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Government Watchdog: Trump Illegally Blocked Health Research Funding

Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray, Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, issued the following statement on a Government Accountability Office (GAO) decision issued today, which concludes that President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. illegally impounded fiscal year 2025 funding for health research conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research […]

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Oct 7 • 2:11 PM EDT • Health • murray.senate.gov
Government report calls for urgent immigration enforcement plans to stop wasting taxpayer money

A Government Accountability Office report says ICE's lack of planning while expanding detention and operations led to wasteful spending.

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Oct 7 • 5:10 AM EDT • Politics • wusf.org
Peng Gao receives NIH New Innovator Award for research measuring chemical exposure in blood and tissues | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Peng Gao was awarded an NIH Director's New Innovator Award from the NIH's High-Risk, High-Reward Research program.

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Oct 6 • 10:47 AM EDT • Health • hsph.harvard.edu
Federal Agencies Lack Data to Track Small Business Research Awards

Federal agencies awarded $4.4 billion in SBIR and STTR grants, but missing commercialization data obscure results. See what GAO says needs to improve.

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Oct 2 • 11:00 AM EDT • Business • legis1.com
GAO Finds Conflict Investigation Unreasonable Where Agency Failed to Ask Awardee About Business Relationship

In Viderity Inc. – Costs, GAO found an agency’s investigation into a potential conflict of interest to be unreasonable where the agency “failed to inquire

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Sep 30 • 2:13 PM EDT • Business • insidegovernmentcontracts.com
Maternal Mortality Reviews Drive Medicaid, Health Equity Changes

GAO report reveals how maternal mortality review committees are pressuring states to expand Medicaid and mental health services. Discover key findings.

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Sep 29 • 3:05 PM EDT • Health • legis1.com
VA Moves Slowly on Pacific Veterans' Health Care

GAO report reveals VA slowly implementing health benefits for Micronesia, Marshall Islands veterans. Learn why Congress-authorized care remains incomplete.

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Sep 28 • 12:39 PM EDT • Health • legis1.com
Governor Stein Announces $5 Million to Strengthen Small Businesses in Western North Carolina

(RALEIGH) Today in Lansing, Governor Stein announced $5 million in new infrastructure grants to support small business recovery in western North Carolina through the Small Business Infrastructure Grant Program. Two years since Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina, Governor Stein continues to advocate for a $10 billion appropriation from Congress to support the next phase …

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Sep 24 • 6:15 PM EDT • Business • wataugaonline.com
HOMETOWN HEALTH: “Women have carried this alone for generations” Senate holds first-ever hearing on menopause care gap

More than 1 million U.S. women go through menopause every year, according to the hearing.

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Sep 22 • 8:12 AM EDT • Health • wdbj7.com
Do pimple patches actually work? Here’s what the science says

If you’re squeamish, you might want to avoid the TikTok videos of people peeling off their pimple patches. But if you want to know if they really work, read on.

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Sep 15 • 10:13 PM EDT • Science • theconversation.com
Gov. Stein Announces $1.25 Million to Expand School-Based Health Centers, Including Appalachian District Health Department

Gov. Josh Stein and the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services announced $1.25 million in federal funding through the North Carolina Rural Health Transformation Program to expand preventive and acute health care, provide nutrition support and address behavioral health needs at school-based health centers. Five organizations will receive funding: the Appalachian District Health Department, …

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Sep 14 • 12:57 PM EDT • Health • wataugaonline.com
Many states have legalized marijuana in some form, but under federal law it remains a controlled substance. That conflict creates challenges when cannabis-related businesses seek banking and other financial services from federally regulated institutions. In this video, GAO Director Courtney LaFountain explains: • The federal guidance available to financial institutions serving cannabis-related businesses • Why banks must conduct enhanced due diligence and file additional reports • What financial institutions consider when deciding whether to serve the cannabis industry • Why cannabis businesses may face higher banking fees and limited access to loans • How restrictions on payment processing

Many states have legalized marijuana in some form, but under federal law it remains a controlled substance. That conflict creates challenges when...

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Sep 8 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • gao.gov
Structure Fire Contained at Yuma Lane Business

Multiple area fire departments responded to a structure fire at a business in the 100 block of Yuma Lane Tuesday morning, though the blaze was quickly contained with only light damage to the building. Watauga County Communications received the call just before 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 25. Responders arriving on scene noted light smoke coming …

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Aug 25 • 9:34 AM EDT • Business • wataugaonline.com
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Pentagon faces challenges in tracking troop brain health: GAO report

The GAO says the military is struggling to assess brain health and track troops' exposure to potentially harmful blast waves from weapons and attacks.

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Aug 24 • 11:57 AM EDT • Health • businessinsider.com
Xpeng says its robotics business raised over $900 million in first funding round

China's Xpeng ​said on Monday ‌its robotics business raised ​over $900 million ​in its first funding ⁠round, ​led by IDG ​and Gaorong Ventures and with Tencent ​and ​Alibaba as strategic investors.

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Aug 24 • 5:40 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com
Xpeng says its robotics business raised over $900 million in first funding round

BEIJING, Aug 24 (Reuters) - China's Xpeng ​said on ‌Monday its robotics business raised over $900 ‌million ​in ⁠its first ⁠funding round, led by IDG and ​Gaorong Ventures and ⁠with ⁠Tencent and ​Alibaba as ​strategic investors. Xpeng's robotics ‌busine...

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Aug 24 • 5:40 AM EDT • Business • kfgo.com
Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino reveal Romy and Michele’s new love interests in sequel

‘Romy and Michele’ stars Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino reveal their character’s new love interests in the upcoming sequel.

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Aug 14 • 11:32 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com
DOGE said it saved $1.7 billion by terminating a military health IT contract. GAO found the contract was never terminated.

DOGE reported $1.76 billion in savings from terminating a contract, but GAO found that the contract was never terminated and no funds were deobligated.

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Aug 10 • 5:33 PM EDT • Health • militarytimes.com
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.

There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe

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Aug 5 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com
Public Health Preparedness: Experts Identified Actions to Improve Surveillance for Emerging Disease Threats

Emerging infectious diseases can pose a serious threat to national health and security. Experts we convened suggested several ways the federal...

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Jul 30 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • gao.gov
A steward’s view on how business can rebuild Earth systems

Business is one of the most powerful levers for transformation when it comes to climate and nature, and needs to rethink how modern systems are designed.

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Jul 28 • 4:36 AM EDT • Business • weforum.org
Filing of bipartisan Senate bill boosts momentum for office of men’s health

Mirroring the bipartisan bill introduced in the House, the measure would require a study from the GAO on the state of men’s health in the U.S. to be presented within a year of the law’s enactment.

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Jul 23 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • statnews.com
Extreme heat is eroding health, productivity and incomes of Dhaka’s informal workers

DHAKA — On June 28, as the afternoon sun beat down on Bangladesh capital Dhaka’s sprawling Tejgaon neighborhood, Samiha Begum gathered her two school-aged children and headed for the shade of Hatirjheel Lake. Their narrow one-room home in a nearby slum had become unbearable. She said, “The room starts heating up as soon as the […]

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Jul 21 • 9:11 AM EDT • Health • news.mongabay.com
Ranking Member Markey, Senator Hirono Reject Trump’s SBA Policy Proposal that Harms Underserved Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

Letter (PDF) (Washington, July 17) – Ranking Member Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) submitted a comment letter to the Small Business Administration (SBA) opposing a proposed rule change by Trump’s SBA to the 8(a) Business Development Program that would harm underserved small business owners and entrepreneurs. The 8(a) Business Development Program was created by Congress more than 50 years ago to level the playing field for small business owners and entrepreneurs who have faced discrimination in starting and operating their businesses. The SBA’s proposed change ignores the existence of historic discrimination that minority and underserved small businesses have faced and continue to face. In the letter, the lawmakers wrote, “SBA’s proposed rule ignores present-day barriers that entrepreneurs from minority and underserved communities face. Discrimination is not dead; minority entrepreneurs continue to face reduced access to contracting opportunities and capital, as well as racial threats and targeting, including unequal treatment, refusal by others to work with minority-owned firms, being called racial slurs, and bias in the workplace. These barriers lead to wide underutilization of, and less revenue for, minority-owned businesses compared to majority-owned businesses, as supported by decades of disparity studies. The proposed rule diminishes the history of systemic racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States by claiming that remedies for discrimination create discrimination in and of themselves.” The lawmakers continued, “The program has always been open to anyone who can prove they have experienced prejudice or cultural bias in education, employment, entrepreneurship, and other facets of our society. Nonetheless SBA has moved forward with the proposed rule. It lacks a reasoned basis, purporting that the federal government has discriminated against White Americans, but offering no substantive qualitative or quantitative data or research in support. If the examples provided in the proposed rule are the only basis for what constitutes discrimination to the agency, they are woefully insufficient. The final rule must provide strong evidence that there is discrimination against White individuals and show how the rule is narrowly tailored to address it. The record remains devoid of evidence of discrimination against White individuals on the basis of race.” Ranking Member Markey is fighting to protect federal programs that address historic discrimination against small business owners from minority and underserved communities, and for a small business agenda that ensures economic opportunity for all. In June, Ranking Member Markey released a statement condemning the SBA’s proposed changes to the 8(a) Business Development Program. Also in June, Ranking Markey released a new report highlighting Trump’s drastic reduction in federal contracting dollars awarded to American small businesses, including minority-owned small businesses. In February, Ranking Member Markey, alongside Senators Hirono and Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Representative Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), introduced the Strengthening Place-based Access, Resources, and Knowledge (SPARK) Act to spur entrepreneurship and increase access to capital and resources for underserved entrepreneurs nationwide. Ranking Member Markey previously held a field hearing in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to discuss how government and the private sector can come together to make entrepreneurship more accessible for underserved communities. Earlier in February, Ranking Member Markey secured funding with the Appropriations Committee for Small Business Development Centers, Women’s Business Centers, SCORE Chapters, and Veterans Business Outreach Centers and provisions to rein in the Administration’s attempts to eliminate programs that support women, veterans, and underserved entrepreneurs. In January, Ranking Member Markey sent a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to oppose rule changes that would gut protections against discriminatory lending practices that harm small businesses. In December 2025, Ranking Member Markey sent a letter to SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler expressing significant concerns with the SBA’s overly burdensome request and unclear guidance for extensive financial documentation over the holidays, as a part of their sweeping attempts to dismantle the 8(a) Business Development Program. In July and December 2025, Ranking Member Markey sent letters to the SBA Administrator demanding answers about the Trump administration’s efforts to limit economic opportunity for American entrepreneurs, including immigrants. In May 2025, Ranking Member Markey sent a letter to the SBA Administrator rejecting President Trump’s FY 2026 budget proposal and calling on SBA to immediately release funding for the entrepreneurial development programs, which include programs like the Women’s Business Centers and the Veteran’s Business Development Centers that support underserved small business owners. In April 2025, Ranking Member Markey introduced the New Start Act of 2025 to establish a five-year pilot program providing grants to support entrepreneurial development training for currently or formerly incarcerated individuals. In February 2025, Ranking Member Markey sent letters to the SBA Administrator and Government Accountability Office (GAO) condemning President Trump’s war on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) policies and asking how the SBA intends to implement Trump’s anti-DEIA executive orders. ###

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Jul 17 • 5:23 PM EDT • Business • sbc.senate.gov
National Nuclear Security Administration: Additional Actions Needed to Plan for Science, Technology, and Engineering Facilities and Workforce Investments

The National Nuclear Security Administration relies on unique science, technology, and engineering facilities and a highly skilled workforce to...

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Jul 15 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • gao.gov
Window World 450 Race Week Entertainment: Hauler Parade, Trackside Live, Driver Autographs & Live Music

NORTH WILKESBORO, N.C. — When race fans from around the world arrive for the first NASCAR Cup points race in 30 years at North Wilkesboro Speedway, they'll find four days of entertainment off the track before the green flag drops for the Window World 450 on July 19. Race week will include a Cup Series …

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Jul 14 • 3:48 PM EDT • Entertainment • wataugaonline.com
DoD's weapons testing office doing more work with fewer people: GAO

Hegseth gutted DOT&E's workforce last year, leaving the office with less officers and oversight on weapons programs.

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Jul 3 • 11:33 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com
NHL Rumors: 3 Boston Bruins Who Could Be Traded Next
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Jun 28 • 10:15 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Gaona: «I’ve seen things that science can’t explain»

Neuropsychiatrist José Miguel Gaona publishes *Possession*, a journey to the boundary between reason, faith, and the inexplicable

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Jun 19 • 5:22 AM EDT • Science • omnesmag.com
Behavioral Health: HHS and DOJ Offer Grants to Help Human Trafficking Survivors

Given the trauma that survivors of human trafficking have experienced, they may need behavioral health services, such as therapy or substance use...

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Jun 11 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • gao.gov
Weapon Systems Acquisition: Beyond Business as Usual—Using Leading Practices to Curb Waste and Save Billions

Since 1990, DOD’s costliest weapon programs have consistently exceeded cost estimates and delivery schedules—wasting billions of dollars and decades...

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Jun 9 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • gao.gov
Here's how you can win tickets to the “Heated Rivalry” season 2 premiere

The show is giving away two tickets to the big event next year.

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Jun 5 • 11:28 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com
Federal Law Enforcement: DHS Could Improve Data Collection and Assessment of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Programs

Law enforcement officers at the Department of Homeland Security face stressors that can adversely affect their mental health and suicide risk. During...

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Jun 4 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • gao.gov
Sophie Cunningham reveals what’s ‘hurting’ Indiana Fever right now

Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham cited the team’s lack of toughness on the defensive end as the main reason behind their uneven start to their 2026 WNBA campaign. The Fever dropped to 4-4 on the season after back-to-back losses to…

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Jun 3 • 1:02 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Goalkeeper Startup to leave Manchester City

Manchester City goalkeeper Katie Startup will leave the club when her current contract expires next month.WSL Full-Time were informed of the news via an official media update from The Cityzens just a ...

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May 30 • 11:45 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
House lawmakers seek more AI transparency from the SBA

The House Small Business Committee advanced a bill requiring the SBA to deliver an annual report on its AI use, weeks after the GAO revealed issues with the agency’s inventory compliance.

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May 22 • 1:54 PM EDT • Business • fedscoop.com
AI-assisted hacking is already here, Google warns

Researchers have found the first known case of cybercriminals using AI to exploit a zero-day flaw.

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May 12 • 5:30 AM EDT • Technology • axios.com
High-Signal Publisher
Figure1_YukiNagao_20260511

Figure 1: A visual comparison showing how interfacial proton transport, previously merged in conventional measurements, can now be separated and measured at each interface.

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May 11 • 1:22 AM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org
Neon, winner of 6 straight Palmes d'Or, comes into the Cannes Film Festival an unlikely heavyweight

It’s one of the most unparalleled streaks in movies.

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May 11 • 12:53 AM EDT • Entertainment • wsls.com
Neon, winner of 6 straight Palmes d'Or, comes into the Cannes Film Festival an unlikely heavyweight

It’s one of the most unparalleled streaks in movies.

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May 11 • 12:53 AM EDT • Entertainment • clickorlando.com
Jones House Announces 2026 Summer Concert Series Lineup

The Town of Boone is pleased to announce the 2026 Summer Concerts at the Jones House, continuing a cherished tradition of free, live music in the heart of downtown Boone. Presented by the Town of Boone and sponsored by the Downtown Boone Development Association (DBDA), Omega Tees Screen Printing and Embroidery, Mast General Store, ECRS, …

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May 10 • 5:43 PM EDT • Entertainment • wataugaonline.com
Military spouses press Congress to expand small business opportunities

A new bill seeks to designate military spouse-owned businesses as a disadvantaged category under the SBA’s 8(a) Business Development Program.

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May 7 • 6:17 PM EDT • Business • federalnewsnetwork.com
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Japan’s Nippon TV Bolsters U.S. Unscripted Business With Nick Ower Hire

EXCLUSIVE: Nippon TV, the Japanese broadcaster, is stepping up its unscripted business in the U.S. and has hired former ITV America exec Nick Ower to help. Ower joins as director of development and sa...

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Apr 27 • 11:30 AM EDT • Business • yahoo.com
Establishing 5G connectivity to enable a smart regional health system

National University Health System assistant group CTO Dr Gao Yujia shares 5G-enabled connected health projects in the pipeline.

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Apr 16 • 11:22 PM EDT • Health • healthcareitnews.com
Fossils from China show complex life evolved millions of years earlier than once thought

Newfound fossils from China suggest that complex animals were around millions of years earlier than thought, among them possibly our vertebrate ancestors.

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Apr 4 • 7:30 AM EDT • Science • cnn.com
Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander admits to ‘failing Celtics test’

Thunder All-Star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's honest admission after Thursday's loss to the Celtics on the road.

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Mar 26 • 1:45 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Good Sports: El Capitan High School baseball players commit to college together

Cooper Gaoiran and Zach Hunter have always been a package deal. That's been the case for as long as they remember, all the way back to t-ball.

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Mar 20 • 8:45 PM EDT • Sports • abc30.com
iFixit Tears Down the iPhone 17e, Discovers MagSafe Upgrade Path for iPhone 16e Owners

Repair site iFixit today took apart the iPhone 17e, which is the new low-cost iPhone that Apple launched last Wednesday. The iPhone 17e is almost identical to the iPhone 16e in design, but it does include a MagSafe back panel that supports MagSafe and faster Qi charging than the iPhone 16e. When disassembling the iPhone 17e, iFixit found that the MagSafe panel for the device is the same size as the panel for the 16e, and the two are interchangeable.

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Mar 17 • 3:49 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
Health Care Workforce: Federal Grants Supporting Mental Health

Health professionals often work in stressful environments that can affect their mental health. From 2022-2024, the Department of Health and Human...

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Mar 12 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • gao.gov
Senators seek review of Justice Department’s handling of Epstein files

Trump signed a law mandating the Justice Department make public records related to the late convicted sex offender with narrow restrictions.

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Mar 11 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • detroitnews.com
How pollutants interact inside the body to impact health | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Peng Gao studies the “exposome”—the measure of an individual’s total environmental exposures over the course of their life and how those exposures impact biology and health.

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Mar 10 • 4:37 PM EDT • Health • hsph.harvard.edu
USU College of Allied Health Sciences Graduate Plays Key Role in Lifesaving Response

Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Adam Altreche, a 2023 USU graduate, utilized his military medical training to revive an unresponsive man ...

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Feb 27 • 7:00 AM EST • Health • news.usuhs.edu
Winter Olympics 2026: Chloe Kim stunned in halfpipe final

South Korea's Gaon Choi stomped her final run to end Kim's Olympic reign.

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Feb 12 • 3:58 PM EST • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Olympics news, live updates: Team USA men's hockey opens vs. Latvia; Chloe Kim takes home silver, Gaon Choi rebounds for gold after scary crash in women's halfpipe
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Feb 12 • 3:50 PM EST • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
China's Anta Sports buys 29% Puma stake for $1.8 billion, rules out full takeover

China's biggest sportswear brand Anta Sports Products said on ​Tuesday it would buy a 29.06% stake in Puma from the Pinault family for 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion), making it the biggest ‌shareholder in the German sportswear maker.

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Jan 27 • 3:03 AM EST • Sports • reuters.com
Just Wait: Alabama Football Will Be Just Fine

Roster shifts and a coaching transition rock Tuscaloosa. Yet, the Crimson Tide's enduring culture and evolving talent promise a championship future.

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Jan 25 • 11:34 PM EST • Sports • roundtable.io
Has the US made peace with the rise of China?
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Jan 4 • 12:06 PM EST • Politics • aljazeera.com
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The new science of ‘many autisms’ and what it reveals about condition’s origins

Scientists are redefining autism as a complex condition with multiple forms, challenging traditional notions.

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Dec 26, 2025 • 5:00 AM EST • Health • washingtonpost.com
The new science of ‘many autisms’ and what it reveals about condition’s origins

Scientists are redefining autism as a complex condition with multiple forms, challenging traditional notions.

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Dec 26, 2025 • 5:00 AM EST • Science • washingtonpost.com