Author: Reporter

U.S. health regulators are weighing the first-ever request to make a birth control pill available without a prescription. Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration meet next week to review drugmaker Perrigo’s application to sell a decades-old pill over the counter. The two-day public meeting is one of the last steps before an FDA decision. If the FDA grants the company’s request, Opill would become the first contraceptive pill to be moved out from behind the pharmacy counter onto store shelves or online. In an initial review posted on May 5, the FDA raised several concerns about studies of...

The Biden administration is urging U.S. meat processors to make sure children are not being illegally hired to perform dangerous jobs at their plants. The call comes after an investigation found more than 100 kids working overnight for a company that cleans slaughterhouses, handling dangerous equipment like skull splitters and razor-sharp bone saws. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sent a letter in mid-April to the 18 largest meat and poultry producers urging them to examine the hiring practices at their companies and suppliers. The letter is part of a broader effort by the administration to crack down on the use...

A Wisconsin judge was set to hear arguments in a lawsuit challenging the state’s 174-year-old abortion ban, a statute held in abeyance for nearly five decades until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year. State Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed the lawsuit in Dane County circuit court last June seeking to repeal the ban. Kaul argues that the 1849 law is so old it was essentially adopted without the people’s consent; or alternately, that narrower restrictions on abortion enacted in Wisconsin in 1985 supersede the older statute. The 1985 legislation permits terminating pregnancies...

The American front door is a place where the welcome mat offers friendly greetings, where affable neighbors knock or ring, where boxes brimming with possibility are delivered. It is where home meets a world full of potentially good things. The American front door is a place where signs trumpet words of warning, where cameras monitor visitors in high definition, where intruders find an entry point. It is where only a hunk of wood or metal separates the innermost spaces of home from a world full of chaos. Both conceptions are real. They can and do exist together — usually...