MicroWave

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It is a scenario playing out nationwide. From Oregon to Pennsylvania, hundreds of communities have in recent years either stopped adding fluoride to their water supplies or voted to prevent its addition. Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice. The broad availability of over-the-counter dental products containing the mineral makes it no longer necessary to add to public water supplies, they say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while store-bought products reduce tooth decay, the greatest protection comes when they are used in combination with water fluoridation.

The outcome of an ongoing federal case in California could force the Environmental Protection Agency to create a rule regulating or banning the use of fluoride in drinking water nationwide. In the meantime, the trend is raising alarm bells for public health researchers who worry that, much like vaccines, fluoride may have become a victim of its own success.

The CDC maintains that community water fluoridation is not only safe and effective but also yields significant cost savings in dental treatment. Public health officials say removing fluoride could be particularly harmful to low-income families — for whom drinking water may be the only source of preventive dental care.

“If you have to go out and get care on your own, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Myron Allukian Jr., a dentist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Millions of people have lived with fluoridated water for years, “and we’ve had no major health problems,” he said. “It’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it.”

According to the anti-fluoride group Fluoride Action Network, since 2010, over 240 communities around the world have removed fluoride from their drinking water or decided not to add it.

A judge ordered Planned Parenthood to hand records of transgender care over to Andrew Bailey.

A St. Louis judge has ruled that Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is entitled to Planned Parenthood’s transgender care records, ordering the nonprofit to turn over some of its most sensitive files to the man who has built his unelected political career on restricting health care access for trans people.

In his Thursday decision, Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer wrote that Bailey can collect documents under Missouri’s consumer protection statute that aren’t protected under federal mandate, namely the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA.

“It is clear from the statute that the Defendant has the broad investigative powers when the consumer is in possible need of protection and there is no dispute in this matter,” wrote Stelzer. “Therefore, the Defendant is entitled to some of the requested documents within his [Civil Investigative Demand].”

Bailey, who last year attempted to implement a ban on gender-affirming care for people of all ages, was quick to celebrate the decision, calling it a “big day” for the state.

The activists said they will continue protesting at clinics for the next two weeks and work to penalize self-managed abortions.

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The 1864 Arizona law outlawed abortion from the moment of conception, with an exception to save the woman’s life. It made abortion a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performed an abortion or helped a person obtain one. Tuesday’s decision effectively undoes a lower court’s ruling that held that a recent 15-week ban superseded the law.

Reproductive rights advocates and supporters like Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes have called the law “draconian” and argued that a 160-year-old policy has no place in the state’s modern political landscape. But Lynn Dyer, 80, with the Life Choices Women’s Clinic doesn’t see it that way. She said she was “overjoyed” when the ruling came down.

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In the days following Tuesday’s decision, reproductive rights groups and advocates have protested across the state as abortion providers wrestle with how to move forward. The state Supreme Court said Tuesday it would put its decision on hold for 14 days so a lower court can consider “additional constitutional challenges.” Reproductive rights advocates can appeal the ruling in the two-week window. Meanwhile, a separate, ongoing suit would allow abortion providers to continue providing services through the 15th week of pregnancy until the end of May.

Greased by lobbying and campaign cash, tax breaks for retirement savings are one thing Congress agrees on. But they also blow out the deficit and add to income inequality.

Five months before Congress faced a near-catastrophic standoff over the debt ceiling, with Republicans demanding restrictions to food and Medicaid programs to rein in spending, a bill that raised the cost of private retirement savings accounts to $282 billion per year was quietly signed into law.

In this era of deeply divided politics, the 2022 bill known as Secure 2.0 was hailed as a bipartisan success — a victory for average Americans. It had sailed through the House by a whopping 414-5 vote. It followed four other major bills passed between 1996 and 2019 that dramatically expanded taxpayer savings – all equally lauded as bipartisan victories.

But that rare issue that brought a divided Washington together also increased wealth disparities and the federal deficit. And the victory was most strongly applauded by the burgeoning financial services industry, for whom tax-advantaged retirement savings has transformed a $7 trillion retirement market in 1995 to a $38.4 trillion behemoth in 2023.

Experts partnered with RIP Medical Debt, a medical non-profit that buys and forgives debt, found it had little effect on people’s credit scores and mental health

Medical debt is the most common form of debt in collections in the US. But forgiving that debt once it has gone to collections may provide fewer health and financial benefits than once hoped.

A new study by researchers who partnered with RIP Medical Debt, a non-profit that buys and forgives medical debt, found “disappointing” results when people’s bills were purchased and forgiven, with little impact on people’s credit scores and willingness to go to the doctor.

“Our hope was that this would be a cost effective intervention,” said Raymond Kluender, lead author on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) report which partnered with RIP Medical Debt, and an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

“We find no real benefits on people’s household finances or their mental health or utilization of healthcare in our study,” Kluender said.

However, he added, he doesn’t “think any of the authors on the project would not say medical debt is not a huge issue”. Instead, Kluender said, “Our interpretation is you have to intervene upstream,” which essentially means it might be more effective to provide people with financial assistance or universal, affordable healthcare – the sort that might prevent bills from accumulating – rather than forgive one bill at a time.

Paris agreement negotiator Todd Stern attacks premiers who say that decarbonisation programmes are unrealistic and should be slowed down

Political leaders who present themselves as “grownups” while slowing the pace of climate action are pushing the world towards deeper catastrophe, a former US environment chief has warned.

“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic,” said Todd Stern, who served as a special envoy for climate change under Barack Obama, and helped negotiate the 2015 Paris agreement.

“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told the Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”

But Stern said the speed of take-up of renewable energy, its falling cost, and the wealth of low-carbon technology now available were evidence that the world could cut emissions to net zero by 2050. “Obviously it’s difficult – we’re talking about enormous change to the world economy – but we can do it,” he said.

Embroidery is enjoying a resurgence as a new generation taps into its potential – both for upcycling clothes and for making an empowering declaration. Here's our DIY guide to embroidering your own clothes.

In the exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at London's Barbican, artist LJ Roberts displays three small textile artworks depicting queer parades and protests. The works, part of Roberts's series Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits, are caught between panes of glass so that visitors can see the back of each embroidery, with knots and incidental threads on show. "Working in textiles mirrors the flexibility and resilience that often permeates queer and trans survival and thriving," writes the artist on their website. "The embroideries demonstrate that art centering kinship, persistence, and connection can be made anywhere at any time."

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The resurgence is due, in no small part, to the need to confront the fashion industry's damaging impact – on everything from carbon emissions to planetary boundaries, from animal rights to racial justice. Almost 70% of all clothes are synthetic, while 40% of all clothes produced never even make it to retail; only 2% of garment workers, mainly women, are paid a living wage. The key driver is over-consumption. More and more sustainable fashion activists are calling for the imaginative re-use, through upcycling and repair, of what already exists – and one way to do this is decorative embroidery.

Police say Curtis Jack admitted that he added antifreeze to his newborn daughter’s milk to avoid paying child support.

A Georgia father was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Thursday for using antifreeze mixed in breastmilk to poison his 18-day-old daughter four years ago.

Curtis Jack was arrested on Oct. 16, 2020, after his daughter became sick and tested positive for ethylene glycol — a chemical found in antifreeze.

Investigators said Jack had picked up bottles of breastmilk from the child’s mother two weeks earlier while she was hospitalized after giving birth to their child.

“After delivering the breastmilk to the child’s grandmother, who was also caring for the woman’s other daughter, the child became critically ill within 24 hours, suspected of being poisoned. Jack admitted to adding antifreeze to the breastmilk to South Fulton Police Department detectives,” police said in a statement on social media.

• Donald Trump's views on abortion are muddled at best and threatening at worst.
• GOP lawmakers are targeting access to IVF, IUDs, birth control pills, and emergency contraception.
• So some women are stockpiling abortion pills and contraception, activists say.

Donald Trump's views on a national abortion ban have not exactly been transparent.

In March, the repeat presidential candidate seemed to support the idea: "The number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15, and I'm thinking in terms of that, and it'll come out to something that's very reasonable," he said during an interview."

Previously, he floated a 16-week ban because he liked the roundness of the number.

But then, last week, after Arizona's Supreme Court revived a near-total abortion ban dating back to 1864, Trump said the court had gone too far and that he wouldn't sign a national abortion ban if it came across his desk. "It's all about state's rights, and it will be straightened out," he said after the ruling.

The flip-flopping probably has something to do with the line Trump is trying to walk between many within his base who support a national ban on abortion and the women voters he'll need to show up for him on election day if he wants to defeat President Joe Biden in November.

Some of the 27 states that have the death penalty have not executed anyone in years but others still do – and the divide is rooted in history

The execution of Brian Dorsey in Missouri on Tuesday, despite an extraordinary campaign asking for his sentence to be commuted, brought into focus the issue of the death penalty in the US – one of the few countries in the western world that still uses corporal punishment.

Dorsey, 52, was executed for the 2006 murders of his cousin and her husband, after the number of people executed in the US rose to 24 in 2023, from 18 in 2022.

The numbers do little, however, to illustrate how unevenly the death penalty is applied in the country: and the growing opposition to capital punishment among Americans.

“It is an act of state violence that we’re using as a punishment,” said Elyse Max, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty.

The father is asking for $1 million in damages due to what he says was permanent scarring from the branding ceremony.

A Texas man is suing a local Hindu temple, alleging it branded his son with a hot iron during a cultural ceremony. 

Vijay Cheruvu, of Fort Bend County, said he did not give his consent for his son to participate in the event in August, during which he alleges several children were branded in front of a group of adults.

The lawsuit, filed last week in Texas’ 458th District Court, says Cheruvu’s son was burned on both shoulders against his will, causing extreme pain, permanent skin damage, an infection and emotional trauma. 

“I was shocked. I didn’t know how to handle it. My primary concern is for my son’s well-being,” Cheruvu said at a news conference covered by local TV channels.

For decades, only three people knew Gloria Johnson had had an abortion.

But a year of watching women and doctors agonize under Tennessee’s strict abortion ban kicked up a fire in the longtime Democrat. She watched in dismay as her Republican colleagues in the General Assembly dismissed concerns that the law was harming women. Many GOP lawmakers argued that only on rare occasions was an abortion needed to save a life.

So without telling her legislative staff or family in advance, the then-60-year-old state representative stood before a Republican-controlled House panel in March 2023 and testified about the abortion she had at age 21. She made the decision to have an abortion, she said, as a newly married college student after being diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm. That would likely have killed her if she did nothing, but might have harmed the baby if Johnson got the treatment she needed to save her own life.

“The reality is that we’re in a situation where people act like stories like mine are one in a million when actually they happen every day,” Johnson said in a recent interview, nearly a year after her dramatic testimony.