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      A US haven for refugees was divided over Trump – now immigration crackdown has left a ‘community breaking’

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      It was 2022, and the Nepali flea market in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, buzzed with life –handmade hats and colorful flags hung outside the homes of families just yards from the market, who had built new lives after being expelled from Bhutan. Elderly men sat in circles, smoking cigars and playing folk songs, unwilling to let the past slip away.In the early 1990s, Bhutan expelled more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese people during a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Most fled to refugee camps in eastern Nepal, where many remained for nearly two decades. Beginning in 2007, about 85,000 were resettled across the US through a program coordinated by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the US government. Today, central Pennsylvania is home to several thousand Bhutanese refugees, with Harrisburg and nearby towns hosting one of the largest clusters in the country. That concentration carries political weight: Pennsylvania is a swing state, and Trump won it in 2024 by a slight margin.When I returned in July 2025, it felt like another world. The flags were gone. The elders no longer gathered outside. Flea markets and restaurants sat quietly. The change wasn’t about ageing or assimilation – it reflected a community unsettled by politics, as families struggled to make sense of immigration policies that had suddenly put Bhutanese refugees back in the crosshairs. Across central Pennsylvania, old cases have been reopened, removal orders issued, over two dozen Bhutanese refugees have been deported back to Bhutan, and families that once felt secure are now bracing for knocks at the door.View image in fullscreenThe Harrisburg office of Asian Refugees United (ARU) looked more like a campsite than a non-profit hub – backpacks in the corners, water bottles scattered on the floor. Robin Gurung, the soft-spoken executive director, had just returned from a youth camp. I asked what had changed after the 2024 election.“Everything,” he said. “Before the Trump administration, ARU focused on rebuilding lives, teaching leadership, suicide prevention, and youth civic action. Now we’re in rapid-response mode, helping families make sense of deportations.”With larger institutions caving in to the administration’s demands, ARU has struggled to find allies. “A lot of our partners don’t want to engage any more, fearing retaliation,” Gurung told me. “We don’t even have attorneys to guide families. We rely on a few groups, but immigrant communities are being left on their own.”He paused before adding that the political climate had reopened old wounds. “We survived as refugees because of community. We always showed up for each other. But that sense of community is breaking. We’ve never seen this level of division and suspicion.”The turmoil Gurung described stood in sharp contrast to the early years of resettlement, when Bhutanese families in Pennsylvania were carving out new lives. Among them was Binay Luitel, who arrived as a teenager in July 2008 as an early cohort of Bhutanese refugees in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and quickly came to see service as his way of giving back.After years in a refugee camp in Nepal, he entered the US through the refugee resettlement program during the Obama era, a time that seemed to embrace the promise of a multiracial America.View image in fullscreenAt just 23, Luitel enlisted in the US army and deployed to Afghanistan. “Growing up as a refugee, I always had a strong desire to serve in the military, but back home that opportunity didn’t exist for someone like me,” he said. “When the United States gave me not just a home but an identity, joining the military was an act of gratitude, a way to honor the gift of belonging.”After four years in uniform, he returned to Harrisburg, now a hub for Bhutanese refugees. Families were buying homes, opening businesses and preserving their culture. With friends and mentors, Luitel helped establish the Bhutanese Community in Harrisburg, a non-profit, community-based organization that aimed to help the Bhutanese refugee community integrate in Harrisburg and address mental health issues, eventually serving as its president.For Ashika Dhaurali, 20, those years of growth shaped her sense of home. A mental-health advocate who arrived at age six, she once canvassed for senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, convinced his progressive ideals matched her community’s hopes. Today, she feels betrayed.“I canvassed for Fetterman,” she said. “I believed in his ideals, but now he’s nothing but a disappointment.” She points to his silence on deportations, his endorsement of Ice enforcement on X, and his willingness to echo Trump’s rhetoric. Watching her neighbors targeted by Trump’s administration, and Democrats failing to defend them, has left her searching elsewhere. “I won’t be voting for Fetterman again. And if there’s a viable progressive candidate against him, a lot of us will be ready to canvass.”The fragile stability that Bhutanese refugees thought they had created has crumbled during Trump’s second administration, as Trump, in his first week of inauguration, banned all refugee entry and halted asylum cases. Ice raids have rattled households, deportations of many of their community members in Harrisburg, as well as across the US, have reopened old traumas, and what had felt like a safe enclave grew clouded with fear and suspicion.“There has been a degree of political division,” Binay admitted. “It has torn people apart.”For Ghanshyam, a small business owner, the split is moral as well. “Trump defies everything immigrants and refugees stand for,” he told me. “When you elect a president, it’s not just about economics, it’s about values. Do you really want to tell your kids you voted for a man who called immigrants rapists and murderers, who’s been found liable for sexual assault, and who’s declared bankruptcy seven times? That’s not a role model. Voting for him isn’t just bad policy, it’s a moral failure.”Others, like Aiman, 24, who asked not to use his last name for privacy, see it differently. He arrived during the Obama years and once voted Democrat, but by 2024, he had switched to supporting Trump. Inflation, border security, the wars abroad and what he viewed as relentless media persecution of then former president Trump shifted his loyalties.View image in fullscreen“When I saw our president constantly attacked and silenced, I started to see him as human – someone who persevered when everything was against him,” he said.For Aiman, America is less about belonging than duty. “We were given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Citizenship means loyalty. Too many in our community never took that seriously.” Deportations, he admitted, were painful, but to him they were the consequence of broken laws. “Facts outweigh emotions,” he said, echoing rightwing commentators like Ben Shapiro.He even pointed to his own family. “Of course, I wish my brother could come here. But what good is that if, in the process, the whole country burns from the bottom up? I’d be happy to see him here, but not at the cost of destroying America.”Unlike older Bhutanese who hesitate to speak openly, Aiman doesn’t feel isolated. “A lot of my friends are Republicans now,” he said. “The only pushback I get is from college kids, who are too easily offended.” He’s part of a broader group of young men who, in recent years, have drifted toward conservative ideals.Dhaurali, the mental-health advocate, sees that shift as dangerous. “For our community, it has a lot to do with a false sense of patriotism. Because we’ve been deprived of it for so long, we want to embody it. To finally say: ‘I’m proud to be of this nation.’ But that’s why some have sided with Trump. Honestly, a lot of it comes from internalized hatred.”Hearing Aiman, I thought of my own uncle, who also voted for Trump but never admitted it publicly. In our community, politics isn’t just about policies; it’s about belonging. What appears to be a small division within the Bhutanese diaspora reflects a broader erosion of the sense of home that many immigrants and communities of color once felt.Dhaurali, though, doesn’t believe the story ends there. “What Trump’s administration is doing is testing our solidarity, our sense of belonging,” she said. “No, I don’t think I can ever stop believing. Especially with this community I’ve grown up in. I believe my generation is going to be the bridge between these old fears and the future we genuinely deserve.”Lok Darjee is a former Bhutanese refugee and freelance journalist covering politics, immigration, democracy and identity. More

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      Trump’s absurd Tylenol claims heighten the suffering of pregnant women in the US | Moira Donegan

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr continued his futile search for a single pharmaceutical cause of autism on Monday, when the Trump administration claimed that distorted recent studies and misstated scientific evidence to allege a link between women’s Tylenol use during pregnancy and the development of autism in children. Kennedy has long spoken with disturbing disgust about autistic people, claiming at one press conference that autistic children “destroy families” and “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” He had previously pledged to find the cause of autism by this month.As part of his apparent quest to eliminate this vast and varied group of people – who do, in fact, pay taxes, hold jobs, play baseball, write poems, go on dates, and function as beloved and caring members of functional families – Kennedy has already sought to restrict access to common vaccines. In June, he fired every member of the advisory committee on immunization practices, an influential group of vaccine experts whose recommendations had long shaped policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In place of the experts, he reconstituted the panel with a number of vaccine critics and cranks, whose incompetence has led to chaotic meetings and bizarrely changing vaccine recommendations. Donald Trump has recently joined his health secretary in casting aspersions on childhood vaccines – safe and effective treatments that have saved countless lives and are among the more wonderful miracles of human innovation. “It’s too much liquid,” the president said of the early childhood immunizations on Monday. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing, when you look at it.”Trump’s remarks came at what was supposed to be the debut for Kennedy’s new tactic: discouraging pregnant women from taking a common over-the-counter medication to ease pain or reduce fevers. At a rambling and shambolic press conference issued from the White House, Trump was unambivalent in his unproven assertions of the drug’s dangers. “Taking Tylenol is, uh, not good,” Trump said, flanked by Kennedy and Dr Mehmet Oz. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.” The president also offered his opinion that the weight-loss drug Ozempic doesn’t work, offering that his friends who take the drug are still fat. Kennedy, his face an uncanny color, stood awkwardly behind Trump, wearing a suit jacket that was visibly too small and with his head hanging slightly to the side; he looked a bit like a bored child at a prep school assembly. “Don’t. Take. Tylenol,” Trump continued, addressing pregnant women. “And don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born.”There is no evidence suggesting that Tylenol causes autism. A small number of studies have shown a correlation – not a cause – between acetaminophen use and incidents of neurological development disorders in early childhood. But these studies, aside from being inconclusive in their results, are also flawed in their methodologies: because pregnant women cannot be easily or ethically sorted into control groups, it is impossible for researchers to isolate Tylenol as a causal factor in the ensuing health of their children. There is as much evidence to suggest that those women whose children later developed autism got it from the Tylenol they took as there is to suggest that they got it because of a gust of wind, or because their mothers wore the color green. Fevers, however – which Tylenol is used to treat – pose proven risks to a fetus, and have been linked to cleft lip and palate, spina bifida, and congenital heart defects. “The conditions that people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus,” Dr Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.Pregnant women do not lack for judgmental, frightening and dubiously factual instructions about their health. Everywhere, they are told that they risk the health of their fetus by partaking in a series of banal everyday activities – be it jogging or having coffee or eating a certain cheese – that they are told will lead, by obscure mechanisms that are never quite explained, to impossible and devastating health outcomes for their children-to-be. The admonishments are multiple and often contradictory, but they all tend to agree on one thing: that it is always good for women to deprive themselves of joy and relief – and to suffer more – for the sake of their fetuses.Health misinformation has thrived on the ignorance in which most women are kept about their bodies, particularly during pregnancy, and it feeds on the cruel combination of neglect and lack of interest with which many women have been treated by the medical system and the maximally judgmental and punitive treatment that they receive from others while pregnant. Frightened women, scared both for the health of their pregnancies and for the ways they will be blamed if something goes awry, seek out a way to secure a good outcome, and are met by charlatans, grifters and quacks who are happy to tell them lies in exchange for their attention and money. It is this very dynamic, fed like a sourdough starter in the damp and fecund social media environment of the pandemic, that Kennedy used to revive his own career after decades of scandal and disgrace.Now, this cynical exploitation of pregnant women’s fears, deployed to them at a time when they are most vulnerable, is coming from no less a place of authority than the White House itself.At the press conference, Trump advised pregnant women to simply endure their suffering. “A mother will have to tough it out,” he told them. Readers will forgive me if I posit that perhaps pregnant women in the US are already suffering enough. Six justices of the supreme court, three of them appointed by Trump himself, ruled in 2022 that they no longer have the federally protected right to terminate their pregnancies. The laws that have gone into effect since have cost several pregnant women their lives, as laws prohibit the medical interventions that could easily save them and allow them to die painful, premature and needless deaths. Other women have had their corpses desecrated for the sake of Trump’s anti-choice agenda, as hospitals and lawmakers use them as incubators against their will. Others are being forced to wait for care while they bleed and develop sepsis, risking their organs and their lives. The Trump administration has cut off Medicaid funding to some of the largest providers of sexual and reproductive healthcare, meaning many of the clinics that pregnant women rely on will now have to close. With doctors who provide gynecological and obstetric care fleeing states with strict abortion bans, many pregnant women in the US do not have access to competent medical care at all. As a result, more babies are being born sick, and more of them are dying. Women from states such as Florida report being forced to carry fetuses that have no chance of surviving, and then being forced to watch those infants suffer and die in the moments after birth. As Kennedy continues with his search for the causes of autism, his eugenic project will inevitably extract more and more coercion and violence on the bodies of pregnant women. Today’s fearmongering about Tylenol is only the beginning.It can seem darkly comedic at times how laughably incompetent Trump and his administration are. Kennedy’s ill-fitting suit; the president’s ramblings about his fat friends; the brazen indifference to truth in the absurd claim that Tylenol, perhaps the paradigmatic over-the-counter drug, is somehow this lurking danger. Trump’s idiocy and vulgarity give the lie to the pomp and dignity of his office; his now near-total capture of American political life mocks the promise of democracy. But pregnant women are not a punchline. Their hopes for their families, their fears for their bodies, their health, their comfort and their dignity – all of these are things Trump is willing to sacrifice at the altar of his own ego. Tylenol isn’t dangerous, but he is.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Charlie Kirk was a divisive far-right podcaster. Why is he being rebranded as a national hero?

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      The streets of Washington DC are unmistakable. In addition to noting the city’s signature architecture and public monuments, one will know they are in the nation’s capital when they can barely go half a city block without spotting a US flag. Two weeks ago, those flags were flying at half-staff, but not in recognition of the passing of a high-ranking public official, as would be customary. Instead, the half-staff was ordered by the White House in a highly politicized effort to memorialize the 10 September killing of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old podcaster, hard-right party operative, and Maga youth influencer, as an event of national tragedy.Kirk ruled over an online fiefdom peddling his signature brand of rage-baiting racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic commentary. It wasn’t just his vitriolic style, but also his popularization of cruelty, humiliation and dehumanization of political opponents – especially college students – that attracted millions to his audience. He famously said empathy was “a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage”.As a Black woman, I felt no sorrow watching these flags hang limp and lifeless from chrome posts in the stiff, humid summer heat that, even on the eve of autumn, will not unhand a city already stifled by federal threats of military occupation. I felt the same when, just hours after the shooting, the speaker of the House of Representatives called for a moment of silence on the floor for a private citizen who had never held office nor served in the military. (The brief silence erupted seconds later into a shouting match melee when congresswoman Lauren Boebert requested that members hold an open prayer for Kirk from the floor). Just nine days later, the House passed a Republican resolution eulogizing Kirk’s life with a sweeping 310-58 majority.I felt no mourning when seven teams in the National Football League – the very organization that has long been criticized for its inconsistent and often hypocritical stance on the place of politics in sports – held in-game memorials for Kirk, who never played any professional sport nor held a role within the league. In the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas, Jumbotrons featured a statesman-like image of Kirk, what one might expect for the passing of a former president or a longtime team affiliate. The grand gesture was drenched in hard-to-miss hypocrisy: forced silence from Black players who were punished for advocating for social justice in 2020, while, in the endzone, a painted astroturf read “End Racism” – a relic of just how fleeting the league’s lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement just a few years ago proved to be.I feel no grief because these memorials to Kirk are not created for me to grieve. Instead, they seek not only to enshrine Kirk into the national consciousness, but also to foster national memories about what he represents ideologically and culturally. The lionizing is an official effort to coalesce the state into his movement – a brazen proclamation that his consistently hostile white nationalist, homophobic and misogynistic convictions represent the federal government’s interests, and thus, what the presidency believes should be the national priority.It’s reminiscent of the long aftermath of the civil war, when Confederate memorials were fashioned well into the 20th century not by those seeking to grieve any one individual, but rather by those who wanted to send a message about racial politics in the present. Some people have settled comfortably into a belief that the recent years of anti-racism protests and organizing have successfully toppled enough of these Confederate monuments, that their white-washed histories collapsed with them. But memorials to Kirk conducted by the country’s most powerful institutions are evidence of the revival of a new iteration of neo-Confederate memorialization.Like the Confederate tributes and monuments of the past, current memorials to Kirk function to throttle any interrogation of their subject. Those who are elevated to the esteem of official national memorializing are commonly – although with notable exceptions –figures that the public agrees are beyond reproach. In honoring Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, for example, Bill Clinton sought to canonize the entire Civil Rights Movement for which she fought. It cemented the era as worthy of national honor because it telegraphed the meaning of democracy and freedom for all Americans.In contrast, with the insta-extolling of Kirk, Donald Trump, who has announced that his late close personal friend will be awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom, echoes the intentions behind Confederate memorials of yore. Instead of public recognitions that reflect the long march towards a national reckoning with our past, memorials like those for Kirk elevate his consistent record of hard-right extremism above the reach of public questioning.Kirk’s style of seizing upon those who challenged his ideologies and punishing his detractors is an agenda that has expanded well beyond Trump’s track record of punishing his personal and political enemies. Though I, like the majority of Kirk’s critics, do not condone his shooting, Kirk himself said gun deaths were “worth it” to maintain gun rights. While rhetoric this extreme, including his claim that Black women in government and media lacked “brain processing power”, is being euphemized in tributes as his “advocacy for free speech”, media figures and government employees who openly question if he should be publicly lauded are being fired from their jobs.Additionally, hundreds of college professors were doxed, harassed and threatened by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and its notorious “Professor Watchlist”, which published the names and information of any academics with views Kirk construed as incompatible with his own. It’s curious how a virtue like “doing politics the right way” can be afforded to someone who sought to devastate the lives of scholars and intellectuals.The aggrandizing of Kirk shares yet another, more lasting legacy with Confederate memorialization. The historian David Blight notes that in the aftermath of the civil war, the call for reconciliation between white northerners and southerners was achieved at the expense of erasing the legacy of slavery from the postbellum narrative. Thus, the reunification of the white citizenry was done wholly on southern terms and exacerbated the racial atrocities that were never addressed in the postwar era, leaving Black Americans to be wholesale lynched and terrorized throughout the south.Further still, reunification campaigns exonerated and elevated rebel insurgents who were, by definition, traitors and enemies of the state, to a status otherwise reserved for senior statesmen and decorated US veterans. It was a damning declaration that even those who sought to overthrow this country would be celebrated as its heroes before Black Americans would be treated as its citizens. The same tone is struck in the tributes to Kirk that exalt a highly controversial private citizen as though he were a national hero.Elected officials, journalists and public figures on the left who stress calls for unity do so on the right’s terms, and are reminiscent of the kid-gloved white northerners who sought to rebrand a war fought expressly over human trafficking and bondage into a national moment for celebration of duty, honor and valorous military service on both sides. Those who call for us to honor the life of a man who said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”, and who described Martin Luther King Jr, as “awful”, have betrayed those of us who heard Kirk espouse eugenics and replacement theory loud and clear, with such vast online influence that it prompted a 2024 investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The valorization of Kirk by his far-right defenders is an insult to millions of the most marginalized Americans who lived every day in the crosshairs of his rhetoric. Kirk’s memorialization by his supporters and apologists is but a new opportunity to announce an old message about whose country this is and whose it isn’t.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

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      Jimmy Kimmel is coming back. It’s proof that you still have power | Robert Reich

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      ABC says Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to the airwaves next Tuesday – less than a week after Trump’s henchman Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said on a podcast that Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people”.Carr threatened that the FCC could “do this the easy way or the hard way” – suggesting that either ABC and its parent company, Walt Disney, must remove Kimmel or the regulator would have “additional work” to do.Why Walt Disney Company’s turnaround? As it limply explained: “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.”But now, apparently, all is well.“We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”How lovely. How reasonable. How, well, kumbaya. All it took were some “thoughtful conversations with Jimmy” and everything returned to normal.Don’t believe it. In the days since ABC’s decision, the blowback against Disney has been hurricane level.At least five entertainment industry unions, with at least 400,000 workers, spoke out, with the screenwriters’ union charging Disney with “corporate cowardice”.Celebrities Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep called out “government threats to our freedom of speech”.Kimmel was supported by his late-night peers including Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver, all of whom blasted Disney and ABC with rapier-like humor.Jon Stewart devoted his show to a takedown of Disney’s cowardice.Disney talent was up in arms. Damon Lindelof, a creator of ABC’s Lost, threatened that if Kimmel’s show did not resume, he could not “in good conscience work for the company that imposed it”.Michael Eisner, a former Disney CEO, added a rare public rebuke.Even the rightwing Republican senator Ted Cruz expressed concern, suggested Carr was speaking like a mafioso and calling his threats to retaliate against media companies “dangerous as hell”.“We should not be in this business,” Cruz said. “We should denounce it.”By Monday, Carr himself was busy minimizing his role in the whole affair – denying he had threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC stations (it “did not happen in any way, shape or form”) – and putting the onus on Disney for having made a “business decision” in response to negative feedback from viewers.“Jimmy Kimmel is in the situation that he’s in because of his ratings, not because of anything that’s happened at the federal government level,” Carr claimed.But the most intense pressure came from us – from Disney viewers and customers – who immediately began to cancel subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.Some stars, such as Tatiana Maslany, star of Marvel’s Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Rosie O’Donnell urged people to cancel their subscriptions.But the consumer boycott seems to have begun almost immediately.Shortly after Kimmel’s suspension was announced, Disney stock dipped about 3.5%. It continued to trade lower in subsequent days. The loss in market value has amounted to about $4bn.Investors got the message. Consumers were upset, which meant they’d buy fewer Disney products and services – which meant lower profits.There’s never one single reason for the ups and downs in the value of a particular firm’s shares of stock, but the timing here has been almost exact.Bottom line: We consumers have extraordinary power. We’re the vast majority. Like every other big corporation – especially one selling directly to consumers – Disney relies on us.Even if we can’t count on our elected politicians to protect our first amendment rights, we can rely on ourselves. When our outrage translates into withholding our consumer dollars, a big corporation like Disney is forced to listen – and respond.Next time you’re feeling powerless, remember this.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now More

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      White House aide sworn in as interim US attorney after Trump fired predecessor

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      Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide, was sworn in on Monday as the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia after Donald Trump removed her predecessor who declined to bring charges against James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.The appointment of Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience and was the most junior lawyer on Trump’s personal legal team, alarmed current and former prosecutors about political pressure to indict the president’s political enemies regardless of the strength of the evidence.For months, federal prosecutors investigated whether there was sufficient evidence to act on referrals by Trump officials at other agencies against Comey, for lying to Congress about matters related to the 2016 election, and against James, for mortgage fraud over a house she bought her niece.The prosecutors ultimately concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against either Comey or James, leading Trump to issue a series of extraordinary social media posts over the weekend demanding that the justice department seek criminal charges regardless.Halligan was sworn in shortly after noon by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, at justice department headquarters, replacing Erik Siebert, who had declined to bring the prosecutions. Interim US attorneys can only serve for 120 days but Trump is expected to submit her nomination to the Senate for a full term.Halligan’s lack of prosecutorial experience was notable given the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia occupies one of the most sensitive posts at the justice department and oversees around 300 lawyers and staff. With the Pentagon and the CIA nearby, the office also handles sensitive national security cases.The officials who have historically been appointed as US attorney in the eastern district of Virginia have extensive experience in that office. The US attorney during Trump’s first term, G Zachary Terwilliger, had been a prosecutor there for years before being elevated to the top job.Before joining the White House, Halligan was an insurance lawyer in Florida and worked for the Save America Pac before joining the Trump legal team as the most junior lawyer, helping to draft briefs in the federal criminal case over Trump’s mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.A White House spokesperson defended Halligan’s appointment, saying in a statement: “Lindsey Halligan is exceptionally qualified to serve as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. She has a proven track record of success and will serve the country with honor and distinction.”Two of Halligan’s former colleagues on the Trump legal team on the classified documents case credited her as a fast learner who provided meaningful contributions in filings. Generally, they said, they were happy to have her on the team.Halligan was at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI executed a search warrant to retrieve classified documents and, as the Florida-barred lawyer on Trump’s team, she was responsible for filing a request to have a so-called special master conduct a review of the materials that had been seized.According to a person familiar with the episode, Halligan found her account on the Pacer was not set up to file the special master request electronically and had to deliver the brief in person.During the drive from Ft Lauderdale, where she was based, to the US district court in West Palm Beach, she got stuck in traffic on the highway and realized she would not make it to the courthouse before it closed for the weekend. Halligan did a U-turn and drove back to Ft Lauderdale, where the case got assigned to the Trump-appointed US district judge Aileen Cannon.Halligan attended the subsequent court hearing on the special master request as the third-chair lawyer, one of the only times she was at counsel’s table in a federal courtroom.Within months, Halligan was in Trump’s political orbit.When Trump hosted a watch party for the 2022 midterms at Mar-a-Lago, Halligan sat at Trump’s table with Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s longtime confidant and personal lawyer; Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy; and Sergio Gor, director of the White House presidential personnel office. More

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      Trump claims with little evidence that use of Tylenol, or acetaminophen, in pregnancy is linked to autism – US politics live

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      “Effective immediately the FDA will be notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen,” Trump struggled to pronounce the drug name, “or Tylenol, can be associated with a very increased risk of autism,” Trump said.“So taking Tylenol is not good.”“For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary,” he added.Donald Trump has responded to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists statement on Tylenol announcement, following a reporter’s question.“That’s the establishment. They’re funded by lots of different groups. And you know what, maybe they’re right,” he said. “But here’s the thing, there’s no downside to doing this.”Trump has returned to the podium, sharing a range of stories and his opinions on vaccines and medications.“Don’t take Tylenol,” he said emphatically. “There’s no downside.”According to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine untreated fever during pregnancy does carry significant risks to moms and babies, such as miscarriage and birth defects.The manufacturer of Tylenol, Kenvue Inc, has released a statement in response to the president’s announcement, saying it “strongly disagrees” with the suggestion that the medication may cause autism.“Sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism,” the statement says.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s leading organization for obstetricians and gynecologists, says Donald Trump’s announcement regarding Tylenol use in pregnancy is “irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients.”“Today’s announcement by HHS is not backed by the full body of scientific evidence and dangerously simplifies the many and complex causes of neurologic challenges in children,” the organization’s president, Dr. Steven Fleischman, said in a statement.“It is highly unsettling that our federal health agencies are willing to make an announcement that will affect the health and well-being of millions of people without the backing of reliable data.”Ahead of the president’s announcement, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine said Tylenol is “an appropriate medication to treat pain and fever during pregnancy.” It added that untreated fever during pregnancy carries significant risks to moms and babies, such as miscarriage and birth defects.The two mothers speaking at Donald Trump’s press conference have shared the experiences of their two children, both of whom have autism, and expressed gratitude to the Trump administration for prioritizing research into autism.Dorothy Fink, who served as acting health secretary pending Robert F Kennedy Jr’s confirmation and is now currently the acting assistant secretary for health, has introduced two mothers, introduced only as Jackie and Amanda.Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, says more than half of children in the United States, who are insured under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip), will be able to access leucovorin due to the FDA’s label change. He said he hopes private insurers will follow suit.He said the agency will also collect data on the effectiveness of leucovorin.Makary has also announced the FDA’s decision to make leucovorin available as a treatment for autism.“Hundreds of thousands of kids will benefit,” he said.“Today the FDA is taking action to update the label on acetaminophen,” says FDA commissioner Marty Makary. He added his agency is sending a letter to all physicians explaining the update.Makary has also cited medical research on the link between Tylenol and autism.Here’s a helpful guide to that research from my colleagues:The National Institutes of Health has launched an Autism Data Science Initiative, says agency director Jay Bhattacharya.The initiative directs $50m to the study of autism, and will fund 13 research projects.“The NIH has invested a lot of money to study autism over the years, but the research has not produced the answers that families and parents of autistic children, and autistic children themselves deserve,” he said. “For too long it’s been taboo to ask some questions for fear the scientific work might reveal a politically incorrect answer.”Kennedy says that the FDA has announced a new treatment for autism: leucovorin, a form of folic acid.The FDA published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the treatment, it cited “patient-level data on over 40 patients, including both adults and pediatric patients” to support the finding that the drug can improve symptoms from cerebral folate deficiency, which it says has been reported in some patients.Health and Human Services will announce a nationwide public service campaign to spread knowledge about the agency’s Tylenol announcement, Kennedy said.Robert F Kennedy Jr is speaking now at the president’s White House press conference. He’s begun by describing changes at US health agencies.”We are now replacing the institutional culture of politicized science and corruption with evidence-based medicine,” Kennedy said. “NIH research teams are now testing multiple hypotheses with no area off limits.”Trump has also announced that the National Institutes of Health will be announcing 13 major grant awards from the autism data science initiatives.“Nothing bad can happen, only good can happen,” he said. More

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      Trump officials unveil highly contentious conclusions on autism

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      The Trump administration unveiled highly contentious conclusions about the causes of autism, together with a push for research purporting to find a possible “cure” for the condition on Monday.After months of widely trumpeted investigations spearheaded by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump announced that pregnant women should limit their use of acetaminophen, usually branded as Tylenol in the US, which he claimed heightens the risk of autism when it used by pregnant women, an assertion hotly contested by scientists internationally and contradicted by studies.Speaking from the White House, flanked by Kennedy, the president said he had “waited for 20 years for this meeting … and added: “It’s not that everything’s 100% understood or known, but I think we’ve made a lot of strides.”But he declared: “Taking Tylenol is not good … All pregnant women should talk to their doctors about limiting the use of this medication while pregnant.”Kennedy followed, announcing that the health department and US Food and Drug Administration would work to change the label on acetaminophen risks.He also spoke about upcoming recommendations that the hepatitis B shot, currently given to newborns as part of the national vaccine standards, should be given in a delayed manner or in smaller doses, despite limited evidence of the impacts.The announcements were made by Trump amid a blaze of fanfare at the White House, in a ceremony attended by other senior administration figures.Trump, who has frequently voiced his concern over autism and said, along with Kennedy, that the US is suffering from an “epidemic”, flagged up a major initiative on Sunday at Charlie Kirk’s memorial in Arizona.“Tomorrow we’re going to have one of the biggest announcement[s] … medically, I think, in the history of our country,” he said. “I think you’re going to find it to be amazing. I think we found an answer to autism.”One in 31 children aged eight had a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – a condition denoting communication and social difficulties, along with repetitive behaviors – in the US in 2022, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That compares to about one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, who previously peddled the theory that the condition is caused by vaccinations, has attributed the rise to “environmental toxins”.However, specialists say the increase is mainly due to increased screening, combined with evolving definitions of the disorder. They have also said the causes are predominantly dictated by genetics.Scientists in the US and UK reacted to the Tylenol link sceptically, with British physicians denouncing it as “fearmongering” that risked stigmatising parents of children with autism.Speaking on a call organized by Defend America Action, a campaign group, Debra Houry, a former chief medical officer and deputy director at the CDC, told journalists: “As of three weeks ago, we hadn’t seen evidence that acetaminophen was linked with autism, so it’s curious to know how quickly that was developed.”“There are many studies which refute a link, but the most important was a Swedish study of 2.4m births published in 2024 which used actual sibling data and found no relationship between exposure to paracetamol [known in the US as acetaminophen] in utero and subsequent autism, ADHD or intellectual disability,” said Dr Monique Botha, associate professor in social and developmental psychology at Durham University“The fearmongering will prevent women from accessing the appropriate care during pregnancy.US medical practitioners also cast doubt on the putative link with acetaminophen.Dan Jernigan, another former CDC career scientist and former director of the national center for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases, criticised Kennedy’s efforts to study autism.“We were all asked to be a part of autism studies and to put together [an autism plan],” he said. We helped develop some of that. But then over time, what we saw was [Kennedy] having an increasingly top down approach, essentially ‘my way or the highway,’ with no regard again for the scientific processes.”Some researchers have also pleaded caution on hopes for leucovorin, which has been reportedly shown in some tests to trigger marked improvements in the speaking and understanding ability of some people with autism.Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist and autism specialist at the University of California, Davis, told the Washington Post that unrealistic expectations could lead to a loss of trust.“I worry that it feels like everything is now tainted that comes out of the current administration,” she said.Bruce Mirken, communications co-chair of Defend Public Health, poured cold water on the announcements in advance. “While we don’t know what he will claim today, we do know that Kennedy has a history of false statements related to autism and that the scientific evidence shows there is no ‘autism epidemic’,” he said.Additional reporting by Melody Schreiber and agencies More