New research reveals key evolutionary benefit of sleeping for a season – or for centuries

The Conversation
December 9, 2024 

Heiti Paves / Shutterstock

What can plants or animals do when faced with harsh conditions? Two options for survival seem most obvious: move elsewhere or adapt to their environment.

Some organisms have a third option. They can escape not through space but through time, by entering a dormant state until conditions improve.

As it turns out, dormancy may not only benefit the species who use it. In new research, we found that a propensity for dormancy may affect the balance of competition between species, and make it possible for more species to survive together when environments change.

What is dormancy?

Many organisms use dormancy as a survival strategy.

Bears hibernate in winter, for example, and many plants produce seeds in summer that lie dormant in soil over the cold months before sprouting in spring. In these examples, the organisms use dormancy to avoid a season where conditions are hard.

However, other organisms can remain inactive for decades, centuries, or even thousands of years.

The oldest known plant seeds to germinate are 2,000-year-old seeds of a Judean date palm.

Even older plant material (though not seeds) has been brought back to life: placental floral tissue more than 31,000 years old, found in an ice age squirrel burrow.

In our research we focus on a particular kind of dormancy in animals called diapause, in which organisms reduce their metabolic activity and resist changes in environmental conditions. Here, animals usually do not eat or move much.
Does dormancy protect species from extinction?

In theory, dormancy can allow species to escape hostile conditions. However, it has been difficult to directly link dormancy to the persistence of a given species.


We tried to make this link by means of experiments using a kind of nematode worm often found in soil called Caenorhabditis elegans. In these worms, the genetic pathway that affects dormancy is well understood.



C. elegans and C. briggsae worms under the microscope. Natalie Jones, CC BY


We looked at four groups of worms. The first group were genetically more inclined to enter dormancy, the second group were less inclined to enter dormancy, the third group were completely unable to enter a dormant state, and the fourth were ordinary wild-type worms with a medium propensity for dormancy.

We created an experiment where all these groups competed with a common competitor species – another worm called C. briggsae – for food in different environments.

Using data from these experiments, we then ran millions of computer simulations to determine whether one species would drive the other to extinction over the long term, or if they could coexist in different environmental conditions.

Dormancy and competition between species

We found that when species are more inclined to dormancy, competing species can coexist under a wider range of environmental conditions.

When we simulated fluctuating environmental conditions, species with a higher investment in dormancy were able to coexist with a competitor over a wider range of temperatures.

This outcome is what is predicted in theory, but it is an exciting result because the prediction has been difficult to test. The experimental system we used has great potential, and can be used to further explore the role of dormancy in species persistence.

Our results also raise an important question: will species that have a dormant form be more resilient to the huge environmental fluctuations the world is currently experiencing? Organisms that can avoid heatwaves and drought may well be more prepared for this era of unprecedented global change.

We hope to begin finding out in the next phase of our research: linking the dynamics we saw in the laboratory to dormancy in plants, animals and microbes in the real world.

Natalie Jones, Lecturer in Ecology, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org › ... › 42 by Washington Irving

Dec 20, 2019 — The story follows Rip Van Winkle, a good-natured yet lazy man living in a small village at the foot of the Kaatskill Mountains.

AI weather models can now beat the best traditional forecasts

The Conversation
December 9, 2024 

NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Jacques Descloitres

A new machine-learning weather prediction model called GenCast can outperform the best traditional forecasting systems in at least some situations, according to a paper by Google DeepMind researchers published today in Nature.

Using a diffusion model approach similar to artificial intelligence (AI) image generators, the system generates multiple forecasts to capture the complex behavior of the atmosphere. It does so with a fraction of the time and computing resources required for traditional approaches.

How weather forecasts work

The weather predictions we use in practice are produced by running multiple numerical simulations of the atmosphere.

Each simulation starts from a slightly different estimate of the current weather. This is because we don’t know exactly what the weather is at this instant everywhere in the world. To know that, we would need sensor measurements everywhere.

These numerical simulations use a model of the world’s atmosphere divided into a grid of three-dimensional blocks. By solving equations describing the fundamental physical laws of nature, the simulations predict what will happen in the atmosphere.

Known as general circulation models, these simulations need a lot of computing power. They are usually run at high-performance supercomputing facilities.
Machine-learning the weather

The past few years have seen an explosion in efforts to produce weather prediction models using machine learning. Typically, these approaches don’t incorporate our knowledge of the laws of nature the way general circulation models do.

Most of these models use some form of neural network to learn patterns in historical data and produce a single future forecast. However, this approach produces predictions that lose detail as they progress into the future, gradually becoming “smoother”. This smoothness is not what we see in real weather systems.

Researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI research lab have just published a paper in Nature describing their latest machine-learning model, GenCast.

GenCast mitigates this smoothing effect by generating an ensemble of multiple forecasts. Each individual forecast is less smooth, and better resembles the complexity observed in nature.

The best estimate of the actual future then comes from averaging the different forecasts. The size of the differences between the individual forecasts indicates how much uncertainty there is.

According to the GenCast paper, this probabilistic approach creates more accurate forecasts than the best numerical weather prediction system in the world – the one at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Generative AI – for weather

GenCast is trained on what is called reanalysis data from the years 1979 to 2018. This data is produced by the kind of general circulation models we talked about earlier, which are additionally corrected to resemble actual historical weather observations to produce a more consistent picture of the world’s weather.

The GenCast model makes predictions of several variables such as temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed at the surface and at 13 different heights, on a grid that divides the world up into 0.25-degree regions of latitude and longitude.

GenCast is what is called a “diffusion model”, similar to AI image generators. However, instead of taking text and producing an image, it takes the current state of the atmosphere and produces an estimate of what it will be like in 12 hours.

This works by first setting the values of the atmospheric variables 12 hours into the future as random noise. GenCast then uses a neural network to find structures in the noise that are compatible with the current and previous weather variables. An ensemble of multiple forecasts can be generated by starting with different random noise.

Forecasts are run out to 15 days, taking 8 minutes on a single processor called a tensor processor unit (TPU). This is significantly faster than a general circulation model. The training of the model took five days using 32 TPUs.

Machine-learning forecasts could become more widespread in the coming years as they become more efficient and reliable.

However, classical numerical weather prediction and reanalysed data will still be required. Not only are they needed to provide the initial conditions for the machine learning weather forecasts, they also produce the input data to continually fine-tune the machine learning models.

What about the climate?

Current machine learning weather forecasting systems are not appropriate for climate projections, for three reasons.

Firstly, to make weather predictions weeks into the future, you can assume that the ocean, land and sea ice won’t change. This is not the case for climate predictions over multiple decades.

Secondly, weather prediction is highly dependent on the details of the current weather. However, climate projections are concerned with the statistics of the climate decades into the future, for which today’s weather is irrelevant. Future carbon emissions are the greater determinant of the future state of the climate.

Thirdly, weather prediction is a “big data” problem. There are vast amounts of relevant observational data, which is what you need to train a complex machine learning model.

Climate projection is a “small data” problem, with relatively little available data. This is because the relevant physical phenomena (such as sea levels or climate drivers such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation) evolve much more slowly than the weather.

There are ways to address these problems. One approach is to use our knowledge of physics to simplify our models, meaning they require less data for machine learning.

Another approach is to use physics-informed neural networks to try to fit the data and also satisfy the laws of nature. A third is to use physics to set “ground rules” for a system, then use machine learning to determine the specific model parameters.

Machine learning has a role to play in the future of both weather forecasting and climate projections. However, fundamental physics – fluid mechanics and thermodynamics – will continue to play a crucial role.


Vassili Kitsios, Senior Research Scientist, Climate Forecasting, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

THE 14TH AMENDMENT

Trump seeks to undo America's great 'triumph over racism and xenophobia': WaPo editorial

Matthew Chapman
December 10, 2024 

RAW STORY

President-elect Donald Trump's signature promise for his first day in office is not just unconstitutional, it's a betrayal of one of America's greatest accomplishments to better itself as a nation, wrote The Washington Post editorial board in a scathing criticism Tuesday.

Specifically, Trump wants to abolish birthright citizenship, the guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen regardless of parentage, a right adopted as part of English common law and affirmed by the 14th Amendment after the Civil War and the fall of slavery. He has also toyed with the idea of denying passports to children of undocumented parents.

"The late Post columnist Michael Gerson said it best when he wrote in 2018: 'Any political movement that regards the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment as an obstacle to its political intentions has earned a great deal of suspicion,'" wrote the board. "Ratified in 1868 to solidify the political transformations for which hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had given their lives, the amendment refuted the belief that a person’s race or ethnicity should determine citizenship. Its authors intended to undo the Supreme Court’s shameful Dred Scott decision, which held that no person of African ancestry could ever claim U.S. citizenship. It offers a clear, simple standard for determining who is an American, by which the color of one’s skin and their ancestry are irrelevant."

Trump and his fellows have tried to twist the plain meaning of the amendment by arguing that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” can be reinterpreted to exclude children of undocumented parents — but this is wrong, wrote the board.

"All people living in the United States — even those here illegally — are 'subject to' U.S. law. Moreover, historians widely agree that the phrase was intended to exempt two groups of people from birthright citizenship: children of foreign diplomats and members of Native American tribes that maintained sovereign status under treaties with the U.S. government," the board noted.

Additionally, the debates in the Senate at the time made it clear that everyone involved understood the amendment would apply to the children of immigrants, of all races — something that rankled white supremacists of the day, the article added.

"A triumph over racism and xenophobia, the 14th Amendment also marked the beginning of a global movement to embrace birthright citizenship, rather than determining citizenship by ethnicity or national origin," wrote the board — and, contrary to Trump's claims we are the "only" country that has such a system, almost every nation in the entire Western Hemisphere does the same.

"By harping on the idea ... Mr. Trump might please his base and scare some first-generation Americans, but he also reveals a misunderstanding of the nation’s history — and what makes it great," the board concluded.

Fox News host dismisses birthright citizenship as 'loophole' in the Constitution

David Edwards
December 9, 2024

Fox News/screen grab

Fox News host Bill Hemmer argued that the Constitution's 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to people born in the United States was a "loophole."

While speaking to Hemmer on Monday, Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany doubted President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to end birthright citizenship on "day one" of his presidency.

"That's because birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment," McEnany explained. "Not only that. In 1898, in a Supreme Court case called Wong Kim Ark, they upheld birthright citizenship. In other words, there's constitutional precedent."

"You can try via executive action. But I think they're going to be some very big court hang-ups that might not go the way of the administration on birthright citizens," she added.

"It's been a loophole when it comes to immigration," Hemmer claimed, according to Media Matters.

Co-host Dana Perino agreed: "Oh, it is. And I've gone back and forth because I love the Constitution, and I'm like an originalist."

"But then I also I want to — I would love to hear what this court thinks about that because they are originalists and when it has the Constitution and see if that precedent would hold up," she added.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "loophole" as "an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

DESANTISLAND

Insurer vows audit after report finds it ​denied 77% of hurricane claims

DON'T NEED NO STINKING AUDIT, GIMME MY MONEY!

Sarah K. Burris
December 9, 2024 

RAW STORY

Broken structures lie on top of a car after Hurricane Milton made landfall, in Venice, Florida, U.S., October 10, 2024. REUTERS/Marco Bello

A Florida insurance company is scrambling to explain why it denied 77% of claims after Hurricane Debby.

NOTUS reported in September that a significant number of insurance claims were denied. Months later, NOTUS said the company has scrambled to justify those denials.

Citizens Property Insurance Corporation announced it would conduct an “independent audit” into the claim denials. After increased scrutiny, the denied claims fell from 77% to 74%. However, according to industry-wide data, it's still much larger than the average of 68%.

That means that, on average, insurance companies deny 68% of residential property claims, and policyholders receive no payment.

Citizens CEO Tim Cerio told lawmakers that he hopes the audit will help bring back public trust, but he still believes the low approval rate is legitimate.


“To the 77% denial story that’s out there,” Cerio began, “Although I do stand behind the data I presented — our Citizens data that we’ve gathered — it is important to maintain public trust and confidence of our policyholders and stakeholders ..."

According to the company's spokesperson, Michael Peltier, that number is significantly higher than the real number. The company only closed claims "because of lack of coverage or because of flood damage are formally deemed 'denied,'" the report said.

Other denied claims fell under the policyholder's deductible or if the claim was withdrawn. Those aren't considered "denied."

Cerio told the Board of Governors that this calculation means they've only denied 13% of claims.

Insurance critic Martin Weiss, who runs an independent watchdog group, said the NOTUS number is nothing more than fuzzy math.

“If I file a claim and I get a letter back saying your claim has been closed with no payment, whether they use the word denial or not, they’re denying my claim,” Weiss said. “We look at it from the perspective of the average consumer’s actual experience.”


Still, state lawmakers were furious.

“I’m not going to sit idly by if legitimate claims get denied while rates continue to rise. Period," said Republican state Sen. Ben Albritton.

“Floridians have been paying faithfully their insurance premiums for years, sometimes decades, and now they expect their insurance company to keep up its end of the bargain. I want to make sure that impacted Floridians and insurance companies hear me loudly and clearly — we are watching,” Albritton added.

Weiss warned last month that Florida insurers are "on the brink of collapse."

Read the full report here.

KULTUS OBSCURIS

Senators urged to examine Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘deep and intense’ ties to Hawaii sect

Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat
December 10, 2024 7:57AM ET

Tulsi Gabbard (Reuters)

A former member of a secretive Hawaiʻi religious sect is warning members of Congress about the potential dangers of confirming Tulsi Gabbard as President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence.

Anita van Duyn says she spent 15 years inside the Science of Identity Foundation, a fringe offshoot of Hare Krishna that was formed in the 1970s and has been described by defectors as a cult.

Van Duyn has sent letters to Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, detailing Gabbard’s deep ties to the organization and its reclusive founder, Chris Butler, who still resides in a multimillion-dollar beachfront home in Kailua.

The letters come as Gabbard is trying to salvage her nomination on Capitol Hill this week after national security experts, former colleagues and others have openly questioned her fitness for the job, with many of the criticisms centered on her lack of intelligence experience, her parroting of Russian propaganda and sympathies for international strongmen, such as Syria’s recently deposed President Bashar al-Assad whom she visited in 2017.

The van Duyn letters outline what she says are Butler’s long-standing political ambitions and the ways he groomed and supported his disciples in their pursuit of public office while promoting his own ideologies, which include a long history of espousing anti-gay rhetoric.

Van Duyn says she worries that Gabbard is still under Butler’s influence, which could compromise national security, noting in her letter that she suspects that any sensitive intelligence Gabbard is privy to will be “communicated to her guru.”

Erika Tsuji, a spokesperson for Gabbard, did not respond to Civil Beat requests for an interview with Gabbard about her relationship with Butler and the Science of Identity Foundation.

Trump’s transition team similarly did not respond to requests for comment.

Van Duyn pointed to Gabbard’s shifting political allegiances and constant upward trajectory as evidence that she’s following Butler’s playbook, from running as a progressive anti-war Democrat in 2020 to going all-in on Trump’s second-term agenda that includes promises of pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, rolling back environmental regulations and mass deportation.

“Everybody is thinking her allegiance is to Trump, but in reality her allegiance was already given away to her guru,” van Duyn said in an interview with Civil Beat. “You can’t just go in and out of that. That’s a lifetime commitment.”

Throughout her public life, Gabbard has been dogged by her ties to the Science of Identify Foundation and Butler, in particular, who has openly described Gabbard as a star pupil.

While Gabbard has tried to downplay this relationship — often criticizing questions about it as an attempt to foment religious bigotry — experts say it shouldn’t be dismissed so easily, especially because if confirmed she’ll be responsible for leading 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, and overseeing a budget of nearly $75 billion.

Scholars specializing in cultic studies and new religious movements said the Science of Identity Foundation displays many of the characteristics that define a cult, which raises questions about whether Gabbard has the judgment and autonomy required to advise the president on matters of national security.

“It is problematic if people in the government making choices for millions of people are being exploited by these manipulative gurus,” Wind Goodfriend, a professor of experimental psychology at Buena Vista University in Iowa, said. While there’s no singular definition for what makes a cult, she said one hallmark is whether a group is “promoting prejudice and stigma that is destructive and harmful.”

Stephen Kent, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Alberta, said those who have defected from the Science of Identity Foundation and been willing to speak out have called Butler an authoritarian, narcissistic leader and described troubling experiences, including verbal abuse, sleep and food deprivation and children being forced to listen to lectures that are “deeply homophobic and sometimes sexually graphic.”

Followers bow to altars of Butler and treat objects that he’s touched or leftover scraps of food as holy relics. If they leave they often find themselves ostracized by the group, including friends and family.

Gabbard has been vague about her own experiences in the group and in 2017 told a reporter for The New Yorker magazine she’d never heard Butler say anything mean or hateful about anyone. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people,” she said.

Kent said it’s clear that Gabbard’s relationship with Butler and his Science of Identity Foundation is “deep and intense.” As a result it should be acceptable for her to be questioned about how her spiritual values might color her worldview, especially since there’s concern she might be operating from any “prejudicial notions” stemming from Butler’s teachings.

Another concern echoes van Duyn, the former disciple. What would happen, he said, if she went against Butler’s wishes?

“Anybody who studies guru-based groups knows that what’s ultimately important is pleasing the guru, not saying or doing anything that upsets or challenges the guru,” Kent said. “Would there be blowback? Would there be repercussions for her were she to take a national security position in contradistinction to Butler’s decisions?”

Jeannie Bishop, who is listed in nonprofit tax records as president of the Science of Identity Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.

Gabbard’s private and public life has sometimes been twisted up with Butler’s world. She was born into the Science of Identity Foundation and her parents, Carol and Mike Gabbard, a state senator, have been prominent figures in the group.

Throughout her political career, Gabbard has maintained ties with Butler and his followers, whether hiring them to staff her congressional office or work on her 2020 presidential campaign. Her husband, Abraham Williams, has deep roots in the organization.

Science of Identity members have donated to her campaigns, sign-waved on her behalf and even staffed her most ambitious political endeavors, most prominently her run for president. In some cases, these followers were simply volunteering their time and efforts. In others, they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Whether senators seize on Gabbard’s ties to Butler and the Science of Identity Foundation is another matter altogether.

She already faces an uphill battle based on her lack of intelligence experience, questionable liaisons with international leaders, such as Syriaʻs al-Assad, and embracement of Russian talking points. Earlier this month, nearly 100 former national security officials signed a letter telling senators they were “alarmed” at the prospect of Gabbard leading the nation’s intelligence community.

Senators could open themselves up to counterattacks if they target Gabbard over her religion, said Todd Belt, professor and director of George Washington University’s political management program. He pointed to Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her own ties to a secretive Christian group known as the People of Praise, which embraces strict and traditional gender roles for men and women.

As a nominee, Barrett faced numerous questions about her religion and how it might influence her work. But when the late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared that “the dogma lives loudly within you” it became a rallying cry for her defense and quickly put Democrats in the crosshairs of those alleging religious persecution.

Being director of national intelligence, however, puts Gabbard in a unique position, Belt said, one in which questions about her religious affiliations might be warranted. Intelligence agencies vet their employees to make sure they don’t have any conflicts of interest and to make sure there isn’t anything in their past that puts them at risk of extortion or bribery at the expense of national security.

“People are free to choose their religion,” Belt said. “The question is, to what extent does an appointee believe in the separation of church and state, and whether or not there will be a conflict of commitment in terms of the commitment to the religion and the commitment to protect the nation.”

Larry Pfeiffer, head of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University and former chief of staff to Hayden when he was director of the CIA, said Gabbard’s extensive history with the Science of Identity Foundation and Butler means there’s “definitely room for questions.”

But Pfeiffer also sees potential danger for senators trying to pin a no-vote solely on those connections. Other more concrete examples, he said, show that she doesn’t exhibit the competence and trustworthiness that’s required for the position.

The director of national intelligence has a direct line to the president and is responsible for preparing the daily briefing about potential dangers facing the U.S. and its allies. Having someone who recites Russian talking points and is “easily influenced by conspiracy theories,” he said, might not be the best pick.

Still, there are legitimate avenues of inquiry about Gabbard’s past considering the close proximity of Butler and his acolytes, from working inside her congressional office to playing significant roles in her campaigns, including when she ran for president in 2020.

“Your expectation is that a Director of National Intelligence is going to be this impartial broker of intelligence information to national leadership,” Pfeiffer said. “And if there’s any question that that individual is under some undue influence by anybody, a religious figure, a corporate figure, a foreign figure, that raises questions about their ability to be impartial.”

Coast Guard commander miscarried and nearly died after being denied care

ProPublica
December 13, 2024 

FILE PHOTO: Anti-abortion and abortion rights protestors demonstrate on the anniversary of the decision by the United States Supreme to overturn Roe v. Wade, outside the U.S. Supreme Court, in Washington, U.S., June 24, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo

By Erin Edwards for ProPublica and Robin Fields

Series: Life of the Mother: How Abortion Bans Lead to Preventable Deaths

More in this series


Reporting HighlightsA Dangerous Denial: Cmdr. Elizabeth Nakagawa was denied a D&C for a miscarriage by military insurer Tricare in 2023, even though it had paid for the same procedure two years earlier.
Barriers to Care: Federal law prohibits the military from paying for most abortion services. Some doctors say Tricare has delayed even permitted procedures, putting women at risk.
Future Fallout: Nakagawa’s experience raises questions about whether the overturning of Roe v. Wade has created a chilling effect that has further complicated access to these procedures.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

The night the EMTs carried Elizabeth Nakagawa from her home, bleeding and in pain, the tarp they’d wrapped her in reminded her of a body bag.

Nakagawa, 39, is a Coast Guard commander: stoic, methodical, an engineer by trade. But as they maneuvered her past her young daughters’ bedroom, down the narrow steps and into the ambulance, she felt a stab of fear. She might never see her girls again.

ALSO READ: The reckoning: Plenty of hurts coming for the people who didn't care about their country

Then came a blast of anger. She’d been treated for a miscarriage before. She knew her life never should have been in danger.

Earlier that day, April 3, 2023, Nakagawa had been scheduled to have a surgical procedure called a D&C, or dilation and curettage, to remove fetal tissue after losing a very wanted pregnancy. But that morning, she was told the surgery had been canceled because Tricare, the military’s health insurance plan, refused to pay for it.

While her doctor appealed, Nakagawa waited. Then the cramps and bleeding began.

In recent months, ProPublica and other media outlets have told the stories of women who died or nearly died when state abortion restrictions imposed after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision impeded them from getting critical care.

But long before Roe v. Wade was overturned, military service members and their families have faced strict limits on abortion services, which are commonly used to resolve miscarriages.

Under a decades-old federal law, the military is prohibited from paying for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. This applies even to service members based in states where abortion is legal; Nakagawa lives in Sonoma County, California.

There’s also no exception for catastrophic or fatal fetal anomalies. In such cases, service members either have to pay out of pocket for abortions or carry to term fetuses that won’t survive outside the womb.

Tricare does allow abortions in cases like Nakagawa’s, in which the fetus has no heartbeat. But even then, some doctors who treat military service members say that Tricare requires more documentation and takes longer to approve these procedures than other insurers, putting women at risk.

“There definitely have been cases where our Tricare patients have required emergency services, emergency D&C procedures, blood transfusions, things that have been critical to lifesaving care because their procedure had yet to occur,” said Dr. Lauren Robertson, an OB-GYN who has served military members and their spouses in San Diego for more than a decade.

“It just feels very unnecessary.”

Since the Dobbs decision, abortion care for service members seems to be coming under heightened scrutiny, said retired Rear Adm. Dana Thomas, who was until recently the Coast Guard’s chief medical officer and advocated for Nakagawa.

“Trust me, post Roe v. Wade, I’m sure people felt there was much more of a spotlight,” Thomas said. “I think they were more guarded after June of ’22.”

After being rushed to the emergency room, Nakagawa hemorrhaged for four more hours before doctors performed the surgery Tricare had refused to authorize. Later, Tricare and Defense Department officials would all agree that Nakagawa should have been treated as her doctor recommended, and she said they told her they’d taken steps to prevent future mistakes.

But her experience, which doctors say nearly cost Nakagawa her life, laid bare the challenges service members have long faced in obtaining reproductive health care. And it raises questions about whether the Supreme Court’s ruling has created a chilling effect that has further complicated access to these procedures.

Officials at the Defense Health Agency, which runs the military health system, including Tricare, did not respond to specific questions from ProPublica, but they provided a statement saying its policies haven’t budged.

“There have not been any changes to Tricare coverage or documentation requirements for medically necessary care of D&Cs following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision,” the statement said. “Medically necessary care was, and continues to be, covered.”

The agency declined to answer questions about Nakagawa, saying that “as a matter of practice” it doesn’t discuss individual beneficiaries’ care. (ProPublica is involved in an unrelated public records lawsuit with the DHA.)

As a senior officer, Nakagawa felt duty-bound to press for answers about what happened to her.

“The abortion policy, in theory, is supposed to protect life, and in my case it did the opposite,” Nakagawa said. “It almost led to my children not having a mother.”

After the Supreme Court upended Roe, the Biden administration took steps to reassure service members that their access to reproductive health care would remain unaffected by a wave of state abortion bans.

An October 2022 memo from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to facilitate leave for service members seeking abortions that were not covered by Tricare, and to pay for travel if care wasn’t available nearby. It also emphasized that these procedures would be “consistent with applicable federal law.”

The statute barring the Defense Department from paying for most abortions goes back to 1985 and mirrors language in what’s called the Hyde Amendment. Named for its author, Henry Hyde, a Republican representative from Illinois, Congress has attached the amendment to spending bills since the late 1970s to prohibit the use of federal funds on abortion.

With Congress in control of military spending, abortion care is highly politicized, said Kyleanne Hunter, a Marine Corps combat veteran and senior political scientist at RAND Corp. “There’s been a lot of backlash and a lot of scrutiny and a lot of congressional disapproval as to how the DOD has engaged with abortion care, D&C care and the like.”

About 9.5 million people, including active-duty service members and their families as well as military retirees and their dependents, rely on Tricare for health services. Women make up a growing portion of the active-duty force, more than 17%. They also leave the military at higher rates. Research by RAND and others suggests the military’s reproductive health policies may make it harder to recruit and retain them.

Dr. Toni Marengo, a former Navy OB-GYN, said she left the service in part because she felt unable to provide patients with appropriate care. Many of them only discovered how sharply Tricare’s policies curtailed access to procedures like D&Cs when they needed them.

“It was like living in a pre-Roe world,” said Marengo, now chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest.

The effects have been felt for decades. In 1994, Maureen Griffin and her then-husband, a captain in the Air National Guard, ended her pregnancy after learning their baby had anencephaly, a fatal birth defect. They found out the military considered her induced labor an abortion when she got a phone call from a bill collector for the hospital seeking thousands of dollars in reimbursement for the procedure.

“I said: ‘We have full coverage. My husband’s in the military.’ And they said, ‘They don’t pay for abortions,’” Griffin recalled. “We were completely blindsided. I mean, no one called it an abortion. It was a horrible tragedy.”

Griffin, then known as Maureen Britell, was so outraged that she sued the Defense Department, winning a judgment in federal district court in 2002. Two years later, an appeals court reversed the decision, upholding the Defense Department’s refusal to cover abortions in such circumstances.

Twenty-five years after Griffin’s pregnancy, Samantha Babcock spent the equivalent of seven paychecks to fly home from her husband’s Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, for an abortion Tricare wouldn’t cover.

She was five months pregnant when doctors told her that her fetus had multiple abnormalities and wasn’t viable.

The grief was crushing. Then she found out that, by law, the military couldn’t perform or pay for a surgery called a D&E, or dilation and evacuation, which her military doctors agreed was the safest option. She and her family paid $14,000 — most of it for plane tickets — with help from a GoFundMe so that she could go home to Portland, Oregon, to get the procedure.

She still can’t believe such a step was necessary.

“I assumed Tricare had my best interest at heart,” she said. “If the condition was fatal, why wouldn’t they help me?”

Babcock said her specialist told her that the military would pay to transfer her temporarily to Hawaii for more testing. They also offered to move her family to a location where they would have access to specialty care for the baby in the unlikely chance she survived outside of the womb.

For Babcock, that was untenable. “I did not want to keep growing a baby that wouldn’t live,” she said.

In August 2022, Thomas, the Coast Guard’s chief medical officer, was galvanized into action when a service member sought help to end her pregnancy after receiving a diagnosis similar to Babcock’s.

Doctors had recommended that, like Babcock, she have a D&E. Because the fetus still had a heartbeat, Tricare would not approve the procedure.

Thomas called Tricare daily trying to find a solution, then elevated the case to leaders at the DHA, which sets policy for the health plan. “We have to do something,” she told them.

Tricare stuck to its denial even after the service member’s doctor appended a note explain­ing that continuing the pregnancy would endanger the patient’s life.

That was the first case Thomas had taken on after Dobbs.

The second was Nakagawa’s.

Nakagawa and her husband, Matt, met a couple years after earning engineering degrees from the Coast Guard Academy in the mid-2000s. Their path to a family was long and bittersweet. In 2015, they suffered a miscarriage. A year later, their first daughter was born. Then came a second miscarriage, followed by the birth of a healthy girl.

For the next three years, they tried for another child. Then Nakagawa got pregnant in 2021, only to learn at 10 weeks there was no fetal heartbeat. She waited, hoping to miscarry naturally, then tried abortion pills.

When a follow-up exam showed she hadn’t passed all the fetal tissue, her OB-GYN scheduled a D&C. The procedure was approved by Tricare, and she had the surgery soon afterward.

By early 2023, Nakagawa had risen to become chief of engineering at the Coast Guard’s training center in Petaluma, California, and her husband had left the service and was supporting her as a stay-at-home dad. They were thrilled to learn she was pregnant, only to have their joy turn to devastation when two ultrasounds showed that once again, her fetus had no heartbeat.

This time, since abortion pills hadn’t worked in 2021, Nakagawa and her OB-GYN agreed the best course would be to schedule a D&C as soon as possible. Her doctor’s office scheduled the procedure for Monday, April 3, and requested approval in advance, or prior authorization, from Tricare.

Then, five hours before the procedure was scheduled to begin, the office told Nakagawa the surgery was canceled — Tricare had refused to cover it.

In its denial letter, Health Net Federal Services, the contractor that administered claims for Tricare’s western region, said the services requested were “not a covered benefit.”

The insurer’s letter also said it had requested additional information from Nakagawa’s doctor, but that the information had not been sent. (Health Net declined to answer questions from ProPublica about Nakagawa even though she waived her right to privacy.)

Her doctor maintains that wasn’t the case. She declined to be identified, citing concerns about safety.

“Tricare has always been difficult to work with for coverage of women’s health care — they require records more than other insurances — this often creates a delay in care,” the doctor said via text.

The office staff appealed the denial, telling Nakagawa they’d provided documentation of the ultrasounds showing no fetal heartbeat. The staff also told her a Tricare medical director wasn’t available to review it that day and that it might take an additional three to five days to get a response.

Nakagawa called Tricare for answers herself, only to be told her options were to wait or pay out of pocket — not only for the surgery but for any follow-up care, including mental health counseling.

“It was surreal. I was angry and shaking,” Nakagawa said. She couldn’t understand why Tricare had approved her D&C in 2021 under similar circumstances, then denied the same care two years later.

Overwhelmed by emotion, she climbed into bed and cried herself to sleep.

At about 5 p.m., her doctor provided a prescription for abortion pills as a backup plan. But before Nakagawa could pick it up, she started to miscarry.

The first signs were mild cramping and spotting. Soon after, the fetus passed. Nakagawa yelled for her husband and sobbed. They consoled themselves with the thought that they’d made it through the hardest part.

“At least this is over,” Nakagawa recalled saying. “At least God’s giving us a break for once.”

Then the hemorrhaging started — fist-sized clots of blood that soaked through sanitary pads in minutes. Nakagawa lay in the fetal position on towels, in so much pain she couldn’t sit up.

Around 9 p.m., her husband called the doctor, who recommended they go to the emergency room.

At the hospital, she was given fluids, a clotting drug and a transfusion, but her bleeding continued.

After four hours, doctors decided her condition was critical and they needed to intervene. They performed a D&C to remove the remaining tissue.

Nakagawa’s recovery took more than a week. Lying on her couch, unable to walk, she was determined to ensure other service women would get the care she was denied. Taking a risk, she banged out a long email to Thomas, who had a reputation for being approachable.

“I feel compelled to report a traumatic experience I went through that will undoubtedly impact more women in the CG and DOD if the TRICARE policy is not changed,” the email began. “The summary is that I nearly lost my life last week due largely to a TRICARE policy regarding miscarriages and abortions.”

Thomas connected Nakagawa to the Defense Health Agency’s chief medical officer, Dr. Paul Cordts, who called her personally a month after her emergency surgery.

Nakagawa said that Cordts seemed apologetic and even angry on her behalf. “This shouldn’t have happened to you,” she recalled him saying, adding that he’d get to the bottom of what went wrong. (Cordts didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica.)

Two days later, a new record appeared in Nakagawa’s Tricare file: a letter approving the scheduled D&C she’d never received and no longer needed. “Please contact the provider to schedule your appointment(s),” it said.

Cordts also arranged for Col. John Verghese, Tricare’s chief of clinical oversight and integration, to look into her case. Nakagawa said she had two calls with Verghese, who looped in a senior official at Health Net, the Tricare contractor that had dealt with the request to cover her D&C.

In one, she said, Verghese acknowledged Tricare had become more conservative in reviewing requests for D&Cs, requiring more documentation to justify approving these procedures. (Verghese, who has retired, declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the case.)

He admitted that until her case, Tricare hadn’t understood that delaying or denying care could put women at risk, she said. This infuriated Nakagawa.

“I just said, ‘Well, maybe you didn’t realize there would be physical negative consequences, but you had to know there would be mental and emotional consequences to making women carry around their [dead] fetuses’” after a miscarriage.

Verghese quickly apologized, she said.

On the final call, Nakagawa said that Verghese and the Health Net official told her that from now on, they would no longer require doctors to submit proof of no fetal heart tones to get approvals for D&Cs and would speed up reviews of appeals.

In its statement to ProPublica, the DHA maintained that Tricare’s coverage and documentation requirements for D&Cs have not changed.

Nakagawa is one of few women in senior leadership within Coast Guard civil engineering. She remains committed to serving in the military. But she worries about the impact the Defense Department’s reproductive health policies could have on service members and their spouses and daughters. Junior members especially might be less able to advocate for themselves, she said.

“At the very least, this policy will likely encourage women, like myself, to work for a company that has insurance that will cover these procedures,” she said, “At the worst, it will lead to service members or their dependents losing their lives.”


Mariam Elba contributed research.

Trump team set to end key vehicle safety rule opposed by Elon Musk's Tesla: report

Travis Gettys
December 13, 2024 
RAW STORY

FILE PHOTO: Tesla and SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk gestures, as he attends political festival Atreju organised by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia) right-wing party, in Rome, Italy, December 16, 2023. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/File Photo


Donald Trump's transition team will make a recommendation that would sabotage the government's ability to investigate and regulate the safety of self-driving vehicles like those Elon Musk's company is developing, according to a new report.

Reuters obtained a document developed as part of a 100-day strategy showing the recommendation to spike a crash-reporting requirement opposed by Musk's company Tesla, which has accounted for 40 out of 45 fatal crashes involving automated-driving systems reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

It's not clear what role Musk, the world's wealthiest person and a close adviser to Trump after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into his re-election campaign, played in developing the recommendation.

NHTSA says the data is crucial in evaluating the safety of self-driving technology, and two of the agency's former employees said crash-reporting requirements were necessary to detect crash patterns that have led to at least nine different safety recalls involving four different companies, including Tesla.

The agency's standing general order requires automakers to report crashes if advanced driver-assistance or autonomous-driving technologies were engaged within 30 seconds of a crash, but the Trump transition team calls for the administration to "liberalize" regulations and favor rules that "enable development" of the nascent technology.


Musk told Tesla investors during an October earnings call that he would use his position as a government-efficiency czar, as Trump had promised to appoint him if re-elected, to push for “a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles" instead of varied state laws that he complained are “incredibly painful” to navigate.

Tesla executives had in recent years discussed a need to end the crash-reporting requirements, the report said, citing a source familiar with the executives' thinking, but they concluded that wouldn't happen until president Joe Biden was no longer in office, because officials from his administration expressed enthusiasm for the rules.

The company finds the rules unfair because its executives believe they report better data than other companies, which they say looks like Tesla vehicles are more prone to crashes.

‘Grim place’: Famed NY Times columnist unleashes blame in bleak farewell column

Adam Nichols
December 10, 2024 

RAW STORY

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman. (Shutterstock)

Famed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman gave a bleak goodbye in his final piece for the paper Tuesday — but left with a glimmer of hope for the future.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist looked back on the 25 years since he penned his first opinion piece — and despaired at what the world has become.

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment,” he wrote as he retired from the Times.

“And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

In 1999, he wrote, there was a feeling of satisfaction and excitement for the future. But, he said, “in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.”

“Why did this optimism curdle?” he asked.

“As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

He remembered the reluctance to believe in 2002 that an American president would pursue fraudulent reasons to invade Iraq. “ Who would say that now?” he asked.

“In a different way, the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.”

But he saved much of his ire — and blame for the state of the world — for the super-rich.

ALSO READ: Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

“Some of the most resentful people in America right now seem to be angry billionaires,” he said.

“ … Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

“So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises.

“And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.”

Rep. Jasmine Crockett forces Trump-appointed official to admit DOGE cuts won't solve problems

David Edwards

RAW STORY
December 10, 2024

Jasmine Crockett (House Oversight Committee/screen grab)

Under questioning from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general appointed during President-elect Donald Trump's first administration, admitted that cuts planned by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would not help the United States Postal Service.

Crockett's questions came during a Tuesday House Oversight Committee hearing. The Texas Democrat first posed her query to Postal Service Inspector General Tammy Hull.

"There has been mention of DOGE and how that is going to come into play, and I'm curious to know, just yes or no, Inspector General Hull, quick question: have you found that if the post office was to cut its workforce by 75%, that that would somehow fix all of the problems within the post office?" Crockett asked.

"No, we've not done any work in that area like that," Hull said.

"Postmaster DeJoy, are you anticipating that a 75 percent cut in your workforce would solve all of the problems of the post office?" the lawmaker said, turning to the postmaster general.

"No," DeJoy admitted.


ALSO READ: Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

"So it's interesting because my colleagues seem to be so excited because there's a new sheriff in town, and the co-sheriff of the DOGE committee, more specifically Mr. [Vivek] Ramaswamy, has actually proposed cutting 75% of our federal workforce to try to rein in some of the spending," Crockett noted.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said he supports a DOGE goal of cutting 75% of federal agencies.

Watch the video below from the House Oversight Committee.

'Free Luigi!' Fellow inmates express support for alleged assassin

Travis Gettys
December 12, 2024 10:05AM ET

Luigi Mangione, 26, a suspect in the New York City killing of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson, poses for a booking photograph at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Huntingdon in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, U.S. December 9, 2024. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections/Handout via REUTERS 

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. THIS PICTURE WAS PROCESSED BY REUTERS TO ENHANCE QUALITY. AN UNPROCESSED VERSION HAS BEEN PROVIDED


Other inmates in the prison where UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione is awaiting extradition to New York called for him to be freed.

The 26-year-old Mangione has a cell to himself at the State Correctional Institution Huntingdon in Pennsylvania while he waits to be transferred to Rikers Island, and NewsNation spoke to some of the other inmates about the suspected assassin.

“Luigi’s conditions suck,” inmates shouted to NewsNation’s Alex Caprariello. “Free Luigi.

Gene Borrello, a former organized crime associate who spent four years at Rikers, which he called “most dangerous [prison] in America," told the outlet that Mangione would face harsh conditions and safety concerns there.

“You have to watch your back every day,” Borrello said. “There’s no structure. It’s just complete chaos. … It’s nonstop stabbings and gang violence where the cops are scared to come to work. It’s a place you want to avoid.”

Police say fingerprints taken from Mangione match those found on a water bottle found in an alley near the hotel where health care executive Brian Thompson was shot and killed last week, and officers said he had a mask, firearm, suppressor and fake New Jersey ID connecting him to the killing when he was apprehended Monday in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Mangione also had a manifesto and spiral notebook with a “to-do” list, according to news reports, and he allegedly wrote in the manifesto that he acted alone and “apologizes for any strife or traumas, but it had to be done.”

“Frankly, these parasites had it coming,” the manifesto says.