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In August 2024, 26-year-old Conor Hylton checked into Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut. Overnight, he was transferred to critical care, where he died.
It was only after his passing that his family found out that Conor was treated at what’s known as a “tele-ICU.” His story shines a light on a practice that’s been around for decades despite a lack of substantial research about its outcomes.
A tele-ICU is a hospital unit where patient care is handled off-site by remote doctors, nurses, or specialists. Up to a third of ICU beds in the U.S. are in tele-ICUs. That’s according to a study from the American Hospital Association.
In Wisconsin, as of May 1, critical care physicians are no longer physically present in the ICUs of a few Ascension satellite hospitals. They remain available via video call to help bedside nurses and on-site hospital medicine doctors, known as hospitalists, who do not specialize in critical care.
These facilities do present an opportunity to expand and improve the health care people receive. But what are the risks of replacing in-person care in the most critical, life or death moments?
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Last year, when Columbia University found itself embroiled by anti-war protests and fighting with the Trump administration, journalist Jodi Kantor was invited to speak at the school’s commencement.
“My friends actually tried to stop me. Like, ‘Don’t do it. Call in sick,'” remembers Kantor.
The Pulitzer prize-winner did wind up giving that speech. And that experience led her to write a new book about how young people can find their life’s work. We sit down with Kantor to talk about ‘How to Start.’
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Public trust in the Supreme Court is at a 30-year low, according to Pew Research Center. For some, this month marked a turning point in perceptions of its legitimacy.
The court recently ruled in Louisiana v. Callais. Its decision undermined a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that protected minority voters and sought to prevent racial discrimination in elections.
Following the court’s ruling, Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a new congressional map, dismantling the state’s majority-Black district. The map gives Republicans a competitive advantage in all nine districts ahead of the state’s midterms. Other red states are now scrambling to redraw their congressional maps as well.
Justice Samuel Alito justified the court’s ruling by claiming that Black voter turnout, both nationwide and in Louisiana, exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five recent presidential elections, writing that the kind of discrimination the Voting Rights Act was designed to prevent no longer exists.
However, reporting from The Guardian found that Alito’s claim was based on misleading data from the Justice Department.
As trust in the Supreme Court continues to remain low, calls for reform grow. In this installment of our weekly politics series, “If You Can Keep It,” we unpack what that reform might actually look like and what’s at stake for our democracy if it doesn’t happen.
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President Donald Trump told PBS News this week that his offensive in the Middle East has a “very good chance of ending.” Just days later though, the U.S. traded fire with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening an already fragile ceasefire. The U.S. is still hoping for a “serious offer” from Iran on a proposal to end the war, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, even as the threat of escalation looms.
Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot in the upcoming Indiana primary. But his agenda certainly is. In late 2025, GOP state lawmakers resisted efforts by the White House to redraw Indiana’s congressional map. Now, Trump allies are running to unseat them.
The Trump administration has opened an investigation into Smith College, a women-only institution of higher education, over its 2015 decision to admit trans women as students.
And, in global news, the fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was tested this week when American forces launched “self-defense strikes” in the Strait of Hormuz after Iranian forces targeted three Navy destroyers, though none were struck.
These strikes come as Iran reviews the latest U.S. proposal to end the war which American officials hope will result in a “serious offer” from Iran, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
President Donald Trump claimed this week that the U.S. will be taking over Cuba “almost immediately.” The backlash from the island nation was swift, with Cuban leader Miguel Diaz-Canel calling the American administration fascist.
On Monday, and despite the ceasefire, Israeli attacks killed 17 people in southern Lebanon.
We cover the most important stories from around the world in the News Roundup.
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One drug is at the center of the current legal battle over abortion: mifepristone.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, mifepristone has become the dominant method of abortion in the United States, filling the gap left by clinic closures in states with abortion bans. And the number of abortions has actually risen nationally as a result.
That’s a problem for abortion access opponents. Now, they’re taking aim at one of the main ways it’s prescribed – via telehealth. And last week, they scored their first big win.
A federal appeals court blocked remote prescription of mifepristone. Louisiana sued the FDA, arguing that mail access undermines the state’s near-total ban on abortion. But two days later, the drug’s manufacturers went to the Supreme Court and it temporarily restored telehealth access while it considers the case. But that stay is set to expire soon.
So, what’s next in this legal battle? And what does it mean for patients and reproductive health providers?
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Last November, Calvin Duncan won an election to serve as the chief records keeper for the criminal courts of the parish that covers New Orleans.
He received 68 percent of the vote, beating out a powerful incumbent. He has some personal experience with Louisiana courts. He was incarcerated for a murder conviction for 28 years. He studied criminal law to advocate for himself, and a judge eventually found him innocent. He was freed in 2011.
But now, the Louisiana state legislature has moved to eliminate his position. State officials voted to combine his office with another in a move that state senators said was meant to save money. Duncan is taking legal action and a lawsuit over his role is now making its way through the courts. This situation is part of a larger trend across the nation where state legislatures are more and more often undoing decisions made by local officials.
“State preemption” describes steps a state government can take to tell a local city or town council it can’t do something. Legislators in states like Florida, Missouri, California, West Virginia, Michigan, and Louisiana have been using it to influence events and regulations in their communities.
What’s leading to more frequent, and public, fights between state legislatures and local governments? And what could defuse these fights?
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Power is at the center of Americans’ lives. It lets us cool our homes, keeps them lit, and charges our electronics.
But the more things we plug into our aging power grid, the more strained it becomes. And electricity use in the U.S. is rising for the first time in more than a decade.
What happens when our grid can’t keep up? We sit down with a panel of experts to find out.
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Last week, in a six-to-three ruling along ideological lines, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
That’s the landmark Civil Rights era law designed to prevent racial discrimination in an election. The law was passed to unravel Jim Crow era policies that limited or blocked Black Americans’ access to the ballot.
The decision in Louisiana v. Callais struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an “unconstitutional gerrymander.”
But the ruling goes further. It effectively rewrites the rules for how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge discriminatory maps, making it much harder to do so going forward. It’s the latest in a string of rulings making the last all but moot.
We tackle the race to redistrict across America and we talk about how this hugely consequential ruling changes an election season already in full swing.
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The Supreme Court this week struck down a voting map in Louisiana that created a second majority-Black district, ruling it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In doing so, the majority also struck an enormous blow to the landmark Voting Rights Act, and fueled GOP redistricting efforts before the midterms.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth headed to Congress, where things got testy as lawmakers grilled him over the war with Iran. Pentagon officials put a price tag on the conflict so far: $25 billion. And gas prices hit a four year high, with a national average of $4.30 a gallon.
Federal prosecutors formally charged the alleged gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with attempting to assassinate the president. He will remain in custody despite an appeal for a pre-trial release.
We cover the most important stories from around the country in the domestic hour of the News Roundup.
And, in global news, the United States and Iran extend their dueling blockades in the Strait of Hormuz as President Trump rejects the Islamic Republic’s proposal to reopen the critical waterway.
Israel ramps up attacks on southern Lebanon, while claiming it did not break a temporary U-S brokered ceasefire.
And uncertainty over the global oil supply causes markets to spike once again, the same week energy companies report massive profits.
We cover the most important stories from around the world in the News Roundup.
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American farmers are being squeezed. Tariffs are raising the cost of equipment and services. And now the war in Iran is driving up the cost of fertilizer and fuel.
And the Farm bill — the sweeping, traditionally bipartisan legislation that shapes everything from crop insurance to food aid – hasn’t been reauthorized since 2018.
Next week, the House will try again.
What’s in the bill and why the coalition that supported it for years seems to be falling apart.
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