u/Silent-Resort-3076

Snippet:

• President Donald Trump earlier this year bought as much as $680,000 in stock of Eli Lilly, the maker of blockbuster obesity drugs, as the agencies he oversees undertook an agenda that largely benefited the company.
• On May 14, the federal government released ethics disclosures revealing a list of stock and bond trades made on Trump’s behalf from January to March of this year. They included extensive trades across the economy, including investments in tech giants such as Microsoft and Nvidia, aerospace firms such as Boeing, and household-name companies such as Target and Chipotle.
• In healthcare, however, the trades for Lilly — a company valued by the stock market at just under $1 trillion — stand out. That’s because the timing of Trump’s purchases coincides with several favorable government decisions benefiting the drugmaker’s GLP-1 business, including progress toward a long-held goal: qualifying the drugs for reimbursement from Medicare, the government health insurance program primarily serving seniors, when they are prescribed for weight loss.

• Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new bill that will allow staff at state colleges and universities to carry guns on campus.
• The new law expands Florida’s existing school guardian program.
• Under the new law, staff members who choose to carry guns must undergo weapons training.
• These staff members must also be certified by a sheriff to participate in the program.
• Participation in the school guardian program is not mandatory for educators.
• The new law has drawn criticism from some, including a professor at Florida State University.
• The professor, who survived a mass shooting last year, expressed concern that the new measure could be detrimental.
• The professor believes the law may do more harm than good.

WHY wasn't this mandated from the start??

• A Senate Democrat is proposing a bill that would require large data centers to secure their own power in a bid to reduce energy costs.
• Dubbed the Energy Cost Fairness and Reliability Act, Sen. Adam Schiff‘s (D-Calif.) bill is the latest effort in Congress to tackle energy affordability as Americans decry high electricity costs and power-hungry artificial intelligence data centers.
• The bill requires data centers that are over 50 megawatts to bring their own power, a common call among Democrats and Republicans amid national pushback against data centers. President Donald Trump received pledges in March from large technology companies that they would secure their own electricity for data centers and pay for grid upgrades.
• A spokesperson in Schiff’s office said the bill intends to enforce the pledge through a law change. The bill doesn’t have any GOP co-sponsors, though a spokesperson said they’re having conversations with other lawmakers to drum up support for the proposal.
• “Artificial intelligence is already deeply impacting our society, economy, and national security, and it is critical that we maintain our international leadership—however that growth cannot come at the cost of consumers or society,” Schiff said in a statement.
• Data centers must pay for the grid upgrades they require and can’t siphon power from existing power plants, according to the bill. It also directs the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to update its rules related to transmission lines — which transport electricity — to allow data centers to reduce demand during peak energy hours.

PART 1:

• A new report shows reading scores have been dropping sharply all over the country for the past decade, in 83% of school districts.
• The report calls it a “learning recession,” and the biggest fall in scores has happened in Florida. Compiled by researchers at Stanford and Harvard, the annual Education Scorecard focused on grades 3-8.
• By the state of Florida’s standards, Broward and Miami-Dade public school students are succeeding at the highest levels, as each school district is A-rated. I asked Broward’s superintendent, Dr. Howard Hepburn, what he intends to tell parents when they ask about this report, which shows Florida’s kids are last in the nation.
• “I will have them look at Broward County Public Schools data, and it will show that we are outranking more than half of the nation’s school districts when it comes to reading and math,” Hepburn said.
• The Education Scorecard used data from 35 states and showed that over the past 10 years, student performance in reading and math dropped almost everywhere in the country. I asked Miami-Dade School Board member Dr. Steve Gallon what should be learned from the report.
• “I think we need to focus more on the things that are proven, sound practices,” Gallon said.
• Miami-Dade County Public Schools sent us a statement, saying the district has been “consistently outperforming the state and comparable urban districts in both math and reading.”

Country: USA

Snippet 1:

• Two years after Florida's six-week abortion ban went into effect, an OB-GYN with over 30 years of experience says he thinks the restrictions have taken a toll on pregnancy care — regardless of whether patients are seeking to terminate.
• Dr. Aaron Elkin is an OB-GYN at Memorial Regional Hospital in Broward County. He's also the chair for the South Florida Section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
• On "The Florida Roundup," he explained how there was an initial lack of clarity in the law for physicians, how it created difficulty for patients to get pregnancy care even if they did not want to terminate, and other topics.
• "You gotta understand that as physicians, we really need to try to really have shared decision-making with the patients and evaluate the patients. We should be able to actually prescribe their treatment," Elkin told host Tom Hudson. "In the last two years, there has been an enormous difficulty for physicians to understand the law and then to clarify the law, and then to actually provide medical care for patients."
• Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 300 in 2023, which banned most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The law took effect on May 1, 2024.

>Seattle-based law firm alleges that world’s largest online retailer passed rising costs from Trump tariff increases directly to consumers and later, after those tariffs were invalidated, allowed the federal government to keep the funds to “curry political

Part 1 of 3:

• Thousands of people from across the country descended on Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, on Saturday. They arrived by bus, by car and by plane to gather for the All Roads Lead to the South rally, following the supreme court’s Louisiana v Callais decision last month, which essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act and severely limited protections against voting discrimination.

>Organized by a coalition of national and local civic engagement groups, the rally took place outside the Alabama state capitol building, in the same plaza where the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches – three nonviolent demonstrations in support of Black voting rights – are enshrined.

• “We’re here, Montgomery, not at a stopping point, but at a starting point,” Steven L Reed, mayor of Montgomery and the first Black person to hold the position, told the crowd. “We’re here in this city because of the spirit, because of the courage and because of the commitment of our forefathers and foremothers who got us to this point.”

This gets crazier and crazier!

• One of three small children in an SUV pulled a loaded gun out of a diaper bag and turned toward a police officer during a traffic stop in St. Paul, according to charges against the driver.
• Kenneth Ray Terry, 37, of St. Paul, was charged May 13 in Ramsey County District Court with endangerment of a child by firearm access, a gross misdemeanor, and misdemeanor possessing a pistol without a permit in a public area.
• Terry was arrested then released on his own recognizance ahead of a June 10 court appearance. Court records do not list an attorney for him. Contact information for Terry was not immediately available.
• Police said Terry is the father of the 3-year-old, who was the oldest of the children in the SUV with him.
• According to the criminal complaint:
• About 2:15 p.m. May 11, police stopped an SUV on Thomas Avenue near Galtier Street after seeing the driver was not wearing a seat belt.
• Terry told the officer he did not have a driver’s license and apologized for not having his seat belt on.
• The officer determined a warrant was pending for Terry’s arrest stemming from a domestic assault allegation.
• After additional police arrived, Terry reached toward the back seat that was occupied by the three children. The officer thought Terry was just checking on the children.
• Terry was informed of the outstanding warrant, and he contended it was for someone else. He was then arrested.
• Another officer looked in the SUV and saw that one of the children wasn’t properly buckled and was crying. Another child was concerned about the mucus coming from their sibling’s nose and climbed to where a Mickey Mouse diaper bag was on the floorboard.
• “The child reached into the diaper bag for a tissue, then turned toward the officer holding a Taurus handgun,” read the complaint. “The officer had the child put the gun down on the car seat and recovered it.”

This is all I could get as there is a paywall:

Three dollar average increase per month??

• Bradenton officials may raise utility rates, with more increases likely to follow after city leaders emphasized a critical need for infrastructure funding.
• City council members reviewed staff’s request to increase city utility rates by 7.5% at the May 6 workshop meeting. If approved during a vote in June, the rates would be effective immediately and would result in a $3 increase on the average utility bill.

Snippet:

• Some people received ballots for the wrong party. The vendor will pay to replace ballots ahead of June 23 primary
• Maryland will have to reissue roughly 400,000 mail ballots after voters reported receiving ballots for the wrong party.
• The state started sending mail ballots this week ahead of the June 23 gubernatorial primary to those who had requested them.
• State Board Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis said the majority of voters received the correct party ballot, but it’s not possible for the state to research which voters received incorrect ballots. So they are replacing the whole batch.
• Voters who were mailed a ballot before May 14 are affected.

• The Texas Supreme Court has rejected an effort by GOP officials to expel Democratic lawmakers who briefly fled the state last summer in an attempt to prevent Republicans from passing a partisan gerrymander.
• The Democrats ultimately returned two weeks later, and the Republicans passed their unprecedented, mid-decade redistricting proposal, setting off a wave of similar gerrymanders across the country.
• Nonetheless, the ruling by the state’s highest court is a blow to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) — and is noteworthy because all the justices are elected Republicans.