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Rescue personnel walk near a building that collapsed after a strong earthquake struck central Myanmar on Friday, March 28, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Major earthquake strikes Southeast Asia, Israel passes judicial reform, Fox News wins advertisers, Pollution kills, HHS sees massive job cuts, Suspected US strikes hit Houthis
7.7: Two disastrous earthquakes, the first of 7.7 magnitude, struck Myanmar on Friday, destroying vital infrastructure across Southeast Asia. Videos of a collapsed bridge in Mandalay, Myanmar, and a fallen building in Bangkok, Thailand, have emerged. The number of casualties isn’t yet known, although several are feared trapped under a fallen skyscraper in the Thai capital. At least 144 people have been confirmed dead.
71,000: Israel’s right-wing government on Thursday passed a contentious law to allow politicians greater sway in judicial appointments, despite some 71,000 opposition amendments. The move is a part of the judicial overhaul that protesters have been fighting for over a year and comes amid Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial.
125: Since the US election, Fox News has gained 125 new high-profile advertisers as Rupert Murdoch’s cable network continues to draw soaring viewership during President Donald Trump’s second term. Businesses such as Amazon, GE Vernova, JPMorgan Chase, Netflix, and UBS have recently run ads on Fox News for the first time in over two years.
5.7 million: According to a new World Bank study, 5.7 million people are killed annually by air pollution. The global institution is calling on countries to take an integrated approach to halve the number of people breathing unhealthy air by 2040 and points to places like Mexico City, which has successfully curbed pollution, and Egypt and Turkey, which have put financing mechanisms in place to support emission reduction.
20,000: The Trump administration announced Thursday that it will cut 20,000 positions from the Department of Health and Human Services – 10,000 from job cuts and 10,000 from voluntary departures – as part of a major restructuring that its chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says “will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.” RFK says the reorganization is intended to help the department prioritize the fight against chronic diseases, but critics fear it could hinder the critical agency, which includes Medicare and the Federal Drug Administration. And throughout the federal government, officials are planning for between 8% and 50% staff cuts, according to an internal White House document obtained by the Washington Post.
19: Two weeks after the Trump administration dropped its first bombs on Houthi rebels in Yemen — details of which were revealed over the now-infamous Signal chat — the United States is believed to have attacked again early Friday, firing at least 19 strikes. The extent of the damage is unclear, although the intensity of the bombardment has increased since the Biden administration first started pounding the Houthis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing in January.
RFK Jr. guts HHS, cutting 10,000 positions
Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education after firing or laying off half its workforce, around 2,000 people. Now, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced his department of Health and Human Services will eliminate 10,000 full-time positions in addition to the 10,000 who’ve left voluntarily through early retirement offers. The HHS roster will drop from 82,000 to 62,000 employees, and its divisions will go from 28 to 15.
The Trump administration has promised to reduce the size of government, and it’s proceeding at pace. Kennedy is citing cost savings, at $1.8 billion a year, and streamlining a “dysfunctional” bureaucracy as reasons for the job cuts. But critics like Larry Leavitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health policy organization, warn that such deep cuts affect the department’s capacity for oversight and program or service delivery.
Kennedy has set out to remake US health policy in line with his Make America Healthy Again movement. Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group, has said the MAHA movement is “a worldview that blends concerns about corporate influence on healthcare with skepticism towards mainstream medicine.” It also leans heavily on vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theory, and alternative medicine.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy said in a statement about the restructuring. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” he added, confirming that MAHA is firmly the order of the day at HHS.Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland on February 20, 2025
Will Republicans really slash Medicaid?
This week, House Republicans are expected to vote on a budget measure that would fund an extension of President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts by taking an axe to one of America’s key entitlement programs: Medicaid.
What’s Medicaid? A joint federal and state program that funds medical care for low-income people. About a quarter of Americans are enrolled directly, and two-thirds say they or their family members have benefitted from the program.
What would the measure do? Slash $2 trillion from the federal budget over the next decade, including about $800 billion from Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts would come by placing per-capita limits on federal funding, narrowing states’ tax options for funding Medicaid, and imposing work requirements on recipients.
The debate: The GOP says these measures will root out waste and abuse, shift more of the burden onto states, which know their own needs better, and incentivize recipients to get off the dole.
Critics say the sweeping reductions would harm the poor by slashing their access to health care while funding tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
What’s Trump saying? He said he would “love and cherish” Medicaid, along with its related old-age benefit programs, Medicare and Social Security, which the GOP has said it wouldn’t touch. But Trump has also endorsed the budget resolution.
How the people see it: Strong majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents view Medicaid favorably, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The GOP’s dilemma: The party is committed to cuts in taxes and spending, but several GOP districts with large populations of Medicaid recipients are up in arms. And given the GOP’s razor-thin House majority, and unified Democratic opposition, the Republicans can’t afford to lose more than a single vote in the House.
An Air Canada airport line.
Hard Numbers: Air Canada to answer for sky-high baggage fees, Biden sets clemency record, Ottawa sanctions Chinese officials over Xinjiang abuses, Most Americans want feds to guarantee health care, Trump promises to “To ROCK” for a billion dollars
25 and 36: Think those additional carry-on baggage fees on airlines are getting out of hand? You’re not alone. Canadian lawmakers are set to grill Air Canada CEO Mike Rousseau about it on Friday after the nation’s flagship carrier hit low-fare travelers with new fees of $25 on their first carry-on, and $36 on their second. The CEOs of WestJet, Porter, and Air Transat Airlines will also be questioned. Airlines say that extra fees like this have become an indispensable source of revenue as cutthroat competition drives down profit margins.
1,500: US President Joe Biden on Thursday commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people in the largest act of clemency ever by a modern US president. The commutations applied to people who were placed in home confinement during the COVID pandemic when authorities sought to thin out crowded prison populations to slow the spread of the virus. Biden also pardoned 39 people who had been convicted of non-violent drug-related offenses. In case you are wondering: Commutation reduces a prison sentence, while a pardon erases a criminal record entirely.
8: Canada this week placed sanctions on eight Chinese government officials over alleged human rights abuses against the Uighurs, a Muslim minority, in China’s far western province of Xinjiang. The Chinese government stands accused of arbitrarily detaining more than a million people there, many of whom were subjected to psychological torture or forced labor in camps. Beijing denies the allegations.
62: A new poll shows nearly two-thirds of Americans, or 62%, think the federal government should ensure that people have health care coverage, the highest mark since 2006. As always, the partisan split is stark: 90% of Democrats agree with the idea, a 60-point gap compared to Republicans. Americans are split nearly evenly on whether insurance should be provided by the government or the private sector. A narrow majority of Americans support the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. There too, nearly all Democrats are pro-ACA, against just a fifth of Republicans and barely half of Independents.
1 billion: Got a billion dollars to invest in the United States? If so, President-elect Donald Trumpwants to roll out the red carpet for you – or at least grant you “expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.” He made the pledge in a Truth Social post. It’s unclear what that will entail or how it will work, but it’s part of Trump’s plan to boost investment in the United States by slashing onerous permitting requirements that have come in for bipartisan criticism in recent years. “GET READY TO ROCK!” wrote Trump.
A man uses a chatbot in this illustration photo.
Get AI out of my health care
You fall and break an arm. Doctors set the break and send you to rehab. It’s pricy, but insurance should take care of it, so you submit your claim – only to be denied. Was it a claims examiner who rejected it? Or AI?
On Feb. 6, the US government sent a memo to certain Medicare insurers clarifying that no, they cannot use artificial intelligence to deny claims. While machine-learning algorithms can be used to assist them in making determinations, an algorithm alone cannot be the basis for denying care.
This memo, sent by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, follows lawsuits against health insurers for allegedly using AI to erroneously deny deserved care to patients. United Healthcare and Humana have each been sued by patients claiming the companies used the AI model nH Predict nefariously — a model they claim has a 90% error rate. It’s a clear and present danger of the technology at a time when many regulators and critics are focusing on far-off threats of AI.
CMS also said it’s concerned about the propensity for algorithms to “exacerbate discrimination and bias” and said the onus is on insurers to make sure these models comply with the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination requirements. And it’s not just the federal government: A number of states including New York and California have issued warnings to insurance companies to ensure their own algorithms aren’t discriminatory.