Virginia is set to implement controversial new abortion clinic restrictions that could force many of the facilities in the state to shut down — a popular anti-choice tactic that indirectly undermines women’s access to reproductive care by targeting abortion providers. After Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) quietly approved the new regulations on the Friday between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the state’s Board of Health will have the power to decide whether or not to adopt them on April 12.

Before then, however, thousands of Virginia residents are raising their voices in protest. Spearheaded by ProgressVA and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, women’s health advocates delivered over 3,000 public comments opposing the new abortion restrictions to the Board of Health on Thursday. The public comment period ends on Friday, and opponents of the new policy hope they can make an impact by expressing the same message with each of the thousands of comments: “Put women’s health above politics. Don’t let red tape trap women.”

The reference to “trapping women” is a nod to the fact that women’s health advocates refer to these types of restrictions as TRAP laws, or the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. Targeting abortion clinics and providers, rather than pushing for outright bans on the abortion procedure itself, allows the anti-choice community to avoid inciting as much public outrage — which helps their efforts fly mostly under the radar.

At Thursday’s event, ProgressVA’s executive director, Anna Scholl, urged the state’s board to put women’s health before politics. “These regulations should be based on evidence-based medicine, not political agendas,” Scholl pointed out.

In fact, even though health boards are intended to operate as nonpartisan medical bodies, Virginia’s proposed TRAP laws have sparked an intensely politicized battle in the state. Reports have emerged that State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) essentially threatened Virginia’s Board into approving the new restrictions by warning members they could be denied state-funded legal services if they voted against them. And last fall, Virginia health commissioner Dr. Karen Remley resigned from her position in protest over the proposed TRAP laws, citing her disapproval of the unnecessary abortion clinic restrictions as the primary reason she could no longer lead the Board “in good faith.”

If the Board of Health approves the final rules next month, they will likely take effect this summer. Many of Virginia’s 20 abortion clinics will likely be forced to close their doors when they are unable to adhere to the costly, complicated new rules.

State legislators in Kansas are considering a bill that would allow the quarantine of people with AIDS or HIV.

Kansas House Bill 2183 was originally created to serve first responders who might be at risk of contracting HIV through their work. But the Kansas Department of Health and Environment rewrote the language in the bill, broadly deregulating when isolation can take place and opening up the possibility that HIV positive people could be quarantined.

Activists fear this oversight could be used to openly discriminate.

“Our state’s health department is willing to roll back a 25-year old civil rights protection,” Thomas Witt, the Executive Director of the Kansas Equality Coalition, told ThinkProgress. “LGBT Kansans are already subject to harassment and legal discrimination, and removing the existing HIV quarantine exemption from law leaves vulnerable Kansans at risk of discriminatory, unfair treatment by local officials.”

Other activists have also expressed concern that Kansans might not understand how HIV can be spread, and have implicit biases thanks to a lack of knowledge. “We live in a very conservative state and I’m afraid there are still many people, especially in rural Kansas, that have inadequate education and understanding concerning HIV/AIDS,” Cody Patton, of sexual health group Positive Directions told Gay Star News. This theory was also evidenced by a debate earlier this year, when the Kansas health department eliminated HIV testing for most counties in the state.

The Kansas senate has approved the HIV quarantine bill, and it looks likely to pass. During a hearing about the measure on Wednesday, however, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said it would be willing to work with groups to fix what they considered problematic aspects of current proposal.

Fast food chains have been some of Obamacare’s biggest critics, issuing warnings of new surcharges, higher costs, and laid-off workers because of the health reform law. Many of them have now changed their thinking. By the new estimates from several chains — including Wendy’s, Popeye’s, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle — Obamacare will actually cost about 80 percent less than they originally warned.

Those include companies whose franchises have already taken preemptive action to avoid providing their employees with health coverage, including one Nebraska Wendy’s chain.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Wendy’s Co. initially estimated the health-care law would increase the cost of operating each of its 5,800 U.S. restaurants by $25,000 a year. But Chief Financial Officer Steve Hare told an investment conference on March 14 that executives have cut the estimate by 80%, to $5,000 a year, primarily because they expect many employees to decline the insurance offering.

“It is still going to be an additional cost that both the company and our franchisees will have to absorb, but we think it is going to be manageable,” Mr. Hare said.

The CEO of Dunkin’ Brands Group also softened criticism of the law earlier this month, when he explained to shareholders that Obamacare’s costs “are not as high as some people have said” and “we can mitigate those costs very easily.”

Company executives say the reason why they exaggerated their estimates is because workers are opting out of the employer-sponsored high-deductible plan that fast food chains typically offer. Those kind of high-deductible plans are popular ways for large companies to lower their profits, but they’re not always the best choice for low-wage workers. For instance, many companies that set up high-deductible insurance plans max out at up to $10,000. They can leave low-income workers worse off, because you can spend more than that sum on a single emergency room visit.

Before exaggerating the impacts of health reform, fast food restaurants could have turned to analyses that showed Obamacare would impose only a negligible cost on large businesses, while actually helping small businesses.

On factory farms across the country, where animals tend to live in close quarters and diseases can spread quickly, the meat industry pumps its livestock full of antibiotics to fight the spread of bacteria. In fact, livestock consume four times the amount of antibiotics as sick Americans do — and even though the food industry maintains the practice is safe, new scientific research could definitively prove that wrong.

According to a new study published by researchers in Britain and Denmark, drug-resistant bacteria in animals can be transferred to humans. Researchers used genetic sequencing to study an outbreak of a bacterial disease on different farms in Denmark, and they were able to prove that the strain of bacteria that was sickening people actually originated in animals. The findings suggest that the meat industry’s practices could be directly exacerbating a growing global health threat, as an increasing number of diseases around the world — including whooping cough, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea — are beginning to develop a resistance to common antibiotics, signaling a future when even common infections may not be able to be treated.

Scientists have long suspected there may be a link between antibiotic resistance in animals and humans, but previous research hasn’t demonstrated it in quite as much detail before. Now that this study has been made public, however, policymakers are pointing to it as evidence that the FDA needs more regulatory oversight in this area of the meat industry. According to Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) — who recently introduced a measure to require food producers to disclose how often they’re feeding antibiotics to their animals, as well as to allow the FDA to collect more detailed information from drug companies — this new study “ends any debate” about whether giving antibiotics to livestock poses a health risk to humans.

Public opinion is on Slaughter’s side. The majority of Americans believe that antibiotics in food represent a health threat, and more than 60 percent of people say they would be willing to pay at least an additional five cents per pound for meat raised without antibiotics.

In the vast majority of popular U.S. restaurant chains, the menu items geared toward kids aren’t meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutritional recommendations, according to a new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Instead, most meals on the kids’ menus contain too many calories, too much salt or fat, and not enough nutrients from fruits and vegetables.

CSPI surveyed almost 3,500 combinations of menu items at the top 50 restaurant chains in the country — including Chipotle Mexican Grill, Dairy Queen, Hardee’s, McDonald’s, Subway, and Panda Express — and found that kids’ meals fall short of the USDA’s standards a staggering 97 percent of the time. That’s only a very slight improvement from 2008, when the organization found that 99 percent of kids’ menus weren’t meeting the recommended nutritional standards.

About one-third of U.S. children are currently considered overweight, and 17 percent are considered obese. The childhood obesity rate in this country has tripled since 1980 — and some nutrition experts at least partially fault the food and beverage industries for resisting regulation efforts and continuing to market their unhealthy products specifically to appeal to children. According to CSPI, some of the responsibility to encourage healthy eating habits among American youth also rests with popular restaurants.

“Most chains seem stuck in a time warp, serving up the same old meals based on chicken nuggets, burgers, macaroni and cheese, fries, and soda,” Margo Wootan, CSPI’s nutrition policy director, told Reuters. “It’s like the restaurant industry didn’t get the memo that there’s a childhood obesity crisis.”

The one exception that CSPI found was Subway. All eight of Subway’s kids’ meals, which offer children smaller portions, apple slices, and low-fat milk or bottled water, met CSPI’s nutrition criteria. And that emphasis on healthier options certainly isn’t hurting the company’s bottom line. The sandwich chain now has more stores in the U.S. than McDonald’s does — and in order to catch up, the McDonald’s corporation is scrambling to recast its own products as healthy, too.

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that children are still consuming too many of their calories from fatty foods, even as American adults have begun to cut back on their own calorie intake. But there’s some hope. Cities with aggressive nutrition policies have seen significant drops in their childhood obesity rates, suggesting that there are some concrete policy solutions — like holding school cafeterias to nutrition standards, launching anti-obesity marketing campaigns, or even limiting the portion sizes of unhealthy options like sugary drinks — that could help reverse the national trend.

At one high school in Massachusetts, 20 students are protesting what they call their school district’s poor response to allegations that a football player sexually assaulted two high school girls. The students protested at the same time the high school held an assembly about violence against women, where male students were asked to take a pledge to not commit violence. One of the student protesters called the action “too little, too late.”

A local report from Framingham Patch has more:

The assault reportedly happened in a corridor near the cafeteria during a study period, said [Framingham High School social worker Kevin] Fox. It involved a then-18-year old Framingham High junior and a freshman girl. It is alleged the student put his hand down her pants and fondled her.

Two months later, in June 2012, the same male was accused of assaulting a second girl, a junior.

The male student involved in both incidents is a student athlete, according to Fox and one of the two females who said she was assaulted. [...]

Every day, this sophomore and senior girl see their alleged assailant at school. He lost five days of school at the end of June, but got to play the entire football season, said Fox.

“That sends the wrong message to these brave girls,” said Fox. “We don’t have control over what the police or the DA does, but we do have control here at Framingham High.”

The protesting students said that school administrators crack down on drugs and alcohol more severely than they do on sexual assault. Administrators need to do more, one student said, and should at least be just as tough on harassment or assault. Ultimately, what the Framingham teenagers are rallying against is part of a broader rape culture that blames the victim for doing something wrong — one that we see again and again in the actions of administrators, adults, and the media.

Neither of the Framingham girls or their families plan will pursue charges. But recent cases show that when victims of rape have pursued legal action, they’ve faced a barrage insults and even threats: The incredibly sad story in Steubenville has not gone away, and it’s unfolding again in a Connecticut town.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a vocal opponent of President Obama’s health reform law, surprised her Republican colleagues when she announced her support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion at the beginning of this year. Since then, Brewer has been attempting to broker a deal with the legislators in her state, who will ultimately need to approve the legislation to expand the public health insurance program.

And as negotiations over Arizona’s Medicaid expansion plan go back and forth, some of the state’s powerful lobbyists are attempting to attach amendments to the proposal to suit their own interests — including a totally unrelated attack on Planned Parenthood, which has become a symbol in the GOP’s ongoing crusade against women’s health.

Obamacare proponents warn that additional amendments could threaten to derail the whole expansion process altogether, since Democratic lawmakers may not be willing to pass a bill with unrelated riders. Nonetheless, one of the state’s most powerful lobbying groups is jumping on the opportunity to target Planned Parenthood, regardless of the potential consequences for Arizona’s low-income residents who may be forced to go without health care if the expansion doesn’t go through:

The Center for Arizona Policy is using an opinion from the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal-defense organization, to argue that the draft Medicaid legislation should be amended to disqualify the non-profit women’s health provider Planned Parenthood from receiving public money. [...]

[Cathi Herrod, the center’s president] said her organization, a conservative Christian-based group that wields influence with GOP lawmakers, is not taking a position on Medicaid expansion and wouldn’t comment on the possibility that such an amendment could sink the plan.

“Our request is to include language guaranteeing that no funding to an abortion provider results from Medicaid expansion,” Herrod said. “Any dollar that goes to an abortion provider for any service frees up another dollar to subsidize abortion.”

Planned Parenthood gets a fraction of its funding from Medicaid but could pick up more patients if the state broadens eligibility. Although Herrod argues that funding to the clinics indirectly supports abortion, Planned Parenthood officials say they lose money on every Medicaid patient because of reimbursement levels.

The proposed amendment to Arizona’s Medicaid expansion is very similar to a measure that Brewer signed into law last year, which also sought to prevent federal Medicaid dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. Last month, a federal judge blocked that law from taking effect — since state-level Medicaid programs cannot exclude qualified providers from providing essential heath care to the low-income Americans who need it, Arizona is not permitted to target Planned Parenthood simply because the national organization performs abortions.

But even Arizona’s failed record won’t deter the abortion opponents in the state from continuing to go after Planned Parenthood. Bryan Howard, the president of Planned Parenthood Arizona, sharply criticized the Center for Arizona Policy and Herrod for pursuing a “failed legislative strategy” that could jeopardize the state’s Medicaid expansion. “She has to know that she is putting health-care access for 400,000 people at risk,” Howard told the Arizona Republic.