SUMMARY: A woman named Rachael Golden was arrested in Charleston after a stabbing incident on Tuesday in the 700 block of Washington Street. Police say the stabbing stemmed from a long-standing property dispute that escalated into an argument before the violent act. Golden has been charged with malicious wounding after stabbing another woman. She was taken into custody following the incident, which involved a dispute that police described as ongoing. The investigation remains active as authorities continue to gather details surrounding the event.

Woman arrested in stabbing

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by Lori Kersey, West Virginia Watch
July 23, 2025

A Republican bill that temporarily restricts Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood will affect about one third of patients at its only West Virginia clinic, according to officials with the organization. 

The clinic — located in Vienna in Wood County — doesn’t offer abortion and hasn’t since long before West Virginia lawmakers mostly outlawed the procedure in 2022. 

Patients — a third of whom are on Medicaid — come to the clinic for birth control, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infections testing and treatment, among other health services, said Anne Logan Bass, clinical director of family planning for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. 

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month prohibits Medicaid from being used at Planned Parenthood, even for preventive health care, for one year. The organization is the country’s top abortion provider, performing more than 400,000 in 2024, according to its annual report.

“We are devastated for our patients,” Bass said of the Medicaid prohibition. “It’s a really harmful law that’s preventing our patients from going to where they want to receive care. We are committed to maintaining access for care for as long as we can.”

The law targets abortion providers who made more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023. 

A spokeswoman for the West Virginia Department of Human Services, which oversees Medicaid, said the department is aware the law will affect the Vienna Planned Parenthood clinic and is seeking further clarification from the federal Centers for Medicare and Services about other clinics in the state that may be affected. The state expects further guidance once the legal process is over, Angelica Hightower, communications specialist for DHS, wrote in an email to West Virginia Watch.

The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, located in Charleston, performed abortions until the state passed an abortion ban and is associated with the Women’s Health Center of Maryland, which still does. A spokeswoman for the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia said the law will not prohibit it from accepting Medicaid patients. 

The Medicaid prohibitions for Planned Parenthood took effect immediately after Trump signed the legislation into law. The national organization filed a lawsuit challenging the law. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston granted a temporary restraining order that kept the law from being effective for 14 days. 

After a hearing Friday, the judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the government for now from cutting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood agencies that either don’t provide abortion care or that don’t have at least $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements per year, according to reporting by the Associated Press. 

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, which manages the West Virginia clinic, does not fall into the category of those that will keep receiving Medicaid funding, said Julia Walker, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. 

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic manages a total of 14 clinics in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Collectively, 13% of the patients of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic are Medicaid recipients, she said.

Planned Parenthood may close up to 200 clinics across the country because of the Medicaid prohibition. Bass said there are no current plans to close any of the clinics in the South Atlantic region.

West Virginia’s entire congressional delegation, all Republicans, voted for the budget reconciliation bill. In a statement after the vote, Rep. Riley Moore praised the legislation, saying it “fully defunds Planned Parenthood.” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito posted about her support of defunding Planned Parenthood on the social media platform X, reposting Wall Street Journal opinion writer Matthew Hennessy who said “The defunding of abortion giant Planned Parenthood is the most beautiful thing in the GOP megabill.”

“Couldn’t have said it better, @MattHennessey,” she wrote.

Bass said she worries about Medicaid patients at the Vienna clinic and elsewhere. 

She recalled a patient she met while working in the Vienna clinic about six months ago. The patient, who is on Medicaid, told Bass she doesn’t see any other health care providers besides the ones at Planned Parenthood. 

“That patient’s been coming here forever, since she was like 18 and coming to Planned Parenthood as her quote, ‘only doctor,’ Bass said. “I just really worry about what’s going to happen to these patients, where they’re going to receive care.”

She said the law is an example of Americans losing their freedoms. 

“You should have the freedom to decide what’s best for you, not the government,” Bass said. “… It’s true that Americans are losing their freedoms, and this law is just one example.”

While the provision of the law is in effect, Planned Parenthood is still reviewing the judge’s order, Walker said.

“While we do that, we are still seeing patients like normal — nothing has changed for our patients in West Virginia,” she said. 

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

The post Law blocks Planned Parenthood from Medicaid dollars, one third of WV patients affected appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article presents facts about a Republican-backed Medicaid restriction affecting Planned Parenthood in West Virginia, highlighting the negative impact on patients who rely on non-abortion health services. The inclusion of direct quotes from Planned Parenthood officials expressing concern and framing the law as harmful, along with the coverage of legal challenges, gives the piece a critical tone toward the Republican bill. While it reports statements from Republican lawmakers supporting the legislation, the overall framing and emphasis on patient hardship suggest a perspective sympathetic to Planned Parenthood and critical of the policy, consistent with a center-left bias.

by Paige Gross, West Virginia Watch
July 24, 2025

For as much promise as artificial intelligence shows in making life better, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is worried.

The tech leader who has done so much to develop AI and make it accessible to the public says the technology could have life-altering effects on nearly everything, particularly if deployed by the wrong hands.

There’s a possible world in which foreign adversaries could use AI to design a bio weapon to take down the power grid, or break into financial institutions and steal wealth from Americans, he said. It’s hard to imagine without superhuman intelligence, but it becomes “very possible,” with it, he said.

“Because we don’t have that, we can’t defend against it,” Altman said at a Federal Reserve conference this week in Washington, D.C. “We continue to like, flash the warning lights on this. I think the world is not taking us seriously. I don’t know what else we can do there, but it’s like, this is a very big thing coming.”

Altman joined the conference Tuesday to speak about AI’s role in the financial sector, but also spoke about how it is changing the workforce and innovation. The growth of AI in the last five years has surprised even him, Altman said.

He acknowledged real fear that the technology has potential to grow beyond the capabilities that humans prompt it for, but said the time and productivity savings have been undeniable. 

OpenAI’s most well-known product, ChatGPT, was released to the public in November 2022, and its current model, GPT-4o, has evolved. Last week, the company had a model that achieved “gold-level performance,” akin to operating as well as humans that are true experts in their field, Altman said.

Many have likened the introduction of AI to the invention of the internet, changing so much of our day-to-day lives and workplaces. But Altman instead compared it to the transistor, a foundational piece of hardware invented in the 1940s that allowed electricity to flow through devices.

“It changed what we were able to build. It became part of, kind of, everything pretty quickly,” Altman said. “And in the same way, I don’t think you’ll be talking about AI companies for very long, you will just expect products and services to use this technology.”

When prompted by the Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman to predict how AI will continue to evolve the workforce, Altman said he couldn’t make specific predictions.

“There are cases where entire classes of jobs will go away,” Altman said. “There are entirely new classes of jobs that will come and largely, I think this will look somewhat like most of history, and that the tools people have to use their jobs will let them do more, achieve things in new ways.” 

One of the unexpected upsides to the rollout of GPT has been how much it is used by small businesses, Altman said. He shared a story of an Uber driver who told him he was using ChatGPT for legal consultations, customer support, marketing decisions and more.

“It was not like he was taking jobs from other people. His business just would have failed,” Altman said. “He couldn’t pay for the lawyers. He couldn’t pay for the customer support people.”

Altman said he was surprised that the financial industry was one of the first to begin integrating GPT models into their work because it is highly regulated, but some of their earliest enterprise partners have been financial institutions like Morgan Stanley. The company is now increasingly working with the government, which has its own standards and procurement process for AI, to roll out OpenAI services to its employees.

Altman acknowledged the risks AI poses in these regulated institutions, and with the models themselves. Financial services are facing a fraud problem, and AI is only making it worse — it’s easier than ever to fake voice or likeness authentication, Altman said.

AI decisionmaking in financial and other industries presents data privacy concerns and potential for discrimination. Altman said GPT’s model is “steerable,” in that you can tell it to not consider factors like race or sex in making a decision, and that much of the bias in AI comes from the humans themselves.

“I think AIs are dispassionate and unemotional,” Altman said. “And I think it’ll be possible for AI — correctly built — to be a significant de-biasing force in many industries, and I think that’s not what many people thought, including myself, with the way we used to do AI.”

As much as Altman touted GPT and other AI models’ ability to increase productivity and save humans time, he also spoke about his concerns.

He said that though it’s been greatly improved in more recent models, AI hallucinations, or models that produce inaccurate or made-up outputs, are possible. He also spoke of a newer concept called prompt injections, the idea that a model that has learned personal information can be tricked into telling a user something they shouldn’t know.

In addition to the threat of foreign adversaries using AI for harm, Altman said he has two other major concerns for the evolution of AI. It feels very unlikely, he said, but “loss of control,” or the idea that AI overpowers humans, is possible.

What concerns him the most is the idea that models could get so integrated into society and get so smart that humans become reliant on them without realizing.

“And even without a drop of malevolence from anyone, society can just veer in a sort of strange direction,” he said.

There are mild cases of this happening, Altman said, like young people overrelying on ChatGPT make emotional, life-altering decisions for them.

“We’re studying that. We’re trying to understand what to do about it,” Altman said. “Even if ChatGPT gives great advice, even if chatGPT gives way better advice than any human therapist, something about kind of collectively deciding we’re going to live our lives the way that the AI tells us feels bad and dangerous.” 

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

The post OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI has life-altering potential, both for good and ill appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This article presents a balanced and factual account of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s views on artificial intelligence, covering both its potential benefits and risks without ideological framing. The language is neutral, focusing on technological, economic, and societal implications without advocating a particular political stance. Altman’s concerns about AI risks and its transformative potential are reported straightforwardly, reflecting a centrist approach that highlights the complexity of AI’s impact across sectors. The piece neither endorses nor criticizes any political ideology, maintaining objective reporting on a topic with broad societal relevance.