Politics

The passage of the Affordable Care Act has marked significant benefits for women, including ensuring increased access to contraceptive services and putting an end to discriminatory insurance practices that charge women higher rates simply based on their gender. And there is yet another important way that Obamacare is helping to advance women’s health under a new program called the Pregnancy Assistance Fund (PAF). PAF helps fund programs across the country that provide services for pregnant teens and young adults, such as increased sexual education and parenting classes. As RH Reality Check reports, Shauna Humphreys runs one organization working with young Native American mothers in Oklahoma that benefits from PAF grants to bolster their critical services: Vastly more robust than the program Humphreys ran prior to receiving a 3-year PAF grant at $900,000 per year , [her organization] is staffed with six caseworkers who visit clients’ homes monthly to deliver parenting and life skills t...

Ron Johnson is best known for creating Apple's retail empire. He's now CEO of retailer JCPenney. This week, he detailed his amazing vision for turning JCPenney into a techno wonderland in Apple's image. And he's turning to Oracle for help. Apple's store design gets almost all the attention. Not as flashy but just as important is the software that does everything from tracking inventory to letting salespeople ring up purchases with iPhones. Like a lot of retailers, JCPenney has old, proprietary code. Johnson is yanking out about 500 applications, nearly all of them custom applications created over the years, and having Oracle be its one-stop shop. This is a big win for Oracle, since its archrival IBM has been entrenched with retailers for decades. (Look at this 1976 article about JCPenney installing IBM cash registers, for example.) Neither company disclosed the size of this deal for Oracle, but it's easy to see that it's big. JCPenney already used quite a b...