Since taking office, the Trump administration has launched a systematic attack on laws that exist to protect all of us from discrimination when we seek basic health care. Today, we’re taking them back to court over it.

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) resurrected a policy that allows health care providers — including hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices — to use their religious beliefs to withhold critical information and obstruct patient’s access to health care. In 2009, the ACLU challenged the original version of the rule. Ten years later, we filed a lawsuit to, once again, preserve access to evidence-based, nonjudgmental health care and ensure that medical standards — not religious belief — guide health care.

A truly bizarre trend is having an impact on the economy — wealthy people and corporations have so much money they literally don't know what to do with it.

Why it matters: At a time when growing income inequality is fueling voter discontent and underpinning an array of social movements, the top 1% of earners and big companies are holding record levels of unused cash.

The big picture: U.S. companies raked in a record $2.3 trillion in corporate profits last year, while the country's total wealth increased by $6 trillion to $98.2 trillion (40% of which went to those with wealth over $100,000).

So, where is all the money going? The IMF notes large companies around the world are overwhelmingly and uniformly choosing not to reinvest much of it into their businesses. They're hoarding it in cash and buying back stock.

"There are only 2 things that money can do — sit on a balance sheet unused, where it's just earned income earning an interest rate of zero," ICI chief economist Sean Collins points out. "Or it makes sense to release it to share buybacks or dividends."

Most nights, Jeremias Ortiz has to shoo away homeless people who sleep and panhandle outside his restaurant, El Salvadoreño in Duarte.

The men and women living in the parking lot are bad for his business, but as their ranks swell, it has become a fact of life — as has cleaning up broken glass, urine and feces.

“They don’t have a place to put [homeless people] in this area. I think it’s where all the problems start.” Local officials, Ortiz said, “are just ignoring the people’s needs.”

According to the latest point-in-time count released Tuesday, the number of homeless people in the San Gabriel Valley jumped 17% from 4,282 in 2018 to 5,021 this year — the second largest bump in Los Angeles County. The largest was on the Westside, up 19% from 4,401 homeless people in 2018 to 5,223 this year. Both outpaced the overall increase of 12% across the county.

We all feel a higher calling sometimes. Maybe it’s to be a teacher. Maybe it’s to leave your six-figure job and be a full-time drag queen. Or maybe, if you’re the CEO of Chick-fil-A, it’s a calling to donate to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

In an interview with Business Insider, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of corporate social responsibility and executive director of the Chick-fil-A Foundation Rodney Bullard said that the company felt a “higher calling” to donate its money to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

Among adults with mental health needs, those covered by Medicare or employer-sponsored health insurance have greater access to medical treatment, less out-of-pocket cost and are more likely to receive care than those seeking an appointment through an Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace-sponsored plan, according to findings from researchers at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health. Their study, published in the May 2019 issue of Health Affairs, provides preliminary results on disparities among those experiencing psychological stress since the ACA became law in 2010.

The researchers used National Health Interview Survey data on adults experiencing mental illness. They looked at a dataset that included 4,500 Medicaid enrollees, 8,600 with employer-sponsored insurance and nearly 900 on a Marketplace plan, and measured access to treatment, specifically whether individuals received care in the previous 12 months and whether those patients could afford treatment.

Among those seeking mental health care during the previous 12 months, success was highest for those with employer coverage. Although 5 percent of those with employer-sponsored insurance and 9 percent of Medicaid patients reported trouble getting a mental health doctor appointment in the previous year, 12 percent of Marketplace-enrollees experienced this same trouble.

Future Relics is a column about the objects that our society is currently making, and how they may explain our lives to future generations. In each article, we'll focus on one item that could conceivably be discovered by someone 1,000 years from now, and try to explain where this item came from, where it's going, and what its existence explains about our current moment.

AirPods are a product of the past.

They're plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt.

The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine them. As they work, humans breathe in airborne particles, which deposit in their lungs. The materials are shipped from places like Vietnam, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, and India, to factories in China. A literal city of workers creates four tiny computing chips and assembles them into a logic board. Sensors, microphones, grilles, and an antenna are glued together and packaged into a white, strange-looking plastic exoskeleton.

These are AirPods. They’re a collection of atoms born at the dawn of the universe, churned beneath the surface of the earth, and condensed in an anthropogenic parallel to the Big Crunch—a proposed version of the death of the universe where all matter shrinks and condenses together. Workers are paid unlivable wages in more than a dozen countries to make this product possible. Then it’s sold by Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar company, for $159 USD.

When an acquaintance offered to pay for my therapy, I was so grateful for the opportunity to get the help I needed. But, after just three sessions, I had to call it quits.

A lot had happened before I started my search for therapy. In 2015, I failed to secure a visa that would have allowed me to work at possibly one of the most highly-reputed companies in Africa. When I first received the job offer, I thought that, finally, I had achieved some semblance of comforting stability in my life. Achieving permanent employment had been a rollercoaster ride—but my whole life has been a rollercoaster ride. Often, it has been one with more downs than ups after surviving sexual abuse, emotional abuse, a dysfunctional family, and financial challenges. It’s been overwhelming, for me and for my loved ones caught in the ride.

So you can imagine how relieved I felt when I got the job because I could finally fend for myself. You can probably also imagine how I felt when my application for a work visa was denied.

Once upon a time, offices had walls inside them. They weren’t glass, like the conference rooms of 2019, but were made of drywall, and were usually painted a neutral color, like many of the walls you know and love. Over time, office walls gave way to cubicles. Now, for many office workers, the cubicles are also gone. There are only desks.

If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers.

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Now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear. Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were. But something as expensive and logistically complicated as an office design is difficult to walk back, so, as Jeff Goldblum wisely intones in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a work-around to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones.

Automation Station
This time, artificial intelligence is literally taking jobs.

Documents obtained by The Verge show how Amazon used a computer system to automatically track and fire hundreds of fulfillment center employees between for failing to meet productivity quotas — a grim glimpse of a future in which AI is your boss.

While not every decision was made by a computer system, the documents — including a signed letter by an Amazon attorney describing the system — reveal how deeply automated the process really is. It’s not clear whether Amazon is still using the system.

“Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” reads the letter as quoted by The Verge, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.”

Sounds About Right

A New York teen suing Apple for $1 billion claims its facial-recognition system falsely linked him to a series of thefts and caused him to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.

The twist: an Apple spokesperson told Gizmodo that such a facial recognition system doesn’t even exist. If Apple is telling the truth, it’s possible the lawsuit filed on Monday is based on mere speculation.

But even if that is the case, the suit still serves as evidence that American citizens find it easy to believe that one of the world’s biggest tech companies uses facial recognition to keep tabs on them.

Food waste, that scourge that sends more than a third of our food supply to rot and is a major contributor to climate change, seems like it should be easy to address.

Waste less food, advocates cry, and you can save money! You can save time! You can save farmland and fuel, and, since agriculture drives habitat loss, you can even help save the tiger.

And yet, here we are in the thick of Earth Month, on a day designated as “Stop Food Waste Day,” and you probably don’t need to look further than your own kitchen or cafeteria to see edible food dumped. In the U.S. more than 80 percent of food waste has been traced to homes and consumer-facing businesses.

So why is this problem so hard to solve? Because, researchers say, we’re only human. We have some irrational tendencies, some aspirations that don’t match reality, and some major blind spots. Not to mention busy schedules that don’t always align with when the avocado on the counter finally ripens. Here in the U.S., food waste is often invisibly baked into how we shop, cook and entertain.

A United Airlines employee has been criminally charged and could be fired after she was accused of using racial slurs to scold a black passenger at Houston's airport, according to police.

Carmella Davano was cited for using profane and abusive language in a public place after Cacilie Hughes and witnesses told police that the United Airlines employee told her to "stop making monkey faces" and "stop making monkey shines," Houston Police spokesman Kese Smith said.

Witnesses also told police that Davano was saying she thought Hughes was on drugs, Smith said.

You would think that the crisis over clerical abuse roiling the Catholic Church for the past few years would be an “all hands on deck” moment in terms of the resources and attention of the Catholic hierarchy. You would also think that given the revelations about predatory behavior reaching to the very highest levels of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the systemic misogyny of the church’s leadership, which last week prompted the entire staff of the Vatican women’s magazine to resign, the hierarchy might back down on its insistence that contraception and abortion were to blame for many of society’s ills and turn its attention inward.

You would be wrong.

Apparently the Catholic hierarchy still has time to find ways to attempt to undercut access to birth control and abortion. As the New York Times reported last Friday, the Trump administration is funneling $5.1 million in federal Title X family planning funding to a Southern California-based chain of faith-based anti-choice medical clinics called Obria. Obria is the more millennial-friendly name given to the former Birth Choice crisis pregnancy centers founded by Kathleen Eaton Bravo, a Catholic woman who pioneered the idea of creating a “medical model” corporate-sounding anti-abortion clinic to siphon money away from Planned Parenthood.

The Obria clinics keep the features of crisis pregnancy centers, including the lure of free or low-cost pregnancy testing and ultrasounds, which lure women with unintended pregnancy in the door to hear a pitch about the horrors and dangers of abortion, but add just enough primary care services—STD testing, prenatal care, and well-women visits—to qualify for Medicaid and some private insurance reimbursement, and now, with the aid of the Trump administration, actual Title X family planning funding.

This Instagram influencer mom is not afraid to leave her family in the back of the plane while she flies first class.

Naomi Isted, a fashion blogger and TV presenter from Essex, U.K., who has 94,400 followers on Instagram, told INSIDER that she travels every six weeks on average for work, and if she’s booked in an economy seat, she’ll always “try to upgrade if there’s scope to do so.”

However, if her children are traveling with her, she will upgrade alone because she believes that, at ages 3 and 9 years old, they’re too young too appreciate the amenities of first class.

“I never personally experienced business or first until I was presenting a wine TV show in my 20s,” Isted, 40, told INSIDER, adding that a person shouldn’t fly first class until they are old enough to “appreciate and understand the value of money and hard work.”

While Operation Varsity Blues uncovered the most explicit example of rich people buying their children’s future, the scandal has sparked a larger conversation on the ways in which elite college admissions have always been tilted toward people like those charged: rich, white parents who, should their children still not measure up despite a childhood of private test-prep tutors and expensive extracurriculars, have the means to buy their way onto Ivy League campuses with a hefty donation or to influence their way in through family legacy.

Meanwhile on these same campuses, low-income students and students of color are assumed to be there only because of affirmative action. In other words, to not deserve their spot. Below is an edited and condensed conversation between Slate editorial assistant Rachelle Hampton (Northwestern Class of 2017), New York Times writers Aisha Harris (Northwestern, 2009) and Jamelle Bouie (University of Virginia, 2009), and Slate parenting columnist and podcaster Carvell Wallace (NYU, 1997) on what it’s like to navigate these primarily white academic spaces when your presence there is assumed to be unearned.