“The Adams administration, simply put, must do more to address the historic crisis of youth homelessness our city faces. Instead, the administration has made policies that will create a worse situation for some of the most vulnerable young people.”

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In March, city officials announced a settlement that limited the right to shelter. Many of those who will be most impacted by this agreement are Black and Latinx. Some are LGBTQIA+ young people we see daily at the Free to be Youth Project, including youth who are fleeing discrimination or torture due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Like all homeless youth, those who have recently come to the United States face a gauntlet of limited or non-existent youth-oriented services, bureaucratic barriers, and high-risk encounters with police. But they also face barriers to services in the language they speak, and must navigate a complex immigration system, typically with almost no support and no legal representation.

LGBTQIA+ homeless youth are disproportionately likely to suffer serious violence and experience suicidality, while migrant and refugee homeless youth are at high-risk for exploitation and violence. Now, they will be systematically pushed onto the street by cruel municipal policy, putting them at further risk for life-threatening harm. 

The Adams administration, simply put, must do more to address the historic crisis of youth homelessness our city faces. Instead, the administration has made policies that will create a worse situation for some of the most vulnerable young people. 

Historically, homeless young adults had access to the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter system, which administers beds under various legal settlements that had amounted to a “right to shelter.” DHS is often not the preference of many young people because it can be very dangerous for them, but it is an option many have accepted, which has heavily-regulated minimum standards the city must attend to.

Typically homeless young people have preferred youth-specific shelters run through the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD). However, eligibility for the vast majority of those beds ends on an individual’s 21st birthday. These beds are scarce and often invisible to young people—there are only 813 of them for thousands of youth across the five boroughs, and no centralized way to access them.

In 2022, the mayor created a separate and unequal municipal shelter system specifically for migrants, run by the Health and Hospitals Corporation, and then steadily pushed countless asylum-seekers—including young adults—into it, while simultaneously closing the door into the DHS system. These shelters, called Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs), include the cots and massive tents on Randall’s Island that have made headlines and appalled so many of us.

What became ensconced in the settlement announced last month, which is official municipal policy, was in large part the framework the mayor had created over the preceding two years.

Many homeless youth and young adults who meet the mayor’s arbitrary definition of “new arrival” are now systematically blocked from accessing DHS shelter, often unable to find or get into DYCD beds, and facing extremely tight time-limits in HERRC shelters.

Youth and young adults in the HERRCs under age 23 will now have 60 days before the city can deny them a bed, while everyone else has 30 days. According to recent reports, New York City has already issued 1,300 eviction notices to these vulnerable young people. 

Decisions about whether young people will get any extension will largely be left to the discretionary decision of city bureaucrats, likely without any advocate involved to provide support. Just last week, city bureaucrats denied nearly half of the first 29 migrants who had applied for extensions and been interviewed. 

If a young person does not meet a particular standard for additional time they will likely end up on the street, where they will face an array of life-threatening risks. Hundreds of migrants ran out of time and faced eviction as of last week. 

This is unacceptable, and it is a major reason why the mayor’s cruel push to limit shelter stays for anyone, particularly young people, is so dangerous and appalling. For LGBTQIA+ young people, the risks are particularly acute.

For homeless youth new to New York City, including LGBTQIA+ youth, sleeping on the street can lead to catastrophe. Young people are at increased risk for individualized violence, targeting by police for crimes of poverty, sweeps by municipal agencies, and sex trafficking. 

The Adams administration must expand the number of shelter beds within the homeless youth system, run by DYCD. Youth shelters tailor age-appropriate services specifically to the needs of the homeless young people they help. The city has not added any new youth beds since the mayor took office. 

The Adams administration can help decrease the risks faced by LGBTQIA+ youth by also ensuring that any new beds, in any of the shelter systems, include specific programming and training for serving these young people, as well as adding specific LGBTQIA+ beds within all the homeless shelter systems. 

New York City officials must ensure protections for all homeless youth who have recently migrated, and they need to pay particular attention to the risks faced by LGBTQIA+ young people, who are now some of those who will be pushed onto the streets by cruel municipal policies.

Amy Leipziger is the project director of the Free to Be Youth Project of the Urban Justice Center. 

Faking it until you make it may be a common practice in some careers. But it’s clearly unethical for scientists and medical researchers. All the same, thousands of fake papers are churned out by so-called paper mills and published every year, many of them in peer-reviewed journals.

The issue made headlines recently when Wiley, a respected publishing house, announced it would be dropping 19 of its journals associated with a publisher they had acquired, called Hindawi, in part because they were infested with fake papers. But the problem was known before: The fraud sleuthing blog For Better Science called attention to the “fraud-positive” attitude at Wiley back in 2022. (And I covered the problem of fake research on my Follow the Science podcast back in 2021.)

These aren’t just papers with fudged data — in many cases, all the data and the text have been invented from whole cloth, generated with artificial intelligence, or plagiarized. They’re fake all the way through. The creators of these fake papers have been dubbed paper mills, and they operate by reaching out to scientists and offering to write papers with the scientists’ names at the top — for a price.

Paper mills have proliferated because of a pathology that’s afflicted many areas of science. Scientists are rewarded for the quantity of their research more than its quality. And peer review is non-functional at many journals.

In that disturbed ecosystem, parasitic companies flourish by helping scientists cheat to bolster their resumes, snag competitive academic jobs, and impress funding agencies. Ultimately that causes some precious resources get routed to cheaters and away from more worthy scientists.

Worse still, some of the fake results can seep into other articles, contaminating the state of medical knowledge, said David Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University who has been tracking scientific misconduct and the paper mill problem. For enough money, the paper mills can make a fake paper look more influential by creating other fake papers that cite it, he said. The paper mill studies can even get cited in seemingly legitimate review papers if the review authors — who are also trying for volume — don’t pay sufficient attention to what they’re reviewing.

Some paper mill papers show obvious flaws, including patently plagiarized graphs, images and text. Some are translated from English to another language and back — and that can lead to bizarre wordings, such as “lactose intolerance” becoming “lactose bigotry,” said Sanders. Still others show absurdities like an experiment in which half a sample of ovarian cancer patients was male.

Now with the help of ChatGPT, paper mills can create much more coherent, plausible papers cheaply and effortlessly. Scientific fields beset by fake papers might do better to address the roots of the problem rather than trying to chase them down.

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch, has been tracking problematic research for years. He said that paper mill output has been estimated to make up about 2% of papers. That may not sound big, but somewhere between 2 million and 6 million scientific papers are published every year, so 2% adds up to a lot.

Some journals are more than 50%-generated by paper mills, said Sanders. The way he described it, the paper mills find a susceptible journal and then “they completely parasitize it.”

He said he blames not just shoddy peer reviews, but a perverse system of evaluating scientific merit. “Hiring committees or grant committees don’t have the wherewithal to make an actual evaluation,” Sanders said. So scientists get rewarded based on the number of publications they author and the number of other publications that cite these.

Even many legitimate journal articles don’t advance the state of knowledge, he said, at least in the biomedical arena. Researchers might have gathered a bit of additional data for an ongoing project, which should be deposited into a data bank rather than turned into an unnecessary paper. “I would say the majority of articles that are published now make no contribution beyond the data they present,” he said. “They are not worth reading.”

The whole incentive system is warped, he said, and people are so dependent on grants for their survival that they’ll “do whatever is necessary.”

The fake papers often use a pre-existing template, he said, filling in words and data like a game of Mad Libs. Paper mill creations are more pervasive in fields where papers tend to be formulaic, like nanotechnology, computer science and an area of cancer research called microRNAs.

But some fault also lies with other scientists who cite these fake papers in review articles — which are proliferating at a rate far beyond what’s beneficial to science or society. Even when initial papers get retracted, their impact remains in the form of citations and mentions in review papers.

Eventually, the bad papers can contaminate standards of medical care, said Sanders. Some people are developing cancer diagnostics based on fake papers. He’s seen a paper mill product referenced in a thesis defense. He’s even heard from cancer patients citing a fake paper to inquire about alternative therapies.

Funding agents could help by refusing to fund work that goes into badly reviewed journals laden with fake findings. They could keep a list of approved journals that do rigorous peer review and only fund work aimed at getting published in those. Sanders said more funding should also go into fraud detection in science.

People don’t need millions of scientific papers, most of them doing little to advance our knowledge. We need more scientists to put their energy into quality control or slow, careful research. Science is a competitive field and those who make it shouldn’t be fakers.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

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By DEE-ANN DURBIN (AP Business Writer)

McDonald’s is fighting back against viral tweets and media reports that it says have exaggerated its price increases.

In a post on the company’s website Wednesday, McDonald’s U.S. President Joe Erlinger said reports suggesting the price of the average Big Mac has doubled since 2019 were false. McDonald’s said the average U.S. Big Mac was $4.39 in 2019 and now costs $5.29, a 20.5% increase.

“For a brand that proudly serves nearly 90% of the U.S. population every year, we feel a responsibility to make sure the real facts are available,” Erlinger said.

Erlinger acknowledged that he and many franchisees were frustrated by a post on X last summer about a Big Mac meal in Connecticut that cost $18, calling the price “an exception.” He noted that franchisees own and operate 95% of U.S. McDonald’s locations and set their own pricing but “work hard to minimize the impact of price increases.”

The average U.S. price of a Big Mac meal, which includes a sandwich, fries and a drink, currently is $9.29.

Still, the Chicago burger giant said the cost of some items have seen bigger price jumps than the Big Mac. The average price of medium fries was $2.29 in 2019 and is $3.29 now, a 44% increase.

McDonald’s said the average price of all menu items has risen 40% over the last five years, to account for a 40% average increase in the cost of labor, paper and food. That is higher than overall consumer prices, which have increased 21% since December 2019, according to government figures.

McDonald’s saw a marked slowdown in store traffic in the first three months of this year as inflation-weary customers in the U.S. and other big markets ate out less often. As a result, the company promised more deals.

Next month, McDonald’s is expected to introduce a $5 meal deal across the U.S. that will include a sandwich, a four-piece McNugget, small fries and a small drink.

Erlinger said he hopes customers will find the company’s upcoming deals “meaningful.”

“It’s clear that we — together with our franchisees — must remain laser-focused on value and affordability,” Erlinger said.