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      ‘A Russian asset’: Democrats slam Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

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      Democratic lawmakers are slamming Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, saying their former House colleague is a vocal supporter of Russia who poses a threat to US national intelligence.Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado and a member of the House intelligence committee, told NBC News that he has “deep questions about where her loyalties lie”.“We get a lot of intelligence from our allies, and there I would be worried about a chilling effect,” he said.Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, told MSNBC on Friday: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”Abigail Spanberger, another House Democrat on the intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”Gabbard is just the latest of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to garner alarm over her nomination. Questions and criticism have been raised by members of both parties over the qualification of other Trump nominees, including representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.It’s unclear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be able to get through a Senate confirmation, even with the chamber’s Republican majority.Moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced reservations about nominees like Gaetz, who Murkowski said is not “a serious nomination”. Former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly said that “Gaetz won’t get confirmed”.“Everybody knows that,” he told Bloomberg.Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and was the first Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. She served in the military in Iraq and was once a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 primary campaign.She has since become a contributor on Fox News and said that she quit the Democratic party, which she said is run by an “elitist cabal of warmongers”. Gabbard has been a staunch critic of US foreign policy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard accused the US of running biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine – a falsehood often touted by Russia.Michael Waldman, president of the Brenna Center for Justice, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Trump’s cabinet nominations “seem designed to poke the Senate in the eyes”.“They’re so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” he said. More

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      In a gun-slinging, dick-swinging Trump vibe, it’s small wonder Die Hard appeals | Alison Phillips

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      Donald Trump’s appointments to his top team continue, as Rishi Sunak would have said, “at pace”. There’s a vaccine sceptic in at health, a misogynist as attorney general, a possible Russia sympathiser as director of national intelligence and first choice for defence is a Fox News anchorman. Oh, and the new US ambassador to Israel believes there’s no such thing as the West Bank.Yet what they may lack in intellectual rigour, moral rectitude and empathy, they more than compensate for in fake tans, chiselled jaws and mistresses. Where once Gordon Brown worked to build a “goat” (government of all talents), Trump is opting for a government of old goats. We could discuss the social, economic and cultural failings over two centuries of US history that have brought it to this place. But I’ve only got 400 words, so let’s talk Die Hard instead. (Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 obviously. Everyone lost interest by the last two.)Anyway, Pete Hegseth, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a Guantánamo Bay guard and New Year’s Eve countdown host for Fox News and is poised to be defence secretary if a previous sex assault allegation doesn’t scupper it, is a big Die Hard fan. His recent bestselling book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, is a deeply troubling rant about elites, where he condenses the world’s ills into that fateful Christmas Eve when something incredible was born. He writes: “Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard.“But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane – their ability to live in peace and prosperity has always depended on guys like him being honorable, powerful and deadly.” It’s easy for the left to snigger at the testosterone-fuelled, gun-slinging, dick-swinging vibe of this new Trump administration. But more than half the US population voted for it. Meanwhile, Die Hard remains one of the most re-watched movies ever. It’s time the left acknowledged the need for heroes. And time it reclaimed John McClane, the brave public servant from an immigrant family fighting the evil of global greed. More importantly, it needs to answer once and for all: is it really a Christmas movie?Score drawView image in fullscreenI’m slightly bemused by the outrage over Premier League referee David Coote. First, audio was revealed of Coote swearing about Liverpool FC and Jürgen Klopp. Then there was video of him snorting a “white powder”.It was a great exclusive for the Sun. Clearly Coote has been done up like a kipper and is in big trouble. But, but, but… Klopp, Liverpool fans and football fans more broadly have sworn at referees with just such language week in, week out – to their faces. And anyone who’s been near a Premier League stadium in recent years will know how much of fans’ excitement is being fuelled by an epidemic of “white powder”. A study in 2021 revealed one-third of fans had seen other supporters taking cocaine at matches. I’d say Coote was just making it a score draw.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTime to ex-X View image in fullscreenToday I am mainly going to be spending the day signing up to Bluesky. It’s time to become ex-X. It was an admirable step by the Guardian to quit Elon Musk’s X in the wake of the social media platform’s increasing ugliness. This will come at a cost in terms of traffic numbers – and potentially revenue – but is unquestionably the right thing to do. Even Stephen King has quit, calling the site “too toxic”. And he’s a man comfortable with horror.Recent months on X have felt like being locked in a King film. Or maybe a morgue staffed by creeps and ghouls. All that’s missing is the rubber shoes. But Musk is about to discover that in the media there is something worse than the wokery he despises, and that’s irrelevance. And it’s coming X’s way very soon. More

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      Loyalists and jesters fill Trump’s ‘winter White House’ for court of King Donald

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      View image in fullscreenThe shutters are down, the curtains are open, and Donald Trump’s opulent, waterfront palace of intrigue is open for business once more. A succession of ambitious, ultra-loyal subjects has paraded through, vying for attention and seeking favors from the throne. Servants fall over themselves to indulge their master’s every whim. And then there are the jesters …Given this week’s extraordinary developments at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, as he builds the cabinet with which he will govern in January, it is difficult to escape the notion that the operation is being run something akin to a royal court.Trump certainly gives the appearance of acting as America’s first monarch since the official end of the revolutionary war in 1783, plotting, scheming and playing favorites, and setting individuals against each other as his courtiers are assembled.His unexpected nomination as attorney general of the Mar-a-Lago regular Matt Gaetz, the controversial Florida congressman under investigation for sexual misconduct, was a power move that wrong-footed even his closest advisers, and threw a gauntlet to Republicans in the US Senate who must confirm the appointment.It followed Trump’s equally astonishing choice a day earlier of a weekend presenter from the rightwing TV station Fox News to be the US defense secretary in charge of the world’s largest and most potent military: Pete Hegseth, the ultimate entertainer who caught the eye of the king.Public health experts decried the choice of the vaccine denier Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary. And perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of all is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a billionaire who has been elected to precisely nothing, strutting around the expansive resort’s perfectly manicured lawns and flaunting his new bromance with the next supposed leader of the free world.Reports say Musk has accompanied Trump almost every day since the election, joining telephone calls to multiple world leaders, offering advice on policy and staffing decisions, playing golf with Trump family members, and dining with them on the open-air patio.Musk received a standing ovation from assembled guests on the other side of the red velvet rope, according to the New York Times, and joined Trump and the classical singer Chris Macchio in a cringy rendition of God Bless America at a Thursday night gala.On Tuesday, five days into his tenure as Trump’s most favored house guest, Musk was named joint head of the freshlycreated Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), where he will generate plans to “slash and burn” government spending. It remains to be seen if any proposed cuts extend to the billions of dollars in lucrative government contracts and subsidies enjoyed by his own companies, SpaceX and Tesla.“He loves Mar-a-Lago. Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him,” Trump joked to Republicans on Wednesday in his first return to Washington DC since the election, before adding ominously: “Until I don’t like him.”Observers say it is no surprise that these machinations are playing out at Mar-a-Lago, the $1m-a-head private members’ club haughtily branded his “winter White House” by Trump during his first term, where he handed out ambassadorships to wealthy friends and donors, and where he took policy advice from regulars written on cocktail napkins.“A lot of action will get done down there during Trump’s second term, as we’re seeing right now with the transition,” said the political historian Matt Dallek, professor of political management at George Washington University.“It’s really a hub. People come in and out of there all the time, he spends a great deal of time there, and as he famously likes to do, he has multiple people telling him different things and he talks to a lot of people.“He’ll be talking to his wealthy friends, and people who come to the resort from around the world to pay homage to him there. He partly likes it because it’s kind of a shrine to him, and it’s his best version of himself, his best vision of himself and the kind of power that he wants to cultivate. He loves the attention. He loves the people coming in and around him.”Dallek noted that Trump also thrived on the atmosphere of unpredictability his presence at Mar-a-Lago creates. This was evident this week by his unorthodox cabinet hiring and procession of hopefuls desperate for an interview in a hastily assembled war room at what CNN called the “chaotic epicenter” of his transition.“There’s a certain amount of chaos that has long surrounded Trump, that Trump really cultivates, and that is a core part of his political identity. And Mar-a-Lago has been a center of that chaos,” Dallek said.“It’s been a kind of hothouse of fringe figures who’ve come there. He dined there with Ye, the antisemitic rapper, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. There have been foreign spies who have attempted to penetrate the resort. It’s where he stored some of the most highly classified documents on the planet in his bathroom.“We don’t need to look very far back in time to get a sense of the goings-on, how freewheeling and just how bonkers it is. He’s dealing with these incredibly important matters of life and death, of national security, and doing it in this unsecured, chaotic atmosphere where people are coming and going all the time, and where some of his more memorable, and memorably unhinged, moments have occurred.”Dallek, and others, expect Trump to spend considerable time at Mar-a-Lago during his second term. During his first four years in office, the Washington Post calculated in 2021, he was there for all or part of 142 days, and played an estimated 87 rounds at his Trump International golf club in West Palm Beach. Mar-a-Lago’s 128 guest suites are always full when he is in residence.“It’s possible that some people just want to hang out with the president and the people who are around the president, but I think people were explicit about it and the first presidency was an opportunity to be able to tell him what your thoughts were, but also to seek favor,” Robert Weissman, president of the Washington DC-based pro-transparency group Public Citizen, told the Guardian in August.“There are profound and systemic issues regarding ethics, and big money, and access for the rich, but Trump is in a category by himself.”As well as operating Mar-a-Lago as his command center ahead of his second administration, Trump is also reaping a significant financial windfall.Mar-a-Lago is expected to be at full occupancy until January’s inauguration, and CNN reported that members had been offered money by outsiders eager to accompany them on to the grounds to get face time with him.Even after he takes office, return trips to Mar-a-Lago will keep Trump’s coffers swollen. In October, it was revealed that Trump properties had overcharged the Secret Service by 300% for rooms occupied by agents providing security for Trump and his family.“Of course it’ll be a money-making opportunity for him,” Dallek said. “Which he’ll never pass up.” More

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      US overdose deaths decreased in 2023 – will Trump continue this trend?

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      The Biden administration saw unprecedented levels of US opioid overdose fatalities, but those deaths are now declining faster than they have in decades – progress a second Trump administration could continue or threaten, experts say.The number of overdose deaths in the US declined for the first time in five years in 2023, and have continued to decline more rapidly this year, according to provisional data.Some of the decline may have resulted from Biden administration efforts to expand access to harm-reduction services, especially the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, which received over-the-counter approval for the first time last year. Public health experts worry that the second Trump administration will gut access to healthcare, including addiction treatment.The president-elect’s legacy on opioids is complicated. When Trump first took office, he inherited a rapidly escalating overdose crisis. Opioid overdose deaths more than doubled during the Obama administration,according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The three most recent presidential administrations have all failed to quell escalating opioid overdose deaths, which nearly doubled again during the Trump and Biden administrations, dipping slightly in 2018 but overall jumping by 62% during Trump’s first term in 2020. Under Biden, deaths increased by 19% from 2020 to 2022, to 81,806, before declining by 2% last year.At times, the Trump administration seemed to work against itself when it came to the crisis. For example, Trump repeatedly attempted to gut funding for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, although Congress blocked his efforts. Similarly, Trump was frequently in disputes with Congress over attempts to repeal elements of the Affordable Care Act and its expansions to Medicaid, which funds treatment for 40% of adults with opioid use disorder.Still, experts contacted by the Guardian within and outside the first Trump administration credit the president-elect for putting unprecedented focus on the crisis.Trump signed an executive order in 2017 forming the Presidential Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. Bertha Madras, a professor in Harvard’s psychiatry department who served on the commission, said it wasn’t until Trump “established the commission that a significant integrated national response materialized”.Adm Brett Giroir, who served as an assistant secretary in Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, says that he was given the authority to head up an unofficial “opioids cabinet … which met every week at the White House under Kellyanne Conway to make sure every department was working on this crisis”.Others praise Trump for supporting harm-reduction efforts, despite past opposition from his party.“President Trump publicly supported syringe services programs, a first for a Republican president,” said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general under Trump. Indeed, the Trump administration in some ways paved the way for the Biden administration’s response to the crisis. Access to naloxone expanded significantly under Trump, and even more under Biden.But despite these efforts, the number of US overdose deaths climbed for the majority of Trump’s first term. Giroir and Madras both attribute the huge overdose spike in 2020 to the Covid-19 pandemic, which overwhelmed the healthcare system and increased depression and suicide.Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, says the administration should have done more.“The first time around, President Trump did an excellent job of calling attention to the opioid crisis and designating it as a public health emergency,” he conceded, but he also said the then president failed to take sufficient action or establish a long-term plan.While the Trump administration allocated unprecedented amounts of funding to combat the crisis, Kolodny said the impact was limited, because states were usually given funds in the form of one- or two-year grants.“That’s not really adequate for building out a treatment system that doesn’t exist yet,” Kolodny said. “If you were to hire a whole bunch of staff, what would you do if you don’t get that appropriation the next year? Do you lay everybody off?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionExperts disagree on whether the administration spent too much of that funding on law and border enforcement, rather than treatment. Giroir supported harm-reduction and treatment expansion during his time under Trump, and is proud of his efforts to remove red tape and increase access to the opioid-cessation drug buprenorphine. Still, he says, “enforcement has to dominate the discussion”, because treatment is less effective than preventing addiction in the first place.Other experts say that criminalization only exacerbates the crisis.“Under Trump’s previous administration, they federally criminalized all fentanyl-related substances in 2018 – and overdose deaths increased from 67,367 that year to 70,630 and 93,331 in 2019 and 2020 respectively,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.Kolodny didn’t necessarily agree that criminalization drove the overdose increases, but he did say “the balance should be different” when it comes to prioritizing treatment over law enforcement. He said the best way to immediately reduce the overdose death count would be to make treatment “basically free” and overall easier to access than fentanyl.“[People with opioid use disorder] are not out there using fentanyl because it’s so much fun. If they don’t use, they’re gonna be very, very sick … People can really feel like they’re gonna die,” he said.It’s hard to predict how Trump will tackle the overdose crisis the second time around. He avoided the topic during his recent presidential campaign, and instead focused on inaccurate talking points about immigrants trafficking drugs across the border. He also falsely claimed he had never wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But a Republican-controlled Congress could cut ACA subsidies and Medicaid.Frederique worries that Trump will continue prioritizing drug arrests during his second term, but said during his first term “he also dedicated billions of dollars toward research, education, prevention and treatment. We are committed to supporting the Trump administration’s previous efforts to advocate for health approaches such as increasing access to treatment and naloxone.” More

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      Karoline Leavitt named as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary

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      Donald Trump named his White House press secretary on Friday, placing Karoline Leavitt, a 27-year-old firebrand from his inner circle, in position to aggressively defend him.The job of the White House press secretary typically is to help inform the American people about presidential activities without betraying the confidence of the boss.“Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator. I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium …, ” the statement read.The challenge for Leavitt will be to impart reliable information and gain credibility with reporters, while maintaining strong loyalty to Trump. Leavitt has been seen as a staunch and camera-ready advocate for Trump who is quick on her feet and delivers aggressive defenses of the president-elect in television interviews.In a June interview on CNN’s This Morning, Leavitt became embroiled in a heated exchange with host Kasie Hunt, bashing Dana Bash and Jake Tapper for their “biased coverage” of Trump before the highly anticipated debate between him and Joe Biden. Bash and Tapper had been moderators for that debate. Hunt abruptly ended that interview after Leavitt refused to be deflected.Leavitt will be the youngest person ever to hold the title of White House press secretary. Ron Ziegler was previously the youngest press secretary at age 29 when Richard Nixon gave him the position in 1969.Leavitt, a New Hampshire native, was an assistant press secretary during the latter part of Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021.When Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, Leavitt became communications director for Elise Stefanik, the Republican US representative, who has been tapped by Trump as his US ambassador to the United Nations.Leavitt ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives from New Hampshire in 2022, winning the Republican primary. She lost the general election to Democrat Chris Pappas, but the experience appeared to give her valuable experience with public speaking.She joined Trump’s 2024 campaign and has been the chief spokesperson for the president-elect’s transition team.Trump had four press secretaries during his 2017-2021 term: Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders, Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany. Spicer got off on the wrong foot with the White House press corps at his first appearance in 2017 after falsely claiming that the crowd gathered in Washington DC for Trump’s inauguration had been “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”.Spicer was replaced after just sixth months in the role, making his tenure the sixth-shortest since the position was created in 1929, according to data from the White House Transition Project. The average term is just under three years.Sanders, who is now the Republican governor of Arkansas, got praise from Trump for her parrying with the press corps.After Sanders left, Trump turned to Grisham, who never held a briefing, which she said was at Trump’s direction. Grisham resigned after the events of 6 January 2021, and is now a sharp Trump critic.Trump’s last chief spokesperson at the White House was McEnany, who sparred with reporters during the pandemic year of 2020 and is now an on-air personality at Fox News. More

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      Two Trump cabinet choices in jeopardy over sexual misconduct allegations

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      The confirmation prospects of two of Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet choices were in jeopardy over sexual misconduct allegations on Friday in developments mirroring the president-elect’s own history of abusive behavior towards women.Uncertainty surrounded the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice as defense secretary – whose path to Senate confirmation was already complicated over concerns about his inexperience and extreme views – following revelations that police in California investigated a sexual assault allegation against him in 2017.No charges were pressed. But the allegations were sufficiently serious for Trump’s newly appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to reportedly speak to Hegseth after she learned of them on Wednesday evening, the day after his nomination.According to Vanity Fair, which initially reported the story, the incoming president’s own lawyers also talked to Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and army veteran who has railed against – among other things – women serving in military combat roles.The disclosure compounded the controversy over Matt Gaetz, the far-right Florida congressman nominated as attorney general despite having faced a two-year Department of Justice investigation over sex-trafficking allegations. They included allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old minor.Republican and Democratic senators pressed on Friday to see a House of Representatives ethic committee report into Gaetz’s conduct that was commissioned despite the criminal investigation ending without charges.Gaetz forestalled Friday’s scheduled publication of the report – the contents of which were widely expected to be damaging to him – by resigning from the House immediately after Trump announced his nomination on Wednesday. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has also said he would “strongly request” the report not be published.But the report’s existence could still in effect torpedo his nomination after senior senators – including Republican John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Senate judiciary committee – demanded that it be preserved for use in Senate confirmation hearings.The inquiry was originally launched in 2021 to investigate whether the congressman “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House rules, laws, or other standards of conduct”.Trump is believed to have picked Gaetz as the ideal candidate to conduct a wholesale purge of the justice department, against which he harbors bitter grievances for pressing criminal investigations into his conduct during his first presidency.Hegseth, likewise, has been selected with a view to purging the armed forces, which he has accused of being hampered by “woke leadership”.His prospects of doing so seemed to be clouded by disclosure of the 2017 investigation, which stemmed from an alleged incident at the Hyatt Regency hotel and spa in Monterey, California, which was hosting a Republican women’s conference.The Monterey city manager’s office confirmed the investigation in a brief statement, adding that the alleged incident occurred between midnight on 7 October 2017 and 7am the following morning.Hegseth reportedly told Wiles and the Trump legal team that it stemmed from a consensual encounter and described the allegation as “he said, she said”, Vanity Fair reported.The magazine’s website also quoted a source as saying Hegseth had not been vetted. This was countered by a source in Trump’s transition team, who said: “Hegseth was vetted, but this alleged incident didn’t come up.”The dispute over vetting followed separate reports that standard FBI background checks on some of Trump’s most controversial nominees – designed to uncover past criminal activity and other potentially disqualifying liabilities – had been set aside.The questions over the sexual behavior of his nominees echo Trump’s own past. The president-elect was ordered to pay $83m damages to the writer E Jean Carroll last year after a New York jury in a civil trial found him liable for sexual assault and defamation. Carroll alleged Trump raped her in 1996, which Trump denied.His candidacy in the 2016 presidential election was almost derailed following the emergence of an Access Hollywood tape from more than a decade earlier in which he boasted of using his celebrity status to grab women’s genitals.Sexual misconduct allegations have also dogged Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s selection as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. A former babysitter for his children alleged that Kennedy groped her in his home in 1998. Kennedy responded to the accusation, again reported in Vanity Fair, by saying: “I’m not a church boy.” More

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      Environmental groups alarmed as Doug Burgum picked for US interior secretary

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      Donald Trump’s nomination of North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, as the interior secretary has prompted swift backlash from environmental advocacy groups alarmed at the incoming administration’s plans to use federal lands for oil and gas drilling.Trump also announced in a statement on Friday his intention to make Burgum chair of a National Energy Council he intends to form to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE” and to focus on “the battle for AI superiority”.Burgum, a former businessman, has been governor since 2016 of North Dakota, which is the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country. Burgum, if confirmed by the Senate, would manage US federal lands including national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as oversee relations with 574 federally recognized Native American tribes.Major concerns have loomed over the country’s wildlife refuges and public lands as Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term. Throughout his campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said “drill, baby, drill” and has vowed to carve up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska’s northern tundra for oil and gas drilling.The Sierra Club, the country’s largest non-profit environmental organization, said: “It was climate skeptic Doug Burgum who helped arrange the Mar-a-Lago meeting with wealthy oil and gas executives where Donald Trump offered to overturn dozens of environmental rules and regulations in exchange for $1bn in campaign contributions.”The April meeting at Trump’s club earlier this year prompted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the country’s top ethics watchdog, as well as House Democrats, to investigate the dinner over constitutional and campaign violations.“If that weren’t disqualifying enough, he’s long advocated for rolling back critical environmental safeguards in order to let polluters profit. Doug Burgum’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep and, if confirmed to this position, he will surely continue Donald Trump’s efforts to sell out our public lands to his polluter pals. Our lands are our nation’s greatest treasure, and the interior department is charged with their protection,” the Sierra Club continued.Similarly, the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation policy organization focused on land and energy issues across the western states, said: “Doug Burgum comes from an oil state, but North Dakota is not a public lands state. His cozy relationship with oil billionaires may endear him to Donald Trump, but he has no experience that qualifies him to oversee the management of 20% of America’s lands.”It went on to add: “If Doug Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.”The Center for Biological Diversity equally condemned the nomination, saying that Burgum would be a “disastrous secretary of the interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBurgum was not always aligned with Trump’s extreme climate agenda. He has said he believes that climate change is real and in 2021 had called for North Dakota to be carbon neutral by 2030, advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions.At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.“Could be worse for sure,” said Jared Huffman, a progressive Democrat of California and senior member of the House natural resources committee who has championed climate action. “I look forward to trying to work productively with him.”Burgum’s views on matters outside of climate and energy, however, have long been reactionary. He signed a number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ people in North Dakota, including ones that banned gender-affirming care for minors, restricted drag shows, and banned trans people from using bathrooms and shower facilities that match their gender identity in prisons, domestic violence shelters or state university families. More

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      RFK Jr could have disastrous global impact on public health, experts fear

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      The appointment of a US health secretary with anti-vaccine views could cause deaths and have profound consequences around the world, global health experts fear.Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick for the position, has a history of spreading misinformation on vaccines and questioning the science of HIV and Aids.His nomination has been greeted with bemusement and alarm. One global health activist, speaking on background, said the move was akin to making the disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield, who falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism, the UK’s health secretary.Prof Sir Simon Wessely, a regius professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, said of the move: “That sound that you just heard was my jaw dropping, hitting the floor and rolling out of the door.”Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said there was real concern that Kennedy might use the platform “to pursue the same anti-science positions on life-saving public health interventions that he has advanced previously”.He added: “If this makes families hesitate to immunise against the deadly diseases that threaten children, the consequence will be fatal for some.”Prof Beate Kampmann, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the measles vaccine had averted more than 60m deaths worldwide in the last 25 years.“Progress will be rapidly lost in societies where vaccine hesitancy is promoted – as I fear will be the case in the US if Kennedy is appointed,” she said. Beyond US shores, the influence “could swing either way”, she said. “My worry is that polarisation on the topic will further increase.”The US is a huge force in global health as the largest funder and the home to many big pharmaceutical companies and leading health research institutes. The decisions of its regulators, such as the Food and Drug Administration, are closely watched by their equivalents elsewhere.Some of those institutions are likely to be disrupted by Kennedy’s pledge to “clear out corruption” at US health agencies and potentially eliminate entire departments. But the impact of a Trump administration on global health will be broader than any policies pursued by Kennedy alone. Trump could reinstate plans to withdraw from the World Health Organization and is almost certain to cut funding to UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency that works in many poorer countries.As under all Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan, NGOs expect there to be a “global gag rule” banning recipients of US health funding from performing or promoting abortions anywhere in the world, which will potentially expand to cover even recipients of humanitarian aid.Kennedy’s stance on vaccination is being watched warily. Globally, routine vaccination coverage has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. Lower immunisation rates led to a 20% annual increase in measles cases in 2023.Kennedy has previously made common cause with anti-vaccine groups overseas. In June 2019 he visited Samoa, where the measles vaccine was being blamed for the deaths of two babies a year earlier. It later emerged that the deaths had been caused by incorrect preparation of the vaccine mixture.Immunisation rates halved to 31% and not long after his visit a measles outbreak ended up infecting more than 57,000 people and killed 83, including children. Even as the outbreak raged, Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister suggesting it might have been caused “by a defective vaccine” rather than inadequate coverage. Kennedy said previously he bore no responsibility for the outcome.His nomination was greeted with cautious civility in Berlin, where Kennedy made a name for himself as a coronavirus sceptic during the pandemic. The health minister, Karl Lauterbach, a qualified doctor, offered his congratulations but couched it in language that made his scepticism clear. “Here’s to a constructive collaboration. Will certainly not be just easy. But the choice of the voters is to be respected,” he wrote on X.Kennedy managed to enter Germany in 2020 despite tight travel restrictions in order to address coronavirus sceptics at a rally in the capital. He became a hero of the so-called Querdenker anti-coronavirus conspiracy theorist group, speaking to a demonstration attended by about 18,000 people.Kennedy drew parallels between his presence in Berlin, as a “fighter against totalitarianism”, and his uncle John F Kennedy’s appearance there in June 1963 during the cold war when he said the city had previously been a front against totalitarianism.On Friday, individuals and groups linked to the Querdenker movement welcomed the appointment, with some claiming Kennedy would “save the rest of the world”.The Hartmannbund association of German doctors voiced its concern about the overall effect a Trump presidency could have on Germany’s healthcare system. Its chair, Klaus Reinhardt, warned of the potential impact of any trade war between the US and Europe on the supply of medicines, saying issues over tariffs could greatly increase health costs and the individual contributions currently required by Germany’s health insurers.Scientific leaders say another pandemic is inevitable and that while during the Covid-19 pandemic Trump’s Operation Warp Speed aided the development, approval and mass manufacture of vaccines in record times, similar US leadership under Kennedy appears less likely.On other issues, experts are waiting for more detail on Kennedy’s plans. He has pledged to tackle chronic diseases and address the issue of overly processed foods. Leadership in those areas could be welcome in a world where diabetes rates have doubled in the past three decades.Many global health activists said they would agree with Kennedy that big pharma has questions to answer, but that companies should not be falsely accused of making vaccines that harm people; rather, they should be asked why so much of the world does not have access to affordable medicines. More