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      Why is much of the media ignoring questions about Trump’s health? | Margaret Sullivan

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      Prestigious news organizations gave scant attention when, for several days recently, Donald Trump faded from public view. Other than some social media posts and some blurry golf-course images, the normally ubiquitous president seemed almost to disappear.But most of Big Journalism gave that subject a pass.Given Trump’s obvious health problems – swollen ankles, an uneven gait, bruised hands and instances of verbal confusion – the media silence struck a lot of people as hypocrisy.“Why are the biggest newsrooms silent?” demanded John Passantino, who writes for the media newsletter Status. “No front-page write ups. No broadcast packages.” Trump’s health problems and near disappearance “barely registered in mainstream coverage”.By contrast, the media went overboard with unrelenting coverage of Joe Biden’s old age, but it came late. Almost all of it followed the then president’s shockingly weak debate appearance during his 2024 re-election campaign.There was plenty of finger-pointing – even a bestselling book by two media bigwigs – about the failures to report Biden’s decline earlier and about the White House’s efforts to obscure it.This time, over the Labor Day weekend, wild rumors swirled on social media that Trump had died, or had suffered a debilitating stroke or a series of them. The much-read Drudge Report published a story with this headline: PRESIDENT HEALTH CRISIS DEEPENS.Nevertheless, JD Vance seemed to target big media.“If the media you consumed told you that Donald Trump was on his deathbed because he didn’t do a press conference for three days, imagine what else they’re lying to you about,” Vance posted on X.That translated, for the gullible, into the usual trashing of the mainstream press, a regular talking point from Magaworld.In fact, big journalism was guilty of nothing of the sort; if anything, they took Trump’s disappearance too lightly.As is often the case with Trump and his allies, there’s a lot of projection going on.“Imagine what else they’re lying to you about” is something that might, much more accurately, be said about Trump and his minions on any number of subjects.Trump joined in, too. “It’s fake news – it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility,” he responded to a Fox News question that conveniently set up this round of media-bashing. (“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” asked Peter Doocy at a briefing after Trump re-emerged.)Nonsense, of course. Most of the mainstream media was overly cautious, if anything, in approaching the topic.When the New York Times did get around to covering the issue, the paper took up the topic obliquely – focusing primarily on the false rumors of Trump’s death and then, much lower in a long story, addressing the paucity of information about his actual health. The headline: President Trump Is Alive. The Internet was Convinced Otherwise.The story puts in historical context the tendency of White House staffs to obscure the physical problems of American presidents – from Woodrow Wilson’s stroke to John F Kennedy’s chronic back pain. Eventually, it makes the point that “justifiable concerns and questions about Mr Trump’s health have often been met with obfuscation or minimal explanation from the people around him”.(The White House in July explained Trump’s bruising and swelling as chronic venous insufficiency, but downplayed the condition as benign and common for older people; his doctor pronounced him in excellent health.)Even after an assassination attempt on Trump last year, no medical briefings were held. And, to my recollection, there was precious little investigative follow-up on that.Yet, amid all of this, the White House press secretary claimed that Trump has been “completely transparent about his health with the public, unlike his predecessor”.As usual, in Trumpworld, a lie outpaces the truth, and everything is Biden’s fault.So what does responsible media coverage of this topic look like? The question evokes the Goldilocks fairy tale: what’s too hot? What’s too cold? And what’s just right?“Evidence-based assessments of a president’s health are absolutely fair game” for journalists, Bill Grueskin of Columbia Journalism School told Associated Press media reporter David Bauder.And when someone as omnipresent in the media as Trump drops out of view for days? That’s fair game, too.With Trump now in his 80th year – he turned 79 in June – these questions are not going away. Rampant speculation certainly isn’t the answer, but it tends to flood in when there is a vacuum of real information.The unquestioning acceptance of White House reassurance isn’t the answer either.In good journalism, “just right” is founded on skepticism and addressed by persistence – by doggedly digging out the facts and presenting them forthrightly.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      RFK Jr’s anti-science agenda will be catastrophic for the United States | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Things seem to be going well at the CDC, the federal agency charged with protecting US public health. By “well” I mean terrible, thanks to the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not only is the agency in complete disarray under his leadership, but the secretary’s fringe agenda is now also putting the lives of everyone in the country at risk.Let me recount a few of Kennedy’s stellar accomplishments. He is, after all, a man labeled “a crown jewel of this administration” by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), a panel that has long developed scientifically based recommendations on the use of vaccines. Kennedy dropped them like a hot beaker and replaced them with new members, several of whom share his anti-vaccine views and half-baked skepticism of the most common mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.Covid is still with us, unfortunately, and the vaccines are helping us survive a dangerous reality. In fact, 14,660 people have died of Covid as an underlying or contributing cause so far this year alone. Yet, at his Senate hearing on Thursday, Kennedy was asked by Senator Jeff Merkley if he accepted the statistic that a million Americans had died of Covid since the outbreak began. “I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy responded. Meanwhile, the CDC’s own website, an agency he’s responsible for, tabulates the number of deaths as 1,234,371. At the same hearing, Kennedy also said he agreed with the statement made by one of his appointees to ACIP that “mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people”. Never mind that numerous studies have repeatedly shown the vaccines to be safe and effective.That’s not all. Getting that Covid booster shot will probably become significantly harder in the future. In late August, the Food and Drug Administration, also overseen by Kennedy, approved some updated Covid vaccines, but at the same time severely restricted who would be authorized to receive boosters. Last year, anyone over the age of six months was eligible. But this year, you must be over 65 years of age or have an underlying health condition that increases the risk of severe Covid-19 infection.We should have seen something like this coming. In May, Kennedy took the unprecedented unilateral move to remove Covid-19 booster shots from its recommended immunization schedule for pregnant women and healthy children. “Our healthcare system is now solidly anti-children and anti-science,” Fatima Khan, co-founder of the Protect Their Future group, which advocates for vaccine access for children, told CNN.Booster shots will still be available, Kennedy says. But what he’s not saying is that they will probably be a lot harder to find and afford. Private insurance companies generally base their decisions on covering the costs of vaccines by following government recommendations, and many states limit which vaccines pharmacists can administer based on those same recommendations. (California, Oregon and Washington recently announced an alliance to safeguard vaccine access.)The long and the short of it is that Kennedy is behind “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections”. This is what Susan Monarez wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Monarez served as the director of the CDC for a whole 29 days before she was ousted from her position. (Jim O’Neil, Monarez’s replacement, is unsurprisingly a Trump loyalist with no medical or scientific background.) The ACIP is scheduled to meet later this month, and will discuss among other topics the Covid-19 vaccines. Monarez wrote that in August she was told to “preapprove the recommendations” to be made by ACIP. She refused. In another statement made through her lawyers, she said she would not “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts”.Kennedy, of course, has done all those things. He fired 2,400 workers (about 18% of the CDC workforce), later rehiring about 700 people. He has “severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more”, according to nine previous directors of the CDC who sounded the alarm about Kennedy’s leadership in the New York Times. He downplayed the use of highly effective vaccines during the largest single measles epidemic in 25 years in this country while cheering on the use of home remedies such as cod liver oil or vitamins.It’s all so ideological and irresponsible, leading predictably to horrible consequences. There have been three confirmed deaths from the measles outbreak, but they are not the only victims. Our collective trust in the government is perhaps the main casualty. After Monarez was fired, four senior officials of the CDC resigned in protest at the politicization of the agency. More than 1,000 past and present workers of the Department of Health and Human Services signed a letter demanding his resignation and stating that “Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation”. We’re now living through a battle between sane scientists and zealous anti-vaxxers, and nobody knows who will win.What do anti-vaxxers and the rightwing get out of such politicization of public health? They live in the same country as the rest of us, after all. Do they feel somehow healthier knowing that Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, aims to end childhood vaccination against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis? I certainly don’t. Routine childhood vaccinations prevented about 508m cases of illness in the US between 1994 and 2023. And he’s getting rid of them? Madness.Ladapo claims that “what you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God”. OK. Fine. But none of us lives entirely alone, and your health affects my health, and vice versa. Living together means taking care of ourselves but also each other for our individual and collective wellbeing. It’s not rocket science. But it must be based on science.The right wing sees it otherwise. To them, the government response to Covid in particular and public health in general is leading us straight to “a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned”. The result? “Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose,” according to David Bell of the Brownstone Institute, a thinktank established to oppose Covid-19 restrictions.But this seems a lot more like projection than any semblance to reality. Recent scholarship tends to point in the opposite direction, showing how social instability from the world’s last major pandemic before Covid, the 1918 global influenza pandemic, helped pave the way for the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the Fascist party in Italy. One study found that “Mussolini’s newspaper tended to blame ‘others’ for the pandemic … and portrayed themselves as the voice of the common people against an out-of-touch ‘elite.’” Sounds familiar.Kennedy’s anti-science anti-vax agenda could have catastrophic health outcomes across the nation, helping fuel the rise of an even more extreme rightwing politics in the future. Could that result be what this government is even counting on? The idea sounds too far-fetched to be true, but I would also like to be alive when I’m proven wrong.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Why Trump is targeting Boston and its Democratic mayor as part of his ‘immigration enforcement blitz’

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      Tensions between Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, and the Trump administration have been escalating in recent months over the administration’s aggressive immigration policies, with reports now signaling the possibility of a federal immigration enforcement surge in the city.The friction came to a head last week when the Trump administration reportedly began preparing an “immigration enforcement blitz” for Boston in the coming weeks, according to Politico.The report, which cited unnamed current and former administration officials, prompted a swift rebuke from Wu, who has in recent months become a vocal defender of sanctuary laws and immigrant protections.“Unlike the Trump administration, Boston follows the law – city, state and federal,” Wu said in a statement. “We are the safest major city in the country because all of our community members know that they are part of how we keep the entire community safe. Stop attacking cities to hide your administration’s failures.”This standoff has been steadily building since March when Wu testified before Congress alongside three other Democratic mayors to defend their cities’ immigration policies – specifically so-called sanctuary city laws that limit state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Supporters of the laws, including local leaders and police chiefs in jurisdictions that have them, argue that these measures can help build trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement. Some studies have found that crime rates tend to be lower in sanctuary counties compared with those without such protections.Critics of these policies claim that sanctuary laws undermine federal law enforcement’s ability to arrest and deport individuals with criminal records.So-called “sanctuary cities” have become a central target of this Trump administration, as it pushes for mass deportations as part of its crackdown on immigration. In June, Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, sent letters to 32 US mayors, including Wu, demanding they end their sanctuary policies or face cuts to federal funding and possible legal consequences.Wu then issued a staunch defense of Boston’s policies in a letter to Bondi and in a subsequent press conference.“The City of Boston is the safest major city in America,” she wrote. “Our progress is the result of decades of community policing and partnership between local law enforcement and community leaders, who share a commitment to making Boston a safe and welcoming home for everyone.”The progress, Wu said, was in part a result of the city’s local laws, including the Boston Trust Act, which prohibits local police from engaging with federal immigration enforcement unless there is a criminal warrant and is “fully consistent with federal law”.“On behalf of the people of Boston, and in solidarity with the cities and communities targeted by this federal administration for our refusal to bow down to unconstitutional threats and unlawful coercion, we affirm our support for each other and for our democracy,” she wrote.After Wu’s remarks, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, said that the agency intended to “flood the zone, especially in sanctuary jurisdictions”.“Now you’re going to see more Ice agents come to Boston to make sure that we take these public threats out that she wants to let go back in the communities,” he said, vowing to make “America safe”.Patricia Hyde, Boston’s acting Ice field office director, echoed Lyons’s sentiment, warning that Ice was “not backing down” and that “the men and women with Ice, unlike Mayor Wu”, took an oath that they swore to uphold “to protect the cities and communities where we work and where we live, and that’s what we’re gonna do, despite the obstacles”.Wu fired back on social media and said she took an oath to uphold the US constitution, noting that she was sworn in with her hand on a 1782 Aitken Bible “also known as the Bible of the Revolution”.As the threat of federal actions looms, Wu said last week that her administration was actively preparing for the possibility of a federal national guard deployment. Such a move would mirror recent actions by the Trump administration in both Washington DC and Los Angeles.The administration sent national guard troops to Washington DC last month under the pretext of combating a supposed surge in violent crime – a claim that stands in contrast to the city’s current crime data. Earlier this summer, the administration also sent thousands of national guard troops to Los Angeles during protests against the administration’s immigration crackdown, a move a federal judge recently ruled as unlawful.“We are following what’s happening in other cities around the country very closely,” Wu told GBH’s Boston Public Radio last week. “Unfortunately, we have seen what it would look like if that should come to pass, and that this federal administration is willing to go beyond the bounds of constitutional authority and federal law.”Wu also said her administration was reviewing relevant legal precedents and working “very closely” with community members “to ensure people know what’s happening and that this is not something that is needed or wanted or legally sound”.She added that “in this moment, however we got here, every mayor of every major city is having to take preparations for the national guard coming in against their will”.Wu’s comments come as leaders in other Democratic-led cities around the country are also bracing for the possibility of national guard deployments or Ice surges in their communities.The Trump administration announced plans this week to ramp up immigration crackdowns and deploy federal agents to Chicago, sparking strong backlash from local leaders.On Thursday, JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, said he had been informed that expanded Ice operations would begin in and around Chicago this weekend, according to ABC News Chicago.Pritzker said earlier this week that he was “deeply concerned“ that Ice would target Mexican Independence Day celebrations on Saturday. So far, one independence day parade in North Chicago has been postponed. More

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      The cat mayoral race: meet 11 runners and riders in the US’s most furious – and furriest – election

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      In Somerville, Massachusetts, a community bike path has, in recent months, become a hotly contested political constituency. A cat with a distinctive black smudge on her nose, Berry, had been sighted on the path by a number of concerned neighbours, who reported her missing. But she wasn’t actually anywhere she shouldn’t have been – Berry is an outdoor cat who lives in the area – so her family put up a poster dubbing her the bike path’s “mayor” to let neighbours know not to worry. It wasn’t long though before things got out of hand. How come Berry got to be mayor, asked other pet owners?A heated election is now under way. There have been dirty tactics (at one point, Berry’s campaign sign was stolen), scandal (candidates were outraged when a local vet claimed to be “sponsoring” the race), and even death: Pirate, the candidate whose family took it upon themselves to set up the online ballot, died unexpectedly, mid-race. Voting (for Somerville locals only) ends on 5 September – and with 73 pets currently in the running, there’s plenty of choice. So who are the runners and riders?The incumbent: BerryView image in fullscreen“Make cats outside again,” reads Berry’s sign campaigning for re-election. The current mayor is a three-year-old black and white cat who can be found on the bike path “daily, when I’m not visiting my humans”, the literature says. She has a dedicated team of humans around her: seven-year-old chief of staff Amias and five-year-old chief canvasser Emmeline; as well as campaign manager Mallory, a 39-year-old scientist. Her team claims she has improved community morale and should she be elected, will “unite the community under cat supremacy”.The challenger: Orange CatView image in fullscreenOrange Cat is a seven-year-old ginger tom, whose owner, 42-year-old comedian Janet, says he is “pro-democracy and pro-free and fair elections” and is also “against rats”. His solution to Somerville’s rat problem is simple: he will “eat them”.The fan favourite: MinervaView image in fullscreenThe simplest – and most intriguing – sign to have appeared along the bike path features a one-word slogan: “CRIME”. This provocative message has won nine-year-old Minerva many supporters online – despite the fact that, as an indoor cat, she has never been seen on the bike path. “Her minions monitor the path for her,” say her owners. “CRIME” remains her sole policy.The bike-hater: CartwheelView image in fullscreenPerhaps controversially for a cat who wishes to be in charge of a cycle lane, six-year-old Cartwheel’s campaign has decreed that, “like all things starting with ‘B’ (buses, basketballs, brooms), bikes are scary, and there should be fewer of them on the bike path”. Cartwheel’s owner, 15-year-old Susan, says he is an advocate of “safe outside time for all cats”, and wears a harness and lead to venture out. In fact, he runs a harness lending library for other local cats and can also do tricks, such as using buttons to demand things from his humans.The duo: Clementine and NixView image in fullscreenTwo-year-old siblings Clementine and Nix are running for mayor and vice-mayor respectively. Their owner Lily, 11, says the pair’s goals are lengthy: “Catnip will be planted along the bike path”, “If a cat is napping they must not be disturbed” and “No one is allowed to pet a cat without the cat’s permission” are just some of the rules the pair would like to implement, should they be elected.The baby: ErnieView image in fullscreenAt just four months old, black kitten Ernie is the youngest candidate in the race. Though he hasn’t yet visited the bike path, his owners say his policies include “adopt, don’t shop”, “free kibble” and “universal pet health insurance”.The climate activist: HugoView image in fullscreenHugo, who was taken in by 61-year-old retiree Jenny, in January, is probably “about a year” old – but as a rescue cat, even he can’t be sure. Jenny says he has “a huge brain” and is “constantly trying to understand how things work” and would apply this to addressing the climate crisis so it’s never too hot for him and other cats to go outside.The one who is not a cat: PicositaView image in fullscreenAlthough the majority of mayoral candidates are cats, it wasn’t long before dogs began planting campaign signs, too. If elected, three-year-old chihuahua Picosita, who lives along the bike path, “will fight for bunnies, birds, and all the small neighbours who can’t bark for themselves”, her owner, 31-year-old data analyst Valerie, says. “Tired of fat cat politicians?” reads her poster. “I’m all ears.”The one who is not a cat or a dog: NagiView image in fullscreenSeven-year-old Nagi is the only tortoise on the ballot: His owner, 24-year-old Trader Joe’s crew member, Shay routinely travels along the bike path with Nagi in his pocket. Nagi’s policies, says Shay, are “centred on waste management” because he has “accidentally nibbled on some trash before.”The nepo-baby: KorbenView image in fullscreenPolitics runs in the family of five-year-old Korben Dallas, whose owner, Jake Wilson, is in the running to be Somerville’s human mayor. Wilson and Dallas have matching campaign posters: while Wilson runs on “Leadership. Values. Action”, Dallas’s slogan is: “Naps. Tuna. Pets”. Dallas’s owners, 14-year-old Ingrid and 11-year-old Margot, regularly use the bike path and report back to him (as he is an indoor cat) and say he is keen to put a speed limit on the community path, enforce the state-wide ban on motorised vehicles on bikeways and to deal with the rodent problems.The one who isn’t actually running for mayor: WasilView image in fullscreenFive-year-old Wasil doesn’t venture outside himself, but lives in an apartment overlooking the bike path – so runs “a 9-to-5 surveillance operation” from his window perch, according to his owners. He is not actually running for mayor, but has put himself forward for a newly created position: attorney general. Here, his focus would be on “keeping the streets safe “ as he has an excellent vantage point “for spotting both birds and wrongdoing”. His owners say he also wants to put an end to “body-shaming” as everyone who walks past his window says “Whoa, he’s so big!” More

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      Trump plans to sign executive order to rename Pentagon to ‘Department of War’ – as it happened

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      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will return on Friday. Among the day’s developments:

      The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.

      Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.

      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “department of war”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

      Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.

      As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.

      The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.

      New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
      As we reported earlier, during a contentious Senate hearing on Thursday, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was asked twice whether he agreed with Retsef Levi, an MIT professor the secretary appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), who has said that mRNA Covid vaccines “cause serious harm including death, especially among young people”.Kennedy said that he did agree with that statement, which Levi made in a video he posted on his X account in 2023, and has pinned at the top to this day.“I am filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time all Covid mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video, “because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level[s] of harm, including the death of young people and children.”Levi, who is Israeli, cited what he called evidence for this conclusion based on his reading of statistics from Israel’s EMS during its vaccination program in 2021. But he offered no scientific or medical evidence to support his claim, which is a fringe view not shared by the overwhelming majority or vaccine experts and medical doctors.It is worth stressing that both of the senators who asked Kennedy about that expert’s claim – Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator – referred to the new vaccine advisory board member as “Dr Levi”. That might have led some viewers to assume that Levi is a medical doctor, but he is not. He is a professor at MIT’s school of management, with a doctorate in operations research and no expertise in the science of infectious diseases or vaccines.It is unclear how Levi’s background qualifies him for a position on a vaccine panel responsible for making vaccine recommendations and whose members are supposed to be “medical and public health experts”.Donald Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.On his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk responded to a question about why he was not at the White House by writing: “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”Musk did not say who his representative was, but one of the guests was Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, until his nomination was withdrawn as Musk’s relations with Trump frayed.Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”As Donald Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, his labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, all have primary-residence mortgages on at least two properties, according to financial disclosure forms, real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media to ProPublica.Real estate experts told the non-profit investigative outlet that claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.But Trump has called for the prosecution of Cook, the Biden-nominated central banker, for allegedly having multiple primary-residence mortgages, and leveled the same charge against Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought a successful civil fraud case against Trump.Two days after an appeals court reinstated a Democratic member of Federal Trade Commission, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge, the justice department asked the supreme court to let Trump remove her again as the legal battle continues.The commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter, posted an image of herself back at work on Thursday, with the caption: “Back at my desk, back online, and have already moved to reinstitute the Click to Cancel Rule. Hope a majority of the Commission will join me – all Americans deserve to be protected from abusive subscription traps.”The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was adopted in October after the agency received more than 16,000 comments from consumers enraged about having to jump through hoops to cancel their enrollments.Implementation of the rule was delayed by the FTC in May, two months after Trump removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner.A federal appeals court vacated the rule on procedural grounds in July, just days before it was set to go into effect. Seven Democratic senators wrote to the new FTC chair that month, urging him to have the commission fix the procedural flaws identified by the court and reissue the rule.Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, just rejected Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claim, during a contentious senate hearing on Thursday, that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies.In an account of her firing published on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Monarez wrote that, at a meeting with Kennedy on 25 August:
      I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.
      When Kennedy was confronted with that accusation by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, at the Senate hearing, he denied that he gave Monarez that order.“No, I did not say that to her, Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her”, he added. “So there are witnesses to every meeting that we had, and all of those witnesses will say I never said that.”Kennedy was not asked if anyone else at the meeting did issue such an order to Monarez, which would be consistent with her account.Instead, Wyden asked Kennedy if Monarez was “lying today to the Wall Street Journal and the American people”.“Yes sir”, Kennedy replied.In a statement responding to Kennedy’s testimony, Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote: “Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she wrote in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions.”Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have already called for Monarez to be called to testify before the senate, which would be under oath.Hawaii announced today that it would join a new public health alliance formed by a trio of west coast states in response to the turmoil at the CDC.On Wednesday, the California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state had partnered with Washington and Oregon to form the West Coast Health Alliance, which they said would provide residents with science-based immunization guidance as the nation’s top public health agency – and a slew of red states – roll back long-standing recommendations medical experts and researchers have credited with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.“By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe,”Josh Green, theDemocratic governor of Hawaii, said in a statement.Green, an emergency room physician, said a science-driven approach was “critical as we all go forward into an era with severe threats from infectious diseases”.The Democratic governors of California, Oregon and Washington unveiled the new alliance on the same day that Florida’s Republican surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.The investigation, which followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the US attorneys’ offices in the northern district of Georgia and the eastern district of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s allegations, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her. Cook’s lawyer, prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, said the DoJ was scrambling to invent new justifications for Trump’s overreach in firing the Fed governor.“He wants cover, and they are providing it. The questions over how Governor Cook described her properties from time to time, which we have started to address in the pending case and will continue to do so, are not fraud, but it takes nothing for this DOJ to undertake a new politicized investigation, and they appear to have just done it again,” Lowell said.The case, which will likely end up before the supreme court, has ramifications for the Fed’s ability to set interest rate policy without regard to politicians’ wishes, widely seen as critical to any central bank’s ability to keep inflation under control.Trump has demanded that the US central bank cut rates immediately and aggressively, berating Fed chair Jerome Powell for his stewardship of monetary policy. The central bank is expected to deliver a rate cut at its 16-17 September meeting.In one of her recent legal filings challenging Trump’s actions, Cook said she listed mortgages on three properties on forms submitted to the White House and Senate in the vetting process for her appointment to the Fed in 2022. Any inconsistencies were known when she was confirmed and cannot give Trump grounds to fire her now.Cook is the third public official to be targeted in a criminal investigation over mortgage fraud allegations. Martin, who also presides over the “Weaponization Working Group” and serves as pardon attorney, is also pursuing criminal investigations into Democratic senator Adam Schiff as well as New York attorney general Letitia James.There are also grand juries convened in those two cases, which started prior to Martin’s new appointment as a special assistant US attorney, according to the source and documents seen by Reuters.The United States will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The plan comes in the broader context of Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” foreign policy, in which his administration has slashed foreign aid and is pushing European countries to cover more of the cost of their own security.The move, first reported by the Financial Times (paywall), comes as Russia’s war with Ukraine has heightened concerns in Europe about regional instability and the possibility of further aggression from Moscow. Key recipients of the funding include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Congress has approved funding for the assistance plan, which comes under the Department of Defense, but only through the end of September 2026. Trump’s administration has not asked that the program be extended, according to the FT report and confirmed to Reuters by one of its sources.Asked for comment, a White House official referred to an order Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term in January.“On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order to reevaluate and realign United States foreign aid,” the official said.“This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president’s longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defense,” the official said.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the decision misguided.“It makes no sense at all to undercut our allies’ defense readiness at the same time that we’re asking them to step up their own capabilities, and it puts American troops at risk when we slash the training of the allied soldiers they would fight alongside,” she said in a statement. 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      US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes investigation

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      The United States has imposed sanctions against three Palestinian human rights groups that asked the international criminal court to investigate Israel over allegations of genocide in Gaza, according to a notice posted to the US treasury department’s website on Thursday.The three groups – the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Ramallah-based Al-Haq – were listed under what the treasury department said were international criminal court-related designations.The groups asked the ICC in November 2023 to investigate Israeli air strikes on densely populated civilian areas of Gaza, the siege of the territory and displacement of the population.A year later, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, Yoav Gallant, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.Donald Trump’s administration has imposed sanctions against ICC judges as well as its chief prosecutor over the Israeli arrest warrants and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan.The ICC, which was established in 2002, has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in its 125 member countries. Some nations, including the US, China, Russia and Israel, do not recognise its authority.The US sanctions against the Palestinian groups come days after the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying the legal criteria had been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.Israel called the announcement disgraceful and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies”.Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, after fighters from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the territory, attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza.Since then, Israel’s war has killed 63,000 people, forced nearly all Gaza’s residents to flee their homes at least once, and set off a starvation crisis in parts of the enclave that a global hunger monitor describes as a famine. More

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      ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail can stay open, appeals court says

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      An appellate panel on Thursday put on hold an order to wind down operations at the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration center in the Florida Everglades, allowing its construction and operation to continue.Last month a federal judge in Miami had ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.That shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams built on a temporary restraining order she had issued two weeks previously, halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation, as well as environmental damage.The state of Florida, which funded and built the hastily-erected camp and runs it on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, then appealed.On Thursday afternoon, a three-judge panel in Atlanta decided by a 2-1 vote to stay Williams’ order pending the outcome of Florida’s appeal, saying the ruling was in the public interest.Ron DeSantis’s administration in late June had raced to build the facility on an isolated airstrip surrounded by wetlands to aid Donald Trump’s efforts to deport people deemed to be in the US unlawfully.The Florida Republican governor said the location in the swampy and remote Everglades was meant as a deterrent against escape, much like the infamous, now disused, island prison in San Francisco Bay that Republicans named it after.The US president visited the facility and praised its harsh environment for detainees, some of whom have accused the authorities of inadequate medical care and other poor conditions.The 11th US circuit court of appeals ruled in a split opinion that the Trump administration was likely to prevail in a legal battle with environmental groups that say the facility is endangering the fragile Everglades and its wildlife.Two judges sided with the Trump administration, and one judge dissented.
      The majority ruled that the project, funded by Florida, which is seeking reimbursement fees from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of Ice, did not trigger the kind of environmental review needed for federally funded construction projects.Although both DeSantis and the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, have said the federal government will pay for expanding the detention facility, there is no evidence that federal funds have been used for construction, the court ruled.The detention center cost about $250m to build and covers more than 18 acres. The facility is 37 miles west of Miami in a vast subtropical wetland that is home to alligators, crocodiles and pythons – imagery that the White House leveraged to show its determination to remove migrants – and also home to many rare birds, plants and creatures such as manatees.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More