Foundations
Here's a look at documents from U.S. foundations
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Rockefeller Foundation: DengueAI - New Model That Anticipates Outbreaks With 93% Effectiveness and Three Weeks' Advance Notice
NEW YORK, May 6 -- The Rockefeller Foundation posted the following news release on May 4, 2026:
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DengueAI: New Model That Anticipates Outbreaks With 93% Effectiveness and Three Weeks' Advance Notice
* The Rockefeller Foundation has supported Universidad Icesi to help reduce dengue incidence in the city. Both institutions now formalize a collaboration with the City of Cali to expand the impact, integrating this effort into a broader public health strategy.
* The Dengue.AI model, designed to benefit 2.2 million people in Cali, has demonstrated 93% effectiveness in predicting dengue outbreaks
... Show Full Article
NEW YORK, May 6 -- The Rockefeller Foundation posted the following news release on May 4, 2026:
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DengueAI: New Model That Anticipates Outbreaks With 93% Effectiveness and Three Weeks' Advance Notice
* The Rockefeller Foundation has supported Universidad Icesi to help reduce dengue incidence in the city. Both institutions now formalize a collaboration with the City of Cali to expand the impact, integrating this effort into a broader public health strategy.
* The Dengue.AI model, designed to benefit 2.2 million people in Cali, has demonstrated 93% effectiveness in predicting dengue outbreaksup to three weeks in advance.
* Anticipating and reducing dengue outbreaks enables more efficient use of public resources and targeted, data-driven action in neighborhoods most vulnerable to this mosquito-borne disease transmitted by Aedes aegypti.
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Cali, Colombia | May 4, 2026 -- The City of Santiago de Cali, Universidad Icesi, and The Rockefeller Foundation today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at reducing the incidence of dengue in the city and strengthening preparedness and response capacities for future epidemics. This collaboration grows out of The Rockefeller Foundation's support for public health work and seeks to protect public health and advance sustainable solutions to one of the most significant public health challenges in both the department of Valle del Cauca and Colombia more broadly. The initiative, known as Dengue.AI (Dengue.IA in Spanish), brings together scientific expertise, technological development, and innovation through a cooperative model that integrates philanthropy, academia, and the public sector.
Dengue.AI is a software system that incorporates artificial intelligence models and it's able to support Cali's Public Health Secretariat in both the early prediction of dengue outbreaks and the delivery of actionable recommendations to guide response strategies. The system can anticipate outbreak risk up to three weeks in advance and recommend highly localized interventions -- such as targeted fumigation, household visits, and storm drain cleaning -- optimizing the use of public resources while enabling faster and more effective responses in highly vulnerable neighborhoods.
The project demonstrates the impact that strategic collaboration between philanthropy, academia, and government can have in advancing innovation in public health. The MOU builds on initial work announced in July 2025, through which The Rockefeller Foundation supported the development of the predictive and prescriptive models created by Universidad Icesi. These models have already demonstrated high reliability in forecasting dengue outbreaks with 93% effectiveness, and now Cali's Public Health Secretariat will lead their implementation and operational use to inform strategic decision-making that protects the health of Cali's residents.
"We firmly believe that innovation and coordination are essential to meeting the public health challenges of the 21st century. This collaboration with a public entity in Colombia, shows how cooperation can protect people's health, and how artificial intelligence can be a tool for progress, equity, and safety," said Lyana Latorre, Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean at The Rockefeller Foundation.
"Collaborative initiatives such as Dengue.AI align complementary capacities across philanthropy, academia, and the public sector, accelerating territorial transformation processes and improving the quality of life for citizens," said Esteban Piedrahita, President of Universidad Icesi.
Dengue.AI analyzes data from 174 sub-municipal units (1 km(2) areas specifically defined for this model), covering a population of approximately 2.2 million people, representing a significant advancement in the precision of epidemiological surveillance in Cali. During a three-month validation period, multidisciplinary experts from Universidad Icesi and the Public Health Secretariat reviewed 91 priority zones across the city and confirmed that the system accurately identifies increased dengue risk in more than 90% of cases, reinforcing its value as an early warning tool.
Although this strategy begins in Cali, its lessons learned, results, and capabilities will lay the groundwork for replicating the model in other cities across the country, demonstrating that innovation developed locally can be scaled nationally and internationally, thereby contributing to the health and well-being of many more people.
"This is a great honor for Cali that puts us at the forefront of the use of artificial intelligence to protect citizens' health, especially because it will help build capabilities both within the mayor's office and in academia," said Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder.
In 2024, Cali recorded 1,520 dengue cases per 100,000 inhabitants, significantly exceeding the national average of 937 cases per 100,000, underscoring the urgent need to continue advancing anticipatory, data-driven, and evidence-based public health strategies.
This technological innovation initiative is supported by a broad network of partners, including Universidad del Valle, which contributes scientific validation and epidemiological analysis; multiple departments of the City of Santiago de Cali, including the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DATIC), responsible for providing georeferenced city data and ensuring technological integration within district infrastructure; the Secretariat of Economic Development, which promotes the initiative as a driver of innovation, technology, and competitiveness; the Department of Environmental Management (DAGMA), which supplies climate data through its meteorological stations; the Office of Relations and Cooperation, which led stakeholder engagement and facilitated the partnerships that made the project possible; and Cubo Social, the external partner responsible for Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL), ensuring rigorous measurement of impact and effectiveness across the territory.
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About The Rockefeller Foundation
Investing $30 billion over the last 113 years to promote the well-being of humanity, The Rockefeller Foundation is a pioneering philanthropy built on unlikely partnerships and innovative solutions that deliver measurable results for people in the United States and around the world. We leverage scientific breakthroughs, artificial intelligence, and new technologies to make big bets across energy, food, health, and finance, including with our public charity, RF Catalytic Capital (RFCC). For more information, sign up for our newsletter at www.rockefellerfoundation.org/subscribe and follow us on X @RockefellerFdn, Instagram @rockefellerfdn, YouTube @RockefellerFdn, and LinkedIn .
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Original text here: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/dengueai-model-anticipates-outbreaks-93-effectiveness-three-weeks-advance-notice/
Reason Foundation Issues Commentary: Our Privacy Laws Need Upgrades to Address the Spread of Facial Recognition Tools
LOS ANGELES, California, May 6 -- The Reason Foundation issued the following commentary by technology policy analyst Richard Sill:
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Our privacy laws need upgrades to address the spread of facial recognition tools
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using facial recognition to identify people in images captured by officers' body-worn cameras (also known as bodycams) and other networked camera systems. Together, these tools enable federal, state, and local agencies to track and identify people at scale in ways that existing privacy and civil rights laws were not designed to regulate.
... Show Full Article
LOS ANGELES, California, May 6 -- The Reason Foundation issued the following commentary by technology policy analyst Richard Sill:
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Our privacy laws need upgrades to address the spread of facial recognition tools
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using facial recognition to identify people in images captured by officers' body-worn cameras (also known as bodycams) and other networked camera systems. Together, these tools enable federal, state, and local agencies to track and identify people at scale in ways that existing privacy and civil rights laws were not designed to regulate.
Fifteen states have moved to limit or ban some law enforcement uses of facial recognition, including its application to body-worn camera footage, but the federal government and most states lack clear, binding standards to protect people's privacy and civil liberties when police use this technology. The current patchwork of laws also causes confusion because people in the same community can face different levels of biometric surveillance depending on which agency they encounter. States should strengthen and expand their privacy and civil rights protections around law enforcement facial recognition, and Congress should set clear and consistent rules for federal law enforcement that limit when the technology may be used, how long biometric data may be kept, and how it's audited and disclosed.
How facial recognition turns camera networks into tools for biometric surveillance
Police use bodycams both to document incidents and to provide raw material for biometric identification. An officer's bodycam records video during his or her shift, and this footage gets uploaded to a database.
Facial recognition software can then search each frame for faces, crop those images, and measure features such as the distance between the eyes or outline of the jaw. Those measurements are converted into a numerical template, essentially a digital faceprint, that can be compared to government image databases containing mugshots, driver's license photos, and immigration records. Some systems are used after the fact to identify people captured in stored footage, but others can operate close to real-time, allowing an officer to see a possible match on a linked device during an encounter. In practice, bodycams become one more high-volume input into the same facial recognition systems that also draw on fixed and networked surveillance cameras.
Facial recognition has become routine in policing for many cities and municipalities. For years, cities like New York and New Orleans and states like Ohio have been scanning faces from hundreds of fixed and networked cameras around the city and sending alerts to officers' phones when someone appears to match a watchlist built from mugshot images. This model, combined with bodycam requirements for officers on patrol, effectively turns dense urban camera networks into live biometric lookouts. This has the potential to improve police efficiency.
But this surveillance also raises obvious privacy concerns. Because body cameras follow officers into many spaces, they can capture far more than only suspects. They can record people standing nearby on sidewalks, family members and children inside homes, patients and staff during medical calls, congregants in places of worship, journalists, legal observers, and protesters in public squares. Once this footage is subject to facial recognition, all those appearances can be treated as biometric data points, even where individuals are not accused of wrongdoing and may not even know that a digital template of their faces exists. This same face-matching system can also ingest images from other camera networks, extending this kind of incidental biometric capture well beyond the spaces officers enter with body-worn cameras.
Law enforcement access is not limited to cameras they control. In many cities and towns, police routinely obtain footage from privately operated cameras and doorbells by requesting clips from residents who have opted-in to sharing footage or asking companies that store cloud-based footage to share it. They can then run the same facial recognition tools on that video. A recent example is Ring's Super Bowl LX "Search Party" commercial, which depicted neighbors pooling footage from Ring cameras to track a lost dog. The concept drew backlash from privacy advocates who warned that the same mechanism could be used to track people, showing how tapping into vast networks of privately collected video can effectively extend biometric surveillance across entire neighborhoods with little public oversight.
Federal law enforcement policies only increase these concerns. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers began deploying body-worn cameras in 2024 in response to calls for more transparency in the field. Shortly thereafter, ICE began implementing mobile tools that allow agents to capture facial images during encounters and check them against federal biometric databases, including immigration records and criminal records.
ICE policies state that facial recognition will not be used to identify people during live bodycam streams, but the agency can still run an analysis of stored footage once it is uploaded. In practice, that means a face captured anywhere, whether during a raid, a workplace inspection, or even a benign street encounter, can still be scanned against federal databases. Recent reports indicate that these tools have been used on people in their households, on protesters while demonstrating, and on legal observers. These reports also revealed that images may be stored for extended periods under Department of Homeland Security policies.
Missing federal and state protections
Fifteen states have moved to restrict or ban police use of facial recognition, with some laws targeting body-worn cameras specifically and others setting broader rules for law enforcement use of the technology. In 2017, Oregon enacted ORS 133.741, which requires any law enforcement agency within the state that uses body-worn cameras to adopt a policy prohibiting the use of facial recognition and other biometric-matching technologies to analyze recordings, meaning they cannot run face-matching on bodycam footage. New Hampshire followed Oregon with a similar law, and from 2020 to 2023, California's Body Camera Accountability Act prevented law enforcement from installing, activating, or using facial recognition or biometric surveillance on bodycams or their data. That moratorium has since expired, so the state no longer has a bodycam-specific restriction in force statewide.
Other states have placed guardrails on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology more broadly, including when officers may apply these tools to bodycam footage. In 2023, Montana enacted the Facial Recognition for Government Use Act, which effectively prohibits real-time facial recognition by requiring police to obtain a warrant before using the technology on video captured from bodycams. Other states, such as Utah, Maryland, and Vermont, have also limited law enforcement use of facial recognition to specified serious offenses, including felonies and violent crimes, and to narrowly defined emergency situations like locating a missing person or responding to a specific threat to life, while Vermont and Maryland, in particular, prohibit its use to monitor protests or other constitutionally protected activities. That still leaves 35 states without clear, binding statewide standards for police.
Congress has also left major gaps at the federal level. Despite years of warnings from civil rights groups and oversight bodies about the risks of facial recognition, there is still no comprehensive federal statute that sets binding rules for how federal law enforcement can use this technology. Instead, federal agencies largely rely on internal policies that can be changed without public debate or clear accountability.
A legal patchwork creates concerns for all Americans
In those jurisdictions without clear rules, policies are often left to individual departments, vendor contracts, or informal practices that the public rarely sees. The result is a patchwork in which the legality and oversight of facial recognition can vary sharply from place to place, even as the technology spreads rapidly in everyday policing.
But this patchwork also affects residents of states that have implemented protections. While state legislatures can regulate their own agencies and local governments, they cannot directly dictate how federal agencies use their own equipment and databases. As a result, a city police department may be prohibited by state law from running facial recognition on its bodycam video, while federal agents working the same operation are free to use their own.
Similarly, state agencies might upload videos into shared systems or honor informal federal requests for clips that are later scanned outside of state processes. Local departments that want to strictly comply with state bans or local ordinances may limit what they share, which can generate tension when federal partners expect broad access to footage. This unevenness can undermine public understanding of, and confidence in, both body cameras and the safeguards meant to accompany them.
New federal and state legal protections are needed
States have begun to address the risks of unregulated facial recognition, but those efforts remain uneven and incomplete, leaving significant gaps in how the technology is used and overseen. Continued state action is needed to clarify limits, strengthen safeguards, and ensure that bodycam and other law enforcement uses of facial recognition do not erode privacy and due process. States without laws on the books yet can adopt concrete safeguards already emerging elsewhere. At a minimum, new statutes should require a warrant for most facial recognition searches of government image databases, as Montana does; limit use to specific serious crimes and narrowly defined emergencies, as in Utah and Maryland; and require regular reporting accuracy and bias audits, as Maryland does.
State laws should also prohibit face matches from serving as the sole basis for an arrest, as Detroit has done, and provide meaningful enforcement mechanisms and remedies when agencies violate these rules.
These safeguards should also apply when police seek to acquire footage from private cameras or third-party platforms, so agencies cannot evade facial recognition limits by outsourcing biometric searches to privately collected video. By adopting these measures, states without facial recognition standards can help ensure the technology serves legitimate public safety goals without enabling unchecked biometric surveillance.
Nevertheless, state-level protections can't govern how federal agencies use facial recognition, so Congress needs to establish clear, comparable baseline rules for federal law enforcement. Because federal agencies investigate within individual states and routinely across state lines, gaps in federal standards can undercut even the strongest state protections, making national rules on when and how facial recognition may be used, how long data may be retained, how agencies may obtain and analyze footage from private camera systems, and how accountability is monitored essential to a coherent system of protections.
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Richard Sill is a technology policy analyst at Reason Foundation.
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Original text here: https://reason.org/commentary/our-privacy-laws-need-upgrades-to-address-the-spread-of-facial-recognition-tools/
Freedom From Religion Foundation: 'Freedom 250' May 17 Prayer Rally is Christian Nationalist Pseudohistory
MADISON, Wisconsin, May 6 -- The Freedom From Religion Foundation issued the following news release:
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'Freedom 250' May 17 prayer rally is Christian nationalist pseudohistory
The White House's "Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving" on May 17 is an unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is sounding the alarm over the prayer fest's sponsor, "Freedom 250," a public/private initiative aligned with the White House to mark the nation's 250th anniversary with explicitly Christian nationalist programming.
President
... Show Full Article
MADISON, Wisconsin, May 6 -- The Freedom From Religion Foundation issued the following news release:
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'Freedom 250' May 17 prayer rally is Christian nationalist pseudohistory
The White House's "Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving" on May 17 is an unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is sounding the alarm over the prayer fest's sponsor, "Freedom 250," a public/private initiative aligned with the White House to mark the nation's 250th anniversary with explicitly Christian nationalist programming.
PresidentTrump promoted the all-day prayer fest on the National Mall during his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast: "On May 17, 2026, we are inviting Americans from all across the country to come together on our National Mall to pray, to give thanks, and to rededicate America as one nation under God."
The all-day spectacle of prayer, testimony, Scripture and worship calls on Americans to gather for "Scripture, testimony, prayer, and rededication of our country as One Nation to God." The overtly sectarian gathering is dominated by Christian nationalist figures and promoted with government involvement. FFRF's Freedom of Information Act request seeking information on public funding is on appeal, so financial details are murky.
The event overwhelmingly features Christian leaders and activists, including those among the Trump cabinet, with token non-Christian representation. Besides House Speaker Mike Johnson and cabinet members Pete Hegseth and Mark Rubio, they include a long list of pastors and religious figures, including Rev. Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas (a vocal proponent of Christian nationalist ideology), White House Faith Adviser Paula White and Rev. Robert Jeffress, who has repeatedly argued that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. All but one of the 15 religious leaders are Christian.
Military and other governmental bands will perform alongside religious choirs, such as with the extremist Christian Hillsdale College.
"This is not a celebration of America's founding principles -- but an overtly sectarian, exclusionary event catering to evangelicals and other conservative Christians, with participation and the full blessing of the federal government," says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. "Our Constitution is godless by design. The government has no authority to organize religious revivals, much less use them to promote a Christian nationalist agenda."
FFRF Co-President Dan Barker adds, "This isn't subtle. They are openly declaring a goal of redefining America as a Christian nation and using the machinery of government to do it."
Major corporations -- including Mastercard, Deloitte, SAP and Lockheed Martin -- have signed on as sponsors of Freedom 250, even as questions mount about the initiative's sectarian agenda and lack of transparency. Critics have called out the companies for potentially enabling what amounts to a government-backed religious campaign.
The United States belongs to all of us -- not just conservative Christians, FFRF points out. Our government was founded on secular principles to ensure freedom of conscience for everyone.
FFRF is calling on federal officials to immediately cease any involvement in sectarian events, and on corporate sponsors to reconsider their support.
"The 250th anniversary of our nation should celebrate liberty, equality and the constitutional separation of church and state," Gaylor concludes. "Anything less betrays the very ideals the Declaration of Independence set in motion."
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The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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Original text here: https://ffrf.org/news/releases/freedom-250-may-17-prayer-rally-is-christian-nationalist-pseudohistory/
[Category: Religion]
Foundation for Economic Education Issues Commentary: FEE's 2026 Bagwell Center Essay Prize
DETROIT, Michigan, May 6 -- The Foundation for Economic Education issued the following commentary by Editorial Director Katrina Gulliver:
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FEE's 2026 Bagwell Center Essay Prize
Celebrating our winners.
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FEE recently held our second-annual essay competition in cooperation with the Bagwell Center at Kennesaw State University. The contest was open to any student at KSU, and their prompt was related to the work of the Bagwell Center's visiting fellow, Grover Norquist, and the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, asks political candidates to sign.
The
... Show Full Article
DETROIT, Michigan, May 6 -- The Foundation for Economic Education issued the following commentary by Editorial Director Katrina Gulliver:
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FEE's 2026 Bagwell Center Essay Prize
Celebrating our winners.
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FEE recently held our second-annual essay competition in cooperation with the Bagwell Center at Kennesaw State University. The contest was open to any student at KSU, and their prompt was related to the work of the Bagwell Center's visiting fellow, Grover Norquist, and the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, asks political candidates to sign.
Thewinner and runner-up each offered carefully considered responses, and we are sharing excerpts below.
Our winner, Aliyah Johnson, is a junior nursing student from Conyers, Georgia. In addition to being a nursing student, she serves as the Vice President of the Student Government Association, President's Parliament Scholar Ambassador, Kennesaw Campus Tour Guide, and KSU Brand Ambassador.
Her essay, "The American Odyssey: The Quest for Strength Through Stewardship," discusses the values of what governments do with taxpayers' money--and how this needs to be balanced with the needs of taxpayers. She writes:
At its core, this debate is about stewardship. Taxpayer dollars represent trust, the consent of citizens who expect government to manage resources wisely and transparently. Ethical governance requires protecting opportunity while demanding efficiency. Budgets do not collapse overnight. They erode slowly; one unchecked program, one unexamined expense, one easy decision at a time. And by the time the consequences arrive, they are no longer theoretical. Fiscal responsibility is about trust. Trust that the government will not take more than it needs. Trust that it will not spend more than it should. Trust that it understands the weight of every dollar earned by working families. It is about protecting what matters, before there is nothing left to protect.
Our runner-up, Omya Airi, also offered a nuanced approach, suggesting flexibility in policy with an end goal of reducing the deficit and government waste. As she wrote in her essay, "Flexible Fiscal Responsibility Without Ideological Rigidity":
As the debt grows, the government becomes more vulnerable to changes in interest rates, as an increase in those rates will cause net interest expenses to rise sharply, consuming an ever-larger percentage of the budget. These expenditures don't provide any new services to citizens; they are a transfer from the current citizenry to bondholders. In this regard, structural deficits operate not as a stimulus but rather as a delayed form of taxation. In addition, there is an equity issue with running large deficits over time, as current citizens get the benefits of government spending while future citizens will have to pay the taxes and face the resulting inability of the government to respond to future crises.
Omya is a first-year university student studying finance and economics, with a growing interest in real estate investment and wealth management. She plans to pursue a career in finance while continuing her study of economics at an advanced level.
Aliyah and Omya's insights showed a keen grasp of the issues at hand, particularly the practical dimensions of the deficit, and the challenges of restraining government excess. As Omya writes: "The persistent deficits of the federal government represent more than a purely macroeconomic abstraction; they represent increased interest burdens, investment crowding out, and reduced policy options for the next generation."
Young people will be faced with the consequences of government choices, as they are taxed to pay the bill for previous generations. Choices have to be made, and as Aliyah summarizes it: "Every federal dollar represents a moral decision. It reflects what a nation chooses to protect, what it chooses to reform, and what it is willing to let go."
We at FEE were impressed by the quality of these essays and the understanding they represent, and were delighted to award the prizes at the Bagwell Center Dinner. They were the best in a strong field of entries, and we thank Bagwell Center Director, Professor Tim Mathews, for coordinating this contest with FEE. We wish Aliyah and Omya the best as they continue their studies.
As part of their awards, Aliyah and Omya were also offered admission to FEE Summer Campus, an opportunity for college students to learn with peers from across the world about the principles of liberty and the free market. To join them, apply now (https://fee.tfaforms.net/5179920?_gl=1*18p7j1r*_gcl_au*MTY4OTcxNzg4LjE3NzUxMTQ4ODc.*_ga*MjA1MzE1OTExMC4xNzc1MTE0ODg3*_ga_NVQ1VDK76N*czE3NzgwNTkyMTQkbzI1JGcxJHQxNzc4MDU5MjI0JGo1MCRsMCRoMA..).
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Katrina Gulliver is Editorial Director at FEE. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University, and has held faculty positions at universities in Germany, Britain and Australia. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2021. Katrina has written for the Wall St Journal, Reason, The American Conservative, National Review and the New Criterion, among others.
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Original text here: https://fee.org/articles/fees-2026-bagwell-center-essay-prize/
FFRF Warns About Appeals Court Ban on Telehealth Mifepristone
MADISON, Wisconsin, May 6 -- The Freedom From Religion Foundation issued the following news release on May 4, 2026:
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FFRF warns about appeals court ban on telehealth mifepristone
The country now awaits Supreme Court action in a case that could ban telehealth abortion nationwide only four years after the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.
While the Supreme Court today temporarily paused an appeals court ruling imposing an extraordinary restriction all across the United States on telehealth access to medication abortion, a constitutional showdown is in the offing.
The
... Show Full Article
MADISON, Wisconsin, May 6 -- The Freedom From Religion Foundation issued the following news release on May 4, 2026:
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FFRF warns about appeals court ban on telehealth mifepristone
The country now awaits Supreme Court action in a case that could ban telehealth abortion nationwide only four years after the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.
While the Supreme Court today temporarily paused an appeals court ruling imposing an extraordinary restriction all across the United States on telehealth access to medication abortion, a constitutional showdown is in the offing.
The5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in its ruling in State of Louisiana v. Food and Drug Administration, ordered the FDA to temporarily ban the use of telehealth medicine to prescribe mifepristone. Although Louisiana argued the use of telemedicine for abortion undermines its draconian state ban, the appeals court not only granted Louisiana's request but also shockingly banned telehealth abortion care all over the country. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a one-sentence order, briefly paused that ban until the parties file briefs by Thursday and the entire court can take up the issue.
"The appeals court ban is an example of practicing medicine without a license," says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president. "An ideologically driven court is overriding evidence-based medicine, federal authority and the rights of patients nationwide to impose a religious agenda."
About two-thirds of abortions in the United States are via medication and about a quarter are via telemedicine. Millions of U.S. women have used mifepristone, in combination with misoprostol, to safely end pregnancies in the last 26 years, with a serious complication rate of less than 1 percent. The FDA approved mifepristone for use in 2000. In early 2023, the FDA permanently lifted restrictions preventing patients from obtaining medication abortion pills at a retail pharmacy or requiring them to visit a medical provider in person.
Three years ago, an obscure Christian nationalist federal judge in Texas presumed to ban mifepristone nationwide, a ban that the 5th Circuit upheld with modifications, limiting use of the medication to seven weeks of gestation, also banning telemedicine and mail-order shipments. The Biden administration, along with major pharmaceuticals, appealed, with the Freedom From Religion Foundation's brief in the case noting the plaintiff anti-abortion groups lacked standing to sue. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with FFRF on the standing question and tossed the case in 2024. FFRF warned at the time that the crusade against medication abortion was only beginning.
The stakes are enormous. Some 100,000 patients per year living in states with abortion bans have received abortion pills through the mail from physicians living in states that have passed shield laws protecting such prescriptions. FFRF honored Dr. Maggie Carpenter with its 2025 Forward Award for co-founding Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, after the states of Texas and Louisiana prosecuted her for prescribing and mailing medication abortion to Texas. New York's shield law has protected her, so far, from extradition.
"The same Christian nationalist movement that pushed Dobbs is now targeting medication abortion and telehealth access nationwide," Gaylor adds. "This ruling underscores the urgent need to defend the separation of church and state, because these bans are rooted in religious ideology, not medicine or public health."
FFRF is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to swiftly overturn the 5th Circuit's ruling and on state lawmakers to enact and strengthen shield laws explicitly protecting telehealth abortion care.
"This is a wake-up call," Gaylor concludes. "Lawmakers who support reproductive freedom must act now to protect patients and providers from escalating judicial overreach."
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The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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Original text here: https://ffrf.org/news/releases/ffrf-warns-about-appeals-court-ban-on-telehealth-mifepristone/
[Category: Religion]
Foundation for Economic Education Posts Commentary: Why Socialism Fails
DETROIT, Michigan, May 5 -- The Foundation for Economic Education posted the following commentary on May 4, 2026, by Deborah Palma, Brazilian writer who holds a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from UNINASSAU:
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Why Socialism Fails
The consequences of ignoring market signals.
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Economics is not a zero-sum game in which one person's gain comes at another's expense; nor is it just about numbers or purposeless statistical aggregates, but conscious human action.
Ludwig von Mises, in his work Human Action, explains that individuals act to replace a less satisfactory state of affairs
... Show Full Article
DETROIT, Michigan, May 5 -- The Foundation for Economic Education posted the following commentary on May 4, 2026, by Deborah Palma, Brazilian writer who holds a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from UNINASSAU:
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Why Socialism Fails
The consequences of ignoring market signals.
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Economics is not a zero-sum game in which one person's gain comes at another's expense; nor is it just about numbers or purposeless statistical aggregates, but conscious human action.
Ludwig von Mises, in his work Human Action, explains that individuals act to replace a less satisfactory state of affairswith a more satisfactory one. This process is inherently subjective and teleological, meaning that the values guiding economic activity are rooted in individual choices, and not in physical objects themselves.
Economic calculation serves as the bridge between the subjectivity of human desires and the objective reality of scarce resources. Consider a quantity of steel that could be used to build either a hospital or a factory. Without a system of prices reflecting society's preferences and the relative scarcity of resources, there would be no way to determine which of these projects creates greater value. Economic calculation, expressed through prices, allows for the comparison of alternatives, whilst directing resources toward their most-valued uses.
Similarly, consider an entrepreneur evaluating whether they should open a bakery. They must decide how much to invest in equipment, rent, labor, and so on. By comparing the costs of these factors with the expected revenue from sales, our entrepreneur can estimate whether the business will create value. If revenues are expected to exceed total costs and taxes, there will be profit.
Profit, therefore, is not merely a financial gain, but evidence that scarce resources have been allocated in ways that better satisfy societal needs, because society has, in an undirected way, decided its needs are satisfied this way. Conversely, losses would indicate that those resources should have been allocated to more valuable uses. Without prices, profits, and losses, the entrepreneur would have no way of knowing whether resources are being used efficiently.
In a complex economy with an advanced division of labor, individuals cannot rely solely on their own direct knowledge to decide how to allocate resources among many possible combinations. They require a common denominator that allows for the comparison of costs and benefits. This denominator is the price, which emerges from voluntary exchanges in the market.
Prices are not arbitrary numbers; they are determined by exchange values arising from the competitive interaction between consumers and producers. Price reflects the relative scarcity of a good in relation to all other possible uses of the same factors of production.
When an entrepreneur invests in new technology or capital infrastructure, they rely on monetary calculation to assess whether the value of the final product will exceed the total value of the inputs consumed. This "surplus" is profit, an unmistakable signal that value has been created by, and for, society. The opposite - loss - signals the waste of scarce resources.
The importance of prices becomes even more evident when we examine historical attempts to artificially control them. Throughout history, governments have sought to replace the market price system with centrally-directed mechanisms, and the results have been consistently disastrous.
One of the earliest examples dates back to the reign of Diocletian in the Roman Empire. In 301 AD, the emperor issued the Edict on Maximum Prices, imposing price ceilings on thousands of goods and services, including basic items such as wheat, meat, and clothing, as well as wages for various professions such as farmers, bakers, craftsmen, and teachers. By fixing prices below their market-clearing levels, the policy reduced the incentive for producers to supply these goods, since many could no longer cover their costs or earn a profit. At the same time, artificially low prices increased consumer demand. This imbalance between reduced supply and increased demand led to widespread shortages. As a result, many goods disappeared from official markets and were instead traded illegally at higher prices, contributing to the expansion of black markets and the disruption of normal productive activity. The policy ultimately proved unsustainable and was abandoned due to its failure.
More recently, similar policies were implemented in Brazil under the government of Jose Sarney, particularly during the Cruzado Plan of 1986. The freezing of prices, initially celebrated as a solution to inflation, quickly resulted in widespread shortages, empty shelves, and the emergence of parallel markets. Unable to adjust prices, producers reduced supply, exposing the inability of such measures to coordinate a complex economy.
More recent cases reinforce this pattern. In Venezuela, strict price controls implemented over the past decades have contributed to chronic shortages, the collapse of domestic production, and increasing dependence on imports. Basic goods disappeared from store shelves, while informal markets became central to the population's survival.
These episodes produce the same outcome: scarcity. Prices emerge from decentralized interactions between individuals, reflecting their preferences and the relative scarcity of goods. Once formed, however, they also serve to coordinate economic activity by conveying information that guides producers and consumers in their decisions. When prices cease to reflect the relationship between supply and demand, they lose this informational and coordinating function. Instead of promoting order, price controls generate disorganization, shortages, and waste.
Mises's thesis was challenged by economists such as Oskar Lange, who proposed a form of "market socialism." Lange argued that a planning board could simulate the market through a process of trial and error, adjusting prices as surpluses or shortages emerged. However, Mises and his student Friedrich Hayek refuted this view, emphasizing that the problem is not merely one of data processing. The crucial point is that the data required for economic calculation, such as subjective preferences and local knowledge, only come into existence through real market exchanges.
Attempts to treat the economy as a system of simultaneous equations, in which equilibrium can be mathematically determined, ignore the dynamic nature of reality. The market is a continuous process of discovery, not a static state of rest. The economy cannot be managed like a problem of engineering or mechanical physics, because it involves constant change, subjective expectations, and genuine uncertainty, elements that no fixed equation can fully capture.
Under socialism, the abolition of private property in the means of production destroys the very concept of capital as a calculable value. When the state owns all higher-order goods (machines, land, and raw materials), there are no exchanges between private owners for these items. Consequently, there are no market prices for capital goods. Without these prices, the central planner, no matter how well-intentioned, lacks the necessary information to determine whether they are creating wealth or merely consuming the nation's capital.
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Deborah Palma is a Brazilian writer who holds a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from UNINASSAU. She has published articles with Instituto Millenium, Boletim da Liberdade, and IFL Brazil, and writes for the Damas de Ferro Institute.
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Original text here: https://fee.org/articles/why-socialism-doesnt-work/
Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation: Tracing a Pediatric Cancer to Its Origins
NEW YORK, May 5 (TNSjou) -- The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation issued the following news release:
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Tracing a pediatric cancer to its origins
Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is a cancer of the soft tissue that predominantly affects children. Under the microscope, these tumors resemble developing skeletal muscle, but they appear in parts of the body where skeletal muscle does not exist, such as the bladder and salivary gland. For years, this has raised two fundamental questions: what types of cells give rise to RMS, and why does this cancer mainly occur in children?
New research from former
... Show Full Article
NEW YORK, May 5 (TNSjou) -- The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation issued the following news release:
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Tracing a pediatric cancer to its origins
Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is a cancer of the soft tissue that predominantly affects children. Under the microscope, these tumors resemble developing skeletal muscle, but they appear in parts of the body where skeletal muscle does not exist, such as the bladder and salivary gland. For years, this has raised two fundamental questions: what types of cells give rise to RMS, and why does this cancer mainly occur in children?
New research from formerDamon Runyon-Sohn Pediatric Cancer Fellow Katherine E. Gadek, PhD, and her colleagues at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital sheds light on this puzzle. Using advanced genetic "lineage tracing" techniques, the team has traced the origin of RMS to endothelial progenitor cells, the cells that give rise to the lining of blood vessels during early development.
Their results show only a specific subset of endothelial progenitor cells, present during a narrow window of embryonic development, have the ability to develop into RMS. Further, the cells capable of becoming cancerous share two critical features: the presence of cilia--tiny cellular structures that act like antennae--and an active Sonic Hedgehog signaling pathway, a molecular communication system that plays a major role in embryonic development. When these features are present, endothelial progenitor cells are vulnerable to tumorigenesis. Once development moves past this window, that vulnerability disappears.
These findings deepen scientists' understanding of how normal developmental processes can go awry and lead to cancer in children. With a clearer picture of the origins of RMS, they are one step closer to developing better strategies to detect, prevent, and treat this lethal disease.
This research was published in Cell Reports.
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Original text here: https://www.damonrunyon.org/discovery/tracing-pediatric-cancer-its-origins
