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People wearing a mask during protests in North Carolina could face extra penalties if arrested, under proposed legislation that critics say could make it illegal to wear a mask in public as a way to protect against COVID-19 or for other health reasons. Republicans supporters say the legislation, which passed its first committee Tuesday, was prompted in part by the recent wave of protests on universities nationwide — including at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — against Israel’s war in Gaza. (Seminera, 5/14)

The first $3.3 billion of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mental health and homelessness bond will start going toward new facilities in July, just months after voters narrowly approved the bond in March and also months ahead of initial plans. “We will quickly approve those plans,” Newsom announced during a press conference Tuesday at a newly constructed psychiatric facility in San Mateo County, which he touted as the kind of project the money will support. (Bluth, 5/14)

Prominent addiction medicine doctors and harm reduction advocates Tuesday blasted San Francisco’s response to the drug overdose crisis, which they say has claimed twice as many lives as the COVID-19 pandemic, and urged the city to open a supervised drug consumption site like the controversial Tenderloin Center that closed in late 2022. Since January 2020, 3,026 people have died from accidental drug overdoses in San Francisco — more than double the 1,319 people who have died from COVID, according to city data. (Ho, 5/14)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Tribal Nations Invest Opioid Settlement Funds In Traditional Healing To Treat Addiction

Outside the Mi’kmaq Nation’s health department sits a dome-shaped tent, built by hand from saplings and covered in black canvas. It’s one of several sweat lodges on the tribe’s land, but this one is dedicated to helping people recover from addiction. Up to 10 people enter the lodge at once. Fire-heated stones — called grandmothers and grandfathers, for the spirits they represent — are brought inside. Water is splashed on the stones, and the lodge fills with steam. It feels like a sauna, but hotter. (Pattani and Orozco Rodriguez, 5/15)

A baby girl who weighed just over one pound when she was born prematurely in November has beaten the odds and gone home with her parents after spending her first six months at a suburban Chicago hospital. Nyla Brooke Haywood was treated to a send-off party Monday at Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox, Illinois, attended by family, friends and hospital staffers before the 6-month-old was taken home by her first-time parents, NaKeya and Cory Haywood of Joliet. (5/14)