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Nevada Regulators Fine Peptide Providers at Anti-Aging Festival Where Two Women Became Critically Ill

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Nevada regulators have fined three people who played a role in offering peptide injections last year at a Las Vegas anti-aging conference where two women became critically ill following treatment. Last month, the Nevada Pharmacy Board levied $10,000 fines against a doctor and a pharmacist who are licensed in California but who don’t have permission to practice in Nevada. It imposed a $5,000 fine against a third man who describes himself as an “ integrative health coach ” but who doesn’t appear to be a licensed health care practitioner. The pharmacy board also imposed a $10,000 fine against a Texas-based private membership association, which authorities accused of mailing the peptides to Nevada. The group, Forgotten Formula, claims a constitutional right to conduct private transactions with its members and contends those transactions occur “outside the scope” of state commercial regulations. The citations stem from an incident in July at the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festi...

Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say

This week, when 2020 voting information from Maricopa County, Arizona, was handed over to the FBI, it might have seemed like a replay of the agency’s late January raid in Fulton County, Georgia. Both are large counties in swing states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and both have long been targets of President Donald Trump’s claims that that year’s presidential election was stolen from him. But the evidence collected from Maricopa County is fundamentally different, in ways that election experts say threaten the accuracy and integrity of the federal government’s investigation. In Fulton, the FBI took the actual ballots cast in the county’s 2020 election, which had been kept in secure court storage facilities. In Maricopa, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of the county’s vote, according to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen , the subpoena’s recipient. This material — which may have included scans and photos of ballots — was stored by t...

Amid Crowded Skies, FAA Kills Rule Aimed at Regulating Space Junk

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The Trump administration is backing off a rule aimed at stopping commercial space companies from leaving rocket bodies in Earth’s orbit, a practice that experts say could threaten public safety and telecommunications. The Federal Aviation Administration first proposed the measure in 2023 , under the Biden administration, in hopes of curbing the growing junkyard of debris circling the planet. It would have required companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX to safely remove such spacecraft within 25 years of launch, saying they “pose a significant risk to people on the ground due to their mass and the uncertainty of where they will land.”  Officials cited examples such as a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket reentering Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Northwest in March 2021, which created streaks of lights across the night sky and dropped a tank on a farm in Washington state . SpaceX and other companies, however, criticized the proposal, citing concerns that included its cost, and in January, th...

Report Confirms Columbia Ignored Decades of Doctor’s Sexual Abuse

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Decades after patients first warned Columbia University that one of its doctors sexually abused them, some university administrators have finally faced consequences. On Tuesday, Columbia released a long-awaited report that details a culture of silence that allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients during his nearly 25-year career at Columbia.  In unveiling the report, the university also announced that two long-time administrators are leaving their positions.  Dr. Mary D’Alton, chair of the OB-GYN department and Hadden’s former boss, has stepped down. D’Alton will maintain her clinical practice. Dr. Lee Goldman, the former dean of the medical school, will retire. The two were administrators above Hadden. They were also among those cc’d on a 2012 letter that let Hadden continue seeing patients even after he was arrested when one woman reported he’d assaulted her. Yesterday’s report was prompted by a ProPublica investigation that revealed how Columbi...

DHS Seeks Access to Massive Employment, Salary and Family Database Legally Restricted to Use in Child Support Cases

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The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement arm is requesting unfettered access to what is considered to be the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and their most private information, including sensitive details about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials. It is called the Federal Parent Locator Service, and it’s meant for finding people who owe child support. Granting access to the Department of Homeland Security, the officials said, would violate a federal law that explicitly limits its use to determining and collecting child support payments and a handful of other narrow purposes. But DHS’ ask is being seriously considered within the Department of Health and Human Services, which maintains the database. The database contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer, and salary or wages of every employed person in the country, as well as the equivalent details for anyone listed in state unempl...

The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

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Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life. Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack. Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getti...

Credit Bureaus Are Leaving More Mistakes on Frustrated Consumers’ Reports Under Trump’s CFPB

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Rebecca Sheppard specializes in untangling other people’s financial messes. But for nearly a year, the Colorado accountant has been unable to fix a glaring error on her own credit report.  Her credit score plunged roughly 85 points because of a $240,000 student loan debt she does not owe. She repeatedly asked the nation’s big three credit reporting companies to correct the mistake, submitting documentation showing the debt belonged to her ex-husband. Even the loan’s account manager confirmed she wasn’t responsible. Still, the credit bureaus refused to remove it, jeopardizing her plans to move with her disabled father into a more accessible home. “There’s no way in the world I could qualify for the purchase,” she said. Sheppard should have been able to count on the federal government to pressure the credit bureaus to take her dispute seriously. For years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wielded the threat of fines and lawsuits to make companies fix errors and engage with...