04 Culture

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Abortions in the United States are overwhelmingly done via the abortion pill regimen, a two-pill procedure that utilizes mifepristone to cut off progesterone from the developing baby inside the womb and then misoprostol to expel the dead baby through uterine contractions. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling on May 1 that essentially said mifepristone could only be prescribed with an in-person doctor visit. The U.S. Supreme Court has since lifted the ban for one week, and it is yet to be seen what will happen with the other half of the abortion pill regimen, misoprostol.

Pro-life groups cheered the 5th Circuit ruling, but here’s the thing: medication abortions can still be done with misoprostol only. Mifepristone is not needed. In fact, many countries have been using the misoprostol-only regimen for decades. And Planned Parenthood was immediately ready to ship out misoprostol pills as soon as mifepristone was no longer an option. One day after the 5th Circuit Court ruling, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York told the New York Times they had already started mailing misoprostol-only abortion pills.

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“Artificial intelligence is not just for computer scientists anymore; it’s going to permeate every aspect of our lives and influence every business,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth.

The world is reaching an inflection point with artificial intelligence: over half of U.S. adults use generative AI — with 12 percent using it daily at work — and 88 percent of global organizations have integrated AI into at least one core function, up from 78 percent in 2024. AI knowledge is no longer optional for career growth, organizational leadership, and life. Yet, a growing information gap exists between those with the capabilities to leverage AI’s potential and those trying to keep pace.

The need for accessible, practical AI education has never been greater. To meet this moment, MIT Open Learning is launching Universal AI, an online, self-paced, modular program that takes a learner from AI novice to authority, starting with core fundamentals and building to real-world, industry-specific applications.

“We identified a need for an AI learning experience that is universal in breadth and accessibility — one that bridges the gap between deeply technical and surface level introductions to the latest AI tools, and that is designed for a non-technical, global audience,” says Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for open learning.

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Canadian citizens are expressing outrage after a woman who was seeking medical attention for back pain was offered euthanasia before she was ever diagnosed. Now, a member of Parliament is citing the story of Miriam Lancaster as proof that Canada needs to stop expanding its euthanasia program.

Miriam told her story in a social media video as well as in a post on The Free Press called, “Never Kill Yourself: When I went to the doctor in Vancouver with back pain, she offered me assisted suicide; instead, I recovered—and went to Cuba!”

It started a year ago when Miriam woke up with back pain and went to the hospital. Before testing her or diagnosing her condition, the hospital staff immediately offered to help her kill herself.

A Texas couple is suing OpenAI, alleging their product, ChatGPT, led to their son’s overdosing on drugs after following the AI platform’s advice.

OpenAI released this statement, “This is a heartbreaking situation, and our thoughts are with the family… ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical or mental health care, and we have continued to strengthen how it responds in sensitive and acute situations with input from mental health experts…”

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Marina Volz, born Matthew Volz, is currently serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted of sex crimes against his own seven-year-old daughter.

A transgender-identifying New Jersey inmate convicted of sexually abusing his 7-year-old daughter is seeking a settlement with the New Jersey Department of Corrections after filing a lawsuit alleging officials denied him access to Wiccan religious accommodations while incarcerated in a women’s prison.

Marina Volz, born Matthew Volz, is serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted of sex crimes against his own seven-year-old daughter. Volz was sentenced in May of 2022 and initially housed at a men’s facility.

Two months later, he was transferred to a women’s correctional facility. State records reportedly continued listing Volz as male until 2023, when New Jersey updated the inmate’s profile to classify Volz as female.

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A postseason track meet in California began Saturday with a “Save Girls’ Sports” rally, taking place outside of the gates. Unfortunately, the event concluded in the same fashion that we’ve seen before, with a transgender athlete absolutely dominating the competition in multiple jumping events. The situation only adds fuel to the fire of the concern regarding protection for girls and women in female sports.

A lot of attention was drawn to the Yorba Linda-based CIF Southern Section Division 3 preliminaries prior to competition beginning as a result of protestors going against the California policy of permitting trans athletes to participate in female sports.

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A huge ancient stone city buried for thousands of years in northern China has just become even more mysterious. Archaeologists working at the Houchengzui Stone City in Inner Mongolia have uncovered a hidden underground tunnel network dating back roughly 4,300 to 4,500 years. The tunnels were reportedly hidden beneath one of the largest and most heavily defended early stone cities ever found in the region. At first glance, the site already looked impressive enough with massive walls, defensive gates, and layers of protection everywhere. Then researchers discovered something underneath it all.Experts say the tunnels may have been used for both defence and movement inside the city, which raises all kinds of questions about how advanced these early communities really were. Some of the passages are still remarkably intact. You can apparently still see tool marks carved into the walls, which feels strangely personal considering the tunnels were dug more than four millennia ago.

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Over the past decade, the Left has cultivated a censorship industrial complex of “experts” on “extremism” who try to bully Big Tech and corporate America into blacklisting conservatives over hot-button cultural issues such as LGBTQ+ orthodoxy and parental rights.

While the censorship industrial complex has suffered setbacks, it enjoys a persistent influence—notably at Anthropic, the major AI company behind the chatbot Claude.

Anthropic openly touts its relationship with four branches of the censorship industrial complex, and each of them has ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC, the left-wing smear factory that pioneered the censorship strategy, now faces federal charges for allegedly lying to banks while attempting to conceal payments to members of the Ku Klux Klan, but Anthropic is not reconsidering its work with the SPLC’s allies.

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‘Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law,’ department leader says

The U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into the supposedly women-only Smith College on Monday in response to a complaint alleging discrimination on “the basis of sex by admitting males who identify as women.”

“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey stated in a news release.

“Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law. The Trump Administration will continue to uphold the law and fight to restore common sense,” Richey stated.

The department also sent a letter to Defending Education, a conservative watchdog group, informing it of the investigation.

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On Thursday, the State Senate will begin considering HCR 26, the Prenatal Development Education Resolution. HCR 26 is the first step to making sure students in Louisiana learn, through scientifically-accurate information and video, about the amazing process of a baby’s development in the womb.

On Monday April 13th, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed HCR 28, the Prenatal Human Development Education Resolution.

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Pro-life advocates have long warned about Planned Parenthood’s role in ending innocent lives through abortion, but now the threat has expanded. The abortion giant is not only ending lives in the present but it is advancing practices that may prevent future generations of children from ever being conceived.

How? By targeting minors with medical interventions that can lead to permanent sterility.

This is not speculation. It can be clearly seen in Planned Parenthood’s expanding involvement in providing so-called gender-transition services.

A review by Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee found that 14 Planned Parenthood regional reports – the regions that consistently publish comparable data – recorded a more than 40 percent increase in reported ‘gender-affirming care,’ visits, or services from 2023-2024 to 2024-2025. Because Planned Parenthood’s national 2024-2025 annual report does not provide a national total for ‘gender-affirming care,’ CWALAC aggregated figures from regional reports that publish comparable data. Planned Parenthood’s national gender-care page lists estrogen and anti-androgen therapy, testosterone therapy, puberty blockers, surgery referrals, and transition support, while noting that not every health center offers every service.

“This is several years in a row now that this number has increased despite society for the most part turning its back and reversing course on a lot of this,” Macy Petty, a legislative strategist for CCA, told the Daily Wire. “Planned Parenthood has found a way to continue this harmful and destructive business.”

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As climate change intensifies, scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about how animals will cope with a more unpredictable world. One way to gain insight is by studying how animals have already responded to natural climate fluctuations. But for long-lived, social animals like humans and other primates, gathering this kind of evidence takes time.

After a lower court issued an injunction temporarily blocking the abortion pill from being delivered through the mail, SCOTUS has lifted the injunction. The abortion pill will continue to be available online until the matter is fully adjudicated in the courts. The ruling could make abortion an issue in the 2026 midterms. This is an issue that favors the Democrats.

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Nature has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning.

The original paper, titled “The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis,” was originally published in May of last year by Jin Wang and Wenxiang Fan of the Hangzhou Normal University in China. It is a meta-analysis, meaning it combines data from 51 research studies published between November 2022 and February 2025 on the effectiveness of ChatGPT in education. The paper claimed it found that ChatGPT had a large or moderately positive impact on “students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking.”

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The Center for Christian Virtue is prepared to pursue legal action after the group’s proposal for displaying three crosses on top of its building was rejected by the city of Columbus, Ohio.

The unanimous decision against the center, a 501(c)(3) family policy organization in downtown Columbus, was made on April 28 by six members of the city’s Downtown Commission, which laid out their objections in a staff report.

It’s a move that Aaron Baer, the center’s president, called “frustrating.”

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At a fundraiser in early January, Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo outright admitted to donors he wasn’t the most inspiring candidate. “I am not enough of a motor—uh, a motivator—as a governor candidate to get them off the couch,” he said on a recording obtained by the Nevada Independent.

“We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” Gov. Lombardo reassured the room.

But the governor had a plan to fix it. “We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” he reassured the room. One measure would mandate photos IDs at the polls, a policy that targets racial minorities. The other initiative would tap into a newer but no less virulent strain of right-wing grievance: “The second thing we’re going to do is this thing called Men in Women’s Sports,” Lombardo said at another event last October, referring to a Nevada constitutional amendment he proposed earlier this year that would ban trans girls and women from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

“Yay!” a few listeners responded. “Yeah!”

“That’s going to get people out to vote,” the governor continued. “Because, just from the groans in the room, I think they’re going to support it.”

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America’s war on student smartphones is intensifying. Roughly two-thirds of US states have moved to restrict phone use in schools. The educational logic is straightforward enough. If these devices distract our kids, lock the gadgets away and learning will naturally improve—a strong prima facie case, to be sure. Yet new nationwide evidence suggests the story is more complicated than this basic common parental and teacher intuition.

A fresh NBER working paper by Stanford University’s Hunt Allcott and co-authors, “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” examines one of the most stringent approaches—lockable phone pouches that physically prevent access during the school day. Using a dataset spanning thousands of schools, the researchers take advantage of a kind of natural experiment by comparing outcomes before and after adoption against similar schools that didn’t adopt the policy.

If the goal is to keep kids off their phones while at school, mission accomplished. On those terms, the policy works. Phone use plunges with pouches—fewer GPS pings on campus and far less in-class use, according to teachers.

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Key Takeaways

  • The U.S. Department of Education proposed a rule to hold colleges accountable for graduates’ earnings, introducing an ‘earnings test’ to ensure graduates earn more than those without a degree.
  • Programs failing to meet the earnings threshold, with bachelor’s graduates earning less than high school graduates, would lose eligibility for federal student loans.
  • The proposal aims to address rising student debt, emphasizing that taxpayer subsidies should only support programs that yield better outcomes for graduates.

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A national free speech group is calling on the Catholic University of America to allow pro-Israel speakers on campus – or else face an accreditation complaint.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sent a second letter to CUA leadership on Friday, asking it to remove its restrictions on Students Supporting Israel.

The intervention follows a proposal earlier this year for the group to host Israeli homeland security expert Dany Tirza as well as Jewish Republican Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, as The College Fix previously reported.

The university is requiring the club to host a pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speaker.

While the school says this is part of their policy, that is only supposed to apply when an invited speaker takes a view contrary to the Catholic Church, such as if a club invited a pro-abortion speaker. However, the university did not even apply this policy, allowing the campus Democrats club to host a speaker who supports abortion, according to Student Supporting Israel’s leadership.

The Catholic university in Washington, D.C. allowed an event with an anti-Israel speaker, for example, but did not present the pro-Israel side, FIRE also said.

“We again strongly urge CUA to approve SSI’s event requests and assure students that the university will not condition event approval on student’s willingness to arrange for and host speakers opposed to their own viewpoint,” Program Counsel Jessie Appleby wrote to President Peter Kilpatrick.

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Chaos erupted in Wisconsin on Saturday.

On Saturday, nearly 1,000 animal rights activists attempted to storm a research facility in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin.

The research facility that the animal activists attempted to storm is home to a beagle breeding facility that has used some questionable research methods.

In response to the activists descending on the research grounds, authorities deployed pepper spray and rubber bullets.

Take a look:

AP reported more on the incident:

About 1,000 animal welfare activists who tried to gain entry Saturday to a beagle breeding and research facility in Wisconsin were turned back by police who fired rubber bullets and pepper spray into the crowd and arrested the group’s leader.

It was the second attempt in as many months by protesters to take beagles from the Ridglan Farms facility in Blue Mounds, a small town about 25 miles (about 40 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Madison.

Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett, said in a video statement that 300 to 400 protesters were “violently trying to break into the property” and assault officers. He said protesters have ignored designated areas for peaceful protest and blocked roads to prevent emergency vehicles from entering.

“This is not a peaceful protest,” Barrett said.

The sheriff’s department said a “significant” number of people were arrested out of about 1,000 protesters at the site but did not give an exact total as they were still being processed as of the afternoon.

Protesters tried to overcome barricades that included a manure-filled trench, hay bales and a barbed-wire fence. Some protesters did get through the fence but were unable to enter the facility, where an estimated 2,000 beagles are kept, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.