A few weeks before Christmas in 2022, Amber Lavigne was cleaning her 13-year-old’s bedroom when she stumbled upon her daughter’s secret: a chest binder. She learned that Autumn had been wearing the garment, which girls use to flatten their breasts to achieve a masculine appearance, for about two months at school in Maine, where she had adopted a boy’s name, Leo, and was using he/him pronouns.
It was the first of...
California’s $200 billion-a-year Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, is one of the largest public healthcare systems in the nation. Behind the staggering price tag lies a program repeatedly flagged for waste, mismanagement, and fraud, raising fresh doubts as state leaders propose taxing billionaires to keep it afloat.
For years, audits and federal investigations have documented everything from improper payments to large-scale fraud schemes. State officials have acknowledged that fraud has reached...
The future was supposed to have arrived this year in a cluster of counties just east of Atlanta in the form of a state-of-the-art factory that would churn out 400,000 electric vehicles a year. But when JoEllen Artz looks about her lifetime neighborhood, all she sees are holes.
“Those shovel holes they made in the ground? That’s it,” she said of the planned site of a Rivian manufacturing plant. “It’s awful,...
The push to “protect” children from cell phones and social media is gaining momentum worldwide. As EU and Asian countries consider legal limits on minors’ access to social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in a Los Angeles courtroom last week about whether his company’s popular apps, which include Facebook and Instagram, are addictive.
That question already seems to have been resolved in the public mind. Pennsylvania now seems poised to become the...
