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Major antiabortion groups were gathering in the nation’s capital on Thursday to begin a lobbying effort with Congress and President Donald Trump’s administration aimed at eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood ahead of the Supreme Court hearing a case in April that could strip the organization’s funding in South Carolina.The antiabortion groups are taking aim at abortion providers under an initiative called Defund Planned Parenthood, which targets federal Medicaid funding for the reproductive healthcare provider.“This event begins an intensive round of outreach to the GOP, calling on them to take advantage of this unique moment to defund the abortion industry,” Students for Life, the national antiabortion group organizing the event, said in a statement.The Hyde Amendment already restricts government funding for most abortions, and less than 5% of the services Planned Parenthood provides are abortions, according to the organization’s 2023 report. Planned Parenthood also provides other forms of reproductive healthcare, including contraception, treatment for sexually transmitted infections and cancer screenings, often for low-income patients.Vicki Ringer, Planned Parenthood’s South Carolina director of public affairs, said claims that Planned Parenthood uses Medicaid funding for abortion is “an attempt to mislead the public” and emphasized Planned Parenthood’s role in providing broader reproductive healthcare.“We should be expanding healthcare to low-income people rather than trying to kick off these people who rely on us for healthcare,” Ringer said.Rachel Rebouche, dean of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, said the Defund Planned Parenthood movement has been building for 10 years but has gained momentum as the antiabortion movement has been emboldened by Trump’s presidential victory and by his fellow Republicans winning control of Congress in November.“We’re seeing more enthusiasm in states like South Carolina and others to close down Planned Parenthood under the banner of stopping abortions, which their laws already do,” she said.The Supreme Court announced it would hear a case involving South Carolina’s attempt to strip Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. Experts say the lawsuit could prompt similar efforts in conservative states across the country to chip away at the organization’s funding.Almost 100 conservative members of Congress signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to side with South Carolina. The state already bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they’re pregnant.In February, a panel of judges in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that attempted to force Planned Parenthood to repay millions of dollars of Medicaid funding in Texas and Louisiana.If the Supreme Court sides with South Carolina, Rebouche said, there may be a wider impact on healthcare by “giving states broad power to exclude healthcare that is unpopular or politically disfavored,” such as contraception. Targeting Planned Parenthood might also have a negative effect on maternal and infant mortality rates and could cost more money in the long run by cutting off low-income patients from vital preventive reproductive healthcare, she said.During a 2015 push to strip Planned Parenthood funding, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that doing so would cost the government $130 million over 10 years.Meanwhile, lawmakers in at least three statesMissouri, Ohio, and South Carolinahave introduced bills this year aiming to create tax breaks for antiabortion centers.The strategies come during a time when abortion rights advocates are warning that Trump and his Cabinet hold significant power to restrict medication abortion access nationwide.Rather than immediately heeding calls from antiabortion allies to restrict Medicaid funding for clinics that provide abortions, Trump has made quieter moves after waffling on the issue on the campaign trail.Trump reinstated a policy that requires foreign nongovernmental agencies to certify that they don’t provide or promote abortion if they receive U.S. aid for family planning assistance. He also pardoned several antiabortion activists convicted of blockading abortion clinics and used wording related to fetal personhood in an executive order rolling back protections for transgender people.The Republican president has appointed abortion opponents in some key Cabinet positions that could affect the availability of medication abortion and contraception, Medicaid coverage for family planning services, collection of abortion-related data and abortion access for troops and veterans.Advocates on either side of the abortion debate are waiting to see if Trump’s Department of Justice will revive the Comstock Act, a 19th-century obscenity law, to restrict the mailing of medication abortion or other materials used for abortions. Attorney General Pam Bondi has a history of defending abortion restrictions, and her confirmation was celebrated by abortion opponents. The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Christine Fernando, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Fast food giant Yum Brands has worked for years to distance itself from third-party tech partners. Last week, it made the ultimate power move: a development deal with Nvidia, a tech giant consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world. We want to own the intellectual property. We want to own the technology, Yum Brands chief digital and technology officer Joe Park told the Wall Street Journal. Thats a shift in our strategy as we think about AI. In other words: Yum knows its strength and wants full control over its own data. The company will build more services for its 61,000 restaurants with Nvidias tech with the goal of quickly processing and understanding critical information about store-level performance and giving managers personalized action plans. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/expedite_logo.jpg","headline":"Expedite","description":"Restaurant technology and the big ideas shaping the future of hospitality, by Kristen Hawley. To learn more visit expedite.news","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.expedite.news","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Yum Brands owns fast food powerhouses Taco Bell and KFC along with delivery stalwart Pizza Hut and its more recent acquisition, a less-known burger concept called Habit Burger. It says it’s Nvidias first restaurant partner, an important distinction in what could become a restaurant-tech land grab. The restaurant industry has been historically slow to deploy new tech, but seems to be excited about AI. According to data from the National Restaurant Association, about a third of restaurant operators plan to invest in AI for operations this yeara significant increase from the year before. Of course, Park is quick to tell the WSJ, all of this new tech wont replace human workers. Instead, he says, theyll be trained on a different form of service and hospitality than I think weve seen in the past. (This is a common refrain from industry execs who promise employees will augment new tech, freed up to provide additional human connection inside restaurants. In tandem, the execs celebrate the efficiency and reduced labor costs that tech brings to their operations.) Yum hasnt been shy about its desire to use tech to win. In 2023, it shared an aggressive sales target, albeit without a timeline: It wants all of its sales to come through digital channels. Digital ordering carries a host of benefits, including a restaurants ability to collect real-time data. Additionally, consumers tend to spend more when they place orders digitally thanks to smart upsells and better order accuracy. Its made some progress toward that goal. In 2024, the companys system-wide digital sales were up 15%, representing over half of sales. In the fourth quarter alone, it processed $9 billion in digital sales. Given the huge growth potential (and massive amount of money involved), Yum is right to hold its own ordering data close. Its a lesson the company may have learned the hard way. In 2018, Yum signed an exclusive deal with Grubhub, the onetime national leader in online ordering and delivery. Grubhub would power delivery at both Taco Bell and KFC, and Yum invested $200 million in Grubhub, a 3% stake. The deal flamed out rather spectacularly just two years later. Yum, realizing the delivery tailwind thanks to the onset of the pandemic, started working with competing delivery services like Uber Eats, which Grubhub said violated the terms of their agreement. In hindsight, this was Yums first big digital flex: Were too big and powerful to be constrained by your platform, it seemed to say. When Grubhub moved to increase the fees it charged Yums restaurants, Yum sued Grubhub for breach of contract, eventually offloading its investment for a reported $208 million. The Nvidia deal, on paper at least, should accelerate Yums next transition. To start, it will use the tech to add voice AI to its drive-thrus and phone lines, targeting a relatively modest 500 restaurants in the second quarter of this year. Eventually, Park says, theyll use the tech to optimize all ordering channels, including the companys mobile apps, and home in on in-store productivity and accuracy with Nvidia-powered computer vision. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/expedite_logo.jpg","headline":"Expedite","description":"Restaurant technology and the big ideas shaping the future of hospitality, by Kristen Hawley. To learn more visit expedite.news","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.expedite.news","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Kristen Hawley
Category:
E-Commerce
The wildfires that blazed through Los Angeles earlier this year, some of the fastest-spreading fires on record, underscored the risk of living in homes known to be at high risk for future fires. One national homebuilder, KB Home, believes that risk can be reduced by building a wildfire-resilient neighborhood.Dixon Trail, a community of 64 homes under construction in Escondido, California, near San Diego, will be the first neighborhood to earn the new Wildfire Prepared Neighborhood standard developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). [Image: KB Home]Each individual home will meet the Wildfire Prepared Home Plus certification, an IBHS designation that requires the homes to meet specific material and design standards, including Class A fire-rated roofs, noncombustible gutters, ember- and flame-resistant vents and all-metal fence systems. The town of Paradise, California, which lost 90% of its homes during a 2018 fire, passed a law requiring all homes meet this standard.The entire development is being designed with a holistic vision to reduce fire risks. Homes will be spaced 10 feet apart, with trees, bushes, and other landscaping distanced from structures to reduce the chances fires will start or spread. Wider streets will run through the neighborhood, creating fire breaks between homes and allowing for quicker evacuations.This is the first neighborhood that cohesively is meeting not just individual property attributes, but is paying attention to fire pathways, and fences and other kinds of landscaping between structures that can become pathways for fires, said Roy Wright, CEO of IBHS.Last year, roughly 1,200 homes in California earned the Wildfire Prepared Home designation, mostly through retrofits to add more fire resistant features. This is the first ground-up neighborhood to aim for this additional neighborhood-level certification, which will be awarded when its finished. Theres real risk in the region for fire; the chaparral on the foothills surrounding the development can easily ignite in the right conditions. Housing shortages in western states like California have pushed more and more development toward whats called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where new development comes up against undeveloped land. Roughly 11.2 million Californians, a quarter of the states population, live in the WUI today, which has substantially higher risks of fires than metro areas. The IBHS, which works in service of the insurance industry, arrives at its recommendations via exhaustive testing and research. The group has studied fire and storm risk for years, including the recent Palisades and Eaton Fires. The organization even has a 90-acre test site in South Carolina where it builds and then blasts apart homes, recreating Category 3 hurricanes and wildfires to test the latest in material safety and building codes. The materials recommended for Wildfire Prepared Home Plus were tested at the South Carolina site, and reflected learnings from what kind of homes tend to survive catastrophic wildfires. [Image: KB Home]KB Home began constructing Dixon Trail last June, said Jacob Atalla, KB Homes Vice President of Sustainability and Innovation. The first homes have been finished, going for roughly $1 million (the median single-family home sale in Escondido last year was $825,000, per Redfin). Its a small part of KB Homes overall production in 2024; the company earned nearly $7 billion in revenue, with more than 6,500 homes under construction, including a sizable number in western states with higher fire risks.[Image: KB Home]This price was set knowing that we are already building these homes to be wildfire prepared, so we didnt add a premium top of it, said Atalla.He expects this project to serve as a testing lab, helping the company figure out how to source materials for these kinds of homes in the future and scale up production of more wildfire resistant products. Initially marketed as a neighborhood with mountain views and oversized lots, the new messaging around wildfire risk reflects the sentiment shift since L.A.s devastating January fires. The certifications will likely reduce the insurance costs for new homeowners, said Atalla and Wright, and lower the total cost of ownership over time. Neither, however, could provide more specifics about the amount of savings, claiming the insurance process is complex and every carrier has their own methodology. Californias home insurance market has become increasingly challenging for homeowners, with rapidly spiking premiums and carriers dropping coverage or leaving the market altogether. Thats why savings on insurance is good business for KB and other homebuilders; in the companys 2024 annual report, it notes wildfire risk and increasing insurance costs as a risk factor, noting that consumers facing higher premiums may decide not to pursue purchasing a home or may cancel a home sales contract with us. Wriht says approximately 10 different neighborhoods in California, either through retrofits or new construction, are looking to gain the Wildfire Prepared Neighborhood designation.This Dixon Trail development is the first, but it will not be the last. I promise you, he said. There are plenty of people watching this who intend to emulate it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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