Human Race: Vaccine rollback

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced Sept. 3 that the Florida Department of Health will work with Gov. Ron DeSantis to eliminate childhood vaccine mandates in the state. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said during the announcement. The Sunshine State currently requires students who attend public school to receive half a dozen vaccinations.

Ladapo immigrated to the United States from Nigeria at age 5 and later studied medicine at Harvard, earning a Ph.D. in health policy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he questioned the effectiveness and safety of mask and vaccine mandates, and after being appointed Florida’s top doctor in September 2021, he repeatedly issued pandemic guidance at odds with mainstream medical organizations. Ladapo also teaches medicine at the University of Florida and researches ways to minimize the risk of cardiovascular disease among low-income populations.

President Donald Trump had considered appointing Ladapo to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year, but did not nominate him. Dr. Richard Besser, the CDC’s former acting director, criticized Florida’s idea of sending kids to school unvaccinated as “absolutely frightening.”

Requests to remain

Some 600,000 Venezuelans and thousands of Haitians are fighting in court to stay in the United States after the Department of Homeland Security terminated their temporary legal status. A federal judge in San Francisco on Sept. 5 blocked the department from ending those protections, which allowed Venezuelans and Haitians temporarily to stay and work in the United States since their home countries were deemed unsafe. The Trump administration was expected to appeal that ruling. DHS recently said the designation for Venezuelans was no longer in the United States’ best interest and conditions in Venezuela had improved. But the State Department still warned Americans against traveling to the socialist-run country, the judge noted. —Elizabeth Russell

Innocent freed

A man incarcerated for 27 years for a murder he didn’t commit walked out of Minnesota’s Stillwater Correctional Facility on Sept. 4, exonerated by court order. In 1998, a Hennepin County judge sentenced Bryan Hooper Sr., now 54, to life in prison for the murder of 77-year-old Ann Prazniak in Minneapolis. But this July, Chalaka Young, a key witness at his original trial, confessed in a handwritten letter she had killed Prazniak and falsely testified against Hooper. She cited her newfound Christian faith: “I am not OK any longer with an innocent man sitting in prison. … God has opened my eyes.” The Great North Innocence Project worked with Hennepin County Conviction Integrity Unit to secure Hooper’s release. —Sharon Dierberger

Presidency ended

Northwestern University President Michael H. Schill announced his resignation on Sept. 4, the latest in a batch of elite university leaders stepping down amid the fallout from pro-­Palestinian campus protests in 2023 and 2024. Schill had clashed with the Trump administration over how to address anti-­Semitism on campus, with the federal government freezing at least $790 million in research funding earmarked for the institution. Last year, Republican lawmakers grilled Schill at a congressional hearing and criticized him for negotiating with student protesters. In addition to Schill, the presidents of Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Harvard universities have also departed their posts. Schill became Northwestern’s president three years ago and plans to continue teaching law at the school following a sabbatical. —Grace Snell

Race announced

Mississippi District Attorney Scott Colom, a Democrat, announced Sept. 3 that he will run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. Colom has been the top prosecutor representing a four-county swath of eastern Mississippi since 2016, just a year after activist George Soros contributed more than $1 million to help unseat conservative district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi. Recently, Colom has criticized Hyde-Smith for voting for President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but it’s not his first run-in with the senator. In 2023, Hyde-Smith blocked President Joe Biden’s nomination of Colom for a federal judicial seat. Republicans control all statewide offices and both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature. —Kim Henderson

Millennial sainted

The Roman Catholic Church canonized Carlo Acutis on Sept. 7, nearly two decades after his death. The act makes Acutis the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint. Nicknamed “God’s influencer,” Acutis was raised in Italy and developed a deep love for religion and God at a young age despite his parents not being devout Catholics, according to his family. He was also passionate about video games and computer programming and built a website to document claims of Eucharistic miracles around the world. In October 2006, at age 15, he was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia and died the same month. The Vatican has since attributed two purportedly miraculous healings to Acutis. In Protestant theology, all true Christians are considered saints. —Lauren Canterberry

Food fraud charges

Justice Department officials indicted Muna Wais Fidhin Sept. 4 on 10 total counts of wire fraud, bribery, and money laundering—making her the 75th person charged in what has become the country’s largest coronavirus fraud case. The 44-year-old resident of a Minneapolis suburb allegedly enrolled her company, M5 Café, in a federal child nutrition program in 2020 and eventually sought $1 million in reimbursements for serving 300,000 meals to children. The acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota says she fed few, if any, children, instead paying off her home mortgage, buying a car, and wiring money internationally. Fidhin also allegedly gave kickbacks to an employee of Feeding Our Future, a now-disgraced nonprofit that recruited people to open sites throughout Minnesota and submitted false claims for serving meals to children. Feeding Our Future went from receiving about $3.4 million in federal funds in 2019 to receiving nearly $200 million in 2021 before federal officials began investigating. More than 50 of the people charged in the nearly $250 million scheme have pleaded guilty or been ­convicted. —Todd Vician