DocMcStuffin

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Tuesday’s decision temporarily stops the bill from moving forward.

The Florida Senate Committee on Criminal Justice has struck down a proposal to allow guns on college campuses.

The bill (SB 914) sponsored by Brevard Republican Senator Randy Fine, failed to get enough “yes” votes on Tuesday after one Republican rejected the idea.

Florida lawmakers rolled back some of the state’s child labor protections last year. Now, a proposal is advancing in Tallahassee that would strip them completely for those 16 and older.

The rollback would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work full-time, including late nights and days longer than eight-hour even on school nights without required breaks. The proposal would also waive those same protections for 14- and 15-year-olds who are enrolled in home school, virtual education, or those who have already graduated and received a high school diploma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reporting Highlights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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