OhioHealth utilizing new technology to document sexual assault injuries
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — When someone reports abuse — whether it's sexual, domestic, or involves a vulnerable person — how evidence is collected can make all the difference.
At 26 OhioHealth emergency rooms, new technology is helping forensic nurses document injuries more accurately — even ones invisible to the naked eye.
Those first few hours are critical, and this imaging tool is strengthening investigations and helping survivors on their path to justice.
NBC4 got a firsthand look at new technology making a big impact in forensic care. It's called the Cortexflo, a high-tech camera now used by Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, or the SANE team.
Ohio State faculty vote to join Big Ten alliance against Trump
The camera captures high-resolution images and uses features like contrast filtering to highlight micro-injuries. It also has an alternative light source that can detect dried bodily fluids, all of which is critical for building a strong forensic case.
'When we aren't finding injuries a lot of times these cases won't make it to court, so people don't get the chance to tell their story,' said Sheree Ford, Associate Manager of Forensics at Ohio Health.
The devices are available at 26 care sites and the images are typically taken in private settings without the need of a referral.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Republican lawmaker's raucous town hall reflects challenges in promoting Trump's bill
By Helen Coster MAHOPAC, New York (Reuters) -Democratic voter Joe Mayhew, a union representative living in a New York swing district, was one of several people at a rowdy town hall with Republican Representative Mike Lawler on Sunday keen to point out potential pitfalls with President Donald Trump's budget. He fears proposed changes to Medicaid requirements could have a devastating effect on people unable to work through no fault of their own. "If your cuts to Medicaid pass, a person working in a low-paying job as an individual contractor who falls ill or has work interrupted because it's seasonal, or because it was a job shutdown - something not of any fault of their own - could not make your 80-hour requirement on a particular month," Mayhew, 63, told Lawler at the town hall in Mahopac, New York. Lawler defended the bill's Medicaid provision, which requires recipients age 19-64 who have no dependents to work, volunteer or be in school at least 80 hours a month starting in 2027. "The objective is to help people get into the workforce ultimately," he said. The exchange at the Sunday night event, where boos were more common than cheers, reflects the kinds of issues that are vexing some Republicans as they seek to promote and defend Trump's sweeping tax and spending bill. The two-hour-long town hall, attended by roughly 500 people, was also an indication of how voters in a swing district that narrowly voted for Lawler feel about the bill and Trump's agenda more broadly. Topics ranged from the justification of Trump's June 14 military parade to attacks on higher education, to whether ICE agents should wear masks during raids and how to fund social security in the future. A moderate Republican representing New York's 17th District, Lawler won re-election in November, defeating former Democratic Representative Mondaire Jones with over 52% of votes. He has expressed interest in running for governor. Lawler's district was the scene of one of the 2022 general election's biggest upsets when he beat Democratic Representative Sean Patrick Maloney – who was head of the Democrats' House campaign arm. Lawler has scheduled four public town hall meetings with voters this year, despite guidance from U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who urged fellow Republican lawmakers to avoid them after some events turned into angry confrontations over Trump's moves to fire federal workers and defund government programs. Lawler's two previous town halls were even more raucous events where several attendees were removed by law enforcement. FIELDING JEERS Trump's 1,100-page bill passed in May in a 215-214 vote, and will add about $3.8 trillion to the federal government's $36.2 trillion in debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It would extend corporate and individual tax cuts passed in 2017 during Trump's first term in office, cancel many green-energy incentives passed by Democratic former President Joe Biden and tighten eligibility for health and food programs for the poor. Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk denounced Trump's bill as a "disgusting abomination" last week, prior to the two men exchanging public insults. Other Republican representatives have also had to field jeers at town halls. During a May 28 town hall in Decorah, Iowa, Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson was booed after she told attendees: 'I was also proud to vote for President Trump's 'one big beautiful bill' last week.' The previous day, Republican Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska told attendees at his town hall that when he voted for the bill, he was unaware it would limit judges' power to hold people in contempt for violating court orders. The response was met with boos from the crowd, with one attendee calling his behavior 'ridiculous.' Flood said he would work to ensure the provision isn't in the final version of the bill. That said, such town halls have been few and far between. Lawler said he felt it was important to have this type of forum. "Almost all of my colleagues are not doing it, and I've been asked why I would do it. But this is your right to come and engage in this dialog. So that's why we're here." He also noted his work on pushing for increases in the so-called SALT deduction for state and local tax payments. He and other Republicans from Democratic-led, high-tax states had previously threatened to oppose Trump's legislation unless there were increases. Trump's current bill would allow taxpayers to deduct up to $40,000 for state and local tax (SALT) payments, up from $10,000 now, with benefits phasing out for households that make more than $500,000. A previous version of the bill had a cap of $30,000. Lawmakers next need to pass the bill in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority and are planning to use a legislative maneuver to bypass the chamber's 60-vote filibuster threshold for most legislation.
Los Angeles Times
32 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, 'NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on 'practical, quantitative,' even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: 'America will always be the first in space,' he said during his first term. 'We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led.' Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that 'the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that.' Among the 'foreign class of servants,' whom Vance acknowledged included 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. 'Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles,' Dreier observes. In this White House, however, 'there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency.' A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a 'hoax.' He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its 'misguided ... Global Climate Change programs,' and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is 'very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do' in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. 'Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money,' Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but 'I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates,' Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. 'You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space,' he told me. 'It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes.'
Politico
33 minutes ago
- Politico
‘It's made up': Democrats say Rubio isn't playing it straight about foreign aid cuts
Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of lying about the state of America's top global health program following massive cuts to foreign aid led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. The administration has cut more than a hundred contracts and grants from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the HIV and AIDS program credited with saving millions of lives in poor countries. President Donald Trump has shut down the agency that signed off on most PEPFAR spending and fired other staffers who supported it. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested Democrats' concerns are overblown, considering that PEPFAR remains '85 percent operative.' Rubio has made the claim repeatedly in budget testimony before Congress, but neither he nor the State Department will provide a detailed accounting to back up the figure. For flummoxed Democrats, it indicates a broader problem: How to respond to Trump's budget requests when his administration refuses to spend the money Congress has provided. Trump last month asked Congress to cut PEPFAR's budget for next year by 40 percent. 'It's made up,' Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz said when asked by POLITICO about the 85 percent figure. 'It's the most successful, bipartisan, highly efficient life-saving thing that the United States has ever done and Elon Musk went in and trashed it.' Schatz confronted Rubio about the cuts at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing in May, telling him: 'You are required to spend 100 percent of the money.' Rubio said the 15 percent cut targeted programs that weren't delivering the services the government was paying for. He pointed to fraud in Namibia and armed conflict in Sudan as reasons for slashed funding, although it isn't clear those instances were related to PEPFAR. Asked repeatedly by POLITICO for more clarity on what the 85 percent figure represents, a State Department spokesperson said that 'PEPFAR-funded programs that deliver HIV care and treatment or prevention of mother to child transmission services are operational for a majority of beneficiaries.' Data collection is ongoing to capture recent updates to programming, the spokesperson also said, adding: 'We expect to have updated figures later this year.' The day after his exchange with Schatz, Rubio told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he meant 85 percent of PEPFAR's beneficiaries were still getting U.S. assistance. But the goal, he said, was to pass off all of the work to the countries where the beneficiaries live. 'We're by far the most generous nation on Earth on foreign aid, and will continue to be by far with no other equal, including China, despite all this alarmist stuff,' he said. People who worked on implementing PEPFAR, both inside and outside the government, as well as advocates for HIV prevention and care, are alarmed nonetheless. A State Department report from the month before Trump took office underscores the breadth of its services. In fiscal 2024, the report says, PEPFAR provided medication to 20.6 million people, including 566,000 children, HIV prevention services to 2.3 million girls and women, and testing for 83.8 million. After DOGE dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development in February, several recipients of PEPFAR grants and contracts said they'd had to lay off staff even as Rubio insisted that life-saving aid was continuing. Rubio's skeptics point to the Trump administration's cancellation of more than 100 HIV grants and contracts, representing about 20 percent of PEPFAR's total budget, according to an analysis by the Center for Global Development, an anti-poverty group. In addition to shutting down USAID, the agency that dispensed and monitored much of that funding, the administration fired experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's global health division who worked on the program, including those specializing in maternal and child HIV. 'I'm not sure where he got these numbers,' Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said of Rubio's 85 percent claim. The lack of clarity has angered HIV activists, who protested against the PEPFAR cuts during the budget hearings where Rubio testified. 'It's unconscionable and alarming to know that 130 days into this administration, Rubio has overseen the completely unnecessary decimation of life-saving services to millions of people, then lying about that fact over and over again,' said Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, a nonprofit working on access to HIV treatment in developing countries. Russell was among those arrested for disrupting Rubio's House Foreign Affairs hearing. The confusion around how much of America's celebrated global health program is still operational adds to the uncertainty about the Trump administration's spending plans for the funds Congress appropriated for 2025. And it comes as Congress gears up to consider the president's 2026 budget request. Last month, Trump asked Congress to reduce the PEPFAR budget from $4.8 billion this year to $2.9 billion next. And on Tuesday, the White House asked Congress to claw back $900 million Congress had provided for HIV/AIDS services and other global health initiatives this year, but insisted that it was keeping programs that provide treatment intact. Even if the Trump administration isn't cutting treatment funding, it has cut other awards that ensure drugs reach people, Russell said. She pointed to a terminated USAID award that was delivering drugs to faith-based nonprofit clinics in Uganda. 'The medicine is literally languishing on shelves in a massive warehouse behind the U.S. embassy,' Russell said. Coons said prevention, if that's what's on the chopping block, is as important as treatment: 'For us to step back from supporting not just treatment but prevention puts us at risk of a reemergence of a more lethal, drug resistant form of HIV/AIDS.' Leading Republicans aren't objecting, even though PEPFAR was created by then-President George W. Bush and long enjoyed bipartisan support. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch of Idaho declined to comment when POLITICO asked him about the program. Earlier this year, Risch said PEPFAR was 'in jeopardy' after the Biden administration acknowledged that Mozambique, a country in east Africa, had misused program funds to provide at least 21 abortions. Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he agrees with the cuts Trump has made and suggested he would want more in the future. 'We also need to be asking the question: How long should American taxpayers borrow money to fund HIV medication for 20 million Africans?' Mast said. The top Democratic appropriators in the House and Senate accused the White House in late May of failing to provide detailed and legally required information about what the administration is doing with billions of dollars Congress directed it to spend. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut wrote to the White House Office of Management and Budget that the administration's decision to not abide by a funding law Trump signed in March has 'degraded Congress' capacity to carry out its legislative responsibilities' and move forward with fiscal 2026 spending bills. It has also clouded plans for reupping the law that directs the PEPFAR program. It expired in March. Mast has said that Congress would consider PEPFAR's future by September, as part of a larger debate about State Department priorities. But Democrats wonder how they could move forward with reauthorizing the program given the uncertainty surrounding it, said a Senate Democratic aide speaking anonymously to share internal debates.
