Doctors across the nation are alarmed that skepticism fueled by rising anti-science sentiment and medical mistrust is increasingly reaching beyond vaccines to other proven, routine, preventive care for babies.

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which analyzed more than 5 million births nationwide, found that refusals of vitamin K shots nearly doubled between 2017 and 2024, from 2.9% to 5.2%. Other research suggests that parents who decline vitamin K shots are much more likely to refuse getting their newborns the hepatitis B vaccine and an eye ointment to prevent potentially blinding infections. Rates for that vaccination at birth dropped in recent years, and doctors confirm that more parents are refusing the eye medication.

“I do think these families care deeply about their infants,” said Dr. Kelly Wade, a Philadelphia neonatologist. “But I hear from families that it’s hard to make decisions right now because they’re hearing conflicting information.”

The latest edict from beard-obsessed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth adds strict new regulations to his crusade on facial hair, which rights groups have characterized as an attack on troops’ civil liberties.

In a March 11 memo, Hegseth, who has made grooming and appearances a central focus in his time at the helm of the U.S. military, raised the bar to qualify for a religious exemption to his blanket ban on beards. The guidelines lay out a strict new process by which service members may apply for a religious exemption and subject those who’ve already received one to a reevaluation, arguing they need to ensure their religious beliefs are “sincerely held” and have a genuine conflict with the grooming standards.

Service members who have spoken against Hegseth’s focus on grooming standards say his restrictions on beards are exclusionary to people from religious communities that require adherents to follow specific tenets of faith around beards, hair, and other grooming matters.

Sikhs, for example, who have served in the U.S. military since at least World War I, are required by their faith not to cut the hair on their head, to keep a beard, and to wrap their long hair in a turban. Members of many schools of Muslim tradition likewise have rules around beards and hair length.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked a federal judge to dismiss charges against two former police officers involved in the raid that resulted in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, a black woman, in her home.

Former detective Joshua Jaynes and former sergeant Kyle Meany were alleged to have used false information to obtain a search warrant to enter Taylor's home in March 2020.

Prosecutors asked the court to dismiss misdemeanour charges against the Louisville officers, which were initially more severe felony counts, but later downgraded by a judge.

In a post on social media, Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, said she was extremely disappointed in US President Donald Trump and the DOJ.

The request comes just a week after the six-year anniversary of Taylor's death.

A far-right conspiracy theorist turned high-ranking official at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) claims to have once teleported to a Waffle House.

Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.

On a January 2025 podcast appearance, Phillips claimed that his car was “lifted up” while he was driving and transported 40 miles (65km) away into a ditch near a church. And in another instance on the same episode, Phillips said he was teleported 50 miles away to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, CNN detailed in a deep dive into Phillips’ past public statements.

“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said on the podcast Onward, co-hosted by rightwing activist Catherine Engelbrecht.

But Phillips did warn about the dangers of teleportation.

“Teleporting is no fun,” he said “You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”

The circumstances of many of the record number of deaths in US immigration custody under the second Trump administration have left loved ones often searching in vain for answers amid a lack of transparency over key investigations.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports mandated by Congress, autopsy reports and 911 calls collected by the Guardian raise questions about the quality of medical care, allegedly inadequate or haphazard responses to emergencies, and contraction of diseases and infections inside detention facilities that in some cases contributed to detainee deaths.

Families and their attorneys, as well as immigration advocates and Democratic elected officials have struggled to navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth of multiple federal agencies, local medical examiners and coroners, walled-off detention facilities, and, in some cases, local law enforcement, to obtain answers about the many deaths.

Veronica Escobar, a Texas congresswoman, said the maze of local and federal agencies and facilities, as well as private contractors operating detention facilities is a “massive problem”.

“It’s a quagmire created by choice … This is not how things should work,” she said.

A small community in the Arizona desert has broken a record for the highest March temperature ever recorded in the US, as the south-west bakes in a blistering late-winter heatwave.

The astonishing temperature was recorded just outside Martinez Lake, Arizona, which reached 110F (43.3C) on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

The community is about 145 miles (233km) west of Phoenix and sits on the Arizona-California border, in the Yuma desert.

The previous record of 108F (42.2C) had been set in Rio Grande City, Texas, in 1954 and was tied on Wednesday by the tiny desert community of North Shore, California.

By the 1980s, Detroit’s once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.

Now western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a similar “profound strategic mistake” as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine just as oil prices are soaring once again. Experts say the industry’s future – and that of tens of millions of jobs – could be on the line. This time, however, the threat is from China.

Cheap, well-made electric cars from brands such as BYD and Leapmotor are finding buyers across Europe. BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest EV seller this year. Chinese marques are fast seizing the market share once dominated by the likes of Volkswagen, Ford, Peugeot and Renault.

In the US, the pullback has been even more severe. Donald Trump has in effect wiped out the country’s electrification push by cancelling tax credits for consumers and dismantling exhaust emissions rules, which he calls a scam.

Moscow proposed a quid pro quo to the U.S. under which the Kremlin would stop sharing intelligence information with Iran, such as the precise coordinates of U.S. military assets in the Middle East, if Washington ceased supplying Ukraine with intel about Russia.

Two people familiar with the U.S.-Russia negotiations said that such a proposal was made by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev to Trump administration envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during their meeting last week in Miami.

The U.S. rejected the proposal, the people added. They, like all other officials cited in this article, were granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions.

The Trump administration is moving forward with its plan to swiftly remove Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia as soon as a court allows.

In a series of filings on Friday, administration officials asked a judge to dissolve a preliminary injunction that bars them from re-detaining Abrego Garcia and deporting him.

Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador who had been living in Maryland with his wife and children, was deported last March to El Salvador's CECOT mega-prison -- despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution. The Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13, which he and his attorneys deny.

SoftBank Group is prepping to build a new AI data center in Ohio that could reach 10 GW of power demand and cost $30 billion to $40 billion for the computing infrastructure and a further $33 billion for a natural gas power plant, reports Bloomberg.

When completed, the new site could be one of the largest AI data centers ever built. Furthermore, it will be powered by one of the world’s largest fleets of gas turbines, equivalent to the energy supply of nine nuclear reactors.

The US Treasury on Friday (Mar 20) temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil already loaded onto vessels, in Washington's latest step to stem a supply crisis over the Middle East war.

The authorisation allows for the delivery and sale of Iranian crude oil and other petroleum products loaded onto ships before Mar 20, and will last through Apr 19, the Treasury said in a statement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260321012446/https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/iran-war-hormuz-oil-prices-us-sanctions-6008151

Elon Musk was misleading in his public statements during a crucial period of his 2022 Twitter takeover, a jury has found.

After two days of deliberations, a jury in San Francisco federal court decided in a unanimous verdict against the tech titan, who was sued by a group of Twitter investors arguing they had relied on his statements.

While testifying in court earlier this month, Musk argued that he did not mislead investors and that people simply read too much into his public comments and tweets.

The jury instead found that certain of his public claims of problems in Twitter's user metrics, and that he was possibly backing out of the $44bn acquisition deal, were intentionally misleading.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44506378

Since becoming defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has found no shortage of ways to bring his strand of conservative evangelicalism into the Pentagon.

He hosts monthly Christian worship services for employees. His department’s promotional videos have displayed Bible verses alongside military footage. In speeches and interviews, he often argues the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and troops should embrace God, potentially risking the military’s secular mission and hard-won pluralism.

Now the defense secretary’s Christian rhetoric has taken on new meaning after the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran, an Islamic theocracy.

This some bullshit

Posting because this hasn't hit the news yet. Wahiawa reservoir is currently failing or expected to fail. If you live or stay north shore, evacuate to higher ground NOW!!!

The Pentagon is reportedly sending three California-based warships and roughly 2,500 Marines to the Middle East, the second significant deployment in a week.

The three warships are part of the San Diego-based USS Boxer amphibious ready group. The Marines are from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Pendleton. The deployments were reported Friday by the Associated Press, citing Pentagon sources.

A 2,500-strong Marine unit accompanied by the USS Tripoli warship launched from Japan on Saturday.

The major reinforcement comes as the war’s economic shock waves are felt throughout the globe, as Washington seeks to secure vital shipping lanes and deter further attacks on energy infrastructure around the Persian Gulf.

A 31-year-old Georgia woman has been charged with murder by police who say she took pills to induce an illegal abortion.

If state prosecutors decide to move forward with the murder charge brought by local police against Alexia Moore, her case would be one of the first instances of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions.

The arrest warrant charging Moore with murder uses language that echoes the law, saying police determined that Moore had been pregnant beyond six weeks “based on the medical staff’s knowledge that the baby had a beating heart and was struggling to breathe”.

“No one should be criminalized for having an abortion,” Dana Sussman, senior vice-president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice said in a statement, calling Moore’s case “an unprecedented murder charge for an alleged abortion”.

A second senior White House official who is also closely involved in the video-making effort described it as a collegial, creative endeavor. “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” said the person, also granted anonymity to speak candidly. “There’s an entertainment factor to what we do. But ultimately, it boils down to the fact that no one has ever attempted to communicate with the American public this way before.”

Rep. Scott Perry has suggested that Iran should compensate the United States for the cost of Operation Epic Fury, effectively arguing that Tehran pay for the brutal airstrikes it has suffered.