Last year the federal government downgraded active surveillance for this parasite. Now thousands are sick

A patient arrives after two weeks of relentless watery diarrhea, sometimes 20 episodes a day. She has lost weight and cannot keep fluids down. Her stool tests come back negative. Unless someone thinks to order an assay that includes Cyclospora cayetanensis, she may leave without a diagnosis and stay ill for weeks longer.

Cyclospora is easy to miss in a clinic. Many routine stool tests do not include it, so a clinician must consider the parasite before the laboratory will look for it. You find it on purpose, or you do not find it.

Robert B Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Idaho to have ballot measure for reproductive freedom law that would reverse ban on abortions at all pregnancy stages

One of the strictest abortion bans in the country will be on the ballot this November after Idaho’s secretary of state certified a ballot measure on Monday that would reverse the state’s abortion ban that prohibits the procedure at all stages of pregnancy.

The ballot initiative was headed by a volunteer-run group called Idahoans United for Women & Families, which ran a petition drive to get the measure in front of voters this fall. They gathered more than 100,000 signatures, surpassing the required 70,725 to get on the ballot.

As people yearn for connection, these events are popping up around the world - and spreading ‘collective effervescence’

We met in a former synagogue, a vast room with hardwood floors where the sound could echo freely. All were strangers, many former choir nerds, united by a love for group singing. Our goal was to learn and perform, in a single day, a classic of our time: a song from the Hannah Montana movie.

The event, near downtown Los Angeles, was a one-day choir hosted by the Gaia Music Collective – a three-hour gathering where more than 100 people rehearsed a choral arrangement of the song and sang it three times, with ourselves as the only audience.

Lillard, of Oklahoma, contracted polio when she was five and slept inside cylindrical metal device to help her breathe

The last known US person living with polio and relying on an iron lung has died aged 78.

Martha Lillard, who contracted polio at age five and spent most of her life dependent on an iron lung machine that helped her breathe, died on 26 June in Oklahoma, according to an online obituary.

The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is the first to target low-income families led by Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi

Three months after giving birth to her son, Amaya Jones moved into a new apartment complex. She knew no one else in the building, but it was a fresh start for her and her two children. One day, someone put up a flyer on her unit’s door, notifying her about a program called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT).

Launched in 2018, the MMT is the longest-running guaranteed income program in the country, and the first to target extremely low-income families headed by Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi. With no strings attached, the program provides mothers with $1,000 a month for 12 months.

Crude jokes about the Maga luminary are exploding online – less than a year after conservatives were suppressing any slander against him

Ten months since his assassination, Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online. Just not the way the far-right activist would have wanted.

Audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, as have ironic reposts of the apparent AI-slop song We Are Charlie Kirk, which was originally created as a posthumous tribute. He was the butt of a crude joke during the Netflix roast of the Hollywood star Kevin Hart in May. The next month, a viral tweet encouraged people to take “a shot” in his honor on Juneteenth. And a trend known as “Kirkification” has emerged, in which internet pranksters superimpose his face on to unlikely images, such as the Mona Lisa, a woman in a bikini, or Jeffrey Epstein.

Illness surging in Michigan and other US states is rarely life-threatening, CDC says – but it can have severe effects

Cases of cyclosporiasis – a parasitic illness that can cause “explosive”, watery diarrhea – have surged across the United States in recent days, health officials have said, with an abnormally large outbreak of almost 1,000 cases reported in Michigan.

Michigan typically reports about 50 cases a year, making the current outbreak the largest in the state’s history and one of the nation’s biggest in recent years. Ohio has also reported a sharp increase, with 177 cases as of 2 July, since the CDC’s last count.

A Ukrainian court has blocked the publication of a completed investigation, using a legal tool meant to protect evidence in a lawsuit that, as of publication, does not exist.

On 24 June, investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info and the Anti-Corruption Action Center (ACC) sent questions to a company called Parkovyi-2 about 143 real estate properties that the reporters had traced to Oleksandr Sukhachov, a Kharkiv businessman and the brother of State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) Director Oleksii Sukhachov, according to Slidstvo.Info’s own statement.

Parkovyi-2 never answered; on 3 July, a Friday, it asked the court for an injunction instead, and by Monday, 6 July, Pecherskyi District Court Judge Serhii Vovk had signed an order barring Slidstvo.Info and the ACC from publishing anything about the property.

The underlying defamation or privacy suit that would normally justify such a ban has still not been filed. According to the court’s own account, the claimant now has 10 days from 6 July to file the suit, or the order will lapse on its own, the Pecherskyi court told Suspilne.

Why a request turned into a courtroom order

The mechanism at work is an interim injunction, ordinarily used to freeze assets or preserve evidence while a court case is underway, not to stop a story before the case behind it is lodged.

The court defended the ban as a routine practice under Ukraine’s martial-law provisions, arguing that weighing free expression against the injunction is a matter for the court once the actual lawsuit is filed.

A tool built to prevent evidence from disappearing mid-case has just been used to stop a finished story from appearing at all, while no case is open yet to test it against. If it survives this use, any person facing embarrassing reporting has a template: file an injunction first, then decide later whether to sue at all.

Media lawyers and the outlet descrive this specific sequence—an injunction granted before the underlying suit is filed—as unprecedented in Ukraine.

As Ukrainska Pravda reports, the court’s order itself gives two reasons for the ban: that publishing details of the properties and how they were financed could cause Oleksandr Sukhachov “irreparable harm,” and that the information could expose Parkovyi-2’s trade secrets.

“We believe the Anti-Corruption Action Center and Slidstvo.Info are simply being used to test an instrument for banning journalists from exposing corruption,” ACC director Daria Kaleniuk said in a statement.

Slidstvo.Info co-author Maksym Savchuk told Ukrainska Pravda the months-long investigation had traced 143 properties to Oleksandr Sukhachov and found “threads leading directly to” the SBI his brother runs.

Reporters Without Borders expressed concern, saying courts should not be used to suppress reporting on matters of public interest.

Why the SBI’s own family matters here

Ukraine’s SBI investigates officials and law enforcement, including cases that touch its own ranks. A court has now shielded the family of the person who runs it from published scrutiny, days before any legal case against that scrutiny existed.

This is not the only recent case of pressure on Ukrainian outlets reporting on state institutions. On 7 July, investigators raided the home of Babel co-founder Oleksii Babenko, days after his outlet published an investigation into deaths at Ukraine’s largest assault regiment.

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Ukraine opened a criminal case over 25 non-combat deaths at its largest assault regiment. Serving soldier’s response was to call reporter “media killer”

Judge Vovk has a documented history of rulings favoring politically connected figures, according to Slidstvo.Info, which reports he sentenced former Interior Minister Yurii Lutsenko in 2012 in a case the European Parliament later called inconsistent with international fair-trial standards, and separately lifted an asset freeze on 415 properties linked to businessman Ihor Kolomoisky.

In 2015, parliament approved Vovk’s own arrest after prosecutors accused him of a ruling that unlawfully stripped someone of property rights; he was suspended, then reinstated in 2016. In 2022, Slidstvo.Info found that his wife had become the owner of a Volkswagen Multivan, now worth roughly $90,000; when asked how she had afforded it, Vovk said it had been a gift from unnamed family members.

The DEJURE Foundation reported that the SBI searched Ukraine’s High Qualification Commission of Judges in March 2025, shortly after judges from the Pecherskyi court, including its chair, were called in for a review that could have cost them their posts.

DEJURE stopped short of alleging a direct link between that episode and this ruling, describing the two courts’ relationship instead as an exchange of favors.

Slidstvo.Info and the ACC say the case carries the hallmarks of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP—a suit filed less to win than to exhaust and silence the party being sued, and note that Kyiv has committed to EU-standard anti-SLAPP legislation by 2027 as part of its accession process, under the same first cluster of talks covering judicial reform and freedom of expression.

I can’t blame my patients for turning to its straightforward assessments. But it has real risks – and care may require human messiness

“Chat told me I should break up with him.”

I instructed my face to remain therapist-neutral, but I must have smirked. The truth is, I was annoyed. We had been discussing the viability of this relationship for weeks, and in an instant AI had brought the answer. “How do you feel about it?” She said this had been her gut feeling all along. The following session, her relationship was over.

Laws banning trans athletes claim to defend science, fairness and women’s safety. They do the opposite

Last week, the US supreme court ruled that states may restrict participation in girls’ and women’s sports to “biological females” and exclude transgender athletes from competing. In the past six years, 27 states have enacted such bans; before the court were challenges to West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act and Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.

The majority opinion, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, upholds the laws’ legality under Title IX, the federal statute that guarantees women’s equal participation in college sports, and their constitutionality under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It also vindicates Donald Trump’s February 2025 executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports”. That directive withdraws funding from “educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy”. US policy, the order continues, will “oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth”.

The NHS will divert billions of pounds from essential services to pay for new medicines, under the terms of the US-UK trade deal agreed in December, which could lead to more than 200,000 excess deaths, analysis has found.

Ministers have defended the deal as a way of helping British drug exports avoid US tariffs and giving patients access to vital medication, but critics accuse the Labour party of caving into pressure from Donald Trump.

Lucy Hough speaks to columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

As GLP-1s drive the current protein craze, a supplement once only taken by powerlifters is now so popular US producers are struggling to keep up

For generations, the Meives family made cheese. Tony Meives’s grandfather, a Swiss immigrant, and his father both ran small cheese factories in Wisconsin, in the heart of America’s dairyland. “I worked in the cheese factory my whole life,” Meives says. “I have four world-class cheesemakers in my family.” But when it came time to inherit the family business, Meives found there was more money in the industrial runoff that his grandfather would have once thrown away. Today, the 39-year-old bodybuilder and gym owner runs a company that sells whey protein powder, the watery byproduct of cheesemaking that was once considered waste. “Twenty years ago, the only people who took whey were bodybuilders,” he says. “Over the past five years, the market has really opened up to each and every type of person you can probably think of.”

When Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, declared late last month, that “the war on protein is over”, he sounded a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers of second world war lore, who spent years hunkering in the jungles of south-east Asia, oblivious to the fact that hostilities had long ceased. Perhaps there was a time when advice leaned more towards a diet based around fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates – but by May 2026, the war on protein was surely over. Protein had won.

INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange launched in Lviv in 2024 with an unusual premise—that the fastest way to change how the world understands Ukraine is to bring the world to Ukraine and keep it here for a while.

The institute documents civilian experiences of Russia’s war against Ukraine and runs fellowships and residencies that pair Ukrainian researchers and cultural practitioners with peers from abroad.

Its head, Sasha Dovzhyk, was born in Zaporizhzhia shortly before the Soviet collapse, into the generation that grew up with Ukrainian independence. She studied at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, then took her master’s and PhD at Birkbeck in London, and worked at the Ukrainian Institute London.

She came home at the start of February 2022, just before the full-scale invasion, worked as a fixer for foreign correspondents, and returned for good in 2023. She now lives in Lviv.

Euromaidan Press spoke with her about what INDEX is trying to fix.

Why the world has to come to Ukraine

Peeter Helme: You worked as a fixer before you founded INDEX. What did that teach you?

Sasha Dovzhyk: When journalists come here for three days, it doesn’t matter how smart or erudite they are—they just don’t get it. People need to spend more time here. They need to develop networks to be embedded in Ukrainian society and social efforts in order to understand what Ukrainian resistance actually is. Through that slow work of introducing them to our context, we can hope they write better stories and make art that feels truthful to us.

And it matters in the other direction too. For Ukrainians still in the country, it’s important to see that the outside world is coming to meet them on their own terms. Our veterans, our Ukrainian fellows—they see international scholars and practitioners coming to learn from them, and through them.

In that laboratory format, with international and Ukrainian fellows working side by side, we try to produce a more nuanced understanding of what Ukraine is today and what Russian aggression means for us.

Peeter: The name INDEX suggests an indicator, a way of locating something. What does the institute help people locate?

Dovzhyk: We’re locating Ukraine on the map for people coming from outside, and pointing toward a more just future for our country—toward epistemic justice. We want the stories of Ukraine and the history of this war told through the insider’s perspective and knowledge.

We’ve lived through Russian colonialism and imperialism for centuries, so we know what it means when your story is told for you by the oppressor. And we know from the first eight years of this war what it means when your story doesn’t resonate abroad because nobody knows who you are. They know big Russia. They don’t know what Ukraine is. We’re trying to give the Ukrainian perspective the resonance it deserves.

Peeter: Aren’t you worried this becomes extraction—a foreigner comes, gathers material, then goes off to explain Ukraine on their own terms?

Dovzhyk: The model INDEX tries to create is precisely the alternative to that extractivist model. People come for three months; many have later moved to Ukraine. When they leave, they do so with more than professional contacts—they build intellectual friendships that keep them in check over the longer term.

On their side, they provide platforms for the Ukrainians they start working with. We often witness the beginning of long-term projects—five-year projects that employ Ukrainians in international research.

One of our fellows, Johana Kotišová, began work at INDEX in 2024 on the value of emotions in international reporting, then won a roughly €1.5 million ($1.7 million) European Research Council grant at the University of Amsterdam and hired four people, one of them Ukrainian.

Why Russia is still the default interpreter

Peeter: But why is Russia still treated as the default interpreter of Eastern Europe—even after it’s common knowledge that it lies, manipulates evidence, and weaponizes history?

Dovzhyk: Russia worked for a very long time to reach the position it holds today. It’s not the past ten or thirty years—it’s centuries of colonialism, and in the 20th century, that was financed by oil and gas money. They take resources from the countries they dominate, and they understand the value of cultural influence.

They’ve invested enormous money and human resources into producing an image of Russia that is now in the heads of every person in the West. Ask anyone what Moscow is, what Russian ballet is, and they’ll have a pretty good idea.

That cultural image is fully formed. We don’t have the same resources to draw on. We were overshadowed by our imperial neighbor for centuries, so we have to be creative.

In Ukraine’s case, I think we were only recognized as the autonomous political nation we are after the full-scale invasion, because of Ukrainian resistance. Now we have a chance to build a new familiarity with Ukraine and Ukrainian culture, and to make it a household word. If people know who you are—if they’ve read a book, if they have a friend here—it’s harder for them to disregard your existence, or to grow bored with the war.

Peeter: At what point does familiarity with Russia stop helping someone understand Ukraine and start distorting it? We have to know the enemy—but can we be too familiar with it?

Dovzhyk: I don’t think we should stop studying Russia. It depends on where you study it from and which voices you listen to. If you keep going to Moscow, your picture of Russia will be the same as it’s been for 300 years.

If you want to know what Russia is, talk to the nations it colonized. You look for resistance in Ukraine, in Georgia, not in Moscow. That’s how you start to understand what Russia actually is.

Peeter: Ukraine became visible through war, destruction, and suffering. Is there a risk that foreign audiences consume Ukraine as an experience of trauma, and how do Ukrainians tell the truth about the war without being reduced to objects of compassion?

Dovzhyk: You’re right, and it’s a problem. What shakes our fellows most is that two things are true at the same time. Ukraine is surviving a genocide—there are war crimes here daily, huge destruction, huge loss, a country in grief.

And at the same time, we have the best coffee, book festivals with tens of thousands of attendees, and a flourishing cultural life. Showing that complexity matters. So does the longevity of our history: we did not spring into existence in 2022. Our resistance today is the result of a long tradition of resistance. The fact that the world didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

We’re educated by the dissidents, who were educated by the Executed Renaissance, who were educated by a generation before them, and so on. This country has been fighting for its existence and its recognition for a very long time.

Documenting people without turning them into exhibits

Peeter: Documentation preserves evidence and testimony, but it can also turn people into objects of observation—pieces in a museum. How does INDEX keep Ukrainians as active interpreters of their own experience?

Dovzhyk: It’s one of the rules of oral history: you don’t ask a person only about the most traumatic thing. You ask how they grew up, what shaped them, and you let them tell the story on their own terms.

We try to do the same. We don’t concentrate only on the person standing in front of their destroyed house—we want the story of the community, and we bring the community into the telling.

The latest example is civilians in captivity. There’s no Geneva Convention that covers civilians captured by the aggressor—they’re not prisoners of war; they simply shouldn’t be there. When you focus on the scale of it, people lose attention, because the scale is hard to comprehend. So you tell personal stories.

We work with people whose loved ones were held in Russia for years. We don’t talk to them for two hours—we talk to them for days. We ask them to write their own narrative, we publish it, and we bring our community in to help tell it.

Peeter: But foreign journalists often come here for sensation.

Dovzhyk: The ones chasing sensation aren’t our audience. We’re interested in people who can spend the time and attention to hold the complexity—who come back, and come back again.

Peeter: What should foreign audiences start asking about Ukraine that they rarely do?

Dovzhyk: Our memory culture. Our relationship with our dead is very specific: there’s a strong emphasis on continuing the work of the people this aggression has taken. There’s grief and loss, but also a sense of responsibility to carry on their work.

The Victoria Amelina Fellowship is one small example; there are dozens of similar initiatives. I created a project called “People of Culture Taken Away By The War”—portraits of cultural figures who were killed, each with a paragraph on how their initiatives are being kept alive by the people close to them.

Your dead push you into the future, because you carry the responsibility to live for those who can’t. And Ukrainians should look outward too—to the strategies other communities have developed against similar threats, and talk to each other beyond the echo chamber of Ukraine.

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Peeter: How do you do that in practice?

Dovzhyk: Bring them here. Create the connections on the ground. For many Ukrainians—men who can’t leave the country—building bridges abroad isn’t possible. So organizations like INDEX have to bring our allies into the country and build those grassroots connections here. For the world to know you, you have to invite the world into your home and make it welcome.

And then there is the Ukrainian bookshelf. We should all be filling it—with the books, films, and cultural work that require time and take years. It’s natural to concentrate on short-term tasks because there are so many.

But those longer works will shape the memory of this war, and it matters that they’re told by people with direct experience of it. This is the work nobody can do for us.