AI labs just can’t get their employees to stay put. Yesterday’s big AI news was the abrupt and seemingly acrimonious departure of three top executives at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines lab.
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If Maury Povich were still handing out white envelopes, Donald Trump might be bracing for one with his name on it.
A 55-year-old woman from another country has stepped forward claiming the U.S. president is her biological father after recently uncovering the truth about her birth.
The claim from Necla Özmen from Turkey landed online with a mix of curiosity, disbelief, and a lot of side-eye about family resemblance.
According to her account, the life she believed was firmly documented by civil records now feels unsettled.
Özmen claims she was officially registered as the daughter of Sati and Dursun Ozmen, the couple who raised her. She maintains that years later, she learned she had been adopted, a truth she says her mother finally shared in 2017. That revelation, she claims, reframed everything she thought she knew about her origins and set her on a search for answers that eventually led her to Trump.
From there, her story grows more dramatic and almost unbelievable. Özmen alleges a baby swap occurred at a hospital in Turkey around 1970, likely in the country’s capital of Ankara.
According to her account, Sati gave birth to a stillborn baby, while another woman giving birth at the same time — a U.S. citizen identified only as Sophia — handed over her newborn. Özmen claims Sophia said the child resulted from a forbidden relationship with Trump and could not be raised by her.
Does Trump have a lost daughter in Turkey?
Please meet Necla Ozmen, she claims Donald is her biological father
She’s requesting a DNA test, citing disputed birth records and an alleged informal adoption
The court dismissed the paternity lawsuit pic.twitter.com/8By7NMyYqD
— RT (@RT_com) January 13, 2026
The baby, she says, was then registered and raised by the Özmen family as their own.
Seeking official recognition, Özmen filed a paternity lawsuit at the Ankara 27th Family Court on Sept. 25, asking judges to establish whether Trump is her biological father and to order genetic testing. The filing was quickly dismissed by the court, though she later appealed the decision, insisting that her request is about clarity rather than publicity.
As the claim circulated, Daily Mail readers quickly turned their attention away from court filings and toward faces when the outlet reported.
One commenter wrote, “None of Donald’s kids has a chin, and this woman does, so it’s clear she is mistaken.”
Another added, “She looks like Ivanka before all the plastic surgery.”
A third weighed in more bluntly, saying, “It’s amazing any person can file a lawsuit for any reason. The mother doesn’t look like someone Trump would go for.”
Still, not everyone dismissed the idea outright.
One user commented, “Yep! Her mom looks like the supermodel type that Donald Trump loves.”
Another shrugged at the controversy, writing, “I mean, he has cheated on all 3 of his wives soooooooo.”
Beyond resemblance debates, some observers fixated on where Özmen would fit within Trump’s well-known family lineup if her claim were ever proven.
Born in 1970, she would be older than all of Trump’s publicly acknowledged children, arriving years before Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, who were born during his marriage to Ivana Trump. That would make Özmen his firstborn child, predating even his earliest, most visible family chapter and reshuffling a birth order that has remained unchanged for decades.
Trump family last night
Eric, Lara, Donald, Don Jr, Tiffany, Ivanka & Michael pic.twitter.com/lz2urU5q7C— Keeping Up With The Trumps (@KUWTTRUMPS) January 19, 2025
The allegation also taps into Trump’s well-documented history of infidelity, which has long shaped public perception of his personal life. For some critics, that pattern makes the claim feel less far-fetched, even without proof. For others, the lack of evidence and the reliance on resemblance arguments leave the story firmly in the realm of speculation.
The court ultimately tossed the petition, citing a lack of evidence to support Özmen’s claim.
Still, the woman isn’t backing down. She is appealing the decision and has also taken her fight beyond Turkey, sending petitions to the U.S. Embassy and to courts in the United States in hopes of keeping her case alive.
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Kyle Hency started Chubbies in 2011 with three Stanford friends as a fun, weekend‑and‑beer‑vibe shorts brand.
The irreverent direct-to-consumer clothing brand—one popular item was a tear-away pair of shorts with a speedo-style bathing suit underneath—”was objectively maybe a bad idea,” Hency says, half joking. Nevertheless, the company caught fire—revenue went from $1 million to $8 million. And when Chubbies was acquired by Solo Stove in 2021, it marked a rare retail exit just as the direct-to-consumer boom began to collapse.
After spending a few years on the sidelines, Hency is back: He cofounded Good Day in 2024 with former Chubbies CFO Dave Wardell, and the startup just raised its seed round to solve one of retail’s biggest problems: managing inventory.
It’s an area in which Hency has hard-earned, first-hand experience. Despite its ultimate success (Hency says Chubbies now does $100 million or more in sales under its new owner), Chubbies almost ran out of cash three times, and at one point managed with negative $2 million cash for 18 months. Managing inventory became critical, and Hency says he struggled with the software tools available at the time.
And in today’s market, clothing brands are under even more pressure to run a tight ship and obsess about everything below the revenue line, Hency says.
“Every single brand now has to manage revenue all the way down to profits, because those profits are the only way they can fund their business,” he says. “The lenders have gone out of business. The VCs aren’t backing brands as much as they were before. If you look up how much VC investments into consumer deals have gone down since before that period, some numbers show over 90% reduction.”
Good Day has raised $7 million in seed funding from current investors like Ridge Ventures, FirstMark Capital, and Flex Capital, the company exclusively told Fortune. New investors include Long Journey Ventures, Adverb Ventures, and Seguin Ventures. This brings the Good Day’s total capital raised to $13.5 million and current customers include Hill House Home, The Normal Brand, Margaux NY, and Kenny Flowers.
Amish Jani, cofounder and partner at FirstMark, described Good Day as “AI-native, ERP-lite”—an enterprise resource planning system that stands apart from traditional options. He sees an opportunity for startups to capitalize on the AI boom as retailers redesign their systems of record for this new era.
“If agentic solutions are driving real utility and replacing labor costs directly, I expect e-commerce brands to be amongst the first adopters of these tools,” Jani said via email. “GoodDay is a good example of this in the ERP space, but you can also see this emerging very quickly in every major vertical SaaS category both in consumer and beyond.”
While Hency’s latest startup may seem more staid than the loud Chubbies shorts he once flogged, the entrepreneur has not completely left the attitude behind. An important part of Good Day’s brand marketing is taunting established ERP competitors like Netsuite.
“Do you think NetSuite, created 20 years ago by a bunch of suits, is helping anybody during Black Friday, Cyber Monday?,” said Hency.
Hency’s rhetoric isn’t an accident, it’s strategy. In the ERP jungle, he’s aware he’s new—but he thinks he can get customers to switch from established competitor NetSuite. There’s some evidence this could perhaps happen. Take Jimmy Sansone, co-owner of The Normal Brand and Good Day customer, who said via email: “From an operational perspective, we did not have accurate visibility into our inventory balances, and our ops teams had to rely on offline spreadsheets and manual tools to move, fulfill, buy and receive inventory.”
Hency’s directness is part of his philosophy about business.
“I think it’s so important when you’re building a brand to be different,” he said. “It’s way more important than it is to be cool.”
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Fernando Mendoza arrived on Indiana’s campus last January carrying huge expectations for himself and the program.
Outsiders almost immediately dubbed the new, highly touted transfer as the quarterback who could lead Indiana’s football program to unprecedented heights. Some even suggested Mendoza could be a Heisman Trophy candidate and possibly the top prospect in the 2026 NFL draft.
But the grounded grandson of Cuban immigrants ignored the chatter and focused instead on proving himself all over again.
Mendoza wasted no time earning the respect of his new teammates thanks to a relentless work ethic. He quickly impressed coaches with his unflappable poise, uncanny natural instincts and unconventional study habits. The Miami native and former Cal star found his exuberant, humble personality fit perfectly in this Midwestern college town John Mellencamp depicted in his hit song “Small Town.” And eventually Mendoza’s penchant for making clutch plays put him on the big stage, winning college football’s most prestigious individual award in a landslide.
Now as the 22-year-old tries to etch one final chapter into this seemingly made-for-television Hollywood script — leading what had been major college football’s losingest program to its first national championship in front of a throng of family and friends just about a 40-minute drive from his parents’ home — Mendoza continues to insist he’s just along for the ride.
“I think it’s the other way around,” he said last Friday when asked about the impact he’s had on Indiana’s program. “If you told me (this would happen) a year ago — I believe a year ago today or the day before actually is the day I arrived on campus — Hoosier Nation, the coaching staff and the entire sports staff has given me so much opportunity here and (shown) so much belief in my character and my play, not only as a player, also as a leader that I’m forever in debt.”
Mendoza’s skill set
By now, Mendoza’s tools on the field should be obvious to even casual football observers.
His arm is strong enough to make any throw and his accuracy is almost unmatched. He’s also capable of extending plays with his legs and when the top-ranked Hoosiers (15-0, No. 1 CFP) need a key play, Mendoza seems to deliver on cue. Miami coach Mario Cristobal has seen all of it on film.
And while Mendoza graciously shares credit with those around him, coaches and teammates recognize they’re heading to Miami this weekend largely because of Mendoza’s ability to make a game-changing play on any snap.
“The throws he makes, they just wow you every time,” All-American linebacker Aiden Fisher said. “The job he’s done this year has been nothing short of remarkable. He’s the best football player in the country, and I don’t think it’s close. He’s done such a phenomenal job being a leader for us, somebody we can depend on, we can count on every single time. He’s fantastic at everything he does.”
That includes the part most fans never see.
Teammates watched Mendoza spend countless hours studying film, dissecting defenses and preparing for every potential game-day contingency. In the rare moments Mendoza isn’t working, he’s probably watching other games searching for something he can add to his repertoire.
That example helped Mendoza not only win over the locker room but also become a beloved figure inside of it.
“He’s just the ultimate professional, a wonderful teammate,” starting center Pat Coogan said. “He prepares like no one I’ve ever seen. He works his butt off like no one I’ve ever seen and he’s just an awesome locker room guy on top of that.”
But Mendoza’s reach goes far beyond football.
He often explains how the daily battle his mother, Elsa, wages against Multiple Sclerosis helped him learn to cherish every precious moment of this incredible journey. Mendoza also talks openly about how his faith has helped him excel as a person and a player and that he relies on prayer, meditation and Bible study sessions to navigate the highs and lows of life and football.
And his ability to balance so many things has come at such a young age that he has turned even the most hardened football people into true believers.
“He’s a special guy. I mean, he’s extremely intelligent, and people recognize that,” blunt-talking Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said recently. “He’s got a great relationship with the guys, and it’s mainly the older guys, obviously. Those guys hang together. But I think what he’s done behind the scenes to bring the offensive unit even closer together — and those are a lot of things I’m not aware of at the time, I find out later — he’s just done a tremendous job in every single area you could impact team success.”
Mendoza’s results
Mendoza was hardly a household name coming out of powerhouse Christopher Columbus High School in Miami.
His first scholarship offer came from Yale. His only Football Bowl Subdivision offer came from California. But it was there, in Berkeley, where Mendoza’s career trajectory changed.
After redshirting in 2022, he won the starting job in 2023 and threw for 1,728 yards, 14 touchdowns and 10 interceptions. In 2023, his completion percentage improved from 63.0% to 68.7% as he finished with 3,004 yards, 16 TDs and six interceptions.
The problem: He was sacked a staggering 41 times.
So when the opportunity came to play behind a better offensive line, chase a national title and join his younger brother, Alberto, in Bloomington, Fernando Mendoza was sold. Naturally, Mendoza started cramming even before Indiana’s winter semester started.
“Having that playbook at home already, because Alberto was in my parent’s house, I definitely started diving into it during Christmas break in the off time,” Fernando Mendoza said, referring to 2024. “Ever since I’ve been trying to be consistent in the film room, in the playbook in order to gain a mastery (of the offense).”
By then, though, he’d already been turning heads in Bloomington.
While Cignetti liked the commitment, the passion and the drive for perfection he saw during Mendoza’s recruiting visit, other people noticed different things.
Receiver Elijah Sarratt remembers Mendoza “trolling” his future teammates with inside jokes that typically take players months or years to get and athletic director Scott Dolson found Mendoza to be uniquely genuine.
“All the stuff you hear him say, it’s all authentic and real,” Dolson said. “He cares more about winning and his teammates than he does about himself, and I think that’s a good lesson for other student-athletes to see or the next generation around the country — that it’s not all about you.”
Still, it’s hard to ignore the results.
Mendoza leads the nation with 41 TD passes, a school record. He’s the first Indiana player to win the Heisman and just the third quarterback to lead the Hoosiers to a Big Ten crown. He’s now the favorite to be the first draft pick in April, and he finds himself squarely in the middle of perhaps the most astounding two-year turnarounds in sports history.
Yet here Mendoza stands, one win away from delivering the first 16-0 season in major college football since the 1890s, and all he wants to do is share the spotlight with everyone around him.
“It’s been a great journey, I believe, for all of us,” Mendoza said. “I still remember when I was in the transfer portal, coach Cignetti said, ‘Hey, if you’re going to come here, you’re going to develop into a hell of a quarterback, and it wasn’t about, at that point, hey, ’I’m going to promise you a national championship.’ It was you’re going to develop and have that belief.”
___
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When I first learned that a critical medication for transplant patients — one that keeps them alive — had generic versions that might not be effective, I called a specialty pharmacist at a hospital in Virginia. Adam Cochrane had written a journal article about the problems with the generics.
The drug is called tacrolimus, and it keeps a transplant patient’s body from rejecting a donated organ. I was surprised to hear that Cochrane had several patients he thought had died in part because their generic tacrolimus hadn’t worked right.
He told me about Hannah Goetz, though he didn’t divulge her name initially. She would become the focus of a story I published recently that’s part of a larger investigation into how the Food and Drug Administration has for years allowed risky drugs into your medicine cabinet.
Hannah was 17 when she had a double lung transplant because of complications from cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition that fills the organs with mucus. She died in 2023 at just 21 years old, he said. And she had been taking one of the bad generics.
He agreed to see if her mom would be willing to chat with me. When I met Holly Goetz at her home in Portsmouth, Virginia, she was open and personable. She was angry, too. Hannah had died too young. She welcomed the chance to tell her daughter’s story. “I was excited, because someone was going to research this issue,” Holly told me recently. “Possibly turn things around.” Before we’d met, she’d been told she didn’t have any legal recourse to sue over Hannah’s death despite the issue with the generic. Lawyers told Holly it was impossible to draw a straight line from Hannah’s death to a generic manufacturer.
I knew that in telling Hannah’s story in detail, I’d also be telling the larger story about tacrolimus, and larger still about the systemic failures at the FDA. ProPublica’s reporting typically focuses on exposing wrongdoing in the hopes of spurring change. I wasn’t sure whether our reporting would bring Holly the accountability she yearned for, at least not in a tangible way. I hoped Holly’s experience sharing an intimate, tragic part of her life wouldn’t end up being a disappointment.
Holly had been by Hannah’s side, advocating for her since she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and through the four-year journey after the transplant. Over several hours as the sky turned dark that February day, she took me through all that happened — from Hannah’s sudden need for a transplant where she almost died, to her doing well enough to take college courses and enjoy having her first (and only) real boyfriend, to her unexpected decline just three and half years after the successful transplant.
“It was hard, because I was reliving everything over again,” Holly said of our first interview at her home. “Then again, I got to talk to someone else about Hannah, who she was, not just her in the hospital.”
As she showed me Hannah’s peach bedroom that day, with its dozens of stuffed animals and the hair bows she wore every day when she was in school, Holly shared that when Hannah was a little girl she started sticking her tongue out in pictures. Holly laughed, saying she thought for sure Hannah would outgrow the habit, but it turned into her signature pose. Now, one of those pictures hangs from Holly’s rearview mirror in her car, one of many touchstones. There are photos and memorabilia of Hannah all over the house. I felt privileged to step into Holly’s own bedroom to see the pink urn with angel wings that holds Hannah’s ashes.
During our conversation, I realized that my reporting had given me access to key details about Hannah’s death that Holly didn’t know. I didn’t relish being the messenger who informed her that Hannah had taken not just one but actually two different suspect generic versions of tacrolimus, that she had the misfortune of exclusively taking ones that doctors, pharmacists or the FDA had found problematic. Holly’s eyes widened. I had to share, too, that the FDA had revoked one version’s generic status just two months after Hannah had died.
The two manufacturers of the generic medication Hannah was taking, companies named Accord and Dr. Reddy’s, both maintain that their tacrolimus is safe and effective. An Accord spokesperson said in a statement that the company cannot comment on individual cases but that it is “dedicated to patient safety, product quality and regulatory compliance.” Dr. Reddy’s said in a statement that it hasn’t received any complaints that “indicated any concerns in patient safety.”
The next day as I made the three-hour drive back to Washington, D.C., where I live, I called one of ProPublica’s managing editors, Tracy Weber, whom I’ve known for years. I cried as I described my conversation with Holly. One unavoidable aspect of my job is that I’m often asking people about the worst things that have happened to them. In my two decades as a reporter — quite a few of those years spent covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — I’ve sat at many kitchen tables with grieving mothers. Talking with Holly, though, was the first time I’d done so as a mother myself. Her sorrow hit me differently.
Over the next nine months, I’d be a constant presence in Holly’s life. We texted hundreds of times. She dug up old photos and videos and gave me access to Hannah’s private Instagram account. One of the hardest moments was listening to a recording Holly sent of the doctors telling Hannah shortly before she died that they couldn’t give her a second transplant.
The ask from an investigative reporter is never just, “Tell me about your loved one.” Our work requires meticulous detail and all the receipts. I had to recruit Holly to take considerable time to help with my reporting.
There were four years of medical care I needed to comb through to write the story, which meant asking Holly to track down records from two hospitals and, crucially, the pharmacy where Hannah had gotten all her medications. It wasn’t a simple task.
Hannah was an adult when she died, so Holly wasn’t automatically entitled to her records. Although Hannah had signed an advance directive giving Holly power of attorney before her death, including the ability to request records, Holly still couldn’t get access.
She had to recruit a lawyer friend and attend probate court to get Hannah’s hospital records for me. “What I had to go through to get them was ridiculous,” Holly said. I first asked about the records in February. It took until May for her to get appointed as executor of Hannah’s estate, and then several more months for the hospitals and pharmacy to fulfil Holly’s request and send her the records. We didn’t have them until July.
There were upwards of 13,000 pages — all of which she shared with me. Sometimes, the records meant I had to ask uncomfortable questions of Holly. Why, for example, didn’t Hannah consistently take her medication for her pancreas? Did that mean she also didn’t take her tacrolimus? (Answers: She didn’t like how the pancreas drug made her feel, and Holly was so insistent on guaranteeing her daughter took her tacrolimus that she made her FaceTime when she took the pills away from home.) Holly was unfazed by even the most difficult questions. She and Hannah were alike that way: There was no shrinking from the world. Holly made my job a lot easier; she didn’t have to.
I hesitated each time I had to reach out, wondering if texting about Hannah in the middle of the day would be jarring. What was it like for Holly to check her phone on her break from teaching high schoolers and be greeted with a message that would take her back to Hannah’s final days in the hospital? To my relief, Holly told me later she looked forward to my texts or calls. “I like sharing everything about Hannah,” she said.
Holly said she had agreed to talk to ProPublica because she thought speaking to me and the resulting story might bring her a sense of closure. Did it? I asked her.
“Yes, because more people know now what really happened,” she said. “The real story.”
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Stacy Cox has always prioritized having access to health insurance. For the 48-year-old self-employed photographer in southern Utah, it’s necessary “so that I can help to calm my anxiety and know that if I need care, I can get care.”
Still, Cox and her husband, John, have decided this month to go uninsured after the cost of their health plan under the Affordable Care Act skyrocketed.
At the end of 2025, Congress let enhanced premium tax credits that had helped bring down the cost of the couple’s ACA coverage expire. They were quoted $2,168.68 a month for the same plan that had previously cost them just under $500 a month.
It was a “nerve wracking” decision, Cox said. Health insurance has helped keep the couple’s preexisting conditions under control. Cox has an autoimmune disease that requires prescription medication and extra medical care. She is also at a high risk for breast cancer and uses preventative services like more frequent mammograms. John, 55, had a quadruple bypass surgery in his late 30s that has required daily prescription medication. He also has annual check-ins with a cardiologist.
“For the most part, we’re healthy middle-aged people, but we’re also middle-aged, which means that every time we wake up, something else hurts or something stops working,” she said.
The enhanced subsidies, which were approved in 2021 at the height of the pandemic and later extended, were aimed at making ACA coverage more affordable to a larger group of people. They helped ACA sign-ups soar, with open enrollment roughly doubling since then. Cox had held out some hope that this current iteration of Congress would have taken some action by Thursday — the deadline in most states for people to enroll or renew ACA plans — to keep the enhanced tax credits.
That did not happen.
While the House passed a three-year subsidy extension on January 8 with the support of all Democrats and 17 Republicans, GOP lawmakers who control the Senate immediately shot down talk of approving the measure. President Donald Trump, who released a health care plan on Thursday with vague details to lower ACA premiums, also told reporters that he might veto the bill if it reaches his desk.
Preliminary data on ACA enrollment shows 22.8 million people have signed up for 2026 coverage so far — about 800,000 fewer people compared to this time last year. Experts say it could take months of emerging data to see the full scope of impact.
Cox has been self-employed since 2022, and losing her health insurance coverage raises a lot of logistical questions about what comes next. Will she eventually close her small photography business to find an employer that offers private health insurance? Would she have time for photography, even as a side gig? Could such a career pivot force the couple — her husband is also self-employed — to move out of Utah to find more job options?
“I don’t want our lives to drastically change because of this,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Women like Cox stand to lose major professional gains amid the cuts to ACA.
Prior to the enactment of the health law in 2010, many Americans were caught in “job lock” — stuck in careers and workplaces primarily because they offered private health insurance, which people with preexisting conditions often couldn’t access otherwise.
This was particularly tricky for small businesses and self-employed people who needed to purchase health insurance on their own. The ACA changed that: By 2022, small business owners and self-employed people represented 18 percent of marketplace coverage for workers between the ages of 21 and 64, according to a 2024 federal analysis.
“The Affordable Care Act has given a number of small business owners or self-employed people or gig workers a kind of flexibility to be able to have that type of income,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president at KFF, a nonprofit health policy research, polling and journalism organization who has no relation to Stacy Cox.
Today, about half of all adults enrolled in the ACA are small business owners, work for a small business or are self-employed, according to a KFF analysis. Roughly five million small business owners and self-employed workers were likely to be enrolled in the ACA at some point last year — and enhanced tax credits saved enrollees an average of $705 annually.
Women-owned businesses represent nearly 40 percent of all U.S. businesses. But while they employ more than 12 million workers, the bulk of these businesses — about 90 percent — have no employees, according to federal data.
From 2019 to 2023, women-owned businesses were outpacing the growth rate for men on every front, including new business creation. Survey data from 2022 showed women created about half of all new businesses — a jump from the 29 percent they represented before the pandemic.
Cox, who said she has had a camera in her hand since she was in grade school, didn’t immediately think of photography as a way to make a living. She has degrees in accounting and public service and worked for years as an auditor. In 2013, Cox began photographing as a side gig — taking occasional photos of friends for special occasions and building a client roster bit by bit. At the end of 2021, she quit her job at a medical device company to be a photographer full time.
Cox said the ACA made her entrepreneurial dreams a reality. Knowing that she would have guaranteed health insurance that was comprehensive and affordable was a critical step as she considered what it would take to branch out on her own.
“It was the last piece that I needed. I had the knowledge, had the motivation. I had been saving money so that I had a foundation to be able to leave my current employment to do this, but none of that would have even mattered,” she said. “It all hinged on: Can I get health insurance?”
Starting her business, Cox said, has been amazing. She has built a following in her town of 5,000 people. She takes photos of her neighbors, everything from maternity shoots to newborn sessions to annual family photos. She loves selling landscape prints of Utah’s scenery. She’s also expanded her skills by photographing properties for real estate agents.
It’s been fulfilling and empowering work, on her own terms — and it all feels really fragile right now.
“I want people to know that this is primarily going to impact people like us — working individuals and small businesses. That is who this is going to hurt the most,” she said. “It matters having this program available. Having affordable health insurance matters.”
These are among the impossible options millions of people across the country face, said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.
“They either have to make pretty significant sacrifices in their budgets to afford what is for many a doubling or even tripling of their premium to maintain their health insurance coverage — and the financial protection that it provides if they get sick or injured — or they have to roll the dice and go uninsured, which exposes them to potential financial catastrophe if they get sick or injured,” she said.
Cox and her husband are considering whether to enroll in short-term health insurance — a kind of temporary medical coverage that is often cheaper than more traditional insurance — but such programs don’t often cover preexisting conditions and often include high deductibles. Women disproportionately have preexisting conditions — including pregnancy and certain types of cancer — that would have left them uninsurable in a pre-ACA individual marketplace.
“It’s really just if you get shot or run over, and the premiums aren’t that great. I think the lowest one we found is just shy of $700 a month,” she said. “It’s disconcerting. I’m just really angry, and on the other hand, I’m really scared.”
Laura Packard is a self-employed digital content creator and stage 4 cancer survivor in Virginia who advocates for affordable health care. She also has an ACA plan and saw her premiums increase by more than 20 percent for the current enrollment year.
Packard said before she was enrolled in the ACA, she was part of a short-term health plan with limited coverage. At the time, she was relatively healthy — her Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis came in 2017, while she was already an ACA enrollee.
Packard feels fortunate that her diagnosis happened while she was no longer part of a short-term plan.
“I could have been bankrupt or dead. And that’s the danger with these short-term plans,” she said. “They take your money, but they don’t actually provide the high-cost care that you might need, just when you need it most.”
On Thursday, amid the final hours of the enrollment deadline, Cox said she and John had decided to go with a short-term plan.
“We can’t afford a catastrophe that could impact our financial future through our credit for years to come,” she said.
Cynthia Cox with KFF noted that some small business owners with flexible incomes — meaning that they have say over how much they make in a year — might consider working less to qualify for some tax credits that are still available for some poorer enrollees. Or they may contribute more to a retirement account to lower the part of their income that is counted for subsidy eligibility.
Packard encouraged some people who were enrolled in the ACA to let their policies auto renew, since there is typically a grace period for some coverage until the policy is terminated. She noted that there are federally qualified health centers in many places that offer sliding scale medical treatments, as well as some free medical clinics.
“These are not solutions for a broken health system,” she said. “But for one individual, maybe it’ll help a little bit around the edges.”
Cox said she and John considered letting their ACA plan auto-renew, but it ultimately did not make sense for them.
“We realized that I don’t want to pay $2,168 for a month of coverage when we’re not going to be able to maintain that. So why give up the extra $1,500 this month?” she said. “This would be different if we were jumping from $500 to say, $900 a month or something, that’d be a totally different conversation.”
Cox, who identifies as an independent, voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. But she doesn’t view this issue through the lens of politics. She said the health of a community relies on preventative care.
“It’s a giant connected circle. People that have health insurance will actually go to the doctor,” she said. “If they don’t have health insurance, they won’t go. It means that many people in the population won’t be as healthy as they could be. This is your neighbor. This is your church member. This is your dog walker. This is your realtor. All these people that are like us — the individuals and small business owners — won’t be as healthy. That affects your community.”
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A man accused of opening fire at a New Hampshire country club in September has been indicted on murder, attempted murder and assault charges, authorities said Thursday.
Hunter Nadeau, 24, of Nashua, is accused of killing one person and wounding two others at the Sky Meadow Country Club on Sept. 20 while a wedding reception was going on nearby. He originally was charged with second-degree murder, but indictments made public Thursday show he’s been charged under alternate theories with both first-degree and second-degree murder, as well as attempted murder and assault.
Authorities have declined to discuss a possible motive for the shooting but said they don’t believe the victims were targeted by Nadeau, who previously worked at the Nashua club and was arrested shortly after the shooting. A message was left for his attorney Thursday.
Police credited restaurant patrons with responding quickly during the chaos, and witnesses said one person struck the gunman with a stool to help subdue him. Charlene DeCesare, whose husband, Robert DeCesare Jr., was killed, said he was shot while protecting her and the couple’s daughter. The gunfire also wounded restaurant manager Steven Burtman and a patron, Brianna Surette.
Robert Steven DeCesare, 59, was having dinner Saturday night at the Sky Meadow Country Club with his wife and daughter, to discuss his daughter’s upcoming wedding that is on Nov. 2.
According to court documents, Nadeau was charged in April with simple assault after being accused of shoving a manager at a grocery store to the floor. Both sides agreed in September to place the misdemeanor charge on file and dismiss it if Nadeau remained on good behavior.
Dave Manganello, a chef, said he knew Nadeau as a banquet server at the club several years ago. In a September interview, he described Nadeau as borderline arrogant but said he didn’t think he was capable of violent crime.
“He wasn’t like sweet as pie or the nicest guy you ever met,” Manganello said.
Whittle reported from Scarborough, Maine.
More than two months after a gunman opened fire at Sky Meadow Country Club, the PRIME restaurant is open again.
Great Job Holly Ramer and Patrick Whittle | The Associated Press & the Team @ NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth for sharing this story.
The mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection faces a capacity crunch of titanic proportions as AI computing investment rushes headlong into its 13-state region, home to more than 67 million people. The most recent PJM capacity auctions — where the grid operator pays in advance for power plants to be available to serve the grid — hit record-high clearing prices in December, portending more expensive electricity for the region.
The developer Elevate Renewables is tackling that dire need by accomplishing something unheard of in the PJM region: building a really big battery. The company, launched by private equity firm ArcLight in 2022, announced today that it had acquired a 150-megawatt/600-megawatt-hour battery project in northern Virginia and will complete construction by mid-2026. Called Prospect Power, the project could be bolstering the grid near the state’s famed “Data Center Alley” just in time for the summer spike in electricity use.
“The states want capacity, they want affordability, they want in-state resources,” Elevate CEO Joshua Rogol told Canary Media. “Storage can clearly be part of the solution to that problem. It is one of the few resources that can come online quickly, given how long it takes to develop and build a project given the supply chain as it exists today.”
Fossil gas still generates more power across the U.S. than any other resource, but battery storage has become the top source of on-demand power being built today (solar, as an intermittent producer, does not meet that definition).
However, almost all the storage action, and its resulting benefits, has happened in California and Texas. Data firm Modo Energy drew the comparison in a report last year: “In the past five years, PJM has added just 200 MW of grid-scale battery capacity — while Texas and California have cumulatively built more than 20 GW of [battery energy storage systems] over the same period.” It’s as if a major swath of the country saw a few states adopting smartphones and said, “No, thanks, we’re happy with flip phones.”
PJM’s failure to keep up with this particular grid technology is particularly surprising because PJM actually created the modern storage market back in 2012, by letting batteries compete for the rapid-fire grid service known as frequency regulation. Those rules spurred a buildout of 181 megawatts by 2016, according to Modo — heady stuff at the time, and well before storage in California and Texas took off. But these batteries tended to have just 15 minutes of duration, because that’s all that was needed to perform that role for the grid.
“The economic strategy was always to build a very short-duration battery, just participate in regulation services and make really substantial returns that way,” said Julia Hoos, head of USA East at Aurora Energy Research.
Frequency regulation has stayed lucrative for battery owners, Hoos noted, in part due to quirks in PJM’s rules that reserved some of the market for thermal generators like gas plants, which set a higher clearing price than batteries do. But rule changes now underway will likely reduce the payoff in future years.
In any case, the amount of regulation PJM needs for the grid isn’t enough to support a larger battery buildout on its own. Currently, PJM has more than 400 megawatts of batteries operating, meaning individual projects elsewhere in the country contain more battery capacity than is in the entirety of the nation’s largest wholesale market.
Beyond the limited regulation market, PJM’s rules and market dynamics make it hard for developers to finance storage projects. In California and Texas, battery owners can profit by charging up at times when solar generation makes grid power very cheap and selling back to the grid when prices are high. But PJM doesn’t experience that level of daily swing from cheap to expensive power, Hoos said.
Battery developers could try to make money instead by committing their batteries in the capacity auction. However, PJM awards capacity contracts on a one-year basis, which prevents developers from locking down long-term revenue certainty, like they can in California.
Aurora modeled a hypothetical four-hour duration battery in Virginia and found that half its revenue would come from capacity payments and half from energy arbitrage. But, Hoos added, “the revenue from both of those is still not enough for an investor to build a merchant battery.”
Prospect Power could be the project that breaks the dry spell, and it’s taken many hands to make that possible.
Great Job Julian Spector & the Team @ Canary Media Source link for sharing this story.
MATT WALSH (HOST): But as pathetic as they are, these people are managing to do real damage. As you just saw, they stole weapons from outside the back of the ICE vehicle. But they also took more than that. Late last night, as various antifa livestreams revealed that these domestic terrorists have obtained a significant amount of documentation from inside the ICE vehicles that were left behind as the mob surrounded them. And specifically, according to those livestreams, they’ve obtained the full names of many ICE agents, location of the hotels that they’re staying in, including the room numbers, and so on. They’ve also obtained FBI badges and badge numbers, and they’re broadcasting it all over the Internet. This is unequivocally domestic terrorism. We need to see prosecutions and crackdowns as soon as possible for everybody involved in this. They’re all on camera.
The residents of Minnesota are waging a campaign of terrorism against federal law enforcement, which is carrying out lawful orders. Thousands more federal agents need to be sent to Minneapolis at a minimum. That’s what sane Americans want to see, the restoration of law and order. And indeed, that does appear to be what’s coming next. Within minutes of the shooting, Federal Bureau of Prison guards were on the scene keeping the agitators at bay and preventing ICE from being overwhelmed. They prevented ICE agents from being dragged away by the mob and murdered, which is what they wanted. They, apparently, weren’t able to prevent some ICE vehicles from being looted, but there was — they did prevent any loss of life. Fox also reported that ICE’s special response team, which is their SWAT team essentially, deployed as well. So this was a unified immediate response to flood the area with manpower. And very soon, we can expect many more federal agents in Minneapolis because the population is clearly out of control.
And they’ve gone full Canada in Minneapolis, and and they need to be dealt with. All of their screeching and whining needs to be ignored. Minneapolis has been ground zero for lawless chaos for years now. The rest of us are sick of it. The whole city must be taught a lesson. How much do we have to deal with from these people? They must be punished. It’s a city full of overgrown children that won’t learn anything unless they’re forced to learn it the hard way. Well, it’s time for the hard way.
Great Job Media Matters for America & the Team @ Media Matters for America Source link for sharing this story.
(Photo by Matthias Bein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
AUSTIN – Attorney General Ken Paxton has finalized a settlement with Cal-Maine Foods Inc. that will provide more than 2 million eggs to food banks across the state following allegations of price gouging.
The agreement stems from a lawsuit filed in April 2020. Paxton accused the company, which is among the largest egg suppliers in Texas, of illegally raising prices by approximately 300 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Timeline:
As part of the settlement, Cal-Maine will donate 180,000 dozen large eggs to various Texas food banks within the next 120 days. Paxton said his office will crack down on any corporation that illegally raises prices on Texans. He described the settlement as an important step toward securing justice for what he called the company’s unethical actions.
The settlement also prohibits Cal-Maine from selling eggs at prices that violate the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act during designated disaster periods. Paxton said these reforms are intended to prevent future instances of price gouging similar to the conduct reported in 2020.
The Source: Information in this article is from the Office of Texas Attorney General.
Great Job & the Team @ Latest & Breaking News | FOX 7 Austin for sharing this story.
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