News Digest

  Today the Biden-Harris Administration is taking new steps to conserve, restore, and expand our nation’s old growth forests by advancing a proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Forest Service to amend all 128 forest land management plans to better steward old-growth forests across the entire National Forest System. America’s forests are a key climate solution, absorbing carbon dioxide equivalent to more than 10 percent of U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions.  USDA’s National Forest Plan Amendment  proposes a consistent framework to guide conservation and restoration of old-growth forest conditions across all national forests. This framework will also help to ensure that our nation’s forests remain resilient to increasing threats from climate change. The proposed amendment will use the best available science, including Indigenous Knowledge, to drive management strategies that conserve, restore, and cultivate old-growth forest conditions across our nat...

  When generative A.I. surged into the public consciousness in late 2022, it captured the imagination of businesses and workers with its ability to answer questions, compose paragraphs, write code and create images. Analysts projected that the technology would transform the economy by driving a boom in productivity. Yet so far, the impact has been limited. Although adoption of A.I. is rising, only about 5 percent of companies nationwide are using the technology, according to a  survey of businesses from the Census Bureau . Many economists predict that generative A.I. is years away from measurably affecting economic activity — but they say change will come. “To me, this is a story of five years, not five quarters,” said Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, the global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group. “Over a five-year horizon, am I going to see something measurable? I think so.” While some of the largest companies, in Nashville and elsewhere, are finding uses for A.I. — and devo...

  Most of the early business uses of generative A.I., which can produce everything from poetry to computer programs, have been to help take the drudgery out of routine office tasks, customer service and code writing. Yet drug discovery and development is a huge industry that experts say is ripe for an A.I. makeover. A.I. is a “once-in-a-century opportunity” for the pharmaceutical business, according to the  consulting firm McKinsey & Company . Just as popular chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on text across the internet, and image generators like DALL-E learn from vast troves of pictures and videos, A.I. for drug discovery relies on data. And it is very specialized data — molecular information, protein structures and measurements of biochemical interactions. The A.I. learns from patterns in the data to suggest possible useful drug candidates, as if matching chemical keys to the right protein locks. Because A.I. for drug development is powered by precise scientific data, to...

  Many firearm owners in the United States do not securely store their guns, even when the weapon is kept loaded and there are children in the home, according to a   report released on Thursday   by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, which relied on data from 2021 and 2022 from eight states, found that many gun owners kept weapons unlocked and loaded in their homes despite rising rates  of suicides involving guns  and  firearm fatalities among children . Gun storage practices varied across the eight states: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Oklahoma. Of those surveyed in Ohio who had both children and a loaded gun in the house, about a quarter said that the weapon was kept unlocked; it was the smallest percentage among the seven states with available data for that metric. In Alaska, more than 40 percent of respondents fell into that category. In all eight states, about half of respondents wh...

  A new law in Florida allowing doctors to perform cesarean sections in outpatient birthing centers has raised serious safety concerns among medical experts, who say the procedures carry a small but real risk of life-threatening complications and should not be undertaken outside hospitals. The proposed new facilities, to be called advanced birth centers, will not be able to rapidly mobilize extra staff, equipment and expertise should complications suddenly occur, as a hospital would, critics noted. Florida’s law, the first of its kind in the nation, comes as the United States grapples with a maternal mortality rate that far exceeds those of comparable high-income countries. Florida itself lags other states in maternal care,  getting a D+  grade in a recent March of Dimes report because of higher than average maternal mortality rates and mortality rates among Black babies that are double those of white infants. The state has high rates of C-sections, and rates of preterm b...

  Addiction remains one of the world’s most  stigmatized  medical conditions. Among people who use drugs, p regnant women   may be the most  scorned. That condemnation is pervasive throughout the  criminal justice  system. In the child protection system, agencies routinely take custody of newborns who test positive for drugs but do not then usually offer support services to the mother. According to a May study in  Obstetrics and Gynecology,  those removals were associated with a greater likelihood that the women would more quickly become pregnant again and that those fetuses would have an increased risk of exposure to drugs in the womb. That stigma is also deeply  ingrained  in health care itself.  Many providers , surveys show, view the women as  selfish  and morally flawed. Pregnant women who use drugs often delay prenatal care or avoid it entirely, medical experts say, afraid that their doctors will report them to ...

  Murder rates and mass shootings make national headlines, defining the discussion over pervasive gun violence. But most gun deaths in America are self-inflicted. There were about 27,000 gun suicides in 2022. That was a record, and far higher than the 19,500 gun homicides documented that year. There have been more gun suicides than gun homicides in the United States every year for the past 25 years. Yet the harm inflicted on communities by suicides rarely registers in the national debate over guns. Over the past three years, Montana’s typically elevated suicide rate was the highest in the nation, according to an analysis of federal mortality data by The New York Times. In a state of 1.1 million people, 955 people died by suicide from January 2021 through November 2023. Other states in the Mountain West, including Wyoming and New Mexico, have also struggled with high suicide rates and face many of the same challenges as Montana. Last year, suicides in Montana and the nation declined...

  Recent cyberattacks targeting the nation’s healthcare system have demonstrated the vulnerability of our hospitals and payment systems.  Providers across the health system had to scramble for funding after one attack on a key payment system. And some hospitals had to redirect care after another.  These disruptions can take too long to resolve before full access to needed health care services or payment systems is restored.  Cyberattacks against the American healthcare system rose   128% from 2022 to 2023 .  In February and March of 2024 alone, the United States experienced one of the most significant healthcare-related cyberattacks to date. During the attack, providers reported that one out of every three health care claims in the United States were impacted, leading to disruptions in timely payment to healthcare providers. Recognizing that effective cybersecurity is critical to Americans accessing the care they need, the Biden-Harris Administrat...

  This week, the Biden-Harris Administration released its   National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics   to accelerate the prevention of food loss and waste, which will help cut costs for families, address climate change, and advance environmental justice. This is the first interagency national strategy that lays out a path for the United States to meet its national goal to halve food loss and waste by 2030. To help advance progress toward this goal, the Biden-Harris Administration has invested more than $200 million to reduce food loss and waste from the President’s Investing in America agenda. Preventing food loss and waste will save families money and lower food costs. In the United States, the average family of four  spends $1,500 each year  on food that ends up uneaten. The National Strategy is a deliverable in the Biden-Harris Administration’s  National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health . Additionally, preventing...

  Today, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service  announced  final rules implementing the prevailing wage and registered apprenticeship increased credit provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Clean energy projects that meet the  requirements of these final rules  will receive a fivefold increase for clean energy tax credits for deployment of wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen, and other clean energy technologies, as well as for projects receiving allocations under the Section 48C Advanced Energy Projects credit., providing a significant incentive for project developers to pay prevailing wages to workers for construction, alteration, and repair of clean energy projects and to hire registered apprentices to earn while they learn by working on those projects.   Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su also  published a blog  highlighting the use of Project Labor Agreements as a best practic...