Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced an effort to investigate the dramatic rise in autism in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 36 children now has autism, an over 300 percent increase since 2000. Kennedy pledged to find the cause of the autism epidemic by September and then to take steps to eliminate it. Kennedy’s new investigation raises several obvious questions: Why hasn’t it been done...

About 8.8 percent of people who received an abortion in Nevada in 2024 had traveled from out of state. That’s a 47.4 percent drop in travel compared with 2023.  AllSides highlights content from Gigafact, a network of newsrooms that respond to online claims. View the full fact brief on The Nevada Independent.

The Environmental Protection Agency continued its staffing shake-up Monday, beginning the termination of hundreds of staffers through a "reduction in force" process as it moved other workers to new roles. Last month, the agency announced a massive rollback of environmental regulations, including key tenets of the Clean Air Act, and Administrator Lee Zeldin promised to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion."

The U.S. Department of Education announced on Monday that it would resume involuntary collections of defaulted federal student loans on May 5. The announcement means that borrowers who have loans in default could see their tax refunds seized or wages garnished. While many borrowers and advocacy organizations will oppose the move, resuming collections is necessary to incentivize loan repayment. The announcement was never a matter of if, but when. The current student loan mess The...

The Trump administration has gone to war with elite universities, even as it claims its latest missive was sent by mistake. Its approach, as in many other policy areas, has been to shoot first and ask questions later. Power seems to grow out of the barrel of a tweet, with punitive action favoured over due process and principle. This might achieve results in the short term, but cannot win a battle of ideas that by definition requires a consistent philosophical stance...

President Donald Trump isn’t getting along with the news media.  That isn’t exactly breaking news. He directed no shortage of jabs at mainstream outlets throughout his first term, but—with notable exceptions—his ire toward the media was limited mostly to rhetoric. Trump 2.0 may be different. The president’s attacks on the media have shifted from talk to action, with news organizations facing substantive retaliation for getting sideways with the new administration. And, if...

A day after Harvard sued the Trump administration over its decision to freeze billions in federal funds to the school, more than 180 higher education leaders from around the country released a joint statement on Tuesday condemning the administration’s efforts to control universities. The government’s “political interference” and “overreach” is “now endangering higher education in America,” they wrote.

At least two dozen people are feared to have been killed after gunmen indiscriminately fired at tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Tuesday in what local authorities called a terror attack, blaming militants fighting against Indian rule. "This attack is much larger than anything we've seen directed at civilians in recent years," Omar Abdullah, the region's top elected official, wrote on social media. "The death toll is still being ascertained so I don't want to get into those details."

The death of Pope Francis has just set in motion the political process for the Catholic Church to select a new leader. The process of the conclave According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, within the first 15-20 days after the death of a pope, cardinals come together in Rome to make the next selection. Right now, there are 252 catholic cardinals, but only 135 can cast ballots because the ones over the age of 80 can only take part in debate but cannot vote....

President Trump spoke on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal and the nuclear talks with Iran, according to Israeli and U.S. officials. Why it matters: The phone call took place amid a stalemate in the Gaza negotiations after another failed attempt last week by the U.S. and Egypt to put forward a bridging proposal both sides could accept.