2025-11-24 02:41:39
Back in February, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) went to great lengths to justify his decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary.
Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, demanded, among other things, that if confirmed, Kennedy would ensure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website did not edit a webpage stating that vaccines do not cause autism.
Of course, under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC did just that this week, as my colleague Kiera Butler covered:
Among other dubious assertions, [the new webpage] informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Despite Kennedy’s flagrant flouting of this apparent agreement with Cassidy, the senator still cannot seem to directly criticize him, or own up to the fact that he played a key role in elevating a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic with no medical training to head the country’s health agencies.
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cassidy refused to face the facts when host Jake Tapper said, “Dr. Cassidy, he lied to you.” Instead, Cassidy doubled down on the very message that Kennedy is undermining: “Vaccines are safe,” he insisted. “That’s the most important message.”
After Tapper pressed him, asking if he was worried about the impact the CDC website could have on Americans’ decisions whether or not to vaccine, Cassidy conceded that the messaging was a problem, but still refused to name Kennedy as its source or express regret over confirming him. “Anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe and that, if you don’t take them, you’re putting your child or yourself in greater danger, anything that undermines that message is a problem,” Cassidy said.
He proceeded to downplay the importance of the website, claiming that he has “never met any parent who wasn’t a pediatrician as well who actually reads the CDC website”—even though, as Tapper pointed out, Cassidy made it a condition of Kennedy’s confirmation that he would not edit the website. After more tough questioning from Tapper, Cassidy conceded: “[The changes to the website] are important, because you need to send the consistent signal that vaccines are safe.” He then pointed to an asterisk that remains on the site, which says: “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with [Cassidy] that it would remain on the CDC website.”
So, in case you’re confused about all this hair-splitting: Yes, the updated webpage now dismisses the claim that vaccines do not cause autism—contradicting the site’s own (correct) heading. This is apparently the extent to which Cassidy managed to reign Kennedy in.
Changes to the CDC website were not the reason Kennedy made even more headlines this week. There was also the heartbreaking essay from his cousin, Tatiana Schlossburg, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, in which she revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis and excoriated Kennedy for defunding cancer research and clinical trials and attacking vaccines and medications she benefitted from. The 35-year-old mother of two and daughter of former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy—who last year urged the Senate not to confirm Kennedy as HHS Secretary—wrote that she “watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”
Faced with Schlossburg’s unflinching criticism of her own family member, Cassidy still refused to directly criticize Kennedy. “Clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on the record saying something negative,” he told Tapper.
“I know it’s titillating,” Cassidy said later, “but I think we need to move beyond the titillation and actually what matters to the American people.”
Someone may want to tell him that includes protecting vaccines.
2025-11-24 02:29:38
Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.
A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.
What if you were able to just… read them like emails?
That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.
The uncanny execution—a boon to journalists, but so realistic it can leave you disturbed, as if slipping directly into Epstein’s life—was created by two Bay Area internet wizards.
The San Francisco Standard identified the duo as Luke Igel, an AI engineer, and Riley Walz, whom they describe as the city’s “favorite internet rascal.” Before Jmail, he was famous for, among other pranks, creating a website showing the exact locations of the city’s parking police by reverse-engineering the municipal ticket system to reveal, in almost real time, where tickets were being issued (an endeavor that worked for just four hours, according to The New York Times—enough to cement Walz’s internet stardom).
“Many people have made fun of how weird and quirky the whole delivery method was,” Igel told The A.V. Club, describing the Congressional email release. “Someone made an amazing indexed database of those emails using Google Journalist Studio. Problem is that once you click on this beautifully indexed document, it’s really hard to read a PDF. So we just decided to do that, to fix that.”
As The A.V. Club recounts:
To fix it, Igel and Walz used an LLM to convert the plain text in the PDFs back into an email format. Then, once the data was prepped, they used an app called Cursor, which, according to Igel, is an ‘amazing tool that allows you to use AI to code really, really fast,’ to ape Gmail’s aesthetics for a web app.
The two creators selected a list of commonly occurring senders and listed them on the site of their web app: Michael Wolff, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and Ken Starr among them. The inclusion of a “Random Page” button sweeps you into a random portion of the chronology.
While we wait for exactly what gets released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the president signed into law this past week, you can check out Jamil here. And of course, don’t forget Mother Jones’s investigation in which Leland Nally called everyone in Epstein’s notorious “little black book.”
2025-11-24 01:07:54
What will Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) do after her shock resignation from Congress in January, announced on Friday? Good question.
President Donald Trump, for one, already seems to be reversing course on their breakup. Not long after (again) calling her a “traitor” on Truth Social on Saturday, the president told NBC News he would “love to see” her revive her career in politics. (Ever one to put the feelings of others ahead of his own, Trump first advised, “she’s got to take a little rest.”)
But Greene is aggressively shutting the rumors of her return down. In response to a Time story claiming that Greene was considering running for president in 2028, the congresswoman wrote today on X: “I’m not running for President and never said I wanted to and have only laughed about it when anyone would mention it. If you fell for those headlines, you’re still being lulled everyday into psychosis by the Political Industrial Complex that always has an agenda when it does something like this.”
“Running for President requires traveling all over the country, begging for donations all day everyday to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, arguing political talking points everyday to the point of exhaustion, destroying your health and having no personal life in order to attempt to get enough votes to become President all to go to work into a system that refuses to fix any of America’s problems,” Greene continued. “The fact that I’d have to go through all that but would be totally blocked from truly fixing anything is exactly why I would never do it.”
Ever prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere—despite her recent mea culpas—Greene also said she doesn’t believe she would be allowed to ascend to the pinnacle of American political power even if she tried to: “The Political Industrial Complex has destroyed our country and will never allow someone like me or you to rise to power and actually solve the crises that plague all of us,” she wrote. “That would go against its business model.”
Earlier this year, Greene appeared to be considering a Senate run. But Trump claimed, in one of his break-up texts, he had dissuaded her from doing so, which Greene denied last week on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Senate,” she said last week. “I think the past two months of the government shutdown should have shown America exactly why I would never want to be there.”
For now, this is Greene’s story—that she’s done with politics—and she and her allies are sticking to it. A person close to Greene told NBC News: “It’s safe to say she’ll probably take a step back and be a private, normal person again.”
Time will tell.
2025-11-23 21:00:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
If you’ve spent any time on a roof, you know that it’s not especially pleasant up there—blazing in the summer, frigid and windy in the winter. Slap some solar panels up there, though, and the calculus changes: Shaded from gusts and excessive sunlight, crops can proliferate, a technique known as rooftop agrivoltaics. And because that hardware provides shade, evaporation is reduced, resulting in big water savings. Plus, all that greenery insulates the top floor, reducing energy costs.
Long held in opposition to one another, urban areas are embracing elements of the rural world as they try to produce more of their own food, in community gardens on the ground and agrivoltaics up above. In an increasingly chaotic climate, urban agriculture could improve food security, generate clean electricity, reduce local temperatures, provide refuges for pollinators, and improve mental and physical health for urbanites, among other benefits.
“This summer we had cucumbers that were the size of baseball bats, that were perfectly suited to the green roof.”
With relatively cheap investments in food production—especially if they’ve got empty lots sitting around—cities can solve a bunch of problems at once. Quezon City in the Philippines, for instance, has transformed unused land into more than 300 gardens and 10 farms, in the process training more than 4,000 urban farmers. Detroit is speckled with thousands of gardens and farms. In the Big Apple, the nonprofit Project Petals is turning vacant lots in underresourced neighborhoods into oases. “You have some places in New York City where there’s not a green space for 5 miles,” said Alicia White, executive director and founder of the group. “And we know that green spaces help to reduce stress. We know they help to combat loneliness, and we know at this point that they help to improve our respiratory and heart health.”
That makes these community spaces an especially potent climate solution, because it’s getting ever harder for people to stay healthy in cities due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment absorbs the sun’s energy and releases it throughout the night. Baking day after day during prolonged heat waves, the human body can’t get relief, an especially dangerous scenario for the elderly. But verdant patches reduce temperatures by releasing water vapor—essentially sweating into the neighborhood—and provide shade. At the same time, as climate change makes rainfall more extreme, urban gardens help soak up deluges, reducing the risk of flooding.
Oddly enough, while the oven-like effect is perilous for people, it can benefit city farms. On rooftops, scientists are finding that some crops, like leafy greens, thrive under the shade of solar panels, but others—especially warm-season crops like zucchini and watermelon—grow beautifully in harsh full-sun conditions. “Most of our high-value crops benefit from the urban heat island effect, because it extends their growing season. So growing food in the city is actually quite logical,” said horticulturist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies rooftop agrivoltaics at Colorado State University. “This summer we had cucumbers that were the size of baseball bats, that were perfectly suited to the green roof.”
That’s not all that’s thriving up there. Bousselot and her team are also growing a trio of Indigenous crops: corn, beans, and squash. The beans climb the corn stalks—and microbes in their roots fix nitrogen, enriching the soil—while the squash leaves shade the soil and reduce evaporation, saving water. In addition, they’ve found that saffron—an extremely expensive and difficult-to-harvest spice—tolerates the shade of rooftop solar panels. Water leaving the soil also cools the panels, increasing their efficiency. “We’re essentially creating a microclimate, very much like a greenhouse, which is one of the most optimal conditions for most of our food crops to grow in,” Bousselot said. “But it’s not a system that needs heating or cooling or ventilation, like a greenhouse does.”
Growers might even use the extreme conditions of a rooftop for another advantage. Plants that aren’t shaded by solar panels produce “secondary metabolites” in response to the heat, wind, and constant sunlight that can stress them. These are often antioxidants, which a grower might be able to tease out of a medicinal plant like chamomile—at least in theory. “We are sort of exploring the breadth of what’s possible up there,” Bousselot said, “and using those unique environments to come up with crops that are hopefully even more valuable to the producer.”
Down on the ground in New York City, Project Petals has seen a similar bonanza. Whereas agricultural regions cultivate vast fields and orchards of monocrops, like grains or fruit trees, an urban farm can pack a bunch of different foods into a tight space. “If you could grow it in rural areas, you could grow it in the city as well,” White said. “We’ve grown squash, snap peas, lemongrass. In our gardens, I’ve seen just about everything.”
That sort of diversification means a cornucopia of nutritious foods flows into the community. (Lots of different species also provide different kinds of flowers for pollinators—and the more pollinators, the better the crops and native plants in the area can reproduce, creating a virtuous cycle.) That’s invaluable because in the United States, access to proper nutrition is extremely unequal: In Mississippi, for example, 30 percent of people live in low-income areas with low access to good food, compared to 4 percent in New York. This leads to “silent hunger,” in which people have access to enough calories—often from ultraprocessed foods purchased at corner stores—but not enough nutrients.
Underserved neighborhoods need better access to supermarkets, of course, but rooftop and community gardens can provide fresh food and help educate people about improving their diets. “It’s not only about growing our own veggies in the city, but actually too it’s a hook to change habits,” said Nikolas Galli, a postdoctoral researcher who studies urban agriculture at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
In a study published last month in the journal Earth’s Future, Galli modeled what this change could look like on a wide scale in São Paulo, Brazil. In a theoretical scenario in which the city turned its feasible free space—around 14 square miles—into gardens and farms, every couple of acres of food production could provide healthy sustenance to more than 600 people. Though the scenario isn’t particularly realistic, given the scale of change required, “it’s interesting to think about that, if we use more or less all the areas that we have, we could provide the missing fruits and vegetables for 13 to 21 percent of the population of the city,” Galli said. “Every square meter that you do can have a function, can be useful to increase the access to healthy food for someone.”
Without urgent action here, silent hunger will only grow worse as urban populations explode around the world: By 2050, 70 percent of humans will live in cities. Urban farms could go a long way toward helping feed all those people, and could indeed benefit from rural farmers making the move to metropolises. “They’re able to pass it on to the community members like me from New York City, who maybe didn’t have the expertise,” White said, “and helping them to find their way in learning how to garden and learning how to grow their own food.”
Whether it’s on top of a roof or tucked between apartment buildings, the urban garden is a simple yet uniquely powerful tool for solving a slew of environmental and human health problems. “They’re serving as spaces where people can grow, where they can learn, and they can help to fight climate change,” White said. “It’s so good to see that people are starting to come around to the fact that a garden space, and a green space, can actually make a bigger impact than just on that community overall.”
2025-11-22 23:07:08
In an interview published Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times that he’d personally directed the CDC to put a new page on the agency’s website, casting doubt on the fact that vaccines don’t cause autism.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told the Times, lying. He added, “The phrase ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not supported by science.”
Kennedy employed confused logic in his conversation with the Times, telling journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg that he doesn’t believe there’s adequate proof to claim that vaccines don’t cause autism. “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism,” Stolberg wrote. “He is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”
Kennedy also claimed that he was merely offering a more accurate look at “the state of the science,” telling Stolberg, “I think the way to drive up vaccine utilization, ultimately, is to be honest with people,” he said, adding, “My job is not to gaslight Americans but to give them accurate information about the state of the science.”
It’s unclear what possible standard of evidence would satisfy Kennedy, who’s been a dedicated anti-vaccine activist since 2005. Dozens of studies both in the U.S. and internationally have made it clear that there’s no link between the aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and autism, including a landmark Danish study that followed 1.2 million children for 24 years. The study was published this summer in the Annals of Internal Medicine and also found no link between vaccines and a variety of other health conditions, including asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Kennedy has baselessly called for the study to be retracted, which he does not have the power to demand, and which the journal declined to do. According to Nature, the journal’s editor-in-chief Christine Laine wrote in a note on the study’s webpage that retraction “is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here.”
Kennedy’s directive has horrified CDC staffers, one of whom told my colleague Kiera Butler, “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” (As Butler wrote this week, the new “Vaccines and Autism” web page contradicts other information still available on the CDC website.) Public health experts told the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) that CDC’s guidance can no longer be trusted, creating an unprecedented challenge for Americans looking for accurate health guidance from their government.
While Kennedy’s version of the CDC focuses on reviving false claims about vaccines, the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status. Measles cases are at their highest level in three decades, with 45 outbreaks so far this year nationwide. According to—for now—the CDC, in 92 percent of those cases, the patient’s vaccination status was listed as either “unvaccinated” or “unknown.”
2025-11-22 20:58:03
In a stunning announcement posted to Twitter/X on Friday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that she will resign her seat in the House on January 5, 2026. The announcement comes after Greene publicly skirmished with Donald Trump over the release of the Epstein files. Trump has responded by calling her a “traitor,” a “lunatic,” and “wacky,” saying he’ll refuse to take her phone calls, and that he’ll consider supporting a primary challenger against her.
In her announcement, Greene decried Trump’s attacks on her, writing, “Loyalty should be a two-way street.” Greene also said she’s being punished by Trump and the larger Republican Party for demanding a full release of files related to dead pedophile and one-time Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein: “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for.” Lurid to the last, Greene also said she refused to be, as she put it, “a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”
“If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well,” Greene wrote (caps hers).
As first noted by journalist Will Sommer, Greene’s announcement also declared “There is no ‘plan to save the world,’” which is the title of a viral 2018 video by a well-known QAnon promoter. Greene repeatedly promoted QAnon conspiracy theories both before and after becoming a member of Congress, but has intermittently disavowed those beliefs of late years, most recently during an early November appearance on ‘The View.’
“There is no ‘plan to save the world’ or insane 4D chess game being played,” Greene wrote in her announcement, referring to QAnon believers’ claims that Trump is enacting a complex, hidden plan to bring a powerful pedophilic cabal to justice.
Greene first took office in January of 2021, quickly establishing herself as part of the most radical and conspiracy theory-addled wing of the Republican party. Before her first candidacy, Greene spent a lot of time on Facebook posting hateful, racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and otherwise toxic viewpoints, which included suggesting the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were hoaxes, and appeared to support committing political violence. Things did not improve after she began serving as an elected official: she promoted stolen election conspiracy theories and appeared as a surprise speaker at a 2022 conference organized by white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, then pretended she had simply no idea how she’d found her way there or about Fuentes’ background and beliefs.
Since Trump was reelected and took office for the second time, Greene has tempered her Trump sycophancy and even offered public criticisms of him. She’s also espoused what are seen as more progressive views, including calling the war in Gaza a “genocide” this summer. Greene has also been vocal in her calls to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein in full; days ago, she appeared at a press conference with several Epstein survivors and called Trump’s handling of the scandal “destructive” to MAGA.
“Watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart, and the only thing that will speak to the powerful, courageous women behind me is when action is actually taken to release these files, and the American people won’t tolerate any other bullshit,” Green said.
In her retirement announcement, Greene was clear that her plans to retire are directly linked to Trump’s attacks, writing, “I have too much self-respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”
In a recent Instagram Live video talking to her constituents, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) offered a different explanation for Green’s rebellion against Trump, saying that because Greene wanted to run for Senate “and Trump said no.” AOC dubbed Greene’s recent behavior a “revenge tour;” Greene responded by calling AOC “really jealous” of her.
Trump responded to Greene’s announcement early Saturday morning on TruthSocial, dubbing her “Majorie ‘Traitor’ Brown,” for some reason, and adding: “Her relationship with the WORST Republican Congressman in decades, Tom Massie of Kentucky, also known as Rand Paul Jr. because he votes against the Republican Party (and really good legislation!), did not help her. For some reason, primarily that I refused to return her never ending barrage of phone calls, Marjorie went BAD. Nevertheless, I will always appreciate Marjorie, and thank her for her service to our Country!”
Greene didn’t give any indication in her announcement of what she plans to do with her sudden abundance of free time. Under federal law, by retiring after five years in office, Greene will be leaving precisely when she’s eligible to collect retirement benefits.
