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A 61-year-old man who suffered critical injuries after being pulled into an MRI machine while wearing a metal chain has died, police said Friday.

The incident occurred Wednesday afternoon at a medical building in Westbury, New York, according to the Nassau County Police Department.

Officers responded to Nassau Open MRI following a 911 call and were informed that the man "entered an unauthorized Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) room while the scan was in progress," the police department said in a statement.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday it is eliminating its research and development arm and reducing agency staff by thousands of employees.

The agency’s Office of Research and Development has long provided the scientific underpinnings for EPA’s mission to protect the environment and human health. The EPA said in May it would shift its scientific expertise and research efforts to program offices that focus on major issues like air and water.

 

A federal judge who previously blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship spent more than an hour Friday grappling with whether his nationwide injunction could stand after the Supreme Court curbed the ability of judges to issue such broad rulings.

US District Judge Leo Sorokin of the federal court in Boston made clear during a hearing that he intended to keep intact some of his earlier ruling against the birthright citizenship executive order issued by Trump on his first day back in office.

He grilled Trump administration lawyers and a group of Democratic attorneys general from more than a dozen states, the District of Columbia and several cities, on major questions about whether his nationwide injunction would still hold after the conservative Supreme Court instructed lower courts to take a second look at such rulings to ensure they weren’t overbroad.

 

Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a bawdy note and sketch of a naked woman.

Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.

It came after the Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared. It was reportedly a contribution to a birthday album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell.

 

Earlier this week, a prominent venture capitalist named Geoff Lewis — managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, which has backed high-profile tech companies including OpenAI and Vercel — posted a disturbing video on X-formerly-Twitter that's causing significant concern among his peers and colleagues.

"This isn't a redemption arc," Lewis says in the video. "It's a transmission, for the record. Over the past eight years, I've walked through something I didn't create, but became the primary target of: a non-governmental system, not visible, but operational. Not official, but structurally real. It doesn't regulate, it doesn't attack, it doesn't ban. It just inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable."

In the video, Lewis seems concerned that people in his life think he is unwell as he continues to discuss the "non-governmental system."

 

The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.

A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.

“It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.

 

The move represents a trend in Congress during Donald Trump's second term. Republican lawmakers across the ideological spectrum keep casting votes in favor of bills even while warning that they’re deeply flawed and may require fixing down the road. In some cases, lawmakers explicitly threaten to vote “no” on bills before eventually folding and voting “yes.”

It isn’t unusual for lawmakers to back legislation they call imperfect. But this year, that contrast has become more stark. It comes as Trump has solidified his grasp over the GOP base, resulting in lawmakers growing increasingly leery of crossing him and risking their political futures.

Nowhere has that dynamic been more pronounced than with the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, whose members have repeatedly threatened to oppose bills before acquiescing under pressure from Trump. With Trump's megabill, they complained about red ink: It's expected to add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

 

Health insurance premiums are going way up next year for people who buy their insurance on Healthcare.gov or the state-based marketplaces, according to an analysis out Friday.

The average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium, according to the analysis from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

 

Use of wastewater treatment plant effluent containing Pfas threatens wildlife, food and drinking water, advocates say

Many of the nation’s wetlands are being filled with toxic Pfas “forever chemicals” as wastewater treatment plant effluent tainted with the compounds is increasingly used to restore swampland and other waters. The practice threatens wildlife, food and drinking water sources, environmental advocates warn.

Effluent is the liquid discharged by wastewater treatment plants after it “disinfects” sewage in the nation’s sewer system. The treatment process largely kills pathogens and the water is high in nutrients that help plants grow, so on one level it is beneficial to struggling ecosystems.

But the treatment process does not address any of the hundreds of thousands of chemicals potentially discharged into sewers, including Pfas. Testing has found effluent virtually always contains Pfas at concerning levels, but the practice of using it for wetland restoration is still presented as an environmentally friendly measure.

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