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The push to remove religious exemptions for vaccines is meant to drive up vaccination rates. It's working.

In the past decade, California, Connecticut, Maine and New York have removed such exemptions in an effort to drive up vaccination rates.

It seems to be working. Maine, for example, had one of the country’s highest vaccination opt-out rates in 2017, at 5.3%. Two years later, in 2019, it passed a law that eliminated religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccinations.

Since then, Maine’s kindergarten MMR vaccination rate has climbed from less than 94% to nearly 98%.

When California passed a law in 2016 removing personal belief and religious exemptions after a measles outbreak that began at Disneyland, MMR coverage increased by 3% in 2019. It has remained high, at 96.2%, according to the California Department of Public Health.

The actions come at a critical time in America’s vaccination history. The country is on track to have the largest measles outbreak in decades, with 1,267 cases already logged this year.

Donald Trump is facing a sharp backlash from young voters, with new polling showing his approval rating among Generation Z has dropped to one of its lowest points yet.

The latest YouGov/Yahoo poll, conducted between June 26-30 among 1,597 adults, shows that among Gen Z voters, his net rating has deteriorated sharply, falling from -23 points in May to -41 points in June.

Net ratings do have a tendency to swing much more than a simple approval rating. Still, the president's approval rating in June is low, at 27 percent. The margin of error is at plus or minus 3.2 percent.

Lucas Walsh, a youth political behavior expert and professor at Monash University, told Newsweek that Trump's falling support among Gen Z voters may reflect how young people "respond to issues rather than party allegiances."

Samsung is reportedly delaying the launch of its Taylor, Texas, fab, citing difficulties in securing customers for its output. Sources told Nikkei Asia that even if the South Korean chipmaker brings in the necessary equipment to produce chips at the new plant, the company cannot do anything with them due to the lack of demand.

Aside from that, the original planned process node for the Taylor plant is no longer aligned with current demand, highlighting the rapid pace of semiconductor technology.

The chip maker started construction on the Taylor fab in 2022, with an initial investment of $17 billion. By 2024, the company decided to increase this to $44 billion, with the addition of another advanced fab and expanded R&D operations. This move is supported by a $6.6-billion CHIPS Act subsidy, which was finalized in December last year, despite multiple delays and setbacks.

Two Dutch intelligence agencies said on Friday that Russia is increasing its use of prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine, including the World War I-era poison gas chloropicrin.

The Netherlands' military intelligence and the security service, together with the German intelligence service, found that the use of prohibited chemical weapons by the Russian military had become "standardized and commonplace" in Ukraine.

According to the findings, the Russian military uses chloropicrin and riot control agent CS against sheltering Ukrainian soldiers, who are then forced out into the open and shot.

For the first time in over a century, Parisians and tourists will be able to take a refreshing dip in the River Seine. The long-polluted waterway is finally opening up as a summertime swim spot following a 1.4 billion euro ($1.5 billion) cleanup project that made it suitable for Olympic competitions last year.

Three new swimming sites on the Paris riverbank will open on Saturday — one close to Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, another near the Eiffel Tower and a third in eastern Paris.

Swimming in the Seine has been illegal since 1923, with a few exceptions, due to pollution and risks posed by river navigation. Taking a dip outside bathing areas is still banned for safety reasons.

Immigrant advocates and civil rights lawyers say evidence is mounting that immigration agents carrying out the Trump administration's deportation crackdown in southern California are engaging in widespread racial profiling.

They've raided known hubs for Latino workers almost daily – hardware store parking lots, car washes, and street vendor corners. Videos of many of those operations, filmed by bystanders and posted to social media, have shown agents arresting people who appear to be Latino as they stand on sidewalks or wait at bus stops.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal groups filed a federal class action lawsuit alleging that immigration agents roving the streets are targeting people based on the color of their skin or their apparent occupation. They want a judge to declare the raids unconstitutional.

Fish or bird ownership showed no significant link to slower cognitive decline in study with implications for ageing societies

As global population ages and dementia rates climb, scientists may have found an unexpected ally in the fight against cognitive decline.

Cats and dogs may be exercising more than just your patience: they could be keeping parts of your brain ticking over too. In a potential breakthrough for preventive health, researchers have found that owning a four-pawed friend is linked to slower cognitive decline by potentially preserving specific brain functions as we grow older.

Interestingly, the associations differ depending on the animal: dog owners were found to retain sharper memory, both immediate and delayed, while cat owners showed slower decline in verbal fluency.

Quest to create viable human sex cells in lab progressing rapidly, with huge implications for reproduction

Scientists are just a few years from creating viable human sex cells in the lab, according to an internationally renowned pioneer of the field, who says the advance could open up biology-defying possibilities for reproduction.

Speaking to the Guardian, Prof Katsuhiko Hayashi, a developmental geneticist at the University of Osaka, said rapid progress is being made towards being able to transform adult skin or blood cells into eggs and sperm, a feat of genetic conjury known as in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG).

His own lab is about seven years away from the milestone, he predicts. Other frontrunners include a team at the University of Kyoto and a California-based startup, Conception Biosciences, whose Silicon Valley backers include the OpenAI founder, Sam Altman and whose CEO told the Guardian that growing eggs in the lab “might be the best tool we have to reverse population decline” and could pave the way for human gene editing.

Vicky Pebsworth has spent decades saying vaccines caused her son’s autism – a connection refuted by years of research

One of the new members of a critical federal vaccine advisory board has argued for decades that vaccines caused her son’s autism – a connection that years of large-scale studies and reviews refute.

Registered nurse Vicky Pebsworth is one of eight new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Acip), all hand-picked by the vaccine skeptic and Donald Trump’s health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“She’s probably been anti-vax longer than RFK has,” said Dr David Gorski, a Wayne State University School of Medicine professor, who is considered an expert on the anti-vaccine movement.

As Donald Trump cheered the passage of his self-styled, and officially named, Big Beautiful Budget Bill through Congress this week, long-sown seeds of doubt about the scale and sustainability of US borrowing from the rest of the world sprouted anew.

Trump's tax-cutting budget bill is expected to add at least $3 trillion (£2.2 trillion) to the US's already eye-watering $37tn (£27tn) debt pile. There is no shortage of critics of the plan, not least Trump's former ally Elon Musk, who has called it a "disgusting abomination".

The growing debt pile leaves some to wonder whether there is a limit to how much the rest of the world will lend Uncle Sam.

A senior cleric in Iran has issued a fatwa declaring that anyone who threatens Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is "an enemy of God," state media has reported.

Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi was responding to a question about any threats made by U.S. President Donald Trump and the leaders of Israel, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A fatwa is a ruling on how to interpret Islamic law issued by a clerical authority.

Donald Trump threatened to impose 17% tariffs on food and farm produce exports from Europe during talks in Washington this week, it has emerged.

Such tariffs would hit everything from Belgian chocolate to Kerrygold butter from Ireland and olive oil from Italy, Spain and France, all big sellers in the US.

First reported in the Financial Times, sources confirmed that the EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, was given the warning on Thursday when he met the US treasure secretary, Scott Bessent, trade representative Jamieson Greer and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.