Reporting Highlights

• An Insurer Sanctioned: Three states found United’s algorithmic system to limit mental health coverage illegal; when they fought it, the insurer agreed to restrict it.
• A Patchwork Problem: The company is policing mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, highlighting a key flaw in the U.S. regulatory structure.
• United’s Playbook Revealed: The poorest and most vulnerable patients are now most at risk of losing mental health care coverage as United targets them for cost savings.

Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.

By the end of 2021, United’s algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states.

But that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, ProPublica found, after reviewing what is effectively the company’s internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses. The insurer’s strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.

Hurricane Milton dumped so much rain over parts of Florida’s Tampa Bay area that it qualified as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.

St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in the 24-hour period during which the storm made landfall, according to precipitation data from the National Weather Service.

That included a staggering 5.09 inches in one hour, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET — a level considered to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon's Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve bowel health in people with constipation, according to data from a randomized triple-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.

Black girls face more discipline and more severe punishments in public schools than girls from other racial backgrounds, according to a groundbreaking new report set for release Thursday by a congressional watchdog.

The report, shared exclusively with NPR, took nearly a year-and-a-half to complete and comes after several Democratic congressional members requested the study. Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later with support from Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, asked the Government Accountability Office in 2022 to take on the report.

Over the course of the 85-page report, the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.

• A new rule proposal from the Biden administration would prohibit products that are subject to U.S.-China tariffs from being eligible for a special customs exemption.

• The de minimis loophole allows packages with a value of less than $800 to enter the United States with relatively little scrutiny.

• Officials say a recent explosion in the number of de minimis shipments is due largely to Chinese-linked online retail giants like Shein and Temu.

Responding to reports that prisoner contact with loved ones helps reduce the recidivism rate, state lawmakers last year approved a $1 million pilot project to allow inmates with good behavior to make one free 15-minute phone call per month to the outside world.

Pleased with its rollout, members of the Florida Senate Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations came back during the 2024 legislative session with a budget line item expanding the program to $2 million from an inmate trust fund, and not from general revenues.

But Gov. Ron DeSantis slashed that line item in June. Advocates for prison and criminal justice reform say that’s a problem.

“Keeping families connected is very important for re-entry and so is the education,” said Karen Stuckey, who’s had to deal with escalating phone bills as both her son and husband have been incarcerated in Florida prisons. “If you want somebody to be successful, you have to keep them connected to their families or their loved ones. Because when you get out, it’s really, really hard.”

What would happen inside an electromechanical central office if you left your phone off hook?

From the channel Connections Museum

AMD is warning about a high-severity CPU vulnerability named SinkClose that impacts multiple generations of its EPYC, Ryzen, and Threadripper processors. The vulnerability allows attackers with Kernel-level (Ring 0) privileges to gain Ring -2 privileges and install malware that becomes nearly undetectable.

Tracked as CVE-2023-31315 and rated of high severity (CVSS score: 7.5), the flaw was discovered by IOActive Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, who named privilege elevation attack 'Sinkclose.'

Full details about the attack will be presented by the researchers at tomorrow in a DefCon talk titled "AMD Sinkclose: Universal Ring-2 Privilege Escalation."

• CVE-2023-31315
• AMD-SB-7014