In CA-45 race, Rep. Michelle Steel and Derek Tran will face off in November

• March 25, 2024

Republican Rep. Michelle Steel and Democrat Derek Tran appear poised to advance to the general election for California’s 45th congressional district race — a contest closely watched by both parties this year.

While Steel has consistently led the pack since the March 5 primary, the race was extremely close for the second-place spot. As of Monday morning in Orange and Los Angeles counties — both served by CA-45 — 366 votes separated Tran and Democrat Kim Nguyen-Penaloza, a Garden Grove councilmember who conceded over the weekend.

“It’s time to call it. Unfortunately, I did not win my bid for CA-45,” Nguyen-Penaloza said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “When I made the decision to run in January 2023, I really thought I could do it. … I felt in my heart I could be the representative we deserve. Someone who walks in our shoes, understands our struggles and who will fight so we can live out our American dream.”

See the latest election results.

Tran, in his own statement on X, thanked Nguyen-Penaloza and said he is honored to be the Democratic nominee for CA-45. A first-time candidate, Tran has said he plans to address the gun violence epidemic, advocate for women’s rights and fight the effects of climate change.

“In the Army, I swore an oath to serve this country, and in November we will defeat corrupt Michelle Steel and provide true representation to the people of CA-45,” he said.

On Monday, Steel thanked her supporters in an emailed statement.

“Southern California families deserve and need someone in Washington who won’t raise their taxes and who will always fight to lower them,” said Steel. “I support lower taxes, more freedom, less spending, an America that challenges the Chinese Communist Party and a secure border.”

“My English may be broken, but my voice is loud and positions clear,” she said.

The race for CA-45 attracted several candidates, including Democrats Aditya Pai, an affordable housing attorney, and Cheyenne Hunt, a policy advocate. Both have since conceded.

CA-45 is one of several Republican-held House districts that went for President Joe Biden in 2020 and where registered Democrats in the district outnumber registered Republicans. As of Feb. 20, according to data from the secretary of state’s office, the district includes 36.9% registered Democrats, 33.3% Republicans and 23.8% no party preference.

In November, more than 752,000 people in the district, home to the largest Vietnamese enclave outside of Vietnam, will get to choose who represents them in Congress for the next two years: a Republican of Korean descent or a Democrat with Vietnamese roots.

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Steel, first elected in 2020, became one of the first Korean American women to serve in Congress along with fellow Republican Rep. Young Kim and Democratic Rep. Marilyn Strickland of Washington.

Tran is the son of Vietnamese refugees who fled communist Vietnam by boat in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, arriving in Southern California.

Ballot counting is still ongoing, and county elections officials have until April 2 to report final results to the secretary of state, who will certify results on April 12.

The OC Registrar of Voters certified its primary results on Friday, March 22. The LA Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk said all outstanding ballots left to be processed in Los Angeles County are pending signature cures from voters who did not sign their return envelopes or had signatures that did not match their registration record. LA results are scheduled to be certified on Friday, March 29.

​ Orange County Register 

Photos: The Easter Bunny makes an early appearance in Anaheim Hills

• March 25, 2024

The Easter Bunny hopped into town early.

The special guest was a hit at the Anaheim Hills Rotary Club’s annual egg hunt and festival on Sunday. The always popular event was held at Ronald Reagan Park; eggs blanketing the park’s grassy field for children to grab and enjoy the surprises inside.

There was also egg decorating, activities for families and photos with the Easter Bunny.

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​ Orange County Register 

President Zelensky is an international star. At home, it’s more complicated

• March 25, 2024

Regular presidential elections should have taken place in Ukraine this month. 

But on day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion of our country, Ukraine’s government introduced martial law, under which presidential, parliamentary, and local elections are all suspended. Instead of getting to vote, my peers and I are stuck with a president we did not vote for, but whose image has changed drastically since February 24, 2022. 

Has Ukraine’s democracy become another victim of war?

Though our country’s democracy has roots dating back to practices instituted by the ancient Greeks who arrived to the territory of today’s Ukraine in the sixth century BCE, its modern instantiation of democratic rule is still in the making. 

In May 2014, I stood in a queue outside a school in a post-industrial residential Kyiv neighborhood on the left bank of the Dnipro River. Inside were voting booths for the presidential election, which had been announced several months after the previous president fled the country. I remember the mood well: there was a consensus in the air that we needed to have a fast, transparent election. 

The president who had fled, Viktor Yanukovych, had won office in a 2010 run-off election in which the opposition claimed there was systematic vote fraud. In office, Yanukovych had gone against the wish of most Ukrainians by declining to join the European Union. Instead, in 2013, he had announced intentions to join the Russia-backed Eurasian Economic Union. This would have made Ukraine economically dependent on its imperial neighbor. 

In November 2013, hundreds of people, mostly students and activists, gathered at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in Kyiv to protest his decision. The protests swelled. On the last day of November, police brutally beat protestors, and the next day, even more people came to the square, turning it into a protest camp with stages, broadcasting facilites, first aid posts, and self-defense units. It was the largest amount of people to ever gather there. In February, when police attacked, violent clashes sparked and killed 100 protestors, known as the Heavenly Hundred. 

Their actions made history. This was the Revolution of Dignity, the moment when Ukrainian society resolutely separated itself from Russia. The country wanted change. The elections that followed were supposed to provide it.

Those elections resulted in the victory of Petro Poroshenko, an old-school politician- businessman. There was no runoff: He won the first round with more than 50% of the vote. This was the second time that this had happened. The first was in 1991, when Leonid Kravchuk got 61% at the elections held simultaneously with the referendum for Ukrainian independence. (90% of the populace voted in favor of independence.) 

Thinking about 1991 and 2014, I ask myself: Do these decisive victories demonstrate that Ukrainian society has an ability to mobilize quickly again in times of radical transformation? Such major upheavals seem to happen here every 10 years—and we’re living in one now. What happens next? Can we keep hold of the democracy we’ve made?

Looking back to 2014 with hindsight, I can see that Poroshenko seemed to be the best-equipped candidate to lead the country: He was a diplomat by education, had experience in state finance and was a businessman, which meant—at that time—that he had a lot to lose. Russian troops were in the country then, as now. Crimea, as well as parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east of the country, were already occupied by Russia. And back then, many Ukrainians volunteered to go fight on the newly formed frontline. 

In 2014, the starting war was a reason to hold elections. Sensing the upcoming turmoil, everyone wanted to at least secure the names of those who would govern the country in the near future. Parliamentary elections were held that year, too, and with them the process of government formation began. It was bumpy and imperfect, but fueled by an eagerness for a democratic transformation. 

Ukrainian voters value the ability to bring about regular changes of power. Winning one election—even if, like Poroshenko, you win on a wave of post-revolutionary adrenaline—does not guarantee that you’ll remain in your comfy chair for longer than one term. 

With Poroshenko, this was the case. In 2019, he lost by nearly a 50% margin to an ambitious, young candidate who had appeared straight from show business. You may know him: Volodymyr Zelensky.

The majority of my generational and political bubble, people between 30 and 40 years old who had devoted our most energetic years to secure post-Maidan transformations, did not vote for Zelensky. We took his promises to fight the corruption and nepotism of the country with skepticism. They mirrored too much his onscreen alter ego in the popular TV series Servant of the People, a history teacher who becomes president after a passionate anti-corruption rant that goes viral. Our universe of “highbrow” intellectual and political culture clashed with “lowbrow” TV that apparently had broken into the real world.

Under the banner of an ambitious effort for “efficiency,” Zelensky and the head of his administration gradually concentrated political power in the executive office even before the full-scale war started in 2022. Because the majority of seats in parliament are held by Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People (yes, it’s named after his TV show), his office had the backing to initiate a number of reforms, many of which were criticized by civil society institutions. 

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s resistance catapulted Zelensky to heroism. He gained the stardom he had once wanted from show biz. It wasn’t undeserved: Skeptics from 2019, including me, were touched and proud on February 25, 2022, when he released a video from Bankova Street proving that he hadn’t left the country and was going to stay and fight.

But two years later, our adrenaline and feelings of pride have waned. Society needs more than just powerful speeches that finish with “Glory to Ukraine!” The dilemma that many journalists initially faced in 2022—whether or not to criticize the country’s governing figures in wartime—has been resolved, and not in the leaders’ favor. Journalists have brought back their anti-corruption investigations, while citizens are holding some civil demonstrations, even despite their prohibition under martial law.

Despite this, most Ukrainians don’t feel an urgent need to hold elections. In a country of 43 million, 6 million have fled the country, 4 million are internally displaced, and hundreds of thousands are serving in the army. Almost 20% of Ukrainian territory is currently occupied by Russia and significantly more is being constantly shelled. Elections, at least on the national level, don’t feel crucial at the moment. 

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With two revolutions in the last 20 years behind us, we are instead strengthening our skills of maintaining democracy by challenging our leaders. Though we are fans of fast political changes that resemble spectacular sprints, we’ve come to a moment at which we need to learn how to run a marathon. 

What does that look like? This means fighting against unjust governmental decisions in courts, organizing advocacy campaigns for the rightful legislation, monitoring (via NGOs) all spheres of social and political life, and taking action when something is not right. It also means planning for the future by adopting the laws necessary to enter the European Union.

Our president may be an international star with multiple Time magazine covers, but he still must serve his people. We are not voting this spring, but we will not miss a chance to remind him of that.

Daria Badior is a critic, journalist and editor based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She co-curates the Kyiv Critics’ Week films festival and is writing a book about the post-Maidan generation of culture-makers. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.

​ Orange County Register 

Researchers unveil new blood test that detects colon cancer

• March 25, 2024

Elise Takahama | (TNS) The Seattle Times

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have unveiled a new type of blood test used to detect colorectal cancer, with high hopes not only in its ability to reduce barriers to testing for this particular disease, but also potentially pave the way for many other types of cancer screenings.

The study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed results from nearly 8,000 people throughout the country between ages 45 and 84 and compared results of their blood tests to those of a colonoscopy. In all, the new test accurately detected colorectal cancer 83% of the time, which is “at least equal and maybe better than” a commonly used stool-based detection test, said Dr. William Grady, medical director of Fred Hutch’s gastrointestinal cancer prevention program and who led the study.

“We have a lot of people who are dying from a preventable cancer,” Grady said. “And the reason is they’re not doing colon cancer screenings. This is a real opportunity to improve that and prevent those deaths. That’s why I get excited about it.”

Colorectal cancer is the third-most diagnosed cancer and second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths among adults in the U.S., according to the paper. About 53,000 people are expected to die from the disease this year. Colorectal cancer is also increasingly being detected in younger people, with 20% of 2019 diagnoses in patients under 55 — almost double the rate reported in 1995, according to the American Cancer Society.

The trend prompted the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which regulates and makes recommendations when to complete certain screenings, in 2021 to lower the age to begin colon cancer testing to 45, five years earlier than previously recommended.

While researchers are still trying to understand what’s driving the change, higher obesity rates, more sedentary lifestyles and diets that include more processed foods are likely contributors, Grady said.

But early detection can significantly increase survival rates — jumping from 14% among those with metastatic cancer to a five-year survival rate of about 91% among those diagnosed at early stages, according to the Guardant Health-funded study. Still, just 59% of those eligible for screenings get tested.

“I think this is an enormous breakthrough,” said Dr. Rachel Issaka, a Fred Hutch gastroenterologist and colorectal cancer researcher who co-authored the paper. “We have another tool in our arsenal that allows people to have a noninvasive and easy way to potentially complete colon cancer screening.”

She noted the new test does not replace the colonoscopy, which identifies and removes precancerous lesions, and remains the “gold standard” for colon cancer screenings and prevention. But because the more involved procedure isn’t always easily accessible to everyone, especially communities of color and lower-income populations, Issaka is optimistic the new option can help boost screening rates and, ultimately, lower deaths.

Because blood tests are generally more convenient, relatively painless and have minimal risk involved, cancer researchers, including Grady, have considered it for decades as a tool in cancer detection, he said. Testing and analysis techniques, however, weren’t ever sophisticated enough to make it a realistic option, Grady said.

Then two “really big breakthroughs” came along, he said.

The first had to do with scientists’ ability to extract tumor cells’ DNA from the blood and process it, which has been developed and optimized over the last decade.

The second milestone involved “next-generation sequencing,” or analyzing DNA in ways that were sensitive enough to detect the rare tumor DNA present in the blood, Grady said. This sequencing has “rapidly advanced over the last 20-plus years,” including in ways to identify potential biomarkers, he added.

Next-generation sequencing hasn’t yet been widely used in cancer detection tests, but Grady’s excitement about the possibilities was evident.

“I think this [colon cancer] test is going to usher in a wave of other types of screening tests,” he said, pointing to ongoing clinical trials that screen people at risk for lung cancer and research around breast cancer blood tests. “Could you replace mammograms with this? I’m going to guess those types of studies will be coming out in the next few years.”

Despite enthusiasm around new technologies — including artificial intelligence’s role in more efficient data analysis — Issaka stressed an importance to pay attention to how these and future tests are rolled out in clinical spaces. It’s always the hope these interventions improve disparities, she said, but “it could also have unintended consequences of widening disparities if we’re not careful.”

Issaka’s lab at Fred Hutch keeps this mission at the heart of its work, specifically focusing on identifying and introducing solutions that reduce racial and ethnic disparities and improve colorectal cancer outcomes. Black and Indigenous communities, for example, report disproportionately high rates of colon cancer diagnosis and deaths, in part because of inadequate screenings, Issaka said.

“If people have more options that are convenient for them, they are more likely to participate in colon cancer screening, and we can pick up earlier cases where treatments are most effective,” she said.

In the past several years, her team has explored a number of strategies, including a program that mails stool-based tests (also known as Fecal Immunochemical Tests, or FIT) to 15,000 to 20,000 Seattle-area homes per year. The program identifies people eligible for colon cancer screenings, and checks in with patients to ensure they’re completing the tests. If someone has an abnormal result, the team works with them to schedule a follow-up colonoscopy.

Because transportation has also been identified as a common barrier to receiving a colonoscopy, Issaka’s team partnered with a service to coordinate rides for patients to and from their procedure.

At a recent community screening and educational event in the Central District, feedback from nearly 150 attendees was “overwhelmingly positive” in learning about the disease and how to find resources, Issaka said. The annual workshop, this year partnered with the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, provided information on what symptoms are, ways to reduce risk and how to get up-to-date with screenings, she added.

“Our goal is to bring as much awareness about this disease to these communities as possible,” Issaka said.

The blood test is still awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, but Grady expects it should receive the endorsements this year.

___

©2024 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

Chrysalis and CalOptima Health develop program to get formerly homeless people working in shelters

• March 25, 2024

Weldon Haywood lived on the streets for a decade and had been arrested for public intoxication multiple times.

So, when an Anaheim police officer stopped him at the back of a liquor store a little more than a year ago, he expected to be arrested again. But instead, the officer offered him a lifeline – a connection to a homeless shelter and a substance use program.

Now, Haywood is celebrating a year of sobriety, is looking for an apartment and he is working as a site attendant at Illumination Foundation, a homeless shelter and recuperative care center in Fullerton. And, he is using his personal experience being homeless to connect and empathize with the people the center serves.

The job is thanks to a partnership between CalOptima Health and Chrysalis, a nonprofit that helps people find employment. The partnership’s goal is to give houseless folks the tools and confidence to exit homelessness, remedy staffing issues in shelters and end the cycle of poverty that can keep some people living on the streets. Since late last summer, Chrysalis has placed 22 formerly unhoused people to work in different shelters throughout Orange County.

Chrysalis has been operating in Anaheim since 2018, helping homeless people and those re-entering society from the criminal justice system get back to work.

“We’ve got transitional businesses that many of our participants utilize to transition from homelessness to self-sufficiency,” Trevor Kale, vice president at Chrysalis, said. “So they’re using transitional jobs with us to work for a period of time while they’re gaining the skills and stability to move from a period of homelessness to a period of self-sufficiency.”

Those temporary jobs with Chrysalis include road and freeway maintenance, as well as janitorial and customer service roles.

Chrysalis, with funding support of about $1.1 million per year from CalOptima, takes people from those existing staffing programs and gets them employed in shelters like those managed by the Illumination Foundation. By doing this, the organizations find that they can get more people working in short-staffed shelters and help their formerly unhoused clients continue to move forward toward financial independence.

After completing rehab, Haywood was referred to Chrysalis and started working for its roads program, cleaning up freeways while also attending job-readiness training classes. Chrysalis staff identified Haywood as a good candidate for the shelter position, and he was more than excited to work at showing others a way out of homelessness.

“Immediately I was like, damn, what are the odds of me being homeless, and now I’m going to be working in a homeless shelter?” Haywood said. “I enjoy it because I can tell people, ‘Hey man, you need to get your stuff together while you’re here. Don’t just waste time. If you’re going to be here, just do what I did. If they tell you to do something, just do it. Take your resources and move up.’”

Haywood’s ability to use his personal experience to uplift other people in the shelter is exactly why CalOptima and Chrysalis joined together, officials said.

“We were consistently hearing the same message from providers,” said Kelly Bruno-Nelson, executive director of Medi-Cal/CalAIM for CalOptima Health. “And that message was, ‘Listen CalOptima Health, we would love to expand services and help more folks, but we simply don’t have the workforce. There is a shortage of individuals that can work in our shelters.’ And equally, we have a partner like Chrysalis saying, ‘We have lots of individuals with lived experience that would like to exit homelessness and be self-sufficient, but they cannot find a job.’

“It just made logical sense to bring the two together,” she said.

Chrysalis designed a training program specifically for those working in homeless shelters that covered topics such as trauma-informed care and harm reduction. CalOptima Health pays for the first three months of employment once a person is placed at a shelter. Each staffer is paid $18 an hour. The goal, Bruno-Nelson said, is that these folks wind up getting hired full-time.

Haywood is on track to become a full-time staff member.

Being a site attendant, Haywood said, is a very hands-on job. He’s responsible for cleaning, getting clients hygiene products, picking up their medicine and more. He said the most stressful part of the job can be seeing clients not live up to their full potential.

“It’s like when you see a person who spends so much energy on something that doesn’t mean anything. And you know that if they spend that much energy on something positive, that can actually get them somewhere,” Haywood said. “I just focus on what I’m there to do, and focus on the people that do because some of them really are tired, some of them really want to get out of there.”

Once a person is employed, Chrysalis keeps up with them through case management and supportive programming.

“Oftentimes we’ve got good relationships with the shelter sites and we’ll speak with them if there’s an issue on the job to try and make sure that we get through that bump or that learning opportunity,” Kale said. “In the workforce development space with this population, the data shows if you can hold down employment for six months, your life trajectory changes significantly. Our goal is to always get to that six-month mark with folks and then support them to take it from there.”

Now, sober, with a job and a roof over his head, Haywood has purchased his ticket to Florida to reunite with his two children.

His daughter is gearing up to graduate high school in a few months. Seeing her cross that stage to receive her diploma has been a driving force in his journey toward sobriety and exiting homelessness, Haywood said.

“I haven’t seen my daughter, or my son, in about 11 years,” he said. “It’s going to be one of those moments where I don’t know if I’m just going to start crying as soon as I see them. I told my daughter, I’m going to try holding it all in and she’s like, ‘No, just let it out, dad.’”

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​ Orange County Register 

Easter candy price increases are just the start as cocoa soars

• March 25, 2024

Mumbi Gitau, Ilena Peng and Dayanne Sousa | (TNS) Bloomberg News

As the Easter holidays approach, higher cocoa prices mean shoppers are paying far more for their chocolate eggs and bunnies. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Higher prices in stores now reflect increases in cocoa in 2023. Since then, the rally has gone into overdrive, and cocoa has more than doubled in price already this year, making it the world’s hottest commodity.

In just the last three weeks, wholesale beans in New York have jumped more than 47%, exceeding $8,900 a ton — a level that once seemed unthinkable.

That means even higher prices for households as those moves feed through to retailers. But already, U.K. shoppers are paying more for chocolate, and sometimes getting less for their money, what’s known as “shrinkflation.” In Brazil, where Easter is a major celebration, chocolate egg prices recently became an internet meme when some stores advertised that people could buy them with loans and payment installments.

The record surge is being driven by disappointing harvests in cocoa’s West Africa heavyweights, Ivory Coast and Ghana, which account for most of the world’s production.

The industry is largely made up of smallholder farmers who have faced a legacy of poor returns, making it harder to invest in their plots or withstand extreme weather events.

“The true cost of chocolate has not been seen by consumers for a long time,” said Emily Stone, founder of specialty cocoa dealer Uncommon Cacao. “Persistent low prices to producers and climate change are driving the market up to these heights. Now, that comes as a shock to some, but this was predictable.”

The price increase is also a reminder that while headline inflation rates are easing around the world, surges in individual commodities can still put the squeeze on consumers. Chocolate may be seen as more a luxury than a necessity, but brands like Kit Kat and Snickers are often regular parts of weekly shopping baskets.

Consumers may even be more sensitive to such price increases after what they’ve been through in recent years. Memories of the post-pandemic inflation spike — and the damage it did to household finances – are still very fresh.

“It’s really expensive,” school counselor Isabel Cristina Brandão said as she picked up three small private label eggs from a candy store in Sao Paulo. She remembers her shopping cart used to be filled a few years ago. “Now we pay more, for a lot less.”

In the U.S., the average unit price of chocolate eggs is up 12% over the past year, data from researcher NIQ shows. The cost of some popular Easter eggs in the UK has soared by up to 50%, according to consumer group Which?

Those changes account for only a small portion of cocoa’s colossal rally as key ingredients used to make Easter treats were likely purchased in the fourth quarter of 2023 or earlier.

Confectionery is among the categories where US consumers are noticing shrinkflation the most, according to a YouGov survey this month. Households are already cutting back on treats; 44% say they buy chocolate or candy less often because of inflation, according to the U.S. National Confectioners Association.

And there’s no relief in sight given what looks like an unstoppable rally, with production shortages expected to persist into the next season. More pain lies ahead when cocoa booked at current sky-high prices will be used for upcoming holidays like Halloween and Christmas.

Earlier this month, Swiss chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli said it would have to raise prices this year and next because of the jump in raw material costs.

While some companies may have cheap inventories to cover production for the next six months, they will opt for gradual price hikes rather than shock customers with steep increases, said Judy Ganes, president of J Ganes Consulting.

“If you push through a price increase now, then you can sustain operations and not have to make a short jump,” she said.

Other top chocolate manufacturers have also raised prices and are leaving the door open for more. Mondelez International Inc. Chief Financial Officer Luca Zaramella in February signaled increases are likely, while Hershey Co. Chief Executive Officer Michele Buck said the company remains “committed to pricing to cover inflation.”

Nestle SA said while it’s absorbed some higher costs through efficiencies, it may need to make “responsible adjustments to pricing in the future given the persistently high cocoa prices.”

____

(With assistance from Paula Doenecke and Thomas Hall.)

___

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

Supreme Court’s mifepristone case: Abortion, FDA’s authority and return to 1873 obscenity law

• March 25, 2024

By Sarah Varney | KFF Health News

Lawyers from the conservative Christian group that won the case to overturn Roe v. Wade are returning to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday in pursuit of an urgent priority: shutting down access to abortion pills for women across the country.

The case challenges the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, a prescription-only drug approved in 2000 with a stellar safety record that is used in 63% of all U.S. abortions.

Viewed across decades of anti-abortion activism, the case brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom represents a “moonshot” couched in technical arguments about pharmaceutical oversight and the resuscitation of an 1873 anti-obscenity law. A victory would lay the groundwork for a de facto nationwide abortion ban.

Abortion is illegal in 14 states, but abortion pills have never been more widely available.

During the covid-19 pandemic, the FDA suspended — and later formally lifted — the requirement that patients be at a health care facility when taking mifepristone, the first of two pills used in medication abortion. Physicians can now prescribe the drug online through telemedicine and pharmacies can dispense it through the mail.

“You don’t need to be handed the pill in the office,” said Linda Prine, a family medicine physician, sitting on a couch in her Manhattan apartment answering texts and calls from patients about abortion care.

“It’s very effective,” she said. “I don’t even have medications that are 98 to 99% effective. Our blood pressure medicines aren’t effective like that.”

Prine, a co-founder of the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, works with other doctors operating under New York state’s shield law to prescribe and send abortion pills to people across the country. A review of Prine’s call log, stripped of personal information, showed hundreds of requests for pills from Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and other states where it is illegal for women to stop a pregnancy.

File – The Supreme Court is seen on Friday, April 21, 2023, in Washington. The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion when it hears arguments Tuesday, March 26, 2024, over mifepristone, a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy, for a case with profound implications for millions of women no matter where they live in America and, perhaps, the race for the White House. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Anti-abortion groups unsuccessfully petitioned the FDA at least twice before, in 2002 and 2019, to revoke mifepristone’s approval and curtail its availability. But in November 2022, following its victory in overturning federal abortion rights, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, claiming the FDA’s safety review of mifepristone was flawed.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and openly opposes abortion, ruled to invalidate the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. An appeals court later said the drug should remain available, but it reinstated restrictions, including prohibitions on telehealth prescriptions and mailing the medication. That ruling was put on hold while the Supreme Court considers the case.

The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone, Danco Laboratories, have argued in legal filings to the Supreme Court that federal judges do not have the scientific and health expertise to evaluate drug safety and that allowing them to do so undermines the FDA’s regulatory authority.

That view is supported by food and drug legal scholars who wrote in court filings that the lower courts had replaced the “FDA’s scientific and medical expertise with the courts’ own interpretations of the scientific evidence.” In doing so, they wrote, the courts “upend the drug regulatory scheme established by Congress and implemented by FDA.”

In his ruling, Kacsmaryk cited two studies purporting to show an increase in emergency room visits and a greater risk of hospitalizations from medication abortion. They were retracted in February by medical publisher Sage Perspectives. The journal said the researchers erred in their methodology and analysis of the data and invalidated the papers “in whole or in part.”

The research, supported by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion group that filed a brief in the mifepristone case, “made claims that were not supported by the data,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a professor of reproductive sciences at the UC San Francisco.

Legal scholars say the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have demonstrated a willingness to accept discredited abortion-related health claims. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, cited statements about harm to maternal health presented by the state of Mississippi that contradict mainstream medical consensus.

“If this case is successful, it will be because the Supreme Court decided to ignore evidence that demonstrated mifepristone’s safety and said to a federal agency, the expert on drug safety, ‘You were wrong,’” said Rachel Rebouché, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law.

The mifepristone case crystallizes “the politicization of science” in abortion regulation, Rebouché said. “But the stakes are getting higher as we have courts willing to strip federal agencies of their ability to make expert decisions.”

Rebouché said that if the Supreme Court overrides the FDA’s expertise in regulating a 24-year-old drug like mifepristone, anti-abortion groups, like Students for Life of America, could find judges receptive to false claims that birth control pills, intrauterine devices, emergency contraception, and other forms of hormonal birth control cause abortion. They do not, according to reproductive scientists and U.S. and international regulatory agencies.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Dobbs that the Supreme Court should reconsider the 1965 decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to contraception, Griswold v. Connecticut, and decide whether to return the power to allow or regulate access to birth control to the states.

Tucked into the Alliance Defending Freedom’s filings is what scholars describe as an audacious legal strategy once on the fringes of the conservative Christian movement: an appeal to the Supreme Court’s conservative members to determine that the Comstock Act, a dormant 1873 anti-vice law, effectively bans medical and procedural abortion nationwide.

Passed at a time when the federal government did not give women the right to vote and the prevailing medical literature summed up women’s sexuality by saying that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind,” the long unenforced law carried a five-year prison sentence for anyone mailing “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.”

References to the Comstock Act appear throughout anti-abortion legal filings and rulings: Kacsmaryk wrote that the act “plainly forecloses mail-order abortion in the present”; the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote if Comstock was “strictly understood” then “there is no public interest in the perpetuation of illegality”; Republican attorneys general threatened legal action against Walgreens and CVS last year citing Comstock as did anti-abortion cases in New Mexico and Texas.

“State attorneys general need to go after and prosecute those who are illegally mailing abortion drugs into their state,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America.

“It’s very simple. If your state has passed a law saying that preborn human beings deserve, at the very minimum, the right not to be starved and killed,” she said, “then those who are committing those crimes and violating the federal Comstock Act by shipping chemical abortion pills over state lines, there should be consequences.”

Tracking abortion pills by mail is difficult — and that’s the point, Rebouché said.

“These more diffuse and mobile ways to terminate a pregnancy,” she said, “really threaten the control that anti-abortion advocates seek to exercise over who and where and how someone can seek an abortion.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

​ Orange County Register 

Feds’ abusive antitrust lawsuit against Apple

• March 25, 2024

The U.S. Department of Justice and 16 state attorneys general – including California’s – last week filed a far-reaching and dubious antitrust lawsuit against Apple accusing it of monopolizing smartphone markets. The legal action is less an indictment of Apple’s business practices and more of an indictment of the Biden administration’s anti-business philosophy – and its ignorance of how the market economy functions and benefits consumers.

“Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers,” the feds allege in a statement last week summarizing its legal complaint. The government accuses one of the tech industry’s most innovative companies of stifling innovation. The first obvious point is our government doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “monopoly.”

The iPhone has a 60-percent market share in the United States, which hardly makes it a monopoly. Across the globe, Android phones have a much higher share, approximately 70 percent. A monopoly suggests that a company has total control of a commodity or service – not a dominant share. For comparison’s sake, Harley Davidson controls 50 percent of the above-600cc motorcycle market in the United States, but buyers can still choose from dozens of other brands.

Specifically, the complaint claims that Apple charges too high of a price to app developers for access to their Apple App Store. It says Apple blocks companies that offer apps that can be used on other types of smartphones, blocks mobile cloud-streaming services, excludes cross-platform messaging, limits the functionality of non-Apple smartwatches and halts third-party payment processes (digital wallets). As a result, the lawsuit alleges, this harms competition.

But how does this differ from how any business operates? “When I walk into Target, I know I’m going to be presented with a finite number of products that Target bigwigs somewhere have approved for sale,” explains Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown. “Not just anyone can walk into Target and start selling their own stuff. Nor are rival retailers like Walmart or Kohl’s able to set up shop within Target stores.”

That’s exactly right. Apple has every right to determine who sells what products on its device. If it allows payment systems that don’t conform to its security standards, it will upset consumers and undermine the trustworthiness of its iPhones. If it allows its store to be inundated with trashy apps, then its consumers will lose confidence in its system. Consumers have myriad choices in smartphones, so there’s no governmental interest here.

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Brown argues that the lawsuit stems from a radical point of view. She’s entirely right, as it assumes that “Apple should be legally obliged to help random developers – including those competing directly with Apple Messages – expand their user base.” Should the feds force Toyota dealers to sell Fords in their showrooms, or Harley Davidson to sell Kawasaki’s? Since there are other choices in the market, this is indeed a radical interpretation of antitrust law.

The Biden administration has long shown a misunderstanding of the tech industry, and its big-government interventions are sometimes supported by Republicans. Politicians from both parties have various grievances with tech firms, which encourages them to pursue such nonsense.

The lawsuit will increase costs for consumers and potentially make iPhones less secure. Once again, the government’s economic ignorance comes at a high price.

​ Orange County Register