Kansas health care experts encourage safe and effective vaccines to protect against seasonal illnesses. (Getty Images)

LAWRENCE — Six viral diseases — including COVID-19, the flu and norovirus — have been found at high concentrations in Lawrence wastewater as Kansas communities face peak flu season.

COVID-19, influenza A and B, RSV, human metapneumovirus, and norovirus have all been detected at high concentrations in Lawrence wastewater within the last three weeks. 

Wastewater data indicates trends of illnesses spreading within a community but does not correlate to exact case numbers, with doctors saying it’s normal to see high concentrations of respiratory illness during flu season. 

“Wastewater data does not measure individual cases, but it provides a reliable picture of how much virus is circulating in a community,” said Veronica White, preparedness and epidemiology coordinator for Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health. “This data captures viral genetic material shed by everyone using the sewer system. One factor that may be contributing to the higher concentrations of respiratory viruses seen in Lawrence’s wastewater is its larger population.”

Lawrence is also seeing an early peak in influenza B compared to the rest of the country. Positive flu tests spiked the last week of 2025, with 32% of total flu tests coming back positive, according to data from the University of Kansas Health System.

Some health care providers such as Watkins Health Center at the University of Kansas are requiring masks for all visitors, patients and staff due to a “record surge in respiratory illnesses,” according to a sign at the front door.

White said early rise in the flu doesn’t indicate a more dangerous flu season, but rather earlier circulation of the virus than usual. 

“Identifying this trend early through wastewater data allows people to take preventive steps, such as getting vaccinated, monitoring symptoms, and staying home when sick,” White said.

Wastewater data also indicated that a newer strain of COVID, known as the XFG or the Stratus variant, has accounted for 82.5% of positive COVID samples, with concentrations increasing by 25% in the last month. The variant has also been increasing nationally, White said.

Dana Hawkinson, medical director for Infection Control and Prevention program at University of Kansas Health System, said there are still large populations of people across the state who have not received a flu shot.

“There have been a large number of people ill and circulators too in our communities. But (the flu) still remains at a high level at this point in time,” Hawkinson said. “There have been extremely low numbers of people not getting the vaccine. We know that we can help prevent this and people’s chances of severe illness and death with it.”

Steve Stites, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said that vaccines are incredibly safe and effective.

Hawkinson said flu symptoms include fever, cough, congestion, body aches and a sore throat rather than stomach bug symptoms, with the definitions often getting mixed up during flu season.

Wastewater data has also indicated that Salina is seeing medium concentrations of the same illnesses, except for influenza A, which is considered to be at a high concentration.

“Based on the data, we expect viral activity to continue in both Lawrence and Salina over the next few weeks,” White said. “As we move through flu season, we anticipate seeing elevated influenza activity reflected in the wastewater, especially as the season approaches its typical peak.”

Medical experts continue to advise washing hands, covering coughs and not going into large public spaces when sick to prevent illnesses from spreading.

“You can still go get the flu vaccine,” Hawkinson said. “It’s still recommended, and you can do it now to protect yourself from infection.”

The Intelligence Trainer is one of NewsBlur’s most powerful features. It lets you train on authors, tags, titles, and text to automatically sort stories into Focus, Unread, or Hidden. But until now, there were limits—you couldn’t train on URLs, regex support was something power users had been requesting for years, and managing hundreds of classifiers meant clicking through feeds one by one.

Today I’m launching three major improvements: URL classifiers, regex mode for power users, and a completely redesigned Manage Training tab.

Train on URLs

You can now train on story permalink URLs, not just titles and content. This opens up new filtering possibilities based on URL patterns.

The URL classifier matches against the full story permalink. Some use cases:

• Filter by URL path: Like or dislike stories that contain /sponsored/ or /opinion/ in their URL
• Domain sections: Match specific subdomains or URL segments that indicate content types
• Landing pages vs articles: Some feeds include both—filter by URL structure to show only what you want

URL classifiers support both exact phrase matching and regex mode. The exact phrase match is available to Premium subscribers, while regex mode requires Premium Pro.

When a URL classifier matches, you’ll see the matched portion highlighted directly in the story header, so you always know why a story was filtered.

Regex matching for power users

For years, the text classifier only supported exact phrase matching. If you wanted to match “iPhone” and “iPad” you needed two separate classifiers. Now you can use regex patterns in the Title, Text, and URL classifiers.

A segmented control lets you switch between “Exact phrase” and “Regex” mode. In regex mode, you get access to the full power of regular expressions:

• Word boundaries (\b): Match \bapple\b to find “apple” but not “pineapple”
• Alternation (|): Match iPhone|iPad|Mac in a single classifier
• Optional characters (?): Match colou?r to find both “color” and “colour”
• Anchors (^ and $): Match patterns at the start or end of text
• Character classes: Match [0-9]+ for any number sequence

A built-in help popover explains regex syntax with practical examples. The trainer validates your regex in real-time and shows helpful error messages if the pattern is invalid.

Regex matching is case-insensitive, so apple matches “Apple”, “APPLE”, and “apple”. This mode is available to Premium Pro subscribers.

Manage all your training in one place

Over the years you may have trained NewsBlur on hundreds of authors, tags, and titles across dozens of feeds. But when you wanted to review what you’d trained, you had to open each feed’s trainer individually and click through them one by one.

The new Manage Training tab provides a consolidated view of every classifier you’ve ever trained, organized by folder. You can see everything at a glance, edit inline, and save changes across multiple feeds in a single click.

Open the Intelligence Trainer from the sidebar menu (or press the t key). You’ll now see two tabs at the top: “Site by Site” and “Manage Training”. The Manage Training tab is available everywhere you train—from the story trainer, feed trainer, or the main Intelligence Trainer dialog.

The Site by Site tab is the existing trainer you know—it walks you through each feed showing authors, tags, and titles you can train. That’s still the best way to train new feeds with lots of suggestions.

The Manage Training tab shows only what you’ve already trained. Every thumbs up and thumbs down you’ve ever given, organized by folder just like your feed list. Each feed shows its trained classifiers as pills you can click to toggle.

Filtering made easy

The real power comes from the filtering options. At the top of the tab you’ll find several ways to narrow down your training:

Folder/Site dropdown — Only folders and sites with training appear in this dropdown. Select a folder to see all training within it, or select a specific site to focus on just that feed’s classifiers. This is especially useful when you have hundreds of trained items and want to review just one area.

Instant search — Type in the search box and results filter as you type. Search matches against classifier names, feed titles, and folder names. Looking for everything you’ve trained about “apple”? Just type it and see all matches instantly.

Likes and Dislikes — Toggle between All, Likes only, or Dislikes only. Want to see everything you’ve marked as disliked? One click shows you all the red thumbs-down items across your entire training history.

Type filters — Filter by classifier type: Title, Author, Tag, Text, URL, or Site. These are multi-select, so you can show just Authors and Tags while hiding everything else. Perfect for when you want to audit just the authors you’ve trained across all your feeds.

Edit inline and save in bulk

Click any classifier pill to toggle it between like, dislike, and neutral. The Save button shows exactly how many changes you’ve made, so you always know what’s pending. Made a mistake? Just click again to undo—the count updates automatically.

When you click Save, all your changes across all feeds are saved in a single request. No more clicking through feeds one at a time to clean up old training.

Subscription tiers

All three features are available now on the web. If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When an explicit video of 19-year-old Paris Hilton having sex was leaked by her ex-boyfriend in 2003, the world turned on her. She was pilloried in the press, called “horny,” and “trashy.” “Sex video gives Paris Hilton publicity money can’t buy,” The Guardian declared. 

“reNowadays, the reaction would probably be different. Hilton’s ex-boyfriend, who was 12 years her senior, shared the video online a decade before the first “revenge porn” law went into effect in the United States. The full-length video was later published, becoming a bestseller. Hilton says she never saw any profits, and said she donated her $400,000 settlement with her ex to charity. 

At a Thursday news conference on Capitol Hill, Hilton spoke about the impact of having the intimate video shared without her consent. 

“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse,” she said. “There were no laws at the time to protect me. There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it. They called me names, they laughed and made me the punchline. They sold my pain for clicks, and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, to even be grateful for the attention. These people didn’t see me as a young woman who had been exploited. They didn’t see the panic that I felt, the humiliation or the shame. No one asked me what I lost.”

The movement to outlaw image-based sexual abuse has entered the mainstream in the two decades since Hilton became the butt of crude jokes everywhere. But the laws haven’t kept up with technological advances, especially as explicit deepfakes can be made with AI image generators for virtually no cost. 

Hilton spoke at the news conference alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Laurel Lee, the co-sponsors of the DEFIANCE Act, a bill that would allow victims of deepfakes to directly sue the people who caused them harm. The bipartisan bill passed the Senate unanimously last week, just as it did last year, and now the lawmakers are rallying for a House floor vote. 

“This bill shows what is possible when we put victims ahead of politics,” Lee said.

The push to pass the DEFIANCE Act is the latest effort to unite women lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and Lee, a Florida Republican, across party lines. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Sarah McBride, progressive Democrats, and Republican Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Claudia Tenney, Nancy Mace and Marianette Miller-Meeks were among those in attendance at Thursday’s news conference.

The House has yet to schedule a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, spoke favorably of the bill to The Independent after last week’s Senate passage. 

Years after the first violation, fake images of Paris Hilton still abound. During the news conference, Hilton said over 100,000 nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of her have been circulated online. 

The DEFIANCE Act allows targets of deepfake abuse to sue the creators, distributors or commissioners of explicit nonconsensual images. There is a booming market for high-quality (read: more life-like) sexually explicit deepfake videos, and the DEFIANCE Act would allow survivors to recover profits from their likeness. 

“Take It Down gave us removal, and DEFIANCE will give us recourse and restitution,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Last year’s Take It Down Act was championed by First Lady Melania Trump and instituted criminal penalties for the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery, real or fake. The second provision of the law, which requires platforms to have a process to remove nonconsensual images 48 hours after reporting, goes into effect in May.

Seventeen-year-old Francesca Mani, a survivor of deepfake abuse from her high school peers, emphasized that DEFIANCE would provide accountability for perpetrators. 

“DEFIANCE adds consequences that hit where it hurts. If ethics aren’t in your heart, self-preservation should be,” she said. “If you don’t care about others, protect yourself. It’s not cool or comfortable in jail and to Congress: pass this now, please, no more waiting while tech outpaces justice.”

The DEFIANCE Act has been revived as the image generation feature of Grok, the AI chatbot integrated in social platform X, has been used to make nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children. Reporting from The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates Grok created and posted over 1.8 million sexualized images of women over nine days in December. X said it took steps to restrict the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes, but users have been consistently able to bypass guardrails. 

None of the speakers at the Thursday news conference mentioned Grok or X specifically in their remarks.

But Ocasio-Cortez said she is among the women elected officials who have been targeted by such nonconsensual explicit deepfakes. Users asked Grok to generate nonconsensual images of the congresswoman in January.

“As a survivor of sexual assault myself, this resurfaces trauma for so many people across the country, and that is what it is intended to do,” she said. “Because the creation of this content parallels the same exact intention of physical assault, which is about power, domination and humiliation. And while these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real. Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this. Teenagers switch schools and children lose their lives. Congress has a moral obligation to stop this harm.”

When asked about potential free speech conflicts, Lee said that there were no First Amendment concerns with the bill and that it does not contradict Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally does not hold online entities responsible for speech posted on their platforms.

This isn’t the first time Hilton has visited Capitol Hill to advocate for a bill. Last year, she shared her experiences as a survivor of the “troubled teen” industry, helping pass the Stop Institutional Abuse Act. 

Hilton closed her official remarks by talking about the world she wants to build for her 2-year-old daughter. 

“I would go to the ends of the earth to protect her, but I can’t protect her from this, not yet, and that’s why I’m here, because this isn’t about just technology,” she said. “It’s about power. It’s about someone using someone’s likeness to humiliate, silence and strip them of their dignity. But victims deserve more than after-the-fact apologies. We deserve justice.”

Do you still want to cling to this pretense, Trump supporters? Do you still want to pretend ICE efforts are targeting “the worst of the worst?” Are you just going to sit there and mumble some incomprehensible stuff about “respecting the laws?”

Go ahead. Do it, you cowards. This is exactly what you voted for, even if it now makes you a bit queasy. Just sit there and soak in it. You are who you support, even if you never thought it would go this far.

“Worst of the worst,” Trump’s parrot repeat on blast. “This one time we caught a guy who did actual crimes,” say spokespeople defending whatever the latest hideous violation of the social contract (if not actual constitutional rights) a federal agent has performed. “Targeted investigation/stop” say the enablers, even when it’s just officers turning white nationalism into Official Government Policy. “Brown people need to be gone” is the end game. Full stop.

Here’s where we’re at in Minnesota, where ICE officers are being shamed into retreat on the regular, punctuated by the occasional revenge killing of mouthy US citizens.

I don’t want you MAGA freaks to tell me you’re OK with this. I want you to tell me why.

Federal agents detained three workers from a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Willmar, Minn., on Jan. 15, hours after four agents ate lunch there.

Does that seem innocuous? Does this seem like some plausible deniability is in play here? Well, disabuse yourself of those notions. This is how it went down.

The arrest happened around 8:30 p.m. near a Lutheran church and Willmar Middle School as agents followed the workers after they closed up for the night. A handful of bystanders blew whistles and shouted at agents as they detained the people. “Would your mama be proud of you right now?” one of the bystanders asked.

Nice. Is this what you want from a presidential administration? Or would you rather complain ICE officers have been treated unfairly if people refuse to feed or house them, knowing full well that doing either of these things will turn their employees into targets.

To be sure, the meal wasn’t a meal. It was half-stakeout, half-intimidation.

An eyewitness who declined to give a name for fear of retribution, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that four ICE agents sat in a booth for a meal at El Tapatio restaurant a little before 3 p.m. Staff at the restaurant were frightened, said the eyewitness, who shared pictures from the restaurant as well as video of the arrest.

I’m not saying ICE officers shouldn’t be able to eat at ethnic restaurants. I am, however, saying that they definitely shouldn’t because everyone is going to think the officers are there for anything but the food. And I do believe any minority business owner should be able to refuse service to ICE officers who wander in under the pretense of buying a meal. The end result is going to be the same whether or not you decide to engage with this pretense. You’re getting raided either way. May as well deny them the meal.

Especially if ICE and the DHS are just going to lie about what happened. Here’s what eyewitnesses, business owners, and local journalists said about this display of ICE shittiness:

El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant closed after WCCO confirmed agents visited the spot for lunch and later returned, detaining its owners and a dishwasher nearby after they had closed early due to the federal law enforcement’s previous appearance.

And here’s the DHS statement, which pretends ICE officers didn’t eat a meal at a restaurant and then return a few hours later to detain employees when they left the building:

“On January 14, ICE officers conducted surveillance of a target, an illegal alien from Mexico. Officers observed that the target’s vehicle was outside of a local business and positively identified him as the target while inside the business. Following the positive identification of the target, officers then conducted a vehicle stop later in the day and apprehended the target and two additional illegal aliens who were in the car, including one who had a final order of removal from an immigration judge.”

Nope. I don’t care what the ICE apologists will say about this. These narratives have places where they overlap but it’s impossible to believe this went down exactly like the government said it did. These officers picked out an ethnic restaurant, were served by an intimidated staff, and then hung around to catch any stragglers leaving the business that previously had graciously served them, despite the threat they posed.

Abolish ICE. It’s no longer just a catchy phrase to shout during protests. It’s an imperative. If we don’t stop it now, it will only become even worse and even more difficult to remove. Treat ICE like the tumor it is. Pretending its MRSA gives it more power than it should ever be allowed to have.