enacting the agenda (and unravelling Trump’s Project 2025 victories) will be dependent on the size of the party’s Election Day wins. If Democrats fail to win a significant number of seats in either chamber or are forced to contend with a thin majority, they’ll face seismic challenges in passing any sort of anti-Trump legislation.

Health care workers fighting for a contract in Vermont have come to the table with not only their own demands for safe staffing and fair pay, but also a more unusual demand—one made in solidarity with farmworkers. They want their employer, the University of Vermont Medical Center, to join the Milk with Dignity program. “We’ve been in spaces with folks, seen them, heard their stories. They’ve come to our rallies,” said administrative assistant Melissa Lavallee, secretary of the union, Support Staff United (AFT-VT). “We’re doing for our neighbors what they do for us.”

From intense psychological trauma to exposure to neurotoxic dust, first responders at ground zero continue to confront significant physical and mental health risks.

A federal judge lit into the Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for using either AI or fake studies to defend the Trump administration’s decision to fund only abstinence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs.“While abstinence-only education may well be appropriate for some age groups or communities, the agency has offered no explanation or evidence to support its across-the-board mandate that only abstinence strategies be pursued,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his opinion. “On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited—a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”Cooper issued a preliminary injunction, pausing an order that has already led to millions of dollars in grant cuts. “The Court concludes that the Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on their arbitrary and capricious claim, combined with the severity and irremediable harm to their programming and the balance of equities in their favor, justify the issuance of a preliminary injunction in this case,” he wrote.This isn’t the first time the Trump administration—and HHS—have used AI to generate references or content. Last year, the department’s “Make America Healthy Again” report contained references to articles that didn’t exist and multiple citation errors.The HHS is likely using fake AI slop to justify and defend bad MAHA policies that have real material impacts on the lives of everyday Americans, and could have alarming effects on public health.

A new generation of health workers in Indonesia is bearing the brunt of a healthcare system oriented towards financial efficiency and commercialization. One of the drivers of this policy today now vys for a position at WHO