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- Many Health Care Grad Students Can’t Get the Loans They Need
With her senior year of college now underway, Mitzie Westgate has begun planning what she’ll do after graduation next spring. An exercise science major, she hopes to go straight to graduate school and pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy so she can open a nonprofit to help children with disabilities like her cousin, who has cerebral palsy. But thanks to unprecedented confusion around federal student loans, she can’t firm up plans or even decide where to apply until she sees how the chaos shakes out. “It’s kind of up in the air whether I’ll be able to pay for college” after this year, said Westgate, a 21-year-old senior at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Tuition and other costs at her top choices—Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, the University of New Hampshire, and the Medical University of South Carolina—could far outpace federal loan limits, she said. That could leave her able to afford only a single smaller school, Johnson & Wales University in her home state of Rhode Island, where she could save money by living with her parents but would graduate with fewer professional connections. She still plans to apply to more expensive schools and hopes that scholarships will cover some of the cost. “I’m kind of playing it by ear,” she said. Congress last year removed dozens of graduate-level programs from the U.S. Department of Education’s list of “professional” degrees, a reclassification that set tight limits on federal loans students can borrow to pay for graduate school. Westgate’s dream program—occupational therapy—is among those that could cost students far more than they can now borrow from the federal government, leaving many wondering whether to rely on more expensive private loans to cover the remainder. Under the Grad PLUS program, students could borrow up to the full cost of attendance. The new law, which took effect July 1, eliminated Grad PLUS and limits federal loans to $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total for most graduate programs, with higher limits of $50,000 annually and $200,000 in total for just 11 professional programs. A lawsuit by nursing groups and other health care and educational associations led a judge to suspend the rule restricting higher limits until at least December, making it difficult for students to plan for the 2027-28 school year even as they apply for graduate school this fall. Depending on how the lawsuit goes, some degrees with higher… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - This Is the Biggest Reason Why a Blue Wave is Probably Coming
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran. There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day. But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income. Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass. Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year. Per capita real disposable income took a… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - ‘Pink Slime’ Is Infecting AI Chatbots Ahead of the Midterms
It’s no secret that AI has become an explosive factor in American politics. Even before the latest concerns that AI poses existential risks to humanity, many people had soured on the rapid growth of data centers used to support the technology. Meanwhile, tens of millions of AI industry dollars are sloshing around the midterm campaign in support of candidates on both sides of the aisle. But the increasing ubiquity of AI is also quietly shaping the perceptions of voters who are simply trying to educate themselves about the candidates — and are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries. Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half of the time when people ask about candidates and issues that the partisan sites have covered in the midterm campaign, according to a new audit by NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability where we work as analysts. These “pink slime” sites have gone into overdrive ahead of the 2026 elections, actively promoting articles designed to influence which party controls Congress in the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Many of these sites, which don’t disclose their political orientation, are focused on the Senate and House races that are considered toss-ups and where small voter swings could be the deciding factor. Against this backdrop, NewsGuard prompted seven leading AI tools with queries based on recent coverage of candidates and issues by 12 pink slime sites — six left-leaning and six right-leaning. The results were stark. Collectively, the chatbots cited pink slime sites along with other sources in 48.2 percent of their responses. In 7.7 percent of responses, pink slime sites were the only sources at all that were cited in chatbot responses, although other sources appeared in the source list provided at the end of the response. None of the AI tools received results they’d probably be eager to boast about, though the percentage of chatbots’ responses that cited a pink slime site had a relatively large range: 70.8 percent for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, 54.2 percent for Microsoft’s Copilot, 54.2 percent for Perplexity, 50 percent for Anthropic’s Claude, 41.7 percent for Google’s Gemini; 37.5 percent for Meta AI and 29.2 percent for xAI’s Grok. A Microsoft spokesperson told NewsGuard: “Copilot has been designed to ground answers in high-quality search results that balance safety, authority, and access to information. The system indexes… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - Russia Said These Foreigners Wouldn’t Have to Fight. Then It Sent Them to the ...
PUCALLPA, Peru — Carlos Lenski Davila Vela cannot name the Ukrainian village that Russia sent him to capture as part of a storm assault, nor a single town nearby. But with a crumpled napkin and a glass, he easily reconstructs where he was when the drones appeared, the tree line where he sought shelter and where, just meters away, one of his companions, a 19-year-old recruit from Kazakhstan, was hit and killed. Davila Vela, a 36-year-old Peruvian recruited into the Russian army, was left with shrapnel in his foot. Recreating his call for help to Puma, a 23-year-old Colombian, he holds his phone to his mouth like a radio: “Puma, Puma,” he says, using the Colombian man’s callsign. “This is Cash. I’m alive, but I’m hurt.” He had spent just four days on the frontline.As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds on, Moscow is looking abroad to find soldiers to send into battle. With recruitment becoming harder in some countries it previously relied on, predominantly in Africa and Asia, its war machine is increasingly turning to Latin America — including Peru, a country of about 35 million people — where testimonies from recruits and their relatives indicate that hundreds traveled to Moscow in the first half of this year alone. The widening of the Kremlin’s recruitment drive suggests that as Russian President Vladimir Putin hesitates to launch another round of military mobilization at home, the war is reaching deeper into the Western Hemisphere — a region where U.S. President Donald Trump has explicitly sought to reassert American primacy — drawing it into the conflict. In Peru, relatives of missing recruits have staged repeated protests and pressed authorities to act, likening the effort to lure men to fight against Ukraine to human trafficking. “We are seeing a clear expansion of Russia’s recruitment network in Latin America,” said a Ukrainian defense official working with prisoners of war who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. “The number of Peruvian cases is clearly increasing.” This year, the official added, the number of foreign fighters is expected to reach a record high.“There are lots of Latinos,” Davila Vela confirmed during an interview in his hometown of Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon, describing the three military training camps where he stayed before being sent to battle as a conveyor belt of fresh foreign recruits. “Every day, some are sent on, and new… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - Trump’s Public Service Announcement: ‘Love Me’
The campaign-style ad starts with grainy video footage of President Trump, followed by a clearer look at his red-bathed profile, as his voice promises: “Together, we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America.” Then comes a strobe-style rapid display of images of the president. A pause. Then a dozen more Trumps. The pattern repeats several times. There are plugs for some of his priorities—such as cutting taxes and defending police officers—but one message stays on the screen for fully half of the 30-second commercial: AmericA will never be a communist country.Throughout, an R&B song plays in the background, with falsetto voices singing, over and over: “Love me … Love me … Love me …” At the end comes this: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”Huh?If the use of taxpayer dollars seems odd—and it should—the explanation that the White House gave me is even more bizarre. No one would speak on the record, but a White House spokesperson told me that the new ad, which began airing this week, is a public service announcement that is “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” A second White House official told me that the ad is “clearly not political,” an assertion that appears intended to provide legal cover. I also received a list of supposedly comparable PSAs from past presidents: George W. Bush spent federal dollars urging the youth of America not to do drugs. Joe Biden had a campaign to encourage the public to get their COVID vaccines. Franklin D. Roosevelt produced radio programs and posters supporting World War II. And now Trump has his own announcement of sorts: “Love me … Love me … Love me …”“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” the White House spokesperson told me in a statement.[Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record ]The White House would not answer my other questions, including about how much money is being spent on these “public service announcements,” which government account is being used to fund them, and who produced the spot. It is unclear how much money the government has spent on these ads and in how many places, but one advertising tracker I spoke with told me that the ad is airing in several major markets. It’s much easier to track such details for political ads,… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
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With her senior year of college now underway, Mitzie Westgate has begun planning what she’ll do after graduation next spring. An exercise science major, she hopes to go straight to graduate school and pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy so she can open a nonprofit to help children with disabilities like her cousin, who has cerebral palsy. But thanks to unprecedented confusion around federal student loans, she can’t firm up plans or even decide where to apply until she sees how the chaos shakes out. “It’s kind of up in the air whether I’ll be able to pay for college” after this year, said Westgate, a 21-year-old senior at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Tuition and other costs at her top choices—Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, the University of New Hampshire, and the Medical University of South Carolina—could far outpace federal loan limits, she said. That could leave her able to afford only a single smaller school, Johnson & Wales University in her home state of Rhode Island, where she could save money by living with her parents but would graduate with fewer professional connections. She still plans to apply to more expensive schools and hopes that scholarships will cover some of the cost. “I’m kind of playing it by ear,” she said. Congress last year removed dozens of graduate-level programs from the U.S. Department of Education’s list of “professional” degrees, a reclassification that set tight limits on federal loans students can borrow to pay for graduate school. Westgate’s dream program—occupational therapy—is among those that could cost students far more than they can now borrow from the federal government, leaving many wondering whether to rely on more expensive private loans to cover the remainder. Under the Grad PLUS program, students could borrow up to the full cost of attendance. The new law, which took effect July 1, eliminated Grad PLUS and limits federal loans to $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total for most graduate programs, with higher limits of $50,000 annually and $200,000 in total for just 11 professional programs. A lawsuit by nursing groups and other health care and educational associations led a judge to suspend the rule restricting higher limits until at least December, making it difficult for students to plan for the 2027-28 school year even as they apply for graduate school this fall. Depending on how the lawsuit goes, some degrees with higher… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran. There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day. But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income. Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass. Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year. Per capita real disposable income took a… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
It’s no secret that AI has become an explosive factor in American politics. Even before the latest concerns that AI poses existential risks to humanity, many people had soured on the rapid growth of data centers used to support the technology. Meanwhile, tens of millions of AI industry dollars are sloshing around the midterm campaign in support of candidates on both sides of the aisle. But the increasing ubiquity of AI is also quietly shaping the perceptions of voters who are simply trying to educate themselves about the candidates — and are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries. Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half of the time when people ask about candidates and issues that the partisan sites have covered in the midterm campaign, according to a new audit by NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability where we work as analysts. These “pink slime” sites have gone into overdrive ahead of the 2026 elections, actively promoting articles designed to influence which party controls Congress in the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Many of these sites, which don’t disclose their political orientation, are focused on the Senate and House races that are considered toss-ups and where small voter swings could be the deciding factor. Against this backdrop, NewsGuard prompted seven leading AI tools with queries based on recent coverage of candidates and issues by 12 pink slime sites — six left-leaning and six right-leaning. The results were stark. Collectively, the chatbots cited pink slime sites along with other sources in 48.2 percent of their responses. In 7.7 percent of responses, pink slime sites were the only sources at all that were cited in chatbot responses, although other sources appeared in the source list provided at the end of the response. None of the AI tools received results they’d probably be eager to boast about, though the percentage of chatbots’ responses that cited a pink slime site had a relatively large range: 70.8 percent for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, 54.2 percent for Microsoft’s Copilot, 54.2 percent for Perplexity, 50 percent for Anthropic’s Claude, 41.7 percent for Google’s Gemini; 37.5 percent for Meta AI and 29.2 percent for xAI’s Grok. A Microsoft spokesperson told NewsGuard: “Copilot has been designed to ground answers in high-quality search results that balance safety, authority, and access to information. The system indexes… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
PUCALLPA, Peru — Carlos Lenski Davila Vela cannot name the Ukrainian village that Russia sent him to capture as part of a storm assault, nor a single town nearby. But with a crumpled napkin and a glass, he easily reconstructs where he was when the drones appeared, the tree line where he sought shelter and where, just meters away, one of his companions, a 19-year-old recruit from Kazakhstan, was hit and killed. Davila Vela, a 36-year-old Peruvian recruited into the Russian army, was left with shrapnel in his foot. Recreating his call for help to Puma, a 23-year-old Colombian, he holds his phone to his mouth like a radio: “Puma, Puma,” he says, using the Colombian man’s callsign. “This is Cash. I’m alive, but I’m hurt.” He had spent just four days on the frontline.As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine grinds on, Moscow is looking abroad to find soldiers to send into battle. With recruitment becoming harder in some countries it previously relied on, predominantly in Africa and Asia, its war machine is increasingly turning to Latin America — including Peru, a country of about 35 million people — where testimonies from recruits and their relatives indicate that hundreds traveled to Moscow in the first half of this year alone. The widening of the Kremlin’s recruitment drive suggests that as Russian President Vladimir Putin hesitates to launch another round of military mobilization at home, the war is reaching deeper into the Western Hemisphere — a region where U.S. President Donald Trump has explicitly sought to reassert American primacy — drawing it into the conflict. In Peru, relatives of missing recruits have staged repeated protests and pressed authorities to act, likening the effort to lure men to fight against Ukraine to human trafficking. “We are seeing a clear expansion of Russia’s recruitment network in Latin America,” said a Ukrainian defense official working with prisoners of war who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. “The number of Peruvian cases is clearly increasing.” This year, the official added, the number of foreign fighters is expected to reach a record high.“There are lots of Latinos,” Davila Vela confirmed during an interview in his hometown of Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon, describing the three military training camps where he stayed before being sent to battle as a conveyor belt of fresh foreign recruits. “Every day, some are sent on, and new… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
The campaign-style ad starts with grainy video footage of President Trump, followed by a clearer look at his red-bathed profile, as his voice promises: “Together, we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America.” Then comes a strobe-style rapid display of images of the president. A pause. Then a dozen more Trumps. The pattern repeats several times. There are plugs for some of his priorities—such as cutting taxes and defending police officers—but one message stays on the screen for fully half of the 30-second commercial: AmericA will never be a communist country.Throughout, an R&B song plays in the background, with falsetto voices singing, over and over: “Love me … Love me … Love me …” At the end comes this: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”Huh?If the use of taxpayer dollars seems odd—and it should—the explanation that the White House gave me is even more bizarre. No one would speak on the record, but a White House spokesperson told me that the new ad, which began airing this week, is a public service announcement that is “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” A second White House official told me that the ad is “clearly not political,” an assertion that appears intended to provide legal cover. I also received a list of supposedly comparable PSAs from past presidents: George W. Bush spent federal dollars urging the youth of America not to do drugs. Joe Biden had a campaign to encourage the public to get their COVID vaccines. Franklin D. Roosevelt produced radio programs and posters supporting World War II. And now Trump has his own announcement of sorts: “Love me … Love me … Love me …”“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” the White House spokesperson told me in a statement.[Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record ]The White House would not answer my other questions, including about how much money is being spent on these “public service announcements,” which government account is being used to fund them, and who produced the spot. It is unclear how much money the government has spent on these ads and in how many places, but one advertising tracker I spoke with told me that the ad is airing in several major markets. It’s much easier to track such details for political ads,… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
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