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.

California students could be restricted or banned from using smartphones at school under a bill by a state lawmaker who says the devices can interfere with classroom learning.

The measure by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) would require school boards to adopt policies that limit or prohibit the use of cellphones on school grounds, leaving it up to them what their rules would do.

“To the extent that smartphones are becoming too much of a distraction in the classroom, I think every school community needs to have that conversation as to when is too much of a good thing getting in the way of educational and social development,” Muratsuchi said Wednesday after introducing the bill.

Many school districts have already banned the use of cellphones, said Muratsuchi, a former Torrance school board member.

In the fall of 2012, it was announced that Chick-fil-A would stop donating to discriminatory, anti-LGBTQ organizations. This happened a few months after the company announced it would “leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage,” following uproar over CEO Dan Cathy’s comments about same-sex marriage. In the years since, the company has done more to expand its reach out of its traditional southeastern stronghold and become the third-fastest-growing chain in this country. But at least as of 2017, Chick-fil-A was still donating to some of these organizations.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place Hawaii court rulings that found a bed and breakfast owner violated the state's anti-discrimination law by refusing to rent a room to a lesbian couple.

The justices rejected an appeal from Aloha Bed & Breakfast owner Phyllis Young, who argued that she should be allowed to turn away gay couples because of her religious beliefs.

"Mrs. Young will rent a bedroom in her home to anyone, including those who are LGBT, but will not rent to any romantic partners other than a husband and wife," her attorney, James Hochberg, said in a statement. "This kind of governmental coercion should disturb every freedom-loving American no matter where you stand on marriage."

WHEN IT COMES to cracking down on tech giants, India is on a roll. The country was the first to reject Facebook’s contentious plan to offer free internet access to parts of the developing world in 2016. Since December, Indian policymakers have taken a page from China’s playbook, enacting sweeping restrictions in an attempt to curtail the power of ecommerce behemoths like Amazon, and pushing proposals that would require internet companies to censor “unlawful” content, break user encryption, and forbid Indian data from being stored on foreign soil. In the past week alone, Indian officials have demanded that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey come before Parliament to answer accusations of bias, called for a ban on TikTok, and opened an investigation into claims that Google abused its Android mobile operating system to unfairly promote its own services.

For all its good intentions, India’s tech backlash could backfire, with potentially dire consequences for all tech companies—big and small—operating in India, not to mention free speech online. “There is an element of nationalism which is creeping into tech policy in India,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights group. Gupta says this has resulted in a number of India-First-style tech policies being rushed through the government using the much quicker executive notification process rather than seeking parliamentary approval, which could have resulted in laws that would be more comprehensive and enforceable.

“If you run into a Salvation Army bell ringer this Christmas season, don’t strike up a conversation about President Trump or gay marriage,” warns FOX News host Todd Starnes is telling his audience.

Starnes says employees “have been told to stop posting their opinions about gay marriage, abortion or anything political on social media because it might reflect poorly on the organization.”

The far right pundit says he has leaked copies of internal memos from the home office to staffers instructing them to keep mum about controversial topics.

The religious charity has come under fire in the United States over the past decade for their atrocious record on LGBT rights. To attempt to stem the ongoing outrage over the group’s previous stances on LGBT issues, they started a public relations campaign to deny that they are anti-LGBT while never acknowledging their history.

A man who voted for Donald Trump and was recently impacted by wildfires in California blasted the president’s response to the deadly crisis.

“My kids lost everything. I voted for him – and now? He can kiss my red ass,” Kirk Ellsworth from Northern California told The Guardian. “What he said was ridiculous. It hurts my heart. A lot of us voted for him and he [talks] down to us?”

As news of casualties and the devastation caused by a recent spate of forest fires broke last weekend, the president blamed California for the disaster while also threatening to cut federal payments to a state which had overwhelmingly rejected Trump and his party at the polls earlier this month.

Five straight, white men have retained a lawyer to look at whether they can bring a discrimination claim against ad agency JWT, after a senior executive said in a meeting she wanted to "obliterate" JWT's reputation for being populated by white, British, privileged, straight men, The Times reports.

The men went to their HR department after hearing the remarks and lost their jobs days later, according to Campaign magazine and The Times.

Last week, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a set of guidelines by the Health and Public Policy Committee of the American College of Physicians (ACP) addressing the problem of firearm-related injuries and death from a public health perspective.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) quickly rebuked the journal — and physicians in general — on Twitter, saying: “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”

As a gun rights advocacy group, the NRA’s sharp critique was entirely expected. But the eruption from my physician colleagues on social media was startling. Responding to the NRA’s central point — that doctors should “stay in their lane” on the topic of guns — medical professionals created a viral hashtag, #ThisISMyLane (also #ThisISOurLane), sharing vivid stories of their clinical experiences with gunshot wound victims, arguing that, despite what the NRA might believe, the issue falls unavoidably into the laps of medical practitioners.

Failing to provide health care to 29.3 million people is “unethical” and “politically wrong, morally wrong,” said former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an interview with the Guardian.

The U.S. is the only wealthy country without universal coverage — and Ban faults “powerful” interest groups within the pharmaceutical, hospitals, and doctors sector.

“Here, the political interest groups are so, so powerful,” Ban said. “Even president, Congress, senators and representatives of the House, they cannot do much so they are easily influenced by these special interest groups.”

While the National Eating Disorder Association reports that the LGBTQ community is disproportionately plagued by eating disorders, experts are saying that being a minority contributes to this dilemma.

Dr. Norman H. Kim, national director for program development at Reasons Eating Disorder Center, believes that queer people are drawn to unhealthy eating habits because of minority stress. Behaviors such as binging, purging, and undereating are a symptom of chronic social stress LGBTQ people experience as minorities, he told Stylecaster.

The rates at which queer people are having this reaction to being otherized are alarming.

"LGBT people experience the same stressors that anyone else does and when you add their internalized feelings and perceptions of discrimination, there are obvious implications for overall health," Stepleman says. "This assessment is meant to provide an overview, but it helps establish an important baseline and will help us look at the impact of minority stress on a lot of other health variables."

Minority stress describes chronically high levels of stress faced by members of minority groups and can be due to things like poor social support and low socioeconomic status. Many studies have shown that it can contribute to health problems like high blood pressure and anxiety.

From the 16th century to the 19th, scurvy killed around 2 million sailors, more than warfare, shipwrecks and syphilis combined. It was an ugly, smelly death, too, beginning with rattling teeth and ending with a body so rotted out from the inside that its victims could literally be startled to death by a loud noise. Just as horrifying as the disease itself, though, is that for most of those 300 years, medical experts knew how to prevent it and simply failed to.

Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, President Donald Trump is campaigning in battleground states with a new slogan: “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”

But Trump’s message isn’t ringing true with working-class voters like Renee Elliott, a Democrat who cast her ballot for Trump in 2016. Elliott - who lost her job at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis after Trump promised to save it from being outsourced Mexico - thinks Trump’s slogan should be the opposite - “Promises made, none of them kept.”

Trump won the White House by selling himself to voters like Elliott and vowing to deliver “more jobs and better wages” by bringing jobs back to the U.S. Trump’s pro-worker message helped him score upset victories in Democratic strongholds that have been hard-hit by outsourcing and the disappearance of good union jobs.

But 18 months into his term, Trump has betrayed his promises to the working-class voters like Elliott who helped him to the Oval Office.

Opponents of the GOP are calling for an In-N-Out boycott after the burger chain donated thousands to the California Republican Party.

According to a public filing on the California Secretary of State’s website, the fast food corporation gave $25,000 to the state’s Republican Party on Tuesday. However, the news of the donation didn’t start to go viral until the filing was tweeted out by Washington, D.C.-based reporter Gabe Schneider the next day.