Alarmed at the prospect of losing their “Silver Sneakers” senior gym memberships at YMCAs and Life Time Fitness locations across the Twin Cities, more than 50 protestors took their concerns to the corporate headquarters of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota in Eagan to demand full reinstatement of their Medicare Advantage fitness benefits.

They were met with a receptive audience, said Terre Thomas, who co-organized the chilly Wednesday afternoon protest with Steve Brandt, a former Star Tribune reporter and elected member of the Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation. The two were invited by Blue Cross to relocate the 30-minute picket — which featured a brief but coordinated step-tap dance number — from a grassy easement. The protest was held instead in the more expansive Blue Cross parking lot off Yankee Road.

Thomas and Brandt had met the day before with Dr. Mark Steffen, chief medical officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, alongside the insurer’s marketing, sales and Medicare Advantage staff. Thomas said the group walked them through a timeline of events that helped shape their understanding of the situation.

“There were a lot of people at the rally that said this is all about corporate greed,” Thomas said. “I don’t think that’s true. It’s math. … What they said is we want to listen to you and let us explain the numbers to you.”

Gym benefit

Through a two-year contract with third-party benefits administrator Tivity, which is based in Tennessee, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota this year had offered “Silver Sneakers” gym memberships to all 425,000 of its Medicare Advantage members. Of that number, up to 26,000 members had signed up for free gym memberships at Lifetime Fitness and YMCA of the North locations throughout the Twin Cities through what Tivity defined as its “premier level” of service.

Only about 11,000 seniors were active participants at those sites, Thomas said she was told, but the contract was priced “per head,” as the benefit had to be made available under the law to all members.

By June, Thomas said, Blue Cross Blue Shield had largely determined what benefits it would offer next year, only to later learn that UCare, the state’s nonprofit health plan, would terminate all of its Medicare Advantage contracts by 2026. While many UCare members will shift to Medica, some 100,000 to 150,000 UCare members have found their way to Blue Cross Blue Shield, unexpectedly increasing the Eagan-based insurer’s total number of Medicare Advantage members well above 500,000.

The cost of covering Tivity’s premier level of service had already increased considerably, before new members were added, Blue Cross Blue Shield officials told Thomas.

Potential work-arounds

Thomas said she presented with Blue Cross Blue Shield with some potential work-arounds aimed at subsidizing or otherwise negotiating affordable memberships at the YMCA and Life Time Fitness. Officials with the insurance provider said the earliest any of those could be implemented would be 2027.

The YMCA has offered “Silver Sneakers” members impacted by the UCare and Blue Cross Blue Shield situation discounted rates of $49 per person, down from $77, and $79 per couple, down from $110.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicare Advantage members may still access more than 200 alternate gym sites throughout the Twin Cities, as well as Life Time and YMCA sites outside the metro, though many boutique gyms and nursing home-based facilities offer limited hours, do not have swimming pools and host just a handful of senior classes per week.

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“The evidence of the health benefits of exercise cannot be overstated,” said Dr. A. Mark Fendrick, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan whose research specializes in the healthcare insurance marketplace.

“Every study of cognitive health to to cardiovascular health to cancer survivorship to mental health shows regular exercise improves outcomes,” Fendrick said. “More is always better.”

By SAFIYAH RIDDLE

An instructor at the University of Oklahoma has been placed on leave after a student complained that she received a failing grade on a paper that cited the Bible to assert that the “belief in multiple genders” was “demonic.”

Samantha Fulnecky, 20, filed a complaint with the administration, the latest flashpoint in the ongoing debate over academic freedom on college campuses amid President Donald Trump’s push to end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and restrict how campuses discuss issues of race, gender and sexuality.

“OU remains firmly committed to fairness, respect and protecting every student’s right to express sincerely held religious beliefs,” the university wrote in a statement on X. The school added that the failing grade would not affect Fulnecky’s academic standing while the administration investigated the matter.

The assignment was for a psychology class about lifespan development. Students were asked to write a 650-word response to an academic study that examined whether conformity with gender norms was associated with popularity among middle school students.

Fulnecky wrote that she was frustrated by the premise of the article because she doesn’t believe that there are more than two genders based on her understanding of the Bible, according to a copy of her essay provided to The Oklahoman.

“Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,” she wrote.

She argued that promoting the belief in multiple genders would lead society to move “farther from God’s original plan for humans.”

The essays were graded out of 25 points, broken down by whether the student demonstrated an understanding of the article and addressed a specific aspect of the argument put forth. Fulnecky received zero points for her work.

“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”

The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.

A contact for the instructor, whose name has not been confirmed by the university, was not immediately available.

Fulnecky’s complaint to the administration soon went viral after the school’s chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative group founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in September, posted about Fulnecky’s experience on the social media site X.

“Professors like this are the very reason conservatives can’t voice their beliefs in the classroom,” the group posted.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt appeared to affirm that perspective, posting on X that the situation was “deeply concerning.”

“I’m calling on the OU regents to review the results of the investigation & ensure other students aren’t unfairly penalized for their beliefs,” he wrote.

The firestorm comes after a professor at Texas A&M was fired earlier this year after a video where a student confronted the instructor over her teaching of issues related to gender identity in a class on children’s literature went viral. A university committee in late November ruled that the firing was without good cause, and flouted formal procedure.

Since Trump took office, student affinity groups have shuttered campus offices and professors have altered curriculums. The president has also threatened federal funding for schools who don’t comply with standards for teaching, admissions and gender in sports supported by the administration. Both supporters and opponents of the Trump administration’s campaign say that freedom of speech is at stake.

By LISA MASCARO

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon knew there were survivors after a September attack on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea and the U.S. military still carried out a follow-up strike, according to two people familiar with the matter.

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The rationale for the second strike was that it was needed to sink the vessel, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. The Trump administration says all 11 people aboard were killed.

What remains unclear was who ordered the strikes and whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was involved, one of the people said. That will be part of a classified congressional briefing Thursday with the commander that the Trump administration says ordered the second strike, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley.

Hegseth has defended the second strike as emerging in the “fog of war,” saying he didn’t see any survivors but also “didn’t stick around” for the rest of the mission.

Hegseth is under growing scrutiny over the military strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Legal experts and some lawmakers say a strike that killed survivors would have violated the laws of armed conflict.

A Manhattan judge has ordered OpenAI to provide the Pioneer Press and other news outlets with millions of anonymous chats between ChatGPT and its users in a major ongoing copyright infringement case.

In a nine-page order made public Wednesday, Manhattan Magistrate Judge Ona Wang denied OpenAI’s request to reconsider her November ruling requiring the tech giant to hand over 20 million ChatGPT output logs to the media outlets.

The newspapers want to analyze a sample of ChatGPT’s consumer logs to test its language-learning model to see whether and how it’s propagating journalists’ work.

The ruling comes in a major consolidated class-action lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI initiated in 2023, in which The New York Times and news outlets affiliated with Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group allege the artificial intelligence company is stealing and distorting their copyrighted works. The Authors Guild and a litany of best-selling writers are also parties in the complex litigation.

“OpenAI’s leadership was hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists, and we look forward to holding them accountable for their ongoing misappropriation of our work. They should pay for the copyright-protected work they use to build and maintain their apps and products, and they know it,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, in a statement.

Spokespeople and lawyers for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but a spokesman for Open AI pointed Reuters to a company blog post that said the request to turn over the chats “disregards long-standing privacy protections” and “breaks with common-sense security practices.”

But in the decision, Wang reaffirmed that users’ privacy was not in jeopardy, noting that OpenAI had almost completed an internal process to anonymize the chats. Also mitigating privacy risks raised by OpenAI are the “multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery that is exchanging hands,” the judge wrote.

She found the A.I. conversations were “clearly relevant” to the news outlets’ claims that they contain partial or complete reproductions of their copyrighted works and to OpenAI’s defense that they contain other user activity.

“News Plaintiffs are entitled to discovery on both,” the judge wrote.

“Production of the 20 Million ChatGPT Logs is also proportional to the needs of the case. The total universe of retained consumer output logs is in the tens of billions. The 20 million sample here represents less than 0.05% of the total logs that OpenAI has retained in the ordinary course of business.”

Wang wrote that once the tech behemoth has completed the deidentification process, it will have 7 days to hand over the data. OpenAI has also appealed Wang’s November order to Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein, the district judge overseeing the case.

The sizable 20 million chats represent a fraction of the billions of output logs ChatGPT has retained, Wang noted in her Wednesday order.

Steven Lieberman, an attorney for MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, in a statement pointed to Wang’s finding that OpenAI had withheld “critically important evidence” when it was first requested and rejected the tech giant’s arguments to the contrary.

“The Court also raised the issue of whether OpenAI’s efforts to delay production of the ChatGPT logs was motivated by an improper purpose, saying of the two possible explanations for OpenAI’s behavior: [n]either bode well for OpenAI.”