President Donald Trump on Wednesday tapped White House health policy adviser Dr. Heidi Overton to lead the Food and Drug Administration, a move that drew fierce opposition from Democratic lawmakers, reproductive rights advocates, and public health experts, who pointed to her opposition to abortion rights and support for controversial changes to federal vaccine policy as cause for alarm.

Trump took to his Truth Social network to announce his pick of Overton, a physician and deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, to replace former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who resigned in May following months of turmoil at the agency. The president described Overton as a "ROCKSTAR" in his administration who will "deliver on the MOST TRANSFORMATIVE Health Agenda in History."

"Heidi is 'ALWAYS RIGHT,' Secretary Kennedy recently said in the Oval Office!" Trump continued, referring to Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "We need her leadership at the FDA now to ensure that the US remains the WORLD LEADER for Scientific Discovery and CURES."

The president also said Overton would work with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz to advance his agenda of faster drug approvals, increased innovation, clinical trial reforms, and lower prescription drug prices.

However, skeptics argue that Overton’s policy record raises serious questions about whether she would maintain the FDA’s scientific and regulatory independence in an administration in which critics say loyalty to Trump is of paramount importance.

Reproductive Freedom for All—formerly the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and NARAL Pro-Choice America—noted that "Overton has an extensive anti-abortion record."

The group continued:

She celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a “huge victory,” and has advocated for the politicization of government agencies to help advance a nationwide anti-abortion agenda. She previously worked at America First Policy Institute, an extreme conservative think tank made up of former Trump administration officials, where she authored a brief pushing disinformation about the safety of medication abortion and calling for additional, medically unnecessary restrictions on access to mifepristone.

“Donald Trump is trying to put an anti-abortion extremist in charge of any agency that could seriously undermine reproductive healthcare—including the agency that could roll back access to mifepristone nationwide," Reproductive Freedom for All president and CEO Mini Timmaraju said. "Her nomination is another alarming step in Trump’s plan to weaponize every part of the federal government to restrict abortion nationwide.”

Overton's shifting stance on vaccines also raised eyebrows.

Endpoint News senior senior reporter Max Bayer highlighted how, while working at AFPI, Overton "and others praised Operation Warp Speed, the massive government initiative to expedite development and manufacturing of the Covid-19 vaccines" during Trump's first administration.

But less than a year later, Bayer said, Overton "advocated against Covid-19 school vaccine mandates, writing in an editorial the data supported more parental choice in the decision."

"Overton stood by Trump earlier in August as he announced a sweeping and contentious new executive order amending the childhood vaccine schedule and advising that the [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine be broken up into individual components," he added. "Makers of the vaccine pushed back on the directive, but now with Overton in line to lead the FDA, there could be enhanced pressure for drugmakers to follow through on the request."

Democratic US lawmakers also voiced opposition to Overton's nomination.

"Heidi Overton is a far-right, anti-abortion extremist who has no business leading the FDA," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on social media. "The American people deserve someone who will put science and facts FIRST, not another Trump sycophant who will make it their mission to attack medication abortion. I will vote NO."

At least one Republican lawmaker—who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee—also questioned Trump's pick.

"While I respect Dr. Overton’s experience as a physician, I have strong concerns about her nomination to be FDA commissioner," Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a gastroenterologist, said on X. "Her lack of managerial experience does not prepare her well for leading a large organization that is already dealing with staffing and morale issues."

"Additionally, Dr. Overton’s active role in last week’s nonsensical vaccine executive order calls into question her commitment to standing up for sound science and protecting children’s health. That alone is almost disqualifying," added Casisdy, who earlier this year lost a primary race to a Trump-backed challenger.

Overton's nomination comes amid turmoil at an agency that has seen thousands of employees fired by Kennedy since last year amid Trump administration efforts to shrink the government in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led framework for a far-right federal overhaul.

Chris Meekins, a former Trump health official who is now an analyst at the investment bank Raymond James, told clients that Overton would be "like Makary, but probably worse."

“Being seemingly inexperienced and unqualified is fine if you have self-awareness and humility and a strong team around you,” Meekins wrote. “Based off of our DC channel checks, she does not seem to have either."

Dozens of Democrats in the US House of Representatives this week announced a congressional inquiry into the use of a widely decried memo from President Donald Trump to persecute "political dissent" and target "left-leaning political groups."

Democratic Reps. Jim McGovern (Mass.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), and Delia Ramirez (Ill.) revealed Tuesday that they, along with over 20 others, wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this month to demand answers about the recent "Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" and directives under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7).

"Specifically, we are alarmed by the Department of State's new ideologically driven visa restriction policy and the Department of Treasury's pledged financial enforcement mechanisms directed against civil society," they wrote. "These policies dramatically escalate the administration's deliberate and targeted attempts to silence any person, organization, or institution critical of its policies and abuses of power on a global scale."

"We are deeply troubled by public commitments to deploy the full force of the State and Treasury departments against loosely defined 'far-left networks' and their alleged 'enablers' and urge you to immediately reverse course," the lawmakers continued. "Rather than relying on law enforcement data—which consistently identifies right-wing violent extremists and white supremacist organizations as the predominant domestic terrorism threat—this administration has instead taken actions that manufacture an ideological enemy."

The visa policy "bars foreign nationals from entry who 'finance, recruit, incite, or otherwise enable terrorist, violent, and criminal far-left terrorist networks' and defines 'far-left terrorist networks' as those with explicit aims to 'undermine the political foundations of free and self-governing societies,'" the letter details. "This rhetoric and policy embody the core characteristics of fascist statecraft—using the security apparatus of the state to repress and criminalize political opponents and dissenters rather than specific violent acts."

The letter notes the impacts of the administration's policies beyond the United States, warning that "seeking to export an ideological mandate to more than 65 countries creates a dangerous precedent that authoritarian governments will eagerly exploit to delegitimize and criminalize political dissent and justify their own crackdowns on peaceful opposition."

"Foreign nationals fleeing political persecution abroad—including persecution by governments that label peaceful dissidents 'leftist terrorists' to discredit them—may find themselves barred from the United States under the very same vague and subjective standard," the lawmakers wrote. "Expanding transnational intelligence-sharing under this ill-defined and hyper-politicized definition of violent extremism opens the door to transnational repression—including cross-border monitoring and harassment—of international activists, researchers, and political dissidents, as well as potentially any individual within their networks."

"We also risk fracturing critical alliances with governments whose own laws strictly protect political speech, civil liberties, and human rights—protections that these very policies are undermining here at home," the Democrats stressed.

The letter also calls out White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's description of leftists as "the enemies of civilization" and a "cancer" that can "destroy a society," as well as Bessent's comparison of leftists to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda—when he said that "the unified front between international Marxism and the radical Islamic movement need not share the same ultimate vision to share the same immediate enemy of free and self-governing societies."

Rubio has similarly called leftists "the enemies of civilization" and recently faced criticism for a "McCarthyite" State Department report claiming that the Cuban government has, for decades, "infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history." The document is seen as a signal that Trump may deliver on his threat to try to take over the island nation by force.

The Trump administration on Wednesday unveiled a plan to ease upward pressure on the cost of US debt by doubling its bond buybacks through November.

In announcing that it will buy back "at least" $4 billion worth of bonds over a two-month period, the US Department of Treasury said it was seeking "to provide greater liquidity support in longer-dated nominal sectors where there is consistent strong sponsorship from market participants."

While the announcement did result in interest rates for US treasuries dropping, economists and other political observers are warning that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's scheme to stop spiking yields will prove ineffective over the long term.

In a Wednesday interview with NOTUS, Joseph Brusuelas, principal and chief economist for RSM US LLP, said that Bessent was making decisions based solely on the political fortunes of the Republican Party.

"Bessent is a political actor," Brusuelas said. "His interest is purely short-term and is organized around the upcoming election and not a return to price stability. This is what fiscal dominance looks like as the fiscal authority leans on the central bank to subordinate its goal of price stability to the government’s borrowing and political needs."

The economist's analysis was echoed by Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim, who argued in a social media post that President Donald Trump's administration was scrambling to save its endangered GOP congressional majority.

"Trump is going to pump billions of dollars into the bond market to push down interest rates through the election, then let everything fall apart again," Grim wrote. "Not sure I’ve seen a more nakedly electoral use of this amount of money before, for such a targeted amount of time."

Krishna Guha, head of global policy and central bank strategy at Evercore ISI, argued in a Wednesday research note flagged by CNBC that the bond buyback scheme "changes almost nothing in terms of the fundamentals in particular the unchanged need to finance the tidal wave of hyperscaler debt in addition to very large government deficits."

Adam Josephson, founder of Sakonnet Research, also expressed skepticism of the buyback plan's effectiveness in a Wednesday interview with Politico.

“They’re trying everything possible to limit upward pressure on long-term yields,” Josephson said. “Nothing has worked. And why would this work? It’s too small to matter.”

Experts say that bond yields have been spiking to highs not seen since the start of the Great Recession due to investor anxiety over a number of factors, including inflation, the size of the US government's debt, and Trump's illegal war with Iran.

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, first authorized through bipartisan legislation in 2009, has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce the number of American teenagers who have experienced unwanted pregnancies in the past decade and a half, dropping by more than 65% over 16 years, according to one congressional report.

Despite the best efforts of President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a federal judge's ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration's limits on the program's federal grants paused.

Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which officials joined King County in Washingtin state, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in challenging HHS's changes to the program's grant policy. The plaintiffs were represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.

The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and capricious.”

The new policy, announced in June, canceled 53 of 66 active grants that had gone to public universities, health departments, and nonprofits for programming related to sex education, including information that was given to teens on contraception and communication with sexual partners.

In Trump's 2027 budget, the grants are described as promoting "radical leftist ideology," and officials claim there is no evidence that teen pregnancy prevention programs that go beyond educating young people about abstinence have "contributed to the historic decline in teen pregnancy, which is now at an all-time low."

Under new guidance issued in June, Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) program grantees are required to focus lessons on abstinence, deemphasize contraception, and teach teens about fertility and "body literacy."

“HHS is perfectly entitled to formulate its own views about how to stem teen pregnancy—or even whether it is worth preventing at all—and to pursue policy initiatives consistent with its viewpoint. But it is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained. The preliminary record suggests that HHS has done just that,” wrote Cooper in the ruling.

"Through the TPP, Congress sought to fund a range of evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategies, not just abstinence. According to unrebutted record evidence, programs that teach abstinence to the exclusion of all other approaches are ineffective in delaying sexual initiation and reducing adolescent pregnancy, at least as a general matter," Cooper continued.

The judge took aim at the administration's promotion of "body literacy," which he called “a nebulous concept that appears to elevate fertility and marital procreation over well-tested forms of contraception and pregnancy prevention.”

Cooper also suggested that HHS had not bothered to find genuine evidence of its claims about "body literacy," instead "remarkably" referencing "public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited—a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”

The judge stopped short of reinstating the dozens of grants, amounting to about $67 million, that have been terminated, saying it was unclear whether he had the authority to do so.

The plaintiffs and other advocates of comprehensive sex education have called for a permanent injunction; Cooper called on both parties in the case to propose a schedule for next steps by September 1.

Callie Simon, executive director of SIECUS, said the group was "encouraged that the court has halted implementation of the new harmful policy" but emphasized that "the impacts of terminating existing grants remain."

“Today’s decision sends a clear message that the Trump-Vance administration cannot replace the proven, bipartisan Teen Pregnancy Prevention program with an ideologically driven alternative that harms young people,” said Simon. "Communities across the country are still without the evidence-based programs they relied on, and we will continue fighting to ensure young people have access to the sex education they deserve.”

Sandra J. Valenciano, director and health officer for public health in Seattle and King counties, said local communities were facing a measurable loss due to HHS' stripping of TPP grants

“This federal action threatened our ability to complete a study on a new science-based, community-informed sex education curriculum specifically for young men and boys,” said Valenciano. “This ruling gives us hope that we may still be able to get to the finish line with this study and ultimately empower more young people to build healthy families if, when, and how they choose.”

Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, said the ruling "reaffirms the value of trusted, evidence-based education programs that help youth make informed choices and plan for their futures."

"Attacks on the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program not only put young people at risk, they also risk increasing costs for taxpayers," said Richardson. "No one benefits from these politically motivated attacks. It’s time for them to end.”

As young families are increasingly priced out of the housing market, a group of economic researchers is pushing to revive an idea from the past to bring the distant dream of homeownership back within reach: mass-produced homes.

A report published Wednesday by the Groundwork Collaborative proposes a federal program to subsidize the creation of 500,000 prefabricated houses over the next eight years—starter homes that they estimate would be drastically more affordable than the ones currently on the market.

The report was written by three economic policy analysts who served under former President Joe Biden: Noah Ball-Burack and Emily DiVito, who worked on policy for the Treasury Department, and Alex Jacquez, who was Biden's special assistant for economic development and industrial strategy at the White House National Economic Council.

The proposal draws from history: From 1908-40, around 75,000 Americans ordered mass-produced homebuilding kits from Sears, Roebuck & Co. through catalogs, which provided pre-cut lumber, doors, windows, and other materials to construct a home that ended up being considerably cheaper to build than those constructed conventionally.

These "Sears homes" were not only fully functional but also durable: More than 80 years after the program was discontinued, thousands of them are still standing today.

Groundwork's researchers argued that marshaling the government's resources, a modern Sears home program could go great lengths toward combating the housing affordability crisis.

"For too many families, homeownership has gone from a milestone to a mirage. Decades of under-building have left us with an affordable housing shortage that’s pricing people out of their communities," DiVito said. "Policymakers must pursue creative, tangible, and lasting solutions that bring homeownership back into reach. The Modern Sears Home program does just that.”

The group called for the Congress to appropriate between $44 billion and $75 billion over eight years---less than the US spends on the military in a single month---to guarantee large orders of factory-built homes, acquire and prepare land for them, and then sell the completed houses to eligible buyers with government-backed affordable mortgages.

They estimate that factory-produced single-family homes could be sold for roughly $170,000-$215,000 each. That's around half the median price of a new single-family home, which has increased nearly 25% since the start of the decade.

"Sears offered these homes for profit," the researchers wrote. "The federal government—with greater resources, lower borrowing costs, and unmatched power to scale—can do it better."

Unlike private capital, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which would administer the program, doesn't have a profit motive and is capable of guaranteeing large amounts of demand so that manufacturers can build scale.

And since the goal is to ensure that people are housed rather than to increase profit margins, the researchers argued that the homes are less vulnerable to the fluctuations of the housing market, which currently disincentivizes lowering rent.

"Private developers build only when projects pencil, meaning that expected rents, net of construction, and financing costs, clear the rate of return their investors demand," the report explains. "This math ties new housing supply to high rents. If rents begin to fall, private capital will walk away.”

The researchers argued that their proposal would not just benefit those who are able to purchase new Sears homes, which HUD would target at households earning 60%-100% of a local area's median income, but everyone in the housing market, by driving up supply.

"Sustainably lowering housing prices relative to other prices in the economy requires public investment," they wrote. "The government can either build housing itself or finance private construction at below-market returns. It should do both.”

The proposal comes as pre-fab homes are being viewed increasingly as a policy solution to confront the housing crisis and as an opportunity for developers looking to attract young homebuyers.

Eager to build cheap starter homes fast, developers are experimenting with entire subdivisions of factory-built houses, as The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

New York state, meanwhile, is trying out a miniature version of what Groundwork has proposed, building 1,500-square-foot homes in Syracuse, Schenectady, and Newcomb. The state has completed three homes so far and awarded funding for 211 more.

According to a 2023 report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, these kinds of higher-end manufactured homes, known as "CrossMods," cost 27% less on average compared to an identical home built on-site.

The ones that have gone up in New York have borne out these cost-saving projections. They took about a third of the time to construct as traditional homes and cost about $250,000 to build and install, about half the cost for a comparable house, according to the state's affordable housing agency.

An affordable housing law that passed Congress in June also took steps toward expanding factory-built housing with a bipartisan bill passed last month that removed regulatory barriers to manufactured homes and sought to make construction easier to finance. However, the law does not provide any new federal funding for housing production.

The researchers said this was a good start that could help speed up the process of building homes. But they said it was far too narrow to really address the problem.

"It will take a government willing to act not at the margins of the market, but at its center—financing cheaply, building at scale,” they wrote. "The technology and policy levers to realize this vision already exist. The question is not whether the federal government can act at this scale—but whether it will."

Amnesty International on Wednesday released a report detailing how the Argentine government under the leadership of right-wing President Javier Milei has created a massive artificial intelligence surveillance state that the human rights group described as "a techno-authoritarian infrastructure of social control."

According to Amnesty, Argentina's Military of National Security invested in several pieces of surveillance technology between 2024 and 2025, including licenses for Maltego, an open-source investigator platform that collects and organizes data from "social media, websites, the dark web, personal data, technical infrastructure, and other open sources"; and Clearview AI, a facial recognition platform with "a widely known track record of mass exploitation of biometric data without sufficient legal grounds."

The government also procured drones equipped with automated tracking capabilities and thermal cameras capable of providing real-time image transmission, Amnesty found.

This surveillance state, Amnesty said, has created a "chilling effect" across the country that has reduced participation in protests and forced activists to reduce their public exposure and take further precautions when planning demonstrations.

Ana Tapia, an activist who has been protesting against pension cuts made by Milei's government, described the government's aggressive surveillance tactics against herself and her fellow demonstrators.

"We’ve all been fully identified for a long time now," Tapia explained. "Sometimes as you’re walking... and suddenly you see the drone hovering just above your head. Sometimes within six feet. Why so close? Why is it so invasive?”

Matías Darabós, an activist who documents police abuses, similarly described the omnipresence of the surveillance state.

"There is a very strong feeling that you are being controlled and watched," said Darabós. "In fact, when we go to marches to record what goes on, they are constantly pointing at us or filming us."

Journalists described being subjected to what they believe are coordinated harassment campaigns in which they are swarmed with violent rhetoric and threats which they believe are related to increased state surveillance.

Paula Cejas, director of the Latin America Office of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told Amnesty that "social media and the streets are no longer a safe space for journalists."

"Even I myself think about what I’m going to post to the IFJ account," Cejas explained, "what language to use so that I’m not put on a list and get us all harassed."

Another journalist who spoke anonymously with Amnesty similarly said she had grown incredibly careful of what she posts on social media compared to the past.

"Before, I used to comment and give my opinion on everything, now I just use it recreationally," the journalist said. "I think a lot about the words I use, I moderated my rhetoric and reduced my interaction 100%, especially on Twitter," the platform Elon Musk renamed X.

Paola Garcia Ray, deputy director of Amnesty International Argentina, summed up the report by arguing that "pervasive surveillance is being used against Argentinians in both physical and digital spaces, to devastating effect" on civil society.

"These technologies have become an integral part of the infrastructure of state control, targeting dissent, deterring protest movements, and harassing marginalized groups, among other authoritarian practices,” Garcia Ray emphasized. "When powerful people don’t want accountability, they attack those who ask questions and use whatever is at their disposal to monitor, control, and repress."

Milei is a political ally of US tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of AI surveillance company Palantir whose presence in Argentina has resulted in protests demanding his ouster from the country.

After years of denying responsibility, the Israel Defense Forces announced Wednesday that it is opening what critics fear will be sham criminal investigations into numerous high-profile killings of Palestinians in Gaza, while separately clearing troops involved in other deadly attacks, including a massacre of World Central Kitchen aid workers.

The IDF Military Advocate-General’s Corps published its first war crimes report since October 2023 on Wednesday, covering more than 150 probes into massacres and other killings of Palestinians.

The most infamous case involves the January 2024 attack in which invading IDF troops fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition at a car carrying 5-year-old Hind Rajab and six relatives as they tried to flee Gaza City, and then attacked a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance dispatched to rescue survivors. The ambulance attack killed two PRCS medics.

Other "exceptional operational incidents" by IDF troops are also under investigation, including the apparent execution-style killing of 15 on-duty first responders—among them PRCS medics, Civil Defense personnel, and a United Nations worker—traveling in a convoy of ambulances and other vehicles in Rafah in March 2025.

The IDF cleared troops involved in the April 2024 attack on a World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy in Deir al-Balah that killed seven members of an international aid team working to feed Palestinians amid the burgeoning famine caused by Israel's "complete siege" of Gaza.

The military also cleared troops involved in a February 2024 tank attack on a house in al-Mawasi where Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff and their families were sheltering. Two women were killed and seven others were wounded in the attack.

Israeli officials had initially either denied carrying out these attacks or claimed the victims were members of or associated with Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group that led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

"The Israeli army lied through their teeth. They claimed no Israeli troops were operating in the area where Hind Rajab and her family were killed," British journalist Owen Jones wrote Wednesday on X. "They lie and lie and lie again—yet Western media outlets still treat Israeli claims as credible."

Few critics of Israel welcomed the IDF probes, while many said they won't accomplish anything.

"Investigations into violations committed by Israeli forces overwhelmingly end without meaningful examination, prosecution, or punishment," the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), which was established to challenge Israeli impunity, said Wednesday in a statement. "In the small number of cases in which soldiers have been convicted of crimes, the punishments imposed have often been exceptionally lenient or administrative in nature."

HRF continued:

The killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh provides a stark example. After conducting its own investigation into her May 2022 killing, the Israeli military acknowledged in September 2022 that there was a “high possibility” that Abu Akleh had been shot by Israeli military fire. Yet the Military Advocate General concluded that there was no suspicion of a criminal offense warranting a Military Police investigation. No criminal investigation was opened.

"This is not new," HRF stressed. "It is the continuation of a decadeslong pattern in which announcements of internal investigations have repeatedly failed to produce meaningful accountability for crimes committed against Palestinians."

HRF noted that 88% of publicly reported Israeli probes into alleged IDF crimes in Gaza "had either been closed without a finding of wrongdoing or remained under review without any publicly reported outcome. Only one resulted in a prison sentence."

"Against this record, the sudden announcement of criminal investigations into the murders of Hind Rajab and the 15 Palestinian paramedics should not be mistaken for a genuine turn toward justice," the group said. "These investigations come amid mounting international scrutiny... Their purpose is not to deliver accountability, but to preserve its appearance while perpetuating impunity."

In the United States—which backs Israel's war with billions of dollars in annual armed aid, diplomatic cover, and genocide denial—Council on American Islamic Relations national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said Wednesday that “everyone, including the Israeli government and its supporters, have long known that Israel was responsible for deliberately murdering Hind Rajab, her family, and the paramedics who tried to save her."

"The Netanyahu regime’s belated admission that it murdered Hind and will open a token criminal investigation is worthless. No one should take it seriously," he added, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.

“Instead, our nation should hold the Israeli government accountable for killing Hind and tens of thousands of other innocent people during the ongoing genocide in Gaza by suspending military aid and imposing sanctions on Israel," Mitchell added. "So should the international community.”

Israeli scholar Shaiel Ben-Ephraim asked on X: "After spending over two years denying even having been in the area, Israel finally admitted to shooting Hind Rajab. Why?"

"Certainly not because of accountability," he continued. "A source in the IDF legal department told the Jerusalem Post that issuing real decisions, including ones critical of soldiers, is 'critical to defend Israel' in those forums and to 'preserve receiving military weapons overseas from the US and other allies.'"

"And because this is the highest profile case of Israeli murder in this genocide, and the most difficult to defend, since Israel had advance knowledge that there was a child in the car, this is the one they chose," Ben-Ephraim added.

Israel's 1,047-day assault on Gaza has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, including thousands who are believed to be dead and buried beneath rubble. Around 2 million other Gazans have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.

Attacks on Palestinian children—more than 21,500 of whom have been killed by Israeli forces—and aid workers, as well as the obliteration of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure, have been defining features of a war that United Nations experts, human rights groups, scholars, and a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice call a genocide.

The plight of Hind Rajab drew worldwide attention after the PRCS published a recording of a desperate phone call made by Hind and her 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamadeh, who was also killed in the car. The recording, which continues for several hours while the mortally wounded child slowly died, was the basis of the award-winning 2025 film "The Voice of Hind Rajab."

Exhaustive investigations, especially into the Hind Rajab massacre, have already occurred. Forensic Architecture, Earshot, and Al Jazeera published the most detailed reconstruction of the attack; The Washington Post, Sky News, and others also documented the events of the massacre.

In the case of the 15 first responders, Forensic Architecture and Earshot, The Washington Post, Bellingcat, The New York Times, and other media outlets investigated the massacre, with some of the reports refuting the IDF's initial claim that the convoy vehicles—at which Israeli forces fired around 1,000 rounds of ammunition—had approached without headlights or emergency signals. The Times affirmed that victims were shot in the head execution-style, while the Post also documented the burial of the responders and their destroyed vehicles in a mass grave.

Despite these exhaustive reports, many Israelis and their international supporters called the Hind Rajab story a fabrication, pointing to discrepancies in reporting about the child's age and other ultimately inconsequential details. Many media outlets, including Common Dreams, initially reported that Rajab was 6 years old. Some supporters of Israel denied that Hind Rajab ever existed; others claimed she was killed by Hamas.

"We know who killed Hind. We know the responsibility of the 401st Armoured Brigade under Beni Aharon, the 52nd Battalion commanded by Daniel Ella, and the Vampire Empire Company commanded by Sean Glass," HRF director general Dyab Abou Jahjah said Wednesday. "These people should be behind bars."

However, he added that “we have no trust whatsoever in the Israeli judicial system. This is a charade aimed at whitewashing and exonerating the criminals who killed Hind Rajab and her family."

"We believe justice will be served, but not by a system responsible for justifying crimes committed during the genocide," Jahjah added. "Justice will be served through international justice, through the ICC, and through national jurisdictions abroad. HRF will continue on this path, and we will not be fooled by these maneuvers.”

A leaked memo written by the National Republican Senatorial Committee is warning Silicon Valley that its artificial intelligence data firms are becoming a massive political liability.

Axios reported on Wednesday that the GOP memo centers on the US Senate race in Ohio, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has made opposition to data centers central to his campaign against incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted.

The memo argues that if Brown's campaign is successful in a state that President Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024, it will send a signal that support for data centers is a losing position across the US.

"If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice—and they will not go near the next one," the memo says. "This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle."

The memo goes on to argue that the tech industry needs to do more to show Americans the benefits they will get from data centers, which have been criticized for raising people's utility bills and generating large amounts of pollution.

"If voters' perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly," the memo cautions, "the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio."

According to Axios, AI CEOs and GOP insiders have become unnerved by internal polls showing that "data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste, and more broadly have become a proxy for feelings about AI."

A poll released in June by Echelon Insights found that only 27% of Americans said they would want an AI data center built in their nieghborhood, with 62% opposed. This made data centers even less popular than nuclear power plants, which 34% of Americans said they would welcome in their neighborhoods.

A separate Axios report published Wednesday described AI CEOs being in "full panic mode" over the backlash to data centers. What's more, reported Axios, tech insiders privately acknowledge that "they can't find a compelling message to shift opinion fast enough" ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

In fact, noted Axios, Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany has even come out against AI data center construction in his state, which the report described as "a striking crack" in President Donald Trump's "pro-AI coalition."

In a Wednesday social media post, pollster Adam Carlson predicted that any Big Tech public relations campaign to change Americans' minds about data centers was likely doomed.

"Charm offensives from tech firms... would’ve been more effective if they did them proactively instead of in response to (very predictable) local backlash," Carlson explained. "They got greedy. Now they’re trying to play catch-up and it's probably too late. No one to blame but themselves."

Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentine political operative who has worked on right-wing campaigns across Latin America, was arrested in Bolivia this week in connection with the attempted murder of a woman with whom he reportedly had a romantic relationship.

Cerimedo was arrested Tuesday morning at Viru Viru Airport after an attack on Bolivian lawyer and activist Nadia Beller.

Video footage circulating online shows two people dressed as delivery workers approaching Beller outside of a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and shooting her at close range. The 33-year-old was taken to a hospital and survived.

Cerimedo has connections to Argentina's President Javier Milei, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz.

As Drop Site News pointed out, he is business partners with President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Brad Parscale, and The Economist has called him "MAGA's man in LatAm" for "forging close ties" to the US leader's right-wing movement.

The 42-year-old operative is "credited with helping secure the US president's endorsement of the right-wing Nasry 'Tito' Asfura, who won Honduras' presidential election in December," The Guardian noted Wednesday.

The newspaper also reported that "Cerimedo's lawyer, Ernesto Giraldes, said his client had not been... trying to flee to Argentina and had traveled to Santa Cruz de la Sierra specifically to visit Beller in hospital, and denied he was behind the attack."

According to Al Jazeera, "Beller, who was four weeks pregnant, believes she was targeted for her opposition to a pack of unconstitutional laws under Decree 5503, which were being prepared by Cerimedo and the government, and for witnessing high-level corruption."

As the outlet detailed:

Decree 5503 introduces radical economic reforms, such as eliminating state fuel subsidies, that target policies put in place under Bolivia's former socialist government.

Beller is also understood to have had a romantic relationship with Cerimedo. She admitted to her relationship with him in a video appearance from her hospital bed, and highlighted Cerimedo's significant political influence.

She said she decided to speak out as she believes that "until I speak directly to the Bolivian people, they are going to finish what they attempted to do. They are going to end up taking my life."

The arrest is not the first time Cerimedo has attracted negative attention in Bolivia. Reuters reported that "in ⁠May, the vice presidency accused him of interfering in the country's internal affairs over a social media post, an allegation he denied," and last month, "Cerimedo said ⁠on X that he was being wrongfully accused on the internet of domestic violence."

Bolivian Vice President Edmand Lara said that the attack on Beller "threatens life, democracy, and freedom of expression," while the president, Paz, wrote in Spanish on X that "acts of violence are reaching unprecedented extremes, with repercussions at both national and international levels. As president and on behalf of the government, we are deeply dismayed by these events and are calling for cooperation at all levels—both national and international—to address this situation."

"I wish to express my solidarity with Ms. Nadia Beller regarding these events," he said. "I have instructed the relevant authorities to conduct a thorough, transparent, and exhaustive investigation until the facts are fully clarified. Ms. Beller must be provided with all necessary security and guarantees, as must the investigation itself, which must be conducted with absolute transparency and independence. The truth must come above all else so that justice prevails and is served—without exceptions and regardless of the circumstances."

"The technology may change, but the laws of war do not," said the United Nations' top humanitarian official on Wednesday as the international community marked World Humanitarian Day—and a record number of violent attacks against aid workers in 2025, with the expanded use of drones partially driving the increased threat to workers' safety.

According to the Aid Worker Security Database and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 907 aid workers were killed, injured, or kidnapped last year.

Nearly 300 more were detained or arrested, said OCHA.

The number of humanitarians who were killed dropped slightly from the previous year, down to 350 from 387. But the death toll was the second highest ever recorded, and a majority of those killed—186—were attacked in Gaza, despite a "ceasefire" agreement that was reached last October.

More than two-thirds of those killed in Gaza were victims of aerial bombardment.

OCHA noted that "cheap and adaptable armed drones are putting lethal capabilities into more hands," with armies now able to wage more explosive attacks from afar and reach "deeper into towns and cities."

The prevalence of armed drones has been linked to 80% of civilian deaths in Sudan in the first four months of this year, while in Colombia, weaponized drone attacks quadrupled between 2024-25.

As the technology of war changes, said OCHA, "our humanity must not... Civilians, including humanitarians, must be protected."

One aid worker was killed in March in the Democratic Republic of Congo when a drone struck a residential building, while four humanitarian convoys were attacked by drones in a single week in May in Ukraine.

"Weaponized drones have become the new face of an old danger: the deliberate or reckless destruction of civilian life,” said Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief.

“But just calling it out will not protect the next aid worker," Fletcher added. "States must uphold international humanitarian law and use every tool to protect civilians and our colleagues. And for those who break the rules, there must be real consequences."

So far in 2026, 82 aid workers have already been killed, while 322 have been injured and 235 have been kidnapped.

"On World Humanitarian Day, we honor humanitarian workers everywhere, and the courage and sacrifices they make every day to help others," said the global humanitarian group Oxfam. "We stand in solidarity with our staff and partners on the frontlines, often working at immense personal risk, and urge governments to uphold their obligations to protect them."

It's been about a year since President Donald Trump began his military occupation of Washington, DC. But while costing taxpayers millions of dollars per day, a new investigation reveals that his National Guard deployments have done almost nothing to stop violent crime.

Crime in DC was already at its lowest level in decades when Trump sent in the troops last August, as was the case in many of the cities that came under unprecedented federal occupation.

But while Trump claimed that these soldiers—who can only detain suspects but must call police officers to make arrests—were the only force capable of saving DC from "crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor," a Reuters investigation out Wednesday found that they’ve had a role in responding to only a tiny fraction of criminal cases.

Since their arrival last August, National Guard members have been mentioned in only about 1.3% of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which handles nearly all the city's criminal prosecutions.

And though Trump has repeatedly credited his troops with protecting residents from being murdered and mugged, charging documents show that his soldiers "mostly responded to minor incidents in neighborhoods that are wealthier, whiter, and less dangerous than the rest of the capital."

Many of the cases where troops intervened, Reuters found, were to stop offenses like subway fare evasion and shoplifting.

Reuters said it "could find no reference in court records to soldiers doing any kind of law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years."

The investigation describes a pattern of soldiers simply standing around while crimes occurred and waiting for police to arrive. In one instance, police officers arrived to arrest a man stomping on a woman outside a nightclub.

According to one of the officers who responded to the scene, "There was approximately 15 National Guard members in the area on routine patrol who did not take any action.”

In another case, soldiers called emergency services after finding a man who'd been stabbed in an upscale waterfront area. But believing him to have only been intoxicated, they left him lying on the ground without performing emergency measures.

They only realized once the police arrived that he'd been "stabbed so severely his intestines were spilling out." He died two hours later after being brought to the hospital.

The administration has portrayed the mere presence of troops as a "deterrent" against crime. But violent crime in the city has actually risen slightly in the year since they arrived. Data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) shows 1,712 violent crimes in 2026 versus 1,645 at the same point in 2025—a 4% increase.

Meanwhile, the grassroots group Free DC has been documenting hostile encounters between guard troops and city residents. The group has cataloged several instances in which troops have detained people, including those protesting their presence, with what it says was “absolutely no cause.”

"They harass people a lot more than they are actually doing police work,” said the Rev. Norman Nixon, the pastor of the Union Temple Baptist Church, who spoke with Reuters.

DC now has over 4,500 troops patrolling the streets. Despite lacking the ability to perform many ordinary police functions, they now outnumber the city’s police force, and maintaining the National Guard's presence is costing more each day.

According to a report from the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, a deployed Guard member costs around $607 per day, compared with about $384 for an MPD officer. The Trump administration has estimated that keeping the Guard deployed until the end of Trump's term in 2029 will cost about $1.4 billion.

The troops also played a role in the administration’s campaign to remove homeless people from DC and help federal agents dismantle encampments last summer as part of what Trump described as a war against “vagrancy.”

Last year, researcher Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project estimated that the deployments, which then cost an estimated $1.1 million per day, was costing four times as much as it would to provide an affordable housing unit for every homeless person in the city, which was pegged at about $257,000 per day.

The Defense Department has since estimated that the cost of the deployments was nearly $1.7 million per day. But that was before the number of troops doubled.

Applying Homestead's methodology today would mean that deploying the National Guard is now nearly 9-10 times as costly as providing housing for the Washington, DC's homeless population, all while providing little apparent benefit to public safety.

"I can think of many other ways that federal resources could have been invested to make the nation’s capital safer," said Clinique Chapman, the CEO of the DC Justice Lab, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post earlier this summer.

“For what it costs to deploy the Guard in [the] US for just six days,” Chapman said, taxpayers could have instead paid for the annual cost of running trauma recovery centers in each ward to help crime survivors heal and connect them to treatment and support.

For five days of the expenditure, the US could fund a mental health crisis response program like Denver's, which responds to hundreds of calls for service each month and reduces arrests, for one year.

For 41 days of what the National Guard deployment costs, the District could fund a year of living-wage jobs and pay the rent on a one-bedroom unit for every US resident returning home from the Bureau of Prisons.

ACLU-DC executive director Monica Hopkins emphasized that the point of the deployments was never to improve the lives of DC residents or enhance public safety, but a “political prop.”

"The Pentagon’s acknowledgment that the deployment will continue until 2029 confirms what we’ve said all along—there is no real emergency here," she said in a statement to mark the one-year anniversary of the deployment. "As was true one year ago, armed military troops are not needed and are not wanted on our streets."

"Because the nation's capital is not legally recognized as a state, extremist politicians have used DC as a testing ground for anti-democratic orders," she added. "We cannot let military deployment on the streets of the United States become normal or acceptable as a part of daily life here or anywhere else."

The International Criminal Court on Wednesday hit back at the Trump administration one day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions against ICC officials.

The ICC described the new sanctions, which target President Tomoko Akane and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Saye, as "a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution."

"When judicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk," the ICC said. "Threats and coercive measures also impact the ability of victims to seek justice, as they turn to the court when all other avenues have been exhausted."

However, the court said that it is "undeterred" from pursuing its mission, while pledging to stand "firmly behind its personnel and behind victims of unimaginable atrocities."

In total, the US has now sanctioned half of the ICC's 18 judges, as well as both of the court's deputy prosecutors, a former prosecutor, and a staff member.

The sanctions on the ICC also drew condemnation from the government of the Netherlands, where the court is physically located.

In a social media post, Dutch Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen insisted that "international courts and tribunals must be able to freely carry out their mandates," and pledged to "fully support the court and its staff."

Balkees Jarrah, the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said the sanctions were "just the latest example of the Trump administration’s utter contempt for international law and a naked attempt to shield American and Israeli officials implicated in serious crimes from justice."

Although no American is currently under investigation or being tried by the ICC, the Trump administration has been targeting ICC officials who have been investigating alleged war crimes committed by Israel with the backing of the US government.

Saye, a target of Tuesday's US sanctions, was charged with investigating war crimes allegedly committed by Israel during its yearslong assault on Gaza.

The Trump administration also sanctioned then-ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, who obtained arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, last year.

In a surprise upset described variously as "stunning" and "a shocker" in headlines, State Rep. Angie Nixon won the Democratic primary for the open US Senate seat in Florida on Tuesday, defeating Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, the former national security official who many presumed would sail to victory with the support of the party establishment and a massive cash advantage.

Nixon, a former union organizer and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, will now face Sen. Ashley Moody, whom Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the seat after former Sen. Marco Rubio became Secretary of State, in the general election.

In her victory speech, Nixon said the win "showed the world what organized people can accomplish," and vowed to continue her surprise run by defeating Moody, the heavy favorite in a state dominated by Republicans over recent years, in the general election.

Outspent by Vindman by an estimated 13-to-1 advantage—raising just $975,000 overall compared to the more than $16 million he had on hand—Nixon was credited with channeling growing voter frustration with the Democratic Party elites who have failed to deliver for working people.

In a Monday night campaign interview on the eve of the election, Nixon told CNN that too many corporate establishment Democrats are standing in the way of real progress on key issues like healthcare as families struggle with an exploding cost of living.

“I don’t care about corporations’ bottom lines," Nixon said. "I care about people."

Prominent national progressives championed Nixon's win.

"Democratic Socialist State Representative Angie Nixon, outspent more than 16 to 1, pulled off a HUGE upset to win the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Florida," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "Congratulations, Angie!"

"Tonight Floridians sent a strong message that they need real progressive leadership to lower costs and protect our rights," declared Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). "Congratulations on your primary victory, Angie Nixon; let's keep up the momentum and send her to Washington in November!"

Noting her strong support for Palestinian rights, the advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace Action heralded the importance of Nixon's willingness to speak out against US complicity in Israeli abuses when too many in the Democratic Party have remained silent.

“The people are rising up against the political establishment that has failed them," said Stefanie Fox, the group's executive director. "The time is now for candidates like Nixon who champion working people and fight relentlessly to defend the rights of all people from Florida to Palestine."

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, also celebrated Nixon's win.

“As an accomplished state representative and union organizer, Angie Nixon has dedicated herself to fighting for working families," said Martin. "AngiFloridians have chosen a proven leader with the experience and vision to lower costs, expand access to healthcare, make childcare and housing more affordable, fight for workers, protect public education, and deliver results for families across the Sunshine State. The DNC is ready to help elect Angie and work together to flip this seat, win the Senate majority, and deliver for all Floridians.”

While the celebrations poured in, Florida remains a deeply red state, and Nixon faces an incredibly tough uphill climb to defeat Moody in November.

In a social media post Tuesday night, Nixon told supporters: "We did it ya'll. Thank you to every person that put their heart into this campaign."

But "get ready," she added, "the fight has just begun."

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, clergy of various faiths, and state and local Democratic officials are among those condemning Tuesday's far-right rally in Dearborn, Michigan as an intimidation campaign against the city’s Muslim community, and warning that the so-called “Christian Crusader March” is part of a broader resurgence of Islamophobic bigotry during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Thousands of anti-Muslim demonstrators, many of them traveling on motorcycles, descended upon Dearborn, a majority-Muslim suburb of Detroit, for the rally organized by racist provocateur Jake Lang and Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell. Video footage showed an overwhelmingly male crowd marching aggressively on Dearborn's City Hall Complex.

Area residents also marched, with a large crowd chanting "Allahu akbar"—meaning "God is great" in Arabic—while chasing some of the outsiders down a street.

Tlaib (D-Mich.), whose district includes Dearborn and who is the only Palestinian American in Congress, warned Tuesday that the city of approximately 105,000 residents "is being targeted by Islamophobic white supremacists and Christian nationalists."

“Islamophobic racists are yet again marching in Dearborn to terrorize a whole faith community," Tlaib said in a statement. "Dearborn is a beautifully diverse place, home to a vibrant, loving Muslim community, and our families do not deserve to be subjected to such hate and bigotry."

"Families are told to stay home for their own safety, unable to go back-to-school shopping, get groceries, or even walk outside," she continued. "To all our Dearborn families and residents: I have your back. I wish I could take away this pain, but know that you are not alone."

"To our interfaith community that’s standing in solidarity with their Muslim neighbors: Thank you for speaking out against this hatred. We need more of this love and compassion," she said.

“More leaders, including local elected officials, must speak out, especially against the local instigators participating in the spread of hatred under the guise of faith," Tlaib continued. "Their silence is complacent and normalizes fearmongering and racism. We know that targeting any community doesn’t allow any of us to be safe."

"People of all faiths and of all backgrounds belong," she added, "and deserve to practice their religion and celebrate their cultures freely without fear.”

Christian leaders joined Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud and Police Chief Issa Shahin for a press conference earlier to denounce the rally, emphasizing that the Islamophobes' “crusader” rhetoric does not represent Christianity.

"To my residents, keep being you," Hammoud said on social media. "Pray how you’ve always prayed. Keep providing for your families and showing up for your neighbors. We won’t let hate unravel this beautiful tapestry forged throughout generations, with countless hands, in the most noble of American traditions."

Rev. Bob McCabe, pastor of the Church of the Divine Child, said during the press conference that "Dearborn is a place where people can love and draw close to each other and to worship freely. I've experienced that as a Christian, as a Catholic."

Pastor Nathan Hayes of Solid Rock Church told viewers that "I'm asking that our community would come together and say, you know what, ignore the outside voices and just pay attention to the person who lives next to you because they care about you way more than these people who are driving in from other places."

The Dearborn rally comes amid mounting renewed anti-Muslim hostility nationwide. The Associated Press reported last week that anti-Muslim rhetoric has surged alongside the historic US Senate campaign of Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim nominated by a major party for one of the state's upper chamber seats. Trump and other Republican figures have portrayed Muslim public officials as national security threats, while anti-mosque campaigns have intensified in communities across the country.

The consequences are not merely rhetorical.

In May, a pair of teenagers opened fire at an Islamic center in San Diego, killing three people and further traumatizing a Muslim community already facing heightened threats.

In July, federal prosecutors charged Utah man Peter Larsen with a hate crime after alleging that he went to a shopping mall seeking Muslims to attack. Prosecutors say he asked employees whether they were Muslim before stabbing a Muslim man multiple times, including in the neck. The victim required several surgeries.

Lang served four years behind bars awaiting trial for alleged crimes, including attacking police officers with a baseball bat during the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He was one of roughly 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists later pardoned by Trump.

He doesn't only hate Muslims; despite being raised Jewish, Lang is rabidly antisemitic and also said that white people "will be replaced, and your children will be Black Muslims if you don't stand up now"—and worse.

Lang was allowed to speak during Tuesday's Dearborn City Council meeting.

"For three years straight, the number one name in the country of England for newborn babies is Muhammad," he said, beginning a nearly four-minute tirade that was equal parts Muslim hate and pure fantasy.

"Tell me that white Christians are not being invaded," he continued. "This is an invasion!"

"These people are trying to destroy us," Lang argued without any evidence. The Muslims have not come here to assimilate. They have come here to steal the wealth of this land, to rape our women."

"The Muslims are being used by the Democrats to instill socialism in America," he asserted. "We know it."

"You're just using the Democrats, these woke liberal idiots, the women in New York, to gain power, and once the Muslims have power in this country, then they will start throwing the homosexuals off the roofs, just like they do in Palestine," he falsely claimed.

"Our founding fathers gave this country to their posterity, white Christians, and they brought along with them their Black friends," Lang said, apparently referring to the Africans they enslaved. "We will not allow these Third World mongrels to run roughshod over us without a fight. The body of Christ is one!"

"We have cruise ships, we have planes, we have trains, and we're going to pack them out with all of the Arabs. You have to go home. We don't want you here," Lang continued.

"If you stand against Islam, you are my brother. If you are willing to stand up and take this country back, you are my brother. Join the crusades and extricate this filth from our country," he concluded. "We will have our way! Come blood or sweat, we will have our way! This is a Christian land! Christ is king!"

Lang then began tearing up a Quran before being forcibly removed from the council chamber.

Some Democratic social media users—including many backing former Vice President Kamala Harris, whose complicity in Israel's Gaza genocide is part of why she was narrowly defeated by Trump in Dearborn in the 2024 presidential election just four years after former President Joe Biden won the city by 20 points—said the city's residents deserve what is happening to them.

However, elected Democrats—who have often been slow to condemn anti-Muslim bigotry—were quick to condemn the rally.

"The people of Dearborn are once again under attack from an out-of-state influencer looking for controversy," US Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said on social media. "[Mayor Hammoud], the police chief, and religious leaders of all faiths are again showing leadership and demonstrating that Michigan is united against hate and Islamophobia."

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement that "Dearborn is home to one of the most vibrant communities in America."

"Its residents are our friends and our neighbors," the Democrat continued. "Today, a group of agitators is traveling to Dearborn for the sole purpose of intimidating that community and provoking a reaction. Their plan emboldens and contributes to dangerous behavior, and I am asking every person of goodwill to denounce it. Their hate has no place in Michigan."

“My top priority is keeping Michiganders safe," Whitmer added I’ve been in contact with Mayor Hammoud, and I echo Chief Shahin and local officials: Do not confront or engage with demonstrators. Together, we stand united against hate in all its forms.”

Just days after President Donald Trump's administration asked the right-wing US Supreme Court to allow construction of a new White House ballroom to continue while a legal challenge plays out, federal lawmakers and advocacy groups on Tuesday urged the justices to block any more work on the project absent congressional approval.

"The Constitution's system of checks and balances ensures that no individual or branch of government holds absolute power," said Trevor Potter, president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which filed an amicus brief with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

"The president is ignoring this design by unilaterally demolishing the East Wing of the White House and trying to construct a massive ballroom with private funds, raising the risk of corruption that constitutional checks are supposed to prevent," he continued.

Potter stressed that "Congress, not the president, is empowered to raise and spend taxpayer dollars—and it has not authorized the ballroom. The administration's reliance on private donor funding for the ballroom project violates a core principle of separation of powers embedded in our Constitution."

CREW president Donald Sherman highlighted that "President Trump has spent his second term creating pay-to-play opportunities for corporations to curry favor and advance his personal priorities, without regard for the Constitution or the American people's best interests."

Trump kicked off his second term with an inauguration dubbed "a coronation of our country’s descent into oligarchy" because of the billionaires who got prime seating at the event. Since then, according to recent disclosures, he's pocketed at least $2.2 billion, over half of it from his family’s crypto scheming.

Amid alarm over Trump's enrichment of himself and his allies—and his plummeting approval rating—Sherman said that "the Supreme Court should deny the request for a stay and ensure that this administration isn't allowed to run roughshod over the separation of powers and dodge congressional approval for spending taxpayer dollars."

Sherman and Potter's groups were far from alone in filing a brief with that demand; dozens of Democrats who serve as ranking members of various committees across both chambers of Congress as well as the minority leader, whip, and caucus chair in the House of Representatives submitted a similar filing to the nation's top court.

The Democrats "understand that the Constitution empowers Congress—not the President—to control federal property, including
determining whether (and how) parts of the White House should be demolished or constructed," their lawyers wrote, noting that they previously sent a brief to US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which earlier this month upheld a district judge's ruling that halted most construction.

The filing argues that the injunction should remain in place, and "the construction the president seeks should not proceed until Congress authorizes that construction and appropriates the funds for it," an event that is unlikely during this session, even with the GOP's narrow control of both chambers.

Welcoming the lawmakers' brief, Jon Golinger, democracy advocate at the watchdog group Public Citizen, asked, "If President Trump is so proud of his Golden Ballroom, why is he so afraid to ask Congress to approve it?"

"A key reason the Constitution requires Congress to authorize the White House ballroom project is to ensure transparency and oversight of the '$335 million of an expected $400 million' that the White House says it's raised from donors, including corporations who have been awarded billions in government contracts and anonymous donors with secret agendas," Golinger said.

"We agree that by law Congress needs to authorize it and urge the court to reject the White House's desperate 'Hail Mary' pass," he added. "The Supreme Court is expected to decide by this Friday whether to intervene in the ballroom case or to allow the Court of Appeals injunction to take effect, which would block further ballroom construction unless and until Congress authorizes it."

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is behind the legal challenge to the project, also sent its arguments against Trump's ballroom on Tuesday. The group's president and CEO, Brent Leggs, noted that "last week, the administration made two audacious claims in asking the US Supreme Court to greenlight continued aboveground construction of the White House ballroom."

"First, that no court in the land has the authority to stop them," he explained. "And second, that because they are using the same indestructible concrete used in nuclear power plants, it would be impossible to remove the ballroom even if ordered to do so. They are working around the clock in an attempt to outrace judicial review."

Leggs said that in its filing, his group "reiterated that the administration has no unilateral legal authority—constitutional, statutory, or otherwise—to build a ballroom on the site of the now-demolished East Wing, unless and until Congress expressly approves. Each court that has reviewed this case has agreed with the National Trust. We hope the Supreme Court will uphold the rule of law by stopping this illegal project."

"Our position was supported by several amicus briefs, including one from the Society for the Rule of Law and former Republican White House lawyers," he added. "These briefs highlight the point the National Trust has made for months: The executive branch lacks unilateral authority to destroy or transform the White House, and cannot use national security as a justification for ignoring the Constitution."

President Donald Trump has pushed to strip millions of Americans of the right to vote by mail. But he doesn't seem to think these restrictions should apply to him.

The White House confirmed to The New York Times that the president voted by mail ahead of Florida's Republican primary on Tuesday, marking at least the third time he has done so since becoming president. He also voted by mail in a state legislative special election earlier this year and in the 2020 Republican primary.

Though Trump has repeatedly characterized mail-in voting itself as a form of "cheating" and pushed to abolish it for most Americans under his proposed SAVE America Act, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said it was a "non-story" that he chose to participate in the practice himself.

"The SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel— but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud," she said. "As everyone knows, the president is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, DC."

Florida notably does not distinguish between absentee and other forms of mail-in voting, allowing residents to cast votes without an excuse—so the system Trump used to vote by mail is the same one he wants to make illegal.

Failing to pass his SAVE America Act through Congress, Trump has attempted to restrict mail-in voting via executive order.

An order he signed in March required states to hand over lists of eligible voters to the federal government and said that the US Postal Service could block residents of states from voting by mail if they refused to comply. The order also directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create state "citizenship lists" to be sent to election officials.

This order has been blocked in federal court, and Trump has pushed for the Supreme Court to allow it to go into effect before the November 3 midterm election. Voting rights advocates have warned that if the order goes into effect, many eligible voters will be wrongly excluded because their names don't appear on DHS's federal lists.

There is scarce evidence that any form of mail-in balloting is susceptible to fraud anywhere near the levels that would be necessary to swing the result of an election.

An analysis by the Brookings Institution last year, which examined data from the right-wing Heritage Foundation's election fraud database, found that for every 10 million mail ballots cast, about four ballots were associated with voting fraud, though the database is not exhaustive.

It's not clear why voting by mail for convenience would be any more "susceptible to fraud" than doing so for illness, disability, military, or travel, as the White House claims.

In fact, the Brookings study found that states with universal no-excuse mail-in voting have the lowest rates of mail-in fraud, and some states, like Washington, have seen reductions in fraud after transitioning to universal mail-in voting.

Advocates for universal mail-in balloting have emphasized that it makes voting easier and more accessible than when it's restricted to election days at physical polling places. They also say restricting it is especially harmful to voters from racial minority groups who face greater barriers to in-person voting and are more likely to have absentee ballot applications rejected.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) rejected the idea that the right of other Americans to vote by mail was any less legitimate than Trump's right to do so.

"Trump just voted by mail AGAIN while trying to take away the right for millions of people to do the same," Pressley wrote in a social media post. "The hypocrisy is the point. We won't let Republicans attack the sacred right to vote, including by mail."

A public library in metropolitan Sydney, Australia confirmed Tuesday that it removed a book critically examining Western media coverage of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza from its shelves, reportedly after a complaint that its prominent display was distressing to a survivor of last year’s mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach.

How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by US journalist and media critic Adam Johnson, was pulled from Waverley Library in Bondi Junction and placed under review. JWire reported last week that the Waverley Council removed the book after a Bondi massacre survivor saw it displayed on the library's “New Release/Hot Item” shelf.

However, Johnson said Tuesday on X that "British-Australia media keep buying this line that my book was pulled from the library after a 'complaint from a Bondi attack survivor.' We have no evidence this is true. This is simply the story they’re telling. Has anyone independently verified this chain of events?"

Johnson also noted that the Bondi massacre, in which two gunmen fatally shot 15 victims, "had nothing to do with Palestinians or Gaza."

"There is ZERO link between the two, and it’s false [to] keep implying there was," he added.

Johnson's book, published in April by Pluto Press, argues that US corporate media have helped enable Israel’s devastation of Gaza through sanitizing Israeli actions, obscuring US responsibility, and dehumanizing Palestinians as Israeli forces killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of them in what United Nations experts, human rights groups, a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice, and many others call a genocide.

Johnson told The Guardian that critics "seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide.'"

“But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding," he stressed. "The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters."

“That it makes some people upset is unfortunate, but reality is often upsetting," he said. "This particular reality is especially upsetting... to the parents of the over 20,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023."

"Do Sydney officials plan on removing pro-Israel books from their libraries because it potentially upsets these community members?” Johnson added.

The Sydney dispute is hardly an isolated case of the silencing of pro-Palestine speech or criticism of Israel's well-documented crimes against humanity and war crimes, for which alleged perpetrator Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In March, Adelaide University canceled a venue booking for a literary event featuring Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Organizers accused the university of bowing to political pressure.

In the United States, college campuses were the epicenter of suppression. New York University withheld a graduating student's diploma after he condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza during his commencement speech. New York authorities also violently cracked down on NYU's anti-genocide protests, and the school adopted a definition of antisemitism conflating anti-Zionism and hatred of Jews.

Seven miles uptown, Columbia University suspended its chapters of the nonviolent groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

George Washington University in Washington, DC banned a graduate from campus after she criticized the university’s ties to Israel, while earlier this year the University of Southern Maine withdrew its support for a Palestine conference because it was slated to include remote participation by Albanese. USM officials cited the dubious sanctions imposed on Albanese and her family by the Trump administration.

There has also been widespread censorship and suppression of pro-Palestine speech in countries including Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

These incidents are indicative of a wider pattern documented by Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, who in 2024 reported that courses, lectures, and panels on Palestine have been canceled and that institutions in Western Europe and North America have restricted books, art, scholarship, and speech concerning Israel and Palestine.

While some Jewish leaders and groups welcomed the removal of Johnson's book from Waverley Library, others decried the censorship.

“Public libraries belong to all of us, and should host a range of views and topics, be they books about queer families or Israel’s widely condemned war crimes," Bart Shteinman, an executive member of the progressive Jewish Council of Australia, told The Guardian. He also called the decision to pull the book "deeply alarming."

One Palestinian account on Bluesky posted: "Is the idea that nothing critical of Israel can ever stand? Because the lobby groups keep telling us there’s a difference between prejudice and criticism, but they keep acting like there’s not."

Another social media user, this one on X, lambasted what she called the "lily-livered library" for "pandering to the vile zealots who protect Israel, despite the evidence before our eyes."

Rhonda Garad, a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, bluntly said on X that "we've reached the book-burning stage of the fascist takeover."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday drew an outraged reaction from critics after he unveiled sanctions against Tomoko Akane, president of the International Criminal Court.

In announcing the sanctions, Rubio described the ICC as "a corrupt and fatally politicized" institution that has supposedly "abused its authority and exceeded its mandate."

Rubio said the ICC "has repeatedly attempt to assert authority over... the United States and other countries that have not consented to its jurisdiction," which he said "sets a dangerous precedent for all nations."

In addition to sanctioning Akane, Rubio said the US would also be sanctioning ICC senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Saye.

While Rubio did not mention what specific actions the ICC has taken to warrant such sanctions, a Tuesday report in The Guardian noted that Saye was charged with investigating war crimes allegedly committed by Israel during its years-long assault on Gaza.

The Trump administration had previously sanctioned then-ICC prosecutor Karim Khan—who obtained arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—and an additional eight ICC officials.

The social media account of Drop Site News accused Rubio of attacking the court solely to protect Netanyahu from war crimes prosecution, pointing out that "there is currently not a single American citizen under indictment, investigation, or facing an arrest warrant" from the ICC.

The sanctions earned the praise of the Israeli American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which accused the ICC of conducting "politically motivated investigations and prosecutions targeting America and Israel."

Rutgers Law School professor Adil Haque said the ICC sanctions showed the US was acting like a "rogue government" and engaged in "deranged behavior."

Michael Karanicolas, law professor at Dalhousie University, didn't just point fingers at the US over the sanctions, but at US allies who have sat back as international institutions have come under assault.

"I’m no longer surprised by the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy the ICC," wrote Karanicolas. "What I keep waiting for is any response from Canada or the European governments who ostensibly still believe in international law to defend these institutions."

War correspondent and international political analyst Elijah Magnier delivered a withering rebuke of Rubio's announcement.

"When you are shameless, contemptuous of international law, and morally bankrupt," wrote Magnier, "you boast of disgrace as though it were an achievement."

Since US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott on Monday announced a temporary pause on construction in Big Bend National Park for an "on-the-ground evaluation," conservationists have called for CBP to permanently halt the Trump administration's widely opposed plans for southwest Texas.

"We've been watching the permanent destruction of a great American national park unfold in real time," said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement.

The center joined Friends of the Ruidosa Church and a local river guide and landowner on Monday in asking a federal judge to stop border barrier and road construction in the region until the court rules on their lawsuit challenging a related waiver of various laws issued by the Trump administration.

"Even with Customs and Border Protection pumping the brakes, the contractors could resume bulldozing deeper into the national park, causing irreversible damage to the wildest place in Texas," Jordahl warned. "We're hopeful the judge will stop this destruction until there's a ruling on the merits of our case."

CPB previously ditched plans for a 30-foot wall in the area, but crews recently started work on a new road, barriers intended to stop cars from crossing over from Mexico, and other infrastructure as part of President Donald Trump's intense anti-immigrant agenda. Conservationists are concerned about negative impacts on not only the national park but also nearby Amistad National Recreation Area and Big Bend Ranch State Park.

The border construction in the region has been met with sweeping opposition, including from both Democratic and Republican elected officials. GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested Monday that his weekend conversation with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin led to the pause. He said the department leader assured him there would be "no construction of any type of barrier at Big Bend National Park," with federal agents instead relying on "other tools" to prevent any border crossings.

Tiernan Sittenfeld, president and CEO for the National Parks Conservation Association, framed the pause as proof that public pressure works, saying: "The people have spoken, and they do not want the Trump administration to bulldoze America's national parks for border infrastructure. This pause on construction comes following hundreds of thousands of Americans bravely raising their voices to save Big Bend National Park."

"Unfortunately, the federal contractors' bulldozers have already inflicted tremendous damage to one of America's most iconic national parks," she noted. "Their heavy equipment has torn through miles of priceless wild landscape, wreaking havoc on sensitive wildlife and irreplaceable habitat."

"We demand that Customs and Border Protection take accountability for the destruction that has occurred at the park and do better by the American people and by our national parks," she added. "When Customs and Border Protection meets with West Texas communities, national park advocates, and expert national park staff, we urge the agency to commit to preventing any further harm to Big Bend and other protected landscapes."

Dave Cortez, director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, pledged Monday that "West Texas will not stand by while these irreplaceable landscapes remain at risk. This pause is a step in the right direction, but the threat has not passed."

"While we call on Texans of all political stripes to continue to press Gov. Abbott to defend Big Bend, we need every American who cherishes our public lands to continue to contact their members of Congress and encourage them to abandon every plan that puts Big Bend in harm's way," Cortez continued.

His colleague who manages the national Sierra Club's lands conservation campaign, Jackie Feinberg, also stressed that "Big Bend should never have been bulldozed for a destructive border project, and the Trump administration must make this pause permanent and repair the damage already done."

"Anything less than a full withdrawal is unacceptable for the millions of Americans across the country who love and cherish our national parks and public lands," she said. "The Sierra Club will keep fighting until this project is permanently rescinded. We call on Congress to act to defend Big Bend and ensure that our shared lands and waters nationwide are protected for generations to come."

With Republican lawmakers refusing to use their congressional authority to investigate a federal agent's fatal shooting last month of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, Democratic leaders assembled a "shadow hearing" on Monday at a local high school, where the 25-year-old's grieving father was among those who spoke to a crowd of about 200 people and pleaded for answers about his son's killing.

“The death of Johan Sebastián, under those conditions, at the hands of ICE, filled our community with fear and uncertainty," said Omar Durán, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "That is why I ask only of God and of the justice system that my son’s case be brought to light, along with the cases of the many others who have had to go through something like this.”

Durán Guerrero was at least the 11th person to be fatally shot by federal agents since President Donald Trump began deploying ICE and other agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cities and towns across the US to carry out his mass deportation operation.

Federal agents have shot at more than 20 people on US streets under the Trump administration; Durán Guerrero was among several who have been shot at while driving a vehicle, which is against ICE's own policies.

Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) reported Monday that the ICE agents who were operating in Durán Guerrero's neighborhood in Biddeford on the morning of July 13 were actually looking for his roommate, who owned the car he was driving.

Pingree said agents did not have a final removal order for the person who was the target of their operation, contrary to what DHS has said about the case.

“This shocking revelation in clear contradiction to what ICE and DHS have been saying about the operation raises fundamental questions,” Pingree said. “How is ICE deciding who to target and detain in Maine? What information are agents relying on?”

"If ICE cannot accurately determine a person's immigration status or circumstance before taking enforcement action, that is a profound failure of competence and accountability," the congresswoman added.

Even in cases where ICE has a deportation order for a person, agents are prohibited from using deadly force unless they have reason to believe the target of the operation poses an imminent threat to an officer's or someone else's safety.

An agent identified as David Michael Brouillette shot Durán Guerrero, who had a 3-year-old daughter with his partner, and DHS has claimed that the officer fired his weapon because Durán Guerrero was trying to flee and Brouillette feared "for public safety."

The agents involved in the operation were not wearing body cameras that were turned on at the time of the shooting, but an eyewitness reported that Durán Guerrero said, "I tried to stop" when the officers pulled him out of his vehicle, bleeding profusely from his head. Surveillance footage taken from a nearby store showed a white car circling an intersection after the shooting before agents stopped it.

"If there were active body cameras on every law enforcement member who was participating there, we wouldn’t be looking at some scratchy videos from one store that’s over here, or one person that’s standing in their doorway that’s trying to get it,” Pingree said at a news conference after Monday's hearing. “We would actually know every moment that’s happened at the scene.”

Durán Guerrero worked as a delivery driver and a cleaner at a veterinary clinic, and had a valid work permit and a pending asylum case.

A lawyer for Durán Guerrero's family said state investigators have interviewed his partner, Karolina Rojas, but no federal agencies have ever contacted her following the killing.

"Any reasonable investigation would include interviewing the family and eyewitnesses,” the lawyer, Ben Gideon, said Monday.

DHS said after the shooting that its inspector general would investigate, but both the agency and the Justice Department refused to answer questions from The New York Times about whether the probe had begun.

The office of Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey is investigating the shooting, and is expected to present its findings to the Maine Deadly Force Review Panel. The panel can make recommendations to DHS, but it does not have jurisdiction over the federal agency.

Durán Guerrero's parents traveled from his home country of Colombia for the shadow hearing. His mother did not speak publicly, while his father described the "deep pain" of hearing his young granddaughter ask where Durán Guerrero is.

"Our dream was always to be reunited and to hold each other again," he said. "Today, that dream can no longer come true."

The Trump administration is moving to reverse a decades-old rule that protected 45 million acres of forest lands from logging and construction, in what the Center for Biological Diversity called the "largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history."

On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the US Forest Service had filed a proposed rule to fully rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted under former President Bill Clinton, which had prevented road building and commercial logging on about 30% of all national forest land.

Rollins described the "roadless rule" as a barrier to government wildfire prevention efforts. "Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions—overgrown stands, insect outbreaks, and disease—turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” she said. "For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities."

But conservation groups argue that the administration's reversal of the roadless rule has little to do with wildfire prevention and everything to do with opening up protected lands to logging interests and other extractive industries, which have long pushed for the rule to be weakened.

Increasing logging on federal lands has been a major goal of Trump's second term, and repealing the roadless rule is part of that effort. An executive order signed in March 2025 calling for the "immediate expansion" of timber production said that federal policies had made the country unable to "fully exploit our domestic timber supply."

In June2025, when the US Department of Agriculture first announced plans to rescind the roadless rule, it said that increasing timber production would be one of the benefits. The USDA said the rule hurt “jobs and economic development” and that repealing it aligned with Trump's goal to eliminate "barriers that hamper American business and innovation."

Earthjustice has argued that, contrary to what the administration says, repealing the roadless rule will actually lead to more wildfires, not fewer.

It points to findings from the Forest Service that 9 in 10 wildfires are caused by human activity, including throwing cigarettes out of windows, leaving campfires abandoned, and driving cars on grassy areas, causing them to ignite.

A peer-reviewed study published in January in the journal Fire Ecology by researchers with The Wilderness Society found that fires are about four times as likely to start near a road as in roadless forests.

Another study by the Forest Service in 2020, during the first Trump administration, examined two decades of data and found that roadless forests actually received more fuel-reduction treatments per square kilometer than areas elsewhere in the National Forest System.

"Speculation that eliminating road prohibitions would improve forest health is not supported by nearly 20 years of monitoring data," the study concluded.

Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns at the Wilderness Society, said Tuesday, "Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is... not a wildfire solution, and never will be."

While doing little to curb the recent increases in wildfires exacerbated by climate change, conservationists argue that repealing the roadless rule will pose other harms to communities and wildlife across the country.

“Roadless forests supply clean drinking water for tens of millions of Americans, are home to irreplaceable wildlife, and store enormous amounts of carbon,” said Gabrielle Berthel, forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Repealing the Roadless Area Conservation Rule would allow for the fragmentation of some of the last intact forest ecosystems in the country, with irreversible consequences for the communities that rely on these forests and the people who seek out these special places for recreation."

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) noted that these forests serve as habitats for numerous threatened species that risk being disrupted, including American wolverines, Canada lynx, grizzly bears, and northern spotted owls.

Randi Spivak, the public lands policy director at the CBD, emphasized that "these are some of the last truly wild forests left in the country... Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back."

More than 625,000 public comments have been submitted to the Forest Service since plans to rescind the roadless rule were announced last June. The USDA will accept public comments on the proposal until September 21, after which the administration is expected to move toward a final rule later this year.

The unprecedented healthcare cuts that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party enacted last summer have impacted people in all 50 US states, stripping insurance coverage from around 8 million Americans total and wreaking havoc on hospitals and other providers nationwide.

The advocacy group Protect Our Care on Tuesday released state-by-state fact sheets detailing how many people have lost Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act coverage due to Republican policy decisions, including the party's roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid and decision to let enhanced ACA subsidies expire, sending premiums skyrocketing.

“Eight million Americans have lost their health care because Donald Trump and Republicans decided they would rather hand out tax breaks to billionaires than protect working families," said Brad Woodhouse, the president of Protect Our Care. "Every day that healthcare becomes more expensive, a family is forced to make an impossible choice between putting food on the table and staying covered, a senior is forced to ration their medication, and an expectant mother has to travel farther to access maternity care."

In Maine, where Democrats are looking to finally unseat vulnerable Sen. Susan Collins, more than 18,700 people have lost Medicaid, CHIP, or ACA coverage under the Republican budget law. Included in that total are the more than 7,500 Mainers who dropped ACA marketplace coverage after premiums soared due to the lapse of enhanced subsidies at the end of 2025.

Collins voted to advance GOP budget legislation that included the devastating Medicaid cuts, but voted against final passage.

Protect Our Care noted that "Maine hospitals and clinics are facing a $38 million loss in funding and a 6.7% spike in uncompensated care demand that will affect their ability to keep their doors open."

"As of August 2026, 20 Maine healthcare providers are at-risk, announced cuts, are closing, or have closed," the group added.

More than 25,600 Alaskans have lost health coverage under the Republican budget law and premiums have surged by an average of 346% this year, according to Protect Our Care's fact sheets.

US Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who along with Collins is seen as one of the most vulnerable Republicans this election cycle, voted for the more than $900 billion in Medicaid cuts.

"From Alaska to Florida, these people are our neighbors, our parents, our kids, and they’re sick of paying the price for Republicans’ greed," Woodhouse said on Tuesday. "They deserve better, and in November they will demand it at the ballot box.”

An agricultural industry watchdog on Tuesday released a report examining how corporate consolidation enabled this summer's widespread outbreak of Cyclosporiasis, a foodborne illness that causes explosive diarrhea.

The report, published by Farm Action, argues that the wide reach of produce giant Taylor Farms, which is the source of the outbreak, spread food contaminated by the Cyclospora parasite far and wide before an issue was detected.

One problem with Taylor Farms' reach, the report states, is that it is often hidden, leaving people unaware of the source of certain products.

"Taylor Farms produces 40% of the salad kits sold in the country and grows about one-quarter of its own vegetables, sourcing the rest through partner farms," the report says. "That makes it a major link between farms and some of the nation’s largest food buyers."

The company's produce is used at popular fast-food chains such as Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Chipotle, and is sold at big-name grocery stories including Whole Foods, Target, Safeway, and Costco.

Beyond that, its produce is bought by foodservice distribution giants Sysco and US Foods, who send it to assorted schools, hospitals, and hotels.

The report says that the consolidation of the produce production industry was itself enabled by the industry consolidation of grocery stores, restaurant chains, and foodservice distributors, which found it more efficient to buy from conglomerates such as Taylor Farms, which the report categorizes as "grower-shipper-packers (GSPs)."

"Like other large GSPs, Taylor Farms sources produce through regional and international networks rather than relying primarily on nearby farms," writes Farm Action. "That helps explain why investigators traced lettuce implicated in the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak to Mexico, even in the middle of summer when much of the US is capable of growing lettuce."

Because Taylor distributes its produce to so many places under so many different brands, the report continues, consumers have a hard time avoiding them even if they are actively trying.

What's more, the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak isn't the first time Taylor has been linked to a food safety event, as Farm Action found that it was connected to "the 2026 Salmonella outbreak linked to jalapeño products, previous Cyclospora outbreaks, the 2024 E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s onions, the 2021 E. coli cluster involving romaine lettuce, and numerous recalls for allergens, labeling errors, contamination risks, and processing defects."

"These incidents do not by themselves prove a pattern of systemic problems," the report adds. "But Taylor Farms’ repeated connection to major outbreaks and recalls warrants a closer look at whether these are unrelated incidents or signs of recurring weaknesses."

The report concludes by recommending stronger enforcement of US antitrust laws to break up big distributors, as well as stronger food safety and traceability policies.

Sarah Carden, senior director of research and policy at Farm Action, said the report on Taylor Farms should be a wakeup call to food safety regulators about the dangers of corporate centralization.

"Taylor Farms has extraordinary reach across the produce supply chain, a history of connections to major food safety events, significant political spending and access, and a workplace record that raises serious questions," said Carden. "Its growth also shows how consolidation has left farmers with fewer buyers and made our food supply increasingly dependent on a small number of powerful companies."

A new poll of US voters published on Tuesday offers a warning for congressional lawmakers backing a plan to deepen military ties between the United States and Israel, finding that a clear majority of voters oppose the proposal—which some critics have called "treasonous."

The Data for Progress survey of 1,217 likely US voters—conducted August 3–7 for Demand Progress and the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project—revealed that 61% of respondents oppose legislation in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2027 that would integrate Israeli weapons companies into the Pentagon at a level exceeding that of any other country. That figure rose to 78% among Democrats and 73% among independents.

“This poll is a flashing red warning sign for any member of Congress who supports the defense authorization bill," Demand Progress senior policy adviser Cavan Kharrazian said in a statement. "A clear majority of voters do not support further integrating the Israeli military and Israeli military companies into the Pentagon, which the NDAA is set to do."

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted last month 216-212, mostly along party lines, in favor of a record $1.15 trillion NDAA. The military spending bill contains Section 219, a provision that would create a US–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, accelerating joint defense research, development, testing, and integration of technologies including artificial intelligence, missile defense, and counter-drone systems.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) submitted an amendment to strip Section 219 from the NDAA. The measure failed to pass.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who voted against the NDAA, described Section 219 as “an outrageous threat to our country’s security and autonomy."

The Senate version of the military spending authorization bill has a related provision—Section 1217, the United States-Israel FUTURES Act—and the two chambers will need to reconcile their NDAA legislation before the final language is decided. Reconciliation is not expected to occur before November at the earliest.

“It’s time for Congress to listen to the American people for once, and not the same voices who always want to cut Israel a blank check," Kharrazian said. That "blank check" has totaled more than $174 billion in non-inflation-adjusted aid since the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.

The new poll found that 57% of respondents believe the Israeli military and Israeli weapons companies should not receive increased access to US military systems. Fifty-one percent said Israel benefits more from the US-Israel relationship, compared with just 12% who said the United States benefits more.

Although Republican voters support the Pentagon provision by a 16-point margin, when asked about it without additional context, they are considerably less enthusiastic about the idea of granting any foreign military special access, opposing it 62%-27%.

Forty percent of surveyed voters said they believe that the US-Israeli relationship is "too close," compared with 42% who say it is "about right." Among Democrats, 56% say relations are too close, versus just 23% who say about right. Twenty-two percent of Republicans and 43% of Independents said US-Israeli relations are too close.

Asked if they think President Donald Trump is too supportive of Israel's right-wing government, 49% said yes, compared with only 33% who said the president is giving Israel the right amount of backing and just 8% who believe he's not giving the key ally enough support.

Respondents' views of Israel itself have deteriorated markedly, with 44% saying they now view the country less favorably than they did three years ago—compared with just 17% who say their views have improved amid the war of annihilation in Gaza that United Nations experts, human rights groups, and a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice call a genocide, as well as the wider Israeli occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid in Palestine.

Looking only at the past six months, 41% of respondents said their view of Israel has become less favorable, versus 16% who say it has become more favorable. Among Democrats, the split is 56%-13%; among Independents it's 42%-11%.

“Israel is a nation committing genocide that just dragged the American people into a disastrous war that is still hitting our pocketbooks," IMEU Policy Project executive director Margaret DeReus said, referring to the Iran War. “Senators take an oath to do what is best for the American people above all; to uphold that oath, they must scrap this ridiculous proposal.”

"It is the height of absurdity," DeReus added, "that Congress is even considering a proposal to become more entangled with the Israeli military and use our tax dollars to subsidize their weapons companies."

US Rep. Randy Fine, who has become notorious for his bigoted remarks against Muslims throughout his political career, was caught on camera Sunday rifling through the mailbox of a Florida voter.

A video that went viral on social media Monday shows Fine (R-Fla.) ringing the doorbell of a resident in Florida's 6th Congressional District, where he was canvassing for votes ahead of Tuesday's Florida congressional primary.

After the resident does not answer the door, Fine is seen opening up their mailbox and flipping through its contents for a few seconds.

Fine's office confirmed to TMZ on Tuesday that the Florida Republican, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump over the weekend, is the man seen in the video.

According to an article published by Legal Overview in May, opening another person's mailbox and touching their mail could run afoul of 18 USC § 1702 and result in felony charges for obstruction of correspondence.

Fine's potentially illegal actions drew ridicule from Rep. Mark Pocan (R-Wisc.), who observed in a Tuesday social media post that MAGA politicians seemingly can't stop committing crimes.

"Watch my 'colleague' Randy Fine break the law by going through someone’s mail," write Pocan. "MAGA movement’s newest hero is breaking federal law. Just like Daddy Trump. Time to throw these bums out in November!"

Former Democratic Florida US House candidate Barbie Harden Hall also mocked Fine.

"Why are you looking through someone’s mailbox while you’re out canvassing?" she asked. "Not only is it wrong, it’s creepy as fuck. Randy Fine is a menace to basic human decency."

Just days after threatening to declare the Strait of Hormuz a US territory, President Donald Trump on Tuesday posted a map on his Truth Social platform with that label over the crucial waterway—and was swiftly called out by a top Iranian diplomat.

"Just as Trump correctly wrote the name of the Persian Gulf, his illusion about the Strait of Hormuz will soon be corrected—or we will correct the delusions of this delusional individual," Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, responded in Arabic on X.

Gharibabadi included a screengrab of Trump's post featuring a map that shows the strait, which is south of Iran and runs between the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.

Since Trump and Israel began illegally bombing Iran on February 28, the Middle East country has restricted traffic through the strait, a key shipping route, particularly for fossil fuels. That has driven up fuel prices worldwide, including in the United States, where the cost for a gallon of gasoline just hit a record high for mid-August.

Despite the economic toll at home, the range of impacts across the Middle East—where nearly six months of war have killed thousands of people—and a plummeting approval rating, Trump said last week that "I'll never apologize, I did the right thing."

That declaration and Trump's threat over the strait came in a Friday speech on Long Island, after which critics across the United States and beyond condemned the president as a "completely unhinged lunatic" and "sadistic violent menace to the world" who ought to be impeached again.

By Monday, a 60-day ceasefire deal expired, and neither side has signaled any progress on talks to end the war—which Trump claims is aimed at stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons, even though his own intelligence agencies have said it wasn't trying to do so. Trump notably ditched the Obama administration's Iran nuclear deal during his first term.

According to Palestine Chronicle, Iranian Maj. Gen. Mostafa Izadi, deputy commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Tuesday that "the enemy failed to destroy Iran's defensive capabilities and nuclear industries."

As for the strait, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said that it will stay closed until the US blockade and oil embargo are lifted, and warned that any party continuing its "aggression or threats" would face a "more severe defeat."

Maj. Jason Watson's participation in a protest organized last month by the Removal Coalition, a group that calls for President Donald Trump's impeachment, wasn't his first foray into speaking out against the commander-in-chief.

He spent 22 days last year on a hunger strike, staying anonymous by wearing a white mask and white jumpsuit on the US Capitol grounds, next to a sign that read: “Impeach. Convict. Remove.”

But the US airman spoke Monday about what pushed him last month to go public with his protest against Trump's unprovoked war on Iran, displaying the same sign at a news conference organized by Removal Coalition, where he wore his Air Force uniform and was identified by name.

"If I don't put myself out there in a big way, it's just noise," Watson told CNN anchor Erin Burnett. "We can change what is happening in our country if we're just willing to pay a price for it."

His public dissent against the broadly unpopular war could violate Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which mandates punishment against “any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words” against the president, military leaders, or US government officials, or Article 134, which prohibits statements "made with the intent to promote disloyalty or disaffection toward the United States."

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink has said the military is investigating the protest. Watson could face dishonorable discharge, a loss of military pay, and months in prison for violating the Uniform Code.

When considering his public protest, Watson said he asked himself, "What's the highest price that I'm willing to pay, and this is what I ultimately came up with."

He said he was "absolutely motivated" by his oath to the US Constitution and his concern for the future of the country as Trump and continues to threaten Iran and other countries in the Middle East, nearly six months after the president joined Israel in waging war on Iran.

"Any American can say, this government is intolerable and I want a better future for my children, and I want to hand them a better country than I inherited," said Watson.

After he joined the news conference on the Capitol steps last month, Watson was arrested by the US Capitol police. He was held in jail overnight and transferred to the DC Superior Court before the DC attorney general dropped the charge, but Air Force police officers then took him into custody and held him at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.

Jessica Denson, founder of the Removal Coalition, told The Washington Post last month that Watson was "prepared for the worst-of-the-worst outcome" of his protest.

Watson said after his arrest that during his previous anonymous protest, he had been overly concerned with being identified, considering the Uniform Code.

“There was nobody paying attention because it’s just easy to ignore a lone actor, especially dressed the way that I was," he said on Denson's podcast, "Lights On."

He told Burnett Monday: "Nothing that is worth doing is something that you can do for free. Everything that is worthwhile is going to cost something."

"It's going to be hard, it's going to require sacrifice, and we are in an incredibly challenging time, and in order for us to get out of this situation we all have to have courage," he said.

On CNN, Watson doubled down on speaking out against Trump's war in Iran, which has killed more than 3,400 Iranians, including hundreds or children and women, as well as thousands of people across the Middle East as the conflict has widened, and at least 17 US service members.

The war has also worsened the affordability crisis in the US as oil and gas prices have soared, and led to a standoff over control of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively closed in retaliation for the US-Israeli assault.

"What is happening with the Iran War is very predictable strategically, and a lot of much smarter people than me knew that it would have gone pretty poorly," said Watson. "And he chose to do it anyway."

"At the end of the day, it's also more important to remember that what he did was unconstitutional," said Watson. "It was an aggressive war of choice that, if we saw another country do that, we would probably look to our allies and say, 'What are we gonna do about this?'"

He compared the US war on Iran with Russia's incursion in Ukraine—another "aggressive war of choice."

"He has failed us," Watson said of Trump. "Not only is he a failure as president, he is flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption, and is killing Americans, and that is unacceptable to me."

ABC and its parent company Disney filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday over what it called a "deeply un-American" effort by the Trump administration to punish broadcasters for airing speech critical of the president.

The suit comes in response to an April order by the FCC requiring Disney's eight ABC stations to file their broadcast renewal requests years ahead of schedule. As the Knight First Amendment Institute pointed out, it's the first time the FCC has ordered a broadcast station to submit early license renewals in more than 50 years.

The unusual request came after President Donald Trump had repeatedly suggested that networks giving him "negative coverage" should have their broadcast licenses "terminated."

ABC has argued that the license renewal demand is part of an effort to "attack" its First Amendment-protected speech.

"Government censorship is deeply un-American," the lawsuit, filed before the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said. "Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts."

ABC specifically has found itself in the crosshairs of FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who used license authority to pressure the network to remove late-night host Jimmy Kimmel from the air briefly last year following a critical monologue about Trump and Republicans following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie

The lawsuit quotes what ABC said were blatant efforts by Carr to "coerce" the network into pulling Kimmel, including his ultimatum, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way."

It also notes that the request for the early renewal order was issued just one day after Trump went on another social media tirade against Kimmel over jokes he made about First Lady Melania Trump, which the president claimed inspired an assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Trump said that Kimmel should “be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”

Carr has defended the FCC's orders to Disney, stating that they were not about retaliation, but about ensuring that ABC stations operate "in the public interest" as they are required to do under law.

“If broadcasters don’t like that, that’s okay,” Carr told CNBC back in July. “They can become a cable channel, they can become a podcast, they can stream online. But if you want to uniquely be on the public’s airwaves, you have to comply with those obligations.”

Noting previous comments by Carr that public interest considerations should include the "political ideology” of a broadcaster's programming, Monday's lawsuit said the order "thus appears intended to broaden the scope of the agency’s review, including to impermissibly consider the content of ABC programming."

Earlier this year, the FCC also opened an investigation into the daytime talk show The View, alleging that its hosting of interviews with Texas Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico in February may have violated a rule requiring broadcast stations to give political candidates "equal time" when appearing on air.

ABC has contended that The View has previously been ruled as a "bona fide news interview" program, which is exempt from the rule.

As part of the investigation, the FCC Media Bureau has probed ABC's editorial process, ordering it to produce internal communications among View staff, disclose the political donations of employees, and provide information about ABC's internal guidance for producing interviews

The White House, meanwhile, included The View on a public webpage listing so-called "media offenders." On this page, it singled out the program's co-hosts for the "offenses" of criticizing government officials for “visiting the Alligator Alcatraz ICE detention facility in Florida” and “claiming President Trump was overstepping his authority by constructing a White House ballroom.”

The lawsuit says the FCC's pressure has affected its editorial decision-making. It notes that since the investigation was launched, it has not booked any other congressional candidates on The View.

It also notes that, considering the "risk of resulting administration retaliation," ABC chose to broadcast a speech by Trump in July on its streaming channel ABC News Live in which he made unfounded accusations of rampant voter fraud in the 2020 election, which "it ordinarily would not have done."

Trump again called on the network to have its broadcast license stripped for not airing the speech on its main network. And Carr has said that the FCC would consider that decision as part of the review of ABC's renewal applications.

The lawsuit says the administration is seeking either to mire the company in costly legal fees and intimidate it into compliance or to rip it off the air entirely, as Trump demanded.

"In either scenario," the lawsuit says, "the administration accomplishes its goal of eliminating a perceived media critic: either it gets plaintiffs to fall in line, or it silences them if they refuse."

The lawsuit asks the court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the FCC from proceeding with the reviews. It ultimately seeks a ruling that the license-renewal proceedings constitute unconstitutional retaliation that violates the First Amendment.

It notes that the administration has been attempting to coerce other legacy news broadcasters in the same way.

"If the administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable: Tell only the stories the administration deems favorable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government," the lawsuit says. "In such a world, the press could in no way be described as free."

CNN's chief media analyst Brian Stelter described Disney and ABC's lawsuit as "one of the stiffest challenges from any American media company against the Trump administration during Trump's return to office."

Press freedom advocates welcomed the lawsuit as a sign that media outlets were beginning to fight back against the administration's strong-arming tactics rather than appeasing them.

"At long last! A broadcast network has found a backbone and is suing to stop the administration’s bullying and censorship," said Nico Perrino, the executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“It’s about time for someone to take Carr and his FCC to court over their endless campaign of intimidation and retaliation against journalism that displeases Carr’s thin-skinned boss,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

"Carr knows the FCC is not the journalism police and said so regularly himself before he decided to throw away any integrity he once had to kiss up to Trump," Stern added. "Countless others whose First Amendment rights have been chilled by Carr’s antics should follow Disney’s lead.”

ABC has faced criticism for bowing to pressure from Trump in the past. In 2024, after Trump won the presidential election, the network agreed to pay out $15 million after he sued over comments made by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who stated that the president had been found “liable for rape” by a jury when he’d technically only been found liable for “sexual abuse." The president's case against the network was widely viewed as legally dubious.

That lawsuit was seen as an opening of the floodgates for Trump's efforts to coerce and control the media during his second term, and other networks, fearful of retaliation, would follow with their own concessions to avoid his wrath.

Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter at CNN, said ABC's decision to fight back against the FCC showed that "today, we're in a different situation."

Data released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday showed that the rate of kindergartners with vaccine exemptions hit a record high over the last year as the nation's top health official continued to spread falsehoods about vaccine safety.

In all, CDC reported that 155,000 students, or 4.2% of all kindergartners enrolled in public schools, received vaccination exemptions in the 2025-2026 school year, an increase from the 3.6% of publicly enrolled kindergartners who received such exemptions in the prior school year.

The Washington Post noted in a Monday report on the data that "the biggest factor in the increasing exemption rate came from families seeking nonmedical exemptions," and that exemption rates now exceed 5% in nearly half of all US states.

The jump in vaccine exemptions comes as the US is dealing with the largest outbreak of measles it's experienced in over three decades.

Numbers released by the CDC last month revealed that there have been 2,318 recorded cases of measles this year, the highest number of cases recorded since the virus was declared eliminated in the country more than two decades ago.

Experts have said that this surge in measles cases is largely due to lower uptake of the measles vaccine.

Dr. James Campbell, member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Infectious Diseases, told CBS News in an interview published Monday that the primary reason for the drop in vaccinations was the "chaos and confusion in vaccination recommendation systems in the last year or so," since the start of the second Trump administration.

Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the Post that it doesn't take a very large decrease in the vaccination rate to give the measles virus an opening.

"For some diseases like measles, even a small decrease in vaccination rates can lead to more outbreaks of disease," Racine explained, "because community immunity requires over 95% of susceptible individuals to be immunized."

"This risk is real," Raccine added. "The United States is experiencing a 35-year high for measles cases as federal officials continue to elevate misleading and disproven information about vaccines, inserting unnecessary fear and confusion into families’ decision making. And we are seeing the results."

The results could get even worse if President Donald Trump's executive order calling for the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination be divided into three separate shots gets implemented.

Experts have warned that separating the vaccines means that families will be less likely to have their children get all three shots, and the CDC's own website notes that "no published scientific evidence shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots."

Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, said surging exemptions were a direct result of misinformation about vaccines being pushed by both Trump and US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"Connect the dots," said Woodhouse. "Donald Trump and RFK Jr. frequently spew anti-vax lies to a national audience, parents get needlessly freaked out, exemptions surge, vaccination rates plummet, outbreaks of preventable diseases shatter records, kids die. Trump’s allergy to science and reality is its own deadly virus."

Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as US surgeon general during Trump's first term, also criticized Kennedy's leadership in a Tuesday social media post.

"You can’t be the leader of all health policy in America, AND claim you’re for childhood vaccinations, AND ignore this trend/not have a clear plan to increase vaccine uptake," Adams wrote, "at least not if you’re serious about improving America’s health."

After a decade since the launch of the Fight for $15 movement in New York City, a record number of U.S. states and communities are set to raise the minimum wage in the new year.

From New Year's Eve to New Year's Day, the minimum wage will increase in 23 states and 41 cities and counties, according to a report released Thursday by the National Employment Law Project (NELP). In 40 of those 64 jurisdictions, it will hit or exceed $15 an hour for at least some workers.

"The raises we are seeing are a true testament to the power of organizing."

By the end of 2023, additional increases are planned in five states and 22 localities—with 21 reaching or topping $15 an hour—bringing the total for next year to 86: 27 states and 59 cities and counties, says the report, Raises From Coast to Coast in 2023. The totals take into account that multiple increases are planned in Michigan and four local jurisdictions.

"The raises we are seeing are a true testament to the power of organizing," said Yannet Lathrop, senior researcher and policy analyst at NELP, in a statement. "These raises were achieved in a variety of ways, from ballot initiatives to statehouses to workers making their demands to employers directly."

"As these wins continue and we see the real-world impact of higher pay—from growing unionization to narrowing racial wealth gaps—we encourage lawmakers to go further and raise pay broadly across our economy," Lathrop added.

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As the report details:

In the 10 years since fast food workers walked out of their jobs demanding a $15 minimum wage and a union, the Fight for $15 worker movement has won minimum wage increases in 28 states and nearly five dozen cities and counties. These victories have led to an estimated $150 billion in additional annual pay for 26 million workers and to the narrowing of the racial wealth gap.
The movement has also put pressure on employers to raise their pay scales, leading… hundreds of businesses, large and small, to raise wages to $15 or more. Among them are corporate giants employing hundreds of thousands of workers from coast to coast, including Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Barclays, Best Buy, Charter Communications, Chobani, Chipotle, CVS, Ikea, JP Morgan Chase, LabCorp, Macy's, MetLife PNC, Sam's Club, Southwest Airlines, Synchrony Financial, T- Mobile, Target, Under Armour, USAA, Verizon, Walgreen's, Walmart, and Wells Fargo.

"The monumental impact of the Fight for $15 is clearly visible in this year's record wage increases as well as those in years past," said NELP executive director Rebecca Dixon. "But in those same 10 years, congressional action to expand worker rights has been limited."

"While it is encouraging to see boosts to the minimum wage in cities and states across the country, we need federal policy to address the mounting crises brought about by record increases in the cost of living and pandemic recovery," she stressed. "We must pass a higher federal minimum wage—at least $15 an hour—that accounts for rising costs of living and ensures that workers have the ability to support themselves and their families."

In March 2021, eight members of the Democratic caucus, joined all 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate to kill legislation that would have established a $15 federal minimum wage, lifting millions of people out of poverty. Among those Democrats was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who officially declared herself an Independent in recent weeks.

State-wide polling conducted shortly before that vote last year showed a majority of Arizonans across the political spectrum in favor of increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour. In November 2021, the people of Sinema's hometown of Tucson approved a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Arizona's second-largest city.

NELP's new report notes that Tucson residents are on track to see a $15 hourly wage by 2025. The city's current rate is $13, but it is set to increase to $13.85 on January 1, with a $10.85 tipped wage—both in line with the state's floor.

Worker wins from 2022 highlighted in the report include campaigns in Foster City and San Mateo County, California; Hawaii; Nebraska; Tukwila, Washington; and Washington, D.C.

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"In 2023 and 2024, the campaigns to watch include an $18 ballot measure in California and possible ballot measures in Arizona, Ohio, and Michigan," the publication points out.

"On the legislative front, there may be one fair wage campaigns in Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland," the report adds, "as well as efforts to raise the minimum wage in Maryland (to speed up the state's implementation of a $15 minimum wage), Massachusetts (where the minimum will reach $15 in 2023 and there are no inflation adjustments planned for following years), and New York (where the demand is $21.25 by 2026-2027)."