U.S. News

Donald Trump has launched a mobile phone service and $499 gold smartphone, the latest monetization of his presidency by a family business empire now run by his sons.

The Trump Organization unveiled Trump Mobile on Monday with a $47.45 monthly plan – both the service name and price referencing Trump as the 47th president. The company will also sell a gold-cased “T1” smartphone in September etched with the American flag.

The venture will be headed by his sons Donald Jr and Eric Trump, who took over the company after Trump transitioned to his second presidency. The mobile service joins Trump-branded watches, sneakers and Bibles as products capitalizing on his political brand, with the Trump sons indicating that more is to come.

“We are going to be introducing an entire package of products where people can come and they can get telemedicine on their phones for one flat monthly fee, roadside assistance on their cars, unlimited texting to 100 countries around the world,” Donald Trump Jr said at the Monday morning announcement at Trump Tower in New York.

And where's this phone being put together? Guessing it's going to be exempt from tariffs, but not because of domestic production.

Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Who even comes up with this shit?

There's not really an excerpt I can paste that covers the full extent of the grift, so I'll let it be an exercise for the reader just how bad this is.

San Francisco-based Wildtype will be the first company to launch cultivated seafood in the US after securing an FDA ‘no questions’ letter regarding the safety of its cell cultured salmon.

Wildtype is the fourth cultivated-protein producer to complete a US pre-market scientific and safety consultation after UPSIDE Foods, GOOD Meat, and Mission Barns, and the third to have full approval to sell (Mission Barns is still awaiting the final go-ahead from the USDA for its cultivated fat).

It will debut its wares at the James Beard award-winning Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday nights in June, then every day starting in July, before expanding into four additional restaurants.

Not going to provide an excerpt here, as this is a developing story.

It's nonetheless of import.

The “No Kings Day” nationwide rallies against Donald Trump/for democracy on Saturday turned out millions of people.

That’s per a collective crowdsourcing effort led by Strength In Numbers, and involving many members of the independent data journalism community. We systematized reports from official sources, accounts from the media, and self-reported attendance from thousands of social media posts into a single spreadsheet. (Researchers, please take our data!)

As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday. Organizers say 5m turned out, but don’t release public event-by-event numbers.

As super-contagious measles continues to spread and nears a six-year U.S. record, cases in its original epicenter of West Texas may be subsiding as hesitant residents become more concerned and willing to vaccinate, while North Dakota is a new focus with the highest rate of any state.

The reality of measles may be overcoming vaccine misinformation in some areas, despite the purge of experts from decision-making roles in the Trump administration under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The nation’s top vaccine expert resigned under pressure in March.

In West Texas, where outbreaks are concentrated, the city of Lubbock hasn’t seen a new case in 20 days, said Katherine Wells, public health director for the city. The area is east of the largest Texas outbreaks, which were centered on a Mennonite community with religious objections to vaccination.

Wells attributed the recent success to a combination of more vaccinations, public awareness campaigns and willingness to stay home when sick to avoid transmission.

In North Dakota, however, the state’s 34 cases give it the highest rate in the nation, followed by New Mexico and Texas, according to the North Dakota Public Health Association, a nonprofit health advocacy group that published an analysis of individual states’ data on Facebook. The state’s first case since 2011 was reported May 2.

For years, the Los Angeles County jail has been known as the United States’ largest mental health institution.

An astonishing 5,901 people – nearly half of its population – struggle with mental health issues. In some parts of the jail, incarcerated individuals in quilted robes are chained to metal tables so they can’t harm themselves or others. For years, the U.S. Department of Justice has been monitoring the jail system – also the nation’s largest – to assess its mental health care.

And yet it’s making progress, particularly with a peer-to-peer program called Forensic Inpatient (FIP) Stepdown that the Monitor reported on four years ago. Since then, the nascent program has grown more than sixfold overall, spreading to the women’s jail. Incarcerated people trained as mental health assistants are helping hundreds of others with severe mental illness who are held at the same facility. The California state prison system – long under federal court orders to improve mental health care – is taking notice. Many familiar with the county program see it as a national model.

Local news stations identified the victims as state senator John Hoffman and state representative Melissa Hortman. Both are members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. There is little information on the suspect at this time.

Two law enforcement officials told CNN the suspect is 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Officials found a “manifesto” identifying “many lawmakers and other officials” in his vehicle, police said. A law enforcement official told CNN Boelter works for a security company.

Kennedy named microbiologist Robert Malone to the reconstituted advisory committee. Malone contributed to research that eventually would pave the way for the development of mRNA vaccines. He claims—falsely, experts say—to be the creator of the RNA technology at the heart of prominent COVID-19 vaccines. During the pandemic he became a leading voice against that technology, a star on right-wing media platforms who spread false claims alleging, for one example, that mRNA COVID vaccine maker Moderna had admitted that its vaccines can insert DNA into genomes and cause cancer. According to Factcheck.org, the claim led to social media posts saying the shots could cause “turbo cancer.”

Another appointee, Vicky Pebsworth, a registered nurse and PhD, is a board member of the anti-vaccine advocacy organization National Vaccine Information Center, described in the Washington Post as “the oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group” in the United States. The group has advocated for expanded exemptions from school vaccine requirements; has made anti-influenza vaccine advertisements; and, according to a 2019 Post report, was at the “forefront of a movement that has led some parents to forgo or delay immunizing their children against vaccine-preventable diseases.” Pebsworth’s bio on the center’s website claims that her son was injured by vaccines he received when he was 15 months old.

Kennedy also appointed Martin Kulldorf, an epidemiologist, who claims he was fired from a position at Harvard for his opposition to COVID measures like lockdowns and vaccination requirements. He is one of the authors of a controversial manifesto, published in the fall of 2020, which called for sequestering the elderly and immunocompromised from COVID, a strategy the authors called “focused protection,” while opening society for other demographic groups. Critics said this would allow the virus to spread widely without the protection that vaccines would be able to offer.

In a bid to confront mounting food insecurity, the City of Chicago announced last year that it was exploring the creation of a municipally-owned grocery store, an unprecedented move for a major American city. The proposal was a response to the persistent exodus of private grocers from the city’s South and West Sides, where decades of disinvestment have left entire neighborhoods with few reliable options for fresh, affordable food.

But by February, the city shifted course. Citing difficulties in securing a qualified operator, a requirement for state funding, officials under Mayor Brandon Johnson revealed that the city will instead pursue a public market. The new plan envisions a space that provides basic groceries while supporting local farmers and small vendors.

For now, it is grassroots, community-driven markets that are filling the void. Often under-resourced but deeply embedded in their neighborhoods, these efforts have proved to be among the most nimble and enduring responses to a crisis that large grocery chains have repeatedly failed to address.

Well, that's fucking ominous.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has ordered the state’s national guard to deploy to the city of San Antonio ahead of immigration-related protests planned for this week, saying the soldiers are “on standby”.

Abbott posted on social media early on Wednesday that the national guard “will be deployed to locations across the state to ensure peace & order. Peaceful protest is legal. Harming a person or property is illegal & will lead to arrest.”

The Texas national guard, he added, “will use every tool & strategy to help law enforcement maintain order”.

Abbott’s move to mobilize troops follows Donald Trump’s decision on Saturday to send the California national guard into Los Angeles after some limited and mostly peaceful protests against immigration raids. California leaders described the sending of the troops, and then 700 US marines, as a deliberate provocation.

Prior restraint, but with guns!

On a glimmering May morning, Tom Briggs pilots a 45ft aluminium barge through the waters of Casco Bay for one of the final days of the annual kelp harvest. Motoring past Clapboard Island, he points to a floating wooden platform where mussels have been seeded alongside ribbons of edible seaweed.

“This is our most productive mussel site,” says Briggs, the farm manager for Bangs Island Mussels, a Portland sea farm that grows, harvests and sells hundreds of thousands of pounds of shellfish and seaweed each year. “When we come here, we get the biggest, fastest-growing mussels with the thickest shells and the best quality. To my mind, unscientifically, it’s because of the kelp.”

A growing body of science supports Briggs’s intuition. The Gulf of Maine is uniquely vulnerable to ocean acidification, which can impede shell development in mussels, clams, oysters and lobster, threatening an industry that employs hundreds of people and generates $85m to $100m (£63m to £74m) annually.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the main driver of declining ocean pH, increasing the acidity of the world’s oceans by more than 40% since the preindustrial era and by more than 15% since 1985. Add carbon runoff from growing coastal communities, regular inflows of colder, more acidic water from Canada, and intense thermal stress – the Gulf of Maine is warming three times faster than the global average – and you’re left with a delicate marine ecosystem and key economic resource under threat.

Enter kelp. The streams of glistening, brownish-green seaweed that Bangs Island seeds on lines under frigid November skies and harvests in late spring are a natural answer to ocean acidification because they devour carbon dioxide. Sensors placed near kelp lines in Casco Bay over the past decade have shown that growing seaweed changes water chemistry enough to lower the levels of carbon dioxide in the immediate vicinity, nourishing nearby molluscs.

This is why we can't have nice things.

The mayor is still making remarks.

archive.is link

Outro officially launched in the US last month and is currently available in seven states, including California and New York. The startup is betting that many of the growing number of Americans taking antidepressants will eventually want help coming off them. Over 11 percent of US adults took medication for depression in 2023, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey, which found women were more than twice as likely as men to use the drugs.

About one in six people who stop taking antidepressants experience side effects like nausea and dizziness, especially if they do so abruptly, according to one study. Other research has found the prevalence of adverse withdrawal symptoms may be much higher, particularly among patients who have been on them for long periods.

For a monthly fee starting at $125, Outro pairs patients with a clinician who meets with them on a custom schedule—often weekly or monthly—and guides them through a tailored tapering program. Outro currently employs a small group of medical contractors, including nurse practitioners specializing in psychiatry and general nurse practitioners, who are supervised by psychiatrists. For now, patients pay for the service entirely out of pocket, but Goode says Outro plans to start accepting insurance soon.

Outro’s program is currently focused specifically on drugs often prescribed for depression, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Lexapro and Prozac, and serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) like Pristiq and Cymbalta. In the next year, Goode says, the company is planning to expand beyond antidepressants and begin offering tapering programs for stimulants and benzodiazepines, two classes of drug that are commonly prescribed in the US for issues like anxiety and ADHD and are known to cause intense withdrawal symptoms.

Politico’s new AI product has generated garbled or made-up Washington intelligence, including a lobbying effort by a fictional basket-weaver guild, the outlet’s unionized staff has complained.

Last year, Semafor first reported that Politico was working on a new product with Capital AI: a new AI tool for its high-paying subscribers that promised to allow them to instantaneously generate detailed reports on topics with information collected by Politico’s reporters.

Earlier this year, Politico’s editorial union filed a complaint against the company over its use of AI, which editorial staffers said violated language in their contract that stipulated that if AI is used, it “must be done in compliance with POLITICO’s standards of journalistic ethics and involve human oversight.”

In several examples printed out and shared in Politico’s Rosslyn, Virginia, newsroom last week, staff pointed to instances where the tool appeared to garble the publication’s reporting, or generate reports filled with completely made-up information.

A wave of bills in state legislatures across the country aim to classify climate-heating methane gas as a source of “green” or “clean” energy to prevent communities from transitioning away from fossil fuels — and secretive dark money groups connected to the gas industry are behind the effort.

The legislation could threaten the enforcement of climate policies across the country, allowing gas to stand in for clean energy in states’ renewable energy portfolios or otherwise thwarting local efforts to phase out reliance on fossil fuels. As methane emissions increasingly drive climate change, the bills would disguise the devastating environmental impacts of the powerful greenhouse gas — while the Trump administration caters to fossil fuel-backed donors on federal gas policy.

State officials say the bills are necessary to protect local economic development tied to a major local source of energy. But the legislators didn’t come up with the idea on their own: The rebrand originated from model legislation introduced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative lobbying network funded by large corporations. And, in at least one case, the effort is being pushed by the gas industry itself to further entrench states’ dependence on gas.

ALEC has a reputation for providing pro-corporate model legislation to legislators, including many bills designed to obstruct climate action. In recent years, the group has drafted bills to blacklist companies that boycott the fossil fuel industry and criminalize protests of fossil fuel infrastructure.

archive.is link

As 2025 began, the stars were aligning for a housing market rebound.

Inflation was easing, the economy looked strong and mortgage rates were drifting downward. By April, there were more available homes to buy than at any time since January 2020, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. The conditions were ripe for buyers to re-emerge, checkbooks in hands, and sellers to negotiate.

Then on April 2, President Trump rolled out his expansive global trade tariffs, shocking the stock and bond markets and sparking fears of a recession. Mortgage rates jumped again, hitting 6.89 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate loan on May 29, their highest level since early February. The extreme volatility threw cold water on a fragile market. Buyers bailed out.

“There isn’t any urgency to buying right now — if anything it feels more risky to put a down payment into a home when you might not have a job six months from now,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin.

Real estate agents across the country report a chilled environment, with sellers unwilling to lower their prices and buyers reluctant to make a big purchase as the economy flounders and the costs for a mortgage, insurance and property taxes rise. Even in markets where prices have fallen and inventory is piling up, like Austin, Texas, homes are sitting on the market for months. In fiercely competitive areas, like the New York City suburbs, where prices are still rising and homes sell fast, properties that would have gotten a dozen offers a year ago now get two or three.

Yet despite a market full of reluctant buyers, sellers are not under pressure to drop their prices. Almost 60 percent of households have an interest rate below 4 percent, according to a study published in the Journal of Finance; selling would mean trading that low rate for a much higher one on a new purchase. Not since the 1980s, when borrowing rates soared into the double digits, have so many Americans been locked into their mortgages, said Lu Liu, an assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an author of the study, describing the conditions as “unprecedented.”

Added to that, the country hasn’t built enough homes since the foreclosure crisis, creating a chronic lack of new housing supply that drags down the market and keeps prices high. “There is no panacea in sight,” Dr. Liu said.

I'm violating my own rules here, but the media are not keeping up with developments, so I'm having to wing it.

Helicopter 1

Helicopter 2

These are chemical containers being unloaded from both helicopters. The commenters on Reddit are far more qualified than I am to extrapolate, but at the base level, the government flying them into the middle of a city is ... troubling.

Linked via the Street Medics Discord.

In the leafy suburbs of Rockland County, New York, democracy tripped on a loose wire and hit its head. What started as a small lawsuit over a few missing votes may be unraveling into one of the most damning election integrity scandals in years.

At the center of it all: missing votes, statistical anomalies, and a federally accredited testing lab called Pro V&V, whose seal of approval may be worth less than the paper it’s rubber-stamped on.

In 2024, voters in Rockland County, NY, filed sworn legal affidavits claiming they had voted for independent Senate candidate Diane Sare. But the machines told a different story. In one district, nine people said they voted for her. The machines recorded five. In another, five claimed to vote for her but only three were officially counted by the machines.

At the same time, In districts where voters clearly favored Democrats (evident by strong support for democratic Senate candidate Kirsten Gillibrand) Kamala Harris’s name either underperformed or seemed to disappear from the top of the ballot completely. They’d found that in some of the counties people where voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate Kirsten, Kamala Harris somehow got no votes at all.

At the same time, Donald Trump raked in more than 750,000 votes above what Republican Senate candidates received on the exact same ballots. That would mean 750k people voted for him & skipped the rest of the Republicans on the same ballot. That kind of pattern doesn’t scream voter preference. It whispers something went wrong in the vote count itself.

Holy shit.