DocMcStuffin

A bill that would radically change Florida’s citizen-led constitutional amendment process received its first hearing in the Legislature on Thursday, where dozens of Floridians warned it would deal a major blow to direct democracy.

The measure (HB 1205), sponsored by Fort Myers Republican Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, was approved mostly along party-lines by the House Government Operations Subcommittee, although Osceola County Democrat Jose Alvarez joined committee Republicans in voting yes.

IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
  To call upon a neighbour and to say:–
"We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
  Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
  And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
  And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
  To puff and look important and to say:–
"Though we know we should defeat you,
        we have not the time to meet you.
  We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
  But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
  You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
  For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
  You will find it better policy to say:–

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
  No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
  And the nation that plays it is lost!"

US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites.

Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill.

Lofgren's press release includes a quote from Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). As we've previously written, the MPA has been urging Congress to pass a site-blocking law.

For years, Wellpath, the largest commercial provider of health care in jails and prisons across 37 states, has been the target of federal lawsuits and scrutiny by lawmakers for its practices that have been alleged to cause long-term health problems and the deaths of dozens of incarcerated individuals.

As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, a federal judge in Texas granted a pause in all lawsuits that involve Wellpath. Legal proceedings in such cases can take years in normal circumstances, but Wellpath's bankruptcy means dozens of those cases, like the Capaci case, are on hold for the foreseeable future.

Reporting Highlights

• An Insurer Sanctioned: Three states found United’s algorithmic system to limit mental health coverage illegal; when they fought it, the insurer agreed to restrict it.
• A Patchwork Problem: The company is policing mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, highlighting a key flaw in the U.S. regulatory structure.
• United’s Playbook Revealed: The poorest and most vulnerable patients are now most at risk of losing mental health care coverage as United targets them for cost savings.

Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.

By the end of 2021, United’s algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states.

But that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, ProPublica found, after reviewing what is effectively the company’s internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses. The insurer’s strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.

Hurricane Milton dumped so much rain over parts of Florida’s Tampa Bay area that it qualified as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.

St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in the 24-hour period during which the storm made landfall, according to precipitation data from the National Weather Service.

That included a staggering 5.09 inches in one hour, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET — a level considered to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon's Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve bowel health in people with constipation, according to data from a randomized triple-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.

Black girls face more discipline and more severe punishments in public schools than girls from other racial backgrounds, according to a groundbreaking new report set for release Thursday by a congressional watchdog.

The report, shared exclusively with NPR, took nearly a year-and-a-half to complete and comes after several Democratic congressional members requested the study. Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later with support from Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, asked the Government Accountability Office in 2022 to take on the report.

Over the course of the 85-page report, the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.