5 hours agoThomas MackintoshBBC News

She opened clinics, worked to educate women about their reproductive health, and promoted an abortion technique she felt was safe enough for laypeople.Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy — so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack a few weeks earlier.Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and the mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women’s movement and began to work on the abortion committee of her local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Years earlier, she had had an illegal abortion, and she was determined that others should not suffer as she did.A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a technique for performing an abortion by suctioning the lining of a women’s uterus. It was safer, quicker and less painful than the more traditional dilation and curettage technique, and he was using it to perform early-term abortions and teaching doctors how to use it.Ms. Downer and others thought the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure themselves.Lorraine Rothman, another member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s device into a kit she patented called the Del-Em, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called the technique a vacuum extraction. The women called it a menstrual extraction — it was also a way to to regulate menstrual flow — as a kind of linguistic feint.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

How My Trip toQuit Sugar Became aJourney Into Hell For my whole life, I’ve been a hard-core sweets junkie. Could […]

At Stiiizy, the best-selling cannabis brand in America, the goal is explicit: producing powerful and cheap marijuana.Inside its Los Angeles headquarters, crews dust joints with concentrated THC, the intoxicating component of cannabis. They package pocket-size vape cartridges that promise “the highest potency possible.” On its website, the company declares that “it has never been easier (or quicker) to get silly high for an affordable price.”Dispensaries operating under the brand of another leading company, Cookies, have promoted “powerful medical benefits,” including “cancer fighting” qualities. A cannabis-infused chocolate bar was, until recently, described as containing properties “beneficial to those suffering” from glaucoma, bacterial infections and Huntington’s disease, a devastating genetic illness.More than a decade after states began legalizing recreational marijuana, businesses are enticing customers with unproven health claims, while largely escaping rigorous oversight. A New York Times review of 20 of the largest brands found that most were selling products with such claims, potentially violating federal and state regulations. And as companies compete, potency has gone up — with some products advertised as having as much as 99 percent THC — and prices have gone down.“What we’re seeing is really a race to the bottom,” said Matt Zehner, a senior analyst at Brightfield Group, which tracks the legal cannabis industry.Some executives said their companies are trying to navigate complex rules while satisfying their customers. Stiiizy’s co-founder and chief executive, James Kim, said in an interview that many are heavy users in search of a good deal, something he had sought as a broke “pothead” in his early 20s. “This is why I believe we’re very successful,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

10 hours agoNick TriggleBBCThe Princess Alexandra Hospital in Essex has been plagued by problems with its ageing buildings and equipment in recent years.

President Trump on Friday reinstated a longstanding Republican anti-abortion policy known as the “Mexico City Rule,” which bars federal funding from going to any overseas nongovernmental organization that performs or promotes abortions.The move came after he addressed thousands of abortion opponents in Washington on Friday to mark the 52nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which created a national right to abortion and which the court overturned in 2022.Federal law already bans the use of taxpayer dollars to support abortion services abroad. But in 1984 President Ronald Reagan went one step further, blocking foreign aid to nongovernmental organizations that discuss abortion as part of family planning services, or advocate abortion rights, even if those groups are not using American tax dollars to do so.In the four decades since, the policy has had a seesaw history. Democratic presidents, including Joseph R. Biden Jr., have revoked it and Republicans have reinstated it. It has been in effect for 21 of the past 40 years.That Mr. Trump reinstated the ban is not a surprise. When he ran for president in 2016, he took a strong anti-abortion stance, winning the support of Christian conservatives by promising to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe. In the two and a half years since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a more complicated issue for Republicans, and Mr. Trump did not make it a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.But Mr. Trump still needs to tend to his party’s right wing, particularly because his pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a muddled record on abortion. While visiting with senators on Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Kennedy promised Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, that he would support reinstatement of the policy as part of a broad anti-abortion agenda.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

His own experience assisting his terminally ill wife in ending her life set him on a path to founding the Hemlock Society and writing a best-selling guide.Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally-ill wife end her life led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and publish “Final Exit,” a best-selling guide to suicide, died on Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94.His death, at a hospice facility, was announced by his family.With a populist flair and a knack for speaking matter-of-factly about death, Mr. Humphry almost single-handedly galvanized a national conversation about physician-assisted suicide in the early 1980s, a period when the idea had been little more than an esoteric theory batted around by medical ethicists.“He was the one who really put this cause on the map in America,” said Ian Dowbiggin, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island and the author of “A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine” (2005). “The people who support the notion of physician assisted suicide absolutely owe him a big thanks.”In 1975, Mr. Humphry was working as a reporter for The Sunday Times of London when Jean Humphry, his wife of 22 years, was in the final stages of terminal bone cancer. Hoping to avoid prolonged suffering, she asked him to help her die.Mr. Humphry procured a lethal dose of painkillers from a sympathetic doctor and mixed them with coffee in her favorite mug.“I took her the mug and told her if she drank it she’d die immediately,” Mr. Humphry told The Daily Record in Scotland. “Then I gave her a hug, kissed her and we said our goodbyes.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Here’s how to make the most of what you’ve learned.Laura Van Antwerp tried Dry January for the first time 11 years ago. Like many who participate in this monthlong sobriety challenge, she reveled in the immediate benefits: She slept better, went to the gym more often and saved money.But as February approached, Ms. Van Antwerp felt excited — “maybe overly excited,” she admitted — to drink again. She would be traveling to Southeast Asia for a six-week trip, and she imagined sipping a glass of wine in Bangkok when she got off the plane.“I couldn’t even wait that long,” Ms. Van Antwerp, 40, said. “I ended up drinking at the airport and getting too drunk right out of the gate.”While people like Ms. Van Antwerp tend to put thought and effort into planning for a month of sobriety (and slogging through it), they don’t necessarily consider the off-ramp — and what they want to take away from the experience. “That’s one of the most important parts of the month,” said Gillian Tietz, host of the “Sober Powered” podcast, “and something a lot of people don’t think too much about.”But research suggests that people who participate in Dry January tend to be more concerned about their drinking habits during the rest of the year than those who don’t. So we spoke to several addiction specialists and sober influencers about how to wind down the month and embrace mindful drinking in the future.Reflect on your experience.At its core, Dry January is all about gathering information about your relationship with alcohol, said Joseph Schacht, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who studies treatment for alcohol and addictive disorders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

R.F.K. Jr. and others have blamed the ingredient for allergies and other illnesses. Scientists say it actually bolsters the immune response.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has often trained his criticisms of vaccines on a common ingredient: aluminum, which he has suggested is responsible for a litany of childhood ailments, including food allergies, autism and depression.“You wonder why a whole generation of children is allergic to stuff,” Mr. Kennedy said during a 2021 interview. “It’s because we’re inducing allergies, pumping them full of aluminum.”To many vaccine scientists, aluminum is a strange target. It is among the most studied ingredient in vaccines, and perhaps in modern medicine.“There’s a huge amount of information that’s gathered,” said Dr. Andrew Racine, a pediatrician and chief medical officer at the Montefiore Health System. “If there was something jumping out about a lack of safety, we would most likely have seen it someplace, and it just doesn’t appear.”Aluminum salts, a more soluble form of the metal, are added to vaccines like the Tdap shot to bolster the body’s immune response. The ingredient has repeatedly been evaluated as a part of vaccines in clinical trials and administered in billions of doses over several decades.Even so, as Mr. Kennedy prepares for confirmation hearings as secretary of health and human services, many experts fear the standby will face fresh scrutiny, and may even serve as a justification for limiting access to several childhood vaccines, like the shots for hepatitis B and pneumococcal disease.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

4 hours agoMichelle Roberts, Nat Wright and Adam EleyBBC News