Antarctic Sea Ice Decline Is Triggering Global Ocean Changes

Inside Climate News -  The rapid decline of Antarctic sea ice since 2016 has triggered a dramatic shift in a crucial part of Earth’s climate system, scientists say. In a paper published Wednesday, researchers documented a sharp salinity increase in a vast layer of the Southern Ocean, extending from 2,300 to 4,000 feet deep and encircling Antarctica. The shift reverses decades of freshening and echoes ocean changes usually associated with major global climate shifts over millennia but is now happening in just a few years.

The study combined six independent datasets to track changes in the Southern Ocean from 2004 to 2024. The data came from Argo floats, which drift through the ocean and periodically descend to different depths to measure water properties such as density and salinity, then resurface to transmit the readings. A 2025 study also detected increasing surface salinity linked to declining sea ice, he added.

Antarctic sea ice reached its highest extent in the satellite record in 2014 and suddenly dropped to a record low just two years later. The sea ice remained well below the 2014 extent and reached another low point in 2023, when it measured about 1 million square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average, with an area of ice about four times the size of Texas gone. As the ice dwindles, there’s less freshwater available during the melt season, making the Antarctic Intermediate Water saltier.

The role of cooperatives

Erbin Crowell, Green Energy Times -   The U.S. Department of Agriculture first proclaimed National Co-op Month in October 1964, reflecting the importance of co-operatives to America’s rural communities. Since 1971, the National Co-operative Business Association has continued this tradition, promoting co-ops as a trusted, proven way to do business and build resilient, inclusive communities.

Under the theme “Built for This Moment,” this year’s Co-op Month is a reminder that formal co-operatives were first organized to address the social and economic challenges of the Industrial Revolutions of the 1800s. Successive waves of co-op development have often responded to the market failures of their times, enabling people from all walks of life to work together to meet their needs. From electric co-operatives powering rural America when investor-owned corporations saw it as unprofitable to farmer co-ops supporting small family farmers locked out by corporate monopolies, worker co-ops securing livelihoods in unstable job markets, to credit unions enabling working people and immigrants to meet their financial needs, housing co-ops retaining affordable shelter amid rampant speculation to food co-ops building community food security, co-ops are a proven response to uncertain times.

In this sense, it may not come as a surprise that in 2016, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, recognized “the idea and practice of organizing shared interests in cooperatives” in its List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Established on the principle that global cultural heritage should be preserved and made accessible to everyone as part of its efforts to offer solutions to the challenges of our times, UNESCO’s list recognizes that co-operatives “allow for community building through shared interests and values creating innovative solutions to societal problems, from generating employment and assisting seniors to urban revitalization and renewable energy projects.” Interestingly, many of the other cultural traditions identified, including agricultural practices such as the Argan Tree Oil harvest in Morocco and irrigation systems in the mountain of Europe, and artisanal customs like Shital Pati weaving in Bangladesh and Pinta’o Hats in Panama, are largely maintained by co-operatives.

It was partly in recognition of this fact that the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) launched its “Cooperative Cultural Heritage Programme,” with the goal of creating a world map of co-operative sites and traditions. It was an inspiring experience to serve on the working group for the project, offering the opportunity to identify co-ops from North America to be included in the inaugural list, including Adamant Food Co-op in Vermont, founded in 1935 and the oldest continuously operating grocery co-operative in the U.S.

Many 30-year-olds in New York City feel worse off than their parents.

Donald Trump

Newsweek - President Donald Trump is officially banning the terms "AI" and "Artificial Intelligence," he said Tuesday, escalating his effort to rebrand the technology as "Super Intelligence," or "SI," across the executive branch. "When will The Wall Street Journal start calling Artificial Intelligence (AI), a very bad and inaccurate name, SI (Super Intelligence), the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "In short order, we will be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy."

Dementia growing

The Guardian - The number of people with dementia in the United States is projected to increase dramatically over the next 25 years, which will place increasing strain on a healthcare system already struggling to help them amid cuts by the Trump administration, experts say.

According to a new study in Jama Neurology, the annual incidence of new dementia cases globally will more than double, from 11.4m in 2023 to 24.7m in 2050. In the United States, the number of adults diagnosed with dementia each year will increase from 514,000 in 2020 to 1m by 2060, according to a Jama study published in 2024.

RFK's false attack on Arabs

The Guardian  - Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, faced backlash on Wednesday for a “wildly racist tirade” during a campaign stop in Michigan in which he falsely asserted that Arabs never won leading awards in science or literature.

Kennedy was speaking at the Monday night event in Grand Rapids in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican US Senate candidate trailing his Democratic midterms opponent Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, in polling.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the ?Nobel prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf prize, they don’t produce literature,” Kennedy said.

A factcheck published on Tuesday by the Associated Press showed that Arabs have won, or been shortlisted, for all those awards in recent years.

The ?Council on American-Islamic Relations called Kennedy’s Islamophobic remarks “a ?textbook display of ?unvarnished racism and bigotry”, and the US healthcare advocacy organization Protect Our Care condemned his “wildly racist tirade”.

Word

“Congress is dead. MAGA has a king. Republicans killed the Constitution. If we don’t win in November, democracy is over in America.”

 ‑ Governor Gavin Newsom

Voting

Maine Morning Star -  Tens of millions of Americans have already made their way to the ballot box as early voting is underway in a midterm election that will determine control of the House and the Senate, possibly flipping one or both from Republicans to Democrats.

As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 34 million people have either gone to the polls to cast a ballot or have mailed in their vote, and the current tally is on track to surpass early voting in the 2022 midterm elections, said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at University of Florida who runs the UF Election Lab that tracks early voting.

With one week until Election Day on Nov. 3, McDonald said he’s not sure if voters will surpass record-breaking early voting of 2018, but it’s clear that the surge in early voting will eclipse turnout in the 2022 midterm elections, where nearly 46 million Americans voted early, according to the UF Election Lab.

Trump sued over First Amendment

 Dan Froomkin - Press Watch -    I sued Donald Trump on Monday. I am one of six plaintiffs in this lawsuit, which argues that Trump’s new policy of banning reporters he doesn’t like from the White House press pool violates the First Amendment. The unique twist here is that we are suing on the grounds that by threatening and punishing journalists, Trump is also depriving us – the consumers of news – of our rights under the First Amendment.

That’s because freedom of the press doesn’t just guarantee the rights of the press – it also guarantees the public’s right to independent and uncensored information about what our government is doing. The founders enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment precisely so that the public would know what its government was doing – and could vote it out should it, say, become corrupt and despotic.

Corrupt Federal Elections Limits

2025-2026 Contribution Limits for Federal Elections

OPEN SECRETS

	Candidate committee (per election)	PAC 1 (SSF and nonconnected) per year	Party committee: state/district/local (per year)	Party committee: national (per year)	Additional national party committee accounts (per year) 2
Individual	$3,500*	$5,000	$10,000 (combined)	$44,300*	$132,900*
Campaign Committee	$2,000	$5,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
PAC (multicandidate)	$5,000	$5,000	$5,000 (combined)	$15,000	$45,000
PAC (not multicandidate)	$3,500*	$5,000	$10,000	$44,300*	$132,900*
Party committee: state/district/local	$5,000	$5,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
Party committee: national	$5,000 3	$5,000	Unlimited	Unlimited

Meanwhile. . .

The Pentagon is pressing Congress to keep measures in the annual defense policy bill that would formally authorize the name change from Department of Defense to “Department of War.”

Donald Trump

Alternet -  On Monday, a widely cited psychologist warned that President Donald Trump is displaying “more signs of apparent neurological decline.” According to Dr. John Garrison, the involuntary vocalizations, confusion, motor control problems,and inhibition problems Trump displayed at a string of rallies over the weekend could suggest seizure, dementia or some other neurodegenerative disease — and it’s getting worse.

While watching a recording of the rally, Garrison begins by noting “an involuntary vocalization” similar to other uncontrolled sounds Trump has been making while speaking lately. What’s more, the president simultaneously makes a number of twitching motions with his hands, arms and face that Garrison links to the vocalization, explaining, “I think this was all part of the same event, and in terms of what this event could be, we could be looking at seizure activity. We could be looking at a lesion in the brain related to having a stroke or something like that. We could be seeing effects of dementia. There are a wide variety of neurological possibilities when we're observing something like this.”

Alternet America - House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a 50-page report Monday that included testimony from 11 women who say Trump raped or sexually assaulted them in connection to Jeffrey Epstein….

The report identifies patterns of behavior shared by Trump and Epstein, including promises of university admissions used to control victims and follow-up contact made months after alleged assaults. Five of the women described Trump and Epstein as competitive in their pursuits, with Epstein reportedly punishing victims when Trump initiated sexual contact with them.

… Rep. Jamie Raskin, the committee’s ranking member, accused the DOJ of a cover-up, saying, “These women have spoken to investigators and, in some cases, testified under oath, yet Trump’s Justice Department has shut down investigations, deliberately withheld evidence and, through Todd Blanche, prevented Ghislaine Maxwell from discussing a survivor whose account implicated Trump.”

Time - In a statement, the White House denies the allegations and says that President Trump has been “fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.”

A report released Monday by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee examining President Donald Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein included new details from a woman who alleged Trump raped her in 1993. 

Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland finalist, alleged to Judiciary Committee staff that she was raped by Trump in a Plaza Hotel suite in Manhattan when she was 24. Keul said that while attending the American Dream Pageant, which had a partnership with Trump, she met with Trump at a press luncheon at the event. Trump, according to Keul, promised to arrange her visa in the U.S. and ensure her acceptance into New York University through his friend Paolo Zampolli, a close Trump ally who was, until earlier this month, part of his Administration. At the same event, she also spent at least 10 minutes talking to Epstein, who she said claimed to have organized “many parties with Don.”

Later that day, Keul alleges, a representative of Trump invited her to a hotel suite where Trump “grabbed Keul from behind and forcibly raped her,” causing “bleeding and bruising on multiple parts of her body,” the report says. Following the incident, Keul alleges Trump made her promise she would keep quiet and repeated his promise for visa and college admission. TIME has been unable to independently verify details of Keul’s account.

Rules for air pilots

Economy stats

Maine Morning Star -  The sheer size of investment in data centers is drawing concern as it surpasses all other historical booms and crowds out other more job-creating ventures.  Until now, no industry had driven the U.S. economy with such force since the railroad expansion of the late 1800s, when titans battled one another to lay the transcontinental tracks that would connect America from coast to coast.Railroads in the 19th century consumed about $173 billion in today’s dollars and created more  than 2% of the nation’s annual economic output (GDP) over 20 years. 

Today’s data center buildout will dwarf that amount, with $10 trillion in investment, and now have almost twice the economic impact — nearly 4% of GDP. That’s according to a report created by a Columbia Business School professor, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.

States are starting to feel left out of the windfall, many having granted tax exemptions before the boom. 

Wallet Hub - Consumers feel over 5% less confident about their financial outlook this month than they did one year ago, according to the latest WalletHub Economic Index. The WalletHub Economic Index is based on a monthly survey that evaluates economic prospects based on 10 components of consumer sentiment. These components revolve around how people feel about their finances, purchasing plans and employment opportunities.

Key Stats

• Decreasing debt-reduction confidence: The share of consumers who expect to have less debt after the next six months decreased by almost 13% in October 2026 compared to last year. At the same time, this is the lowest index value recorded since December 2020.
   
• Credit score insecurity: The share of consumers who expect their credit score to increase in the next six months is over 8% lower in October 2026 compared to last year, registering the lowest level since December 2020.
   
• Large purchases are not a priority: In October 2026, consumers’ likelihood of making a large purchase in the next six months is over 6% lower than it was last year.
   
• Decreasing interest in auto purchases: The share of consumers who expect to buy a car in the next six months is almost 5% lower in October 2026 compared to last year.
   
• Real estate popularity decline: Home-buying interest among consumers decreased by over 4% in October 2026 compared to last year.
  
  The complete WalletHub Economic Index results

Record number of women running for state legislatures

Maine Morning Star -   A record number of women are running for state legislative seats this November, more than two-thirds of whom are Democrats.   Across the 46 states with legislative seats on the ballot, a total of 3,824 women are running — up from 2022’s previous record of 3,621 women candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Women make up 35.5% of all state legislative candidates this cycle.

Buying elections

TNR Blue Book - According to new calculations from Bloomberg News, Elon Musk is spending $3.6 million a day on politics. And according to Democratic strategist Mike Nellis, Musk has spent $759 million on politics in the last two years, while George Soros has spent $624 million—in his entire life.

The potential Senate fight

 The Hill -  Senators are bracing for a potential floor fight over accepting the results of the Alaska Senate race between incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) and former Rep. Mary Peltola (D) — and perhaps other battleground contests — if President Trump urges allies to dispute what he might view as unfair or “rigged” results.

Democratic senators generally view Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) as a straight shooter who would be averse to rejecting an election result in an Alaska Senate race certified by the governor and lieutenant governor.

But they aren’t ruling out the possibility that the president will prod his MAGA allies in the Senate to contest the election results if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses by a narrow margin and blames his loss on voter confusion leading to a significant number of votes for his opponent with a similar name, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

If Alaska’s top officials certify Peltola as the winner, and Trump calls on Senate allies to reject that finding, it puts Thune in a tough spot and potentially sets up a messy floor fight.

“Everybody is gaming everything out, and everybody is preparing for everything,” a Senate Democratic aide said of the preparations for potential Republican objections if Peltola narrowly beats the incumbent Republican senator.

Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a Senate rules expert, said Trump’s aggressive threat to challenge a Democratic win in Alaska could lead to a nasty Senate floor fight.

“We can’t rule anything out at this stage just given the president’s single-minded persistence that there’s a lot of electoral fraud conducted by Democrats,” she said.

Polls

Alternet - President Donald Trump has suffered an embarrassing defeat to former President Barack Obama in a new national poll exploring masculinity. The Bulwark and Pablo Torre Finds Out released a poll, which found that 59 percent of American adults view Obama as a stronger role model for men, while only 37 percent said the same of Trump.

Trump was right at the bottom of the list when respondents were asked whether he represented a positive example of masculinity. 55 percent said the president was not a strong male role model, leaving him with a negative 18-point net rating.

However, Obama earned a positive 28-point net rating, which is a huge 46-point gap between the rival presidents, which puts the spotlight on how the public feels about Trump’s desire to portray himself as a political strongman.

The results were not split across party lines, as 23 percent who voted for Trump identified Obama as a stronger male role model.

Trump finished last among the politicians, athletes and entertainment figures who were included in the survey.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth performed slightly better than the president, but only 28 percent of respondents considered the Pentagon chief a strong role model for American men, while 39 percent disagreed.

Trump ignores federal judge's golf course ruling

The Hill -  President Trump is insisting his plan to redevelop East Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., and renovate the public golf course there will be carried out as scheduled despite an order from a federal judge halting future work at the site.

In a Truth Social post late Monday, the president said “we are closing the East Potomac Golf Course Site as scheduled” on Nov. 15, saying a judge “does not have the Constitutional Right to ‘ask for or receive notices,’ which are time-consuming, unnecessary, expensive, and unconstitutional.”

The president’s post came hours after U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes granted a preliminary injunction requested by a preservationist group and group of local D.C. golfers asking her to stop the Trump administration from cutting trees at the park as part of the redevelopment project.

“We will immediately appeal this decision,” Trump said. “When completed, it is anticipated that this Course, which will be open to the Public, at a reduced rate for those living in Washington, D.C., will be one of the finest anywhere in the World.”

….The plan would also eliminate walking and biking trails currently at East Potomac Park, and questions remain about the feasibility of the project and affordability for golfers.

Major church settlement

Newsworthy News - The Archdiocese of New York agreed to an $800 million settlement with about 1,300 clergy abuse survivors, a scale that forces long-ignored wrongdoing into the open while avoiding bankruptcy.

• About 1,300 survivors approved an $800 million settlement after seven years of litigation.
• Each claimant is set to receive at least $250,000, with higher awards after review.
• The agreement includes releasing Church documents tied to known offenders.
• Final signatures were pending when announced, with paperwork still being completed.

Attorneys for survivors said the Archdiocese of New York will pay $800 million to resolve claims by roughly 1,300 people who reported sexual abuse by clergy and lay workers. Reporters noted this as one of the largest payouts by a Catholic diocese in the country. The size signals how many people came forward and how serious the claims are. The settlement aims to deliver money faster, without sending the Archdiocese into bankruptcy and a longer court process.

Donald Trump

The Guardian -  Donald Trump’s policies have been a disaster for the nation’s farmers, so much so that a near electoral miracle may soon happen: Kansas, one of the deepest red, most rural states, may elect its first Democratic senator in nearly a century.

After Trump won farm country handily in 2024, many rural voters in Kansas, Iowa and elsewhere have soured on him because the price of diesel fuel, a key input for farming, has soared by nearly 70%, farm bankruptcies have surged and because Trump’s trade wars have significantly reduced agricultural exports.

Rural voters are so upset with Trump that polls show that Republican Senate candidates stand a good chance of losing in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas, even though Trump won those rural states by 13 percentage points or more in 2024. No wonder Trump is hopscotching madly across Kansas, Iowa, and other states in the midterm campaign’s final weeks.

No one is saying that Trump deliberately hurt farmers, but when he plunged the US into the Iran war and his many trade wars, he showed little concern about what those decisions might mean for rural America. It was nearly inevitable that Trump’s moves would batter farmers – by pushing down soybean and other farm exports and by pushing up the price of fuel, fertilizer and farm equipment. Not only that, Trump’s proudest legislative achievement, his “big, beautiful bill”, further hammered farm country with its major cuts to food assistance and its $1tn in Medicaid cuts, which will cause an estimated 1.8 million rural Americans to lose health insurance.

Even the Cato Institute, a Republican-friendly, conservative thinktank, slammed Trump over what he has done to farmers. A Cato commentary stated that while Trump calls this a “golden age” for farmers, the fact is that Trump’s “tariffs are inflicting serious damage” on farmers, increasing their input prices and causing their exports to decline by billions of dollars.

This helps explain why farm bankruptcies have jumped by 85% over two years ago.

Michigan: Trump’s grim closing argument. “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” Donald Trump said of Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed at a rally yesterday in Port Huron. He said El-Sayed, if elected, “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to Trump at an El-Sayed rally in Grand Rapids: “Mr. President, instead of slandering Abdul and his family, what are you going to do about the health care crisis in America?”

For his part, El-Sayed offered this: “I get that the president of the United States takes personal offense to my first name, he doesn’t mind as much when it’s a shared name from the Saudis who are funding his son-in-law’s private equity.”

Artificial Intelligence

Newsweek - A University of California, Berkeley professor has stopped grading students' homework for accuracy over concerns that AI is making it harder for educators and teachers to use traditional written assignments to assess students' abilities.

Richard Borcherds, a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley who won the Fields Medal in 1998, now gives students credit for completing their homework on time, rather than assessing whether their answers are correct, according to reports by The Inc.

Borcherds believes there’s "no point" in marking papers that have been generated with AI, telling the California Post: "Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty."

His move comes as universities across the country grapple with the rapid advancement of AI and its impact on education, with some professors turning to oral examinations, in-person assessments and other methods designed to establish what students actually understand and can do.

Artificial Intelligence - Anthropic’s Claude model accessed voter data in the US state of Georgia, the AI company has confirmed, in the latest example of unauthorised behaviour by the technology.

The AI model managed to bypass a paywall to reach data that is publicly available but is typically accessible only after paying a fee. Claude accessed aggregate vote counts as part of a statistics project at Anthropic, which is preparing for a $1.5tn (£1.1tn) flotation.

“Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records,” Anthropic said.

Anthropic said the AI found a loophole in an old version of the state agency’s website, discovering that it issued a digital entry pass – an “access token” – to visitors. It then requested a token and gained access to the information.

The AI developer said it had since put in place guardrails to prevent similar actions happening again. The incident was first reported by the news website Axios.

Climate change

NY Times - In just a few decades, summers in California will not only be much hotter, but will also stretch for months longer. Floods will become more widespread and extreme. Exposure to wildfire smoke will kill thousands more people every year.

Those are the dire projections of California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, a report produced by California every few years that analyzes the impacts of changing weather patterns on the nation’s most-populous state.

The future laid out in the report, which was published on Monday, touches on familiar warnings: more wildfires, bigger storms, longer droughts. But it illustrates in unsettling detail just how quickly the climate is being reshaped, and reveals what is likely to be major upheaval to long-established ways of life in California.

According to the report, average temperatures are likely to increase in California by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the century. Current warming in California is unprecedented compared with the past century and estimates for the past millennium, the report shows.

More and more, warm weather will arrive in California earlier in the year and persist later, with summer conditions lasting for 135 days on average by the middle of the century, compared with an average of 90 days between 1981 and 2010, according to the report. That prolonged summer will have widespread impacts, including on fire risk, tourism, agriculture and wildlife.

The warmer conditions will also mean a 40 percent reduction by midcentury in California’s snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which feeds the state’s reservoirs. What once fell as snow will instead fall as rain and immediately become runoff. This will lead to more severe droughts, according to the report.

Many Californians have already lived through the beginnings of these trends. The state this year logged its warmest August on record. And several of the most destructive fires in state history have happened in the last decade, including the wildfires last year in Los Angeles that were among the costliest disasters in U.S. history.

Abby Edwards, senior deputy director for the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, which produced the assessment, said she hoped the report would alert communities and decision makers about where to focus their efforts as the climate continues to change.

Churches

1440 - The Archdiocese of New York has agreed to pay more than $800M to settle decades of sexual abuse claims against clergy and staff, Catholic Church officials announced Friday. The agreement avoids a potential bankruptcy filing by the archdiocese and offers a minimum $250K lump-sum payout to roughly 1,300 plaintiffs (specific cases may seek higher compensation based on the extent of abuse).

Health

New York Times  - An experimental vaccine developed by Merck and Moderna could become the first vaccine of its kind used to treat cancer. Scientists hope it won’t be the last. On Thursday, the drug makers announced that patients with melanoma who received a vaccine tailored to help their immune systems attack their tumors were 42 percent less likely to experience a recurrence of the cancer within two years than those who did not receive the vaccine. The companies have yet to show the treatment can prolong melanoma patients’ overall survival.

Maine Morning Star - The percentage of working-age adults without health insurance has increased in the past two years, largely because many people can no longer afford Obamacare coverage after Congress allowed federal subsidies to expire at the end of last year.

The uninsured rate for adults ages 19-64 rose to 11.2% this year, up from 8.9% in 2024, according to a new analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy and philanthropic nonprofit.

Nearly half of the 7,362 working-age adults who participated in the group’s biennial health insurance survey said they were uninsured, underinsured, or experienced a gap in coverage this year. Half said they delayed or avoided getting medical care because of the cost, compared with 46% in 2022. 

The Guardian -  US vaccine recommendations are in limbo, access to vaccines is suffering, and some of the uncertainty may continue for years following major blows to vaccination by the Trump administration, experts say.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has made sweeping changes to vaccination policy, cutting childhood immunization recommendations by a third and replacing experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with his own handpicked allies.

A judge’s order halted these changes because they were not done correctly, but Kennedy has not nominated any new ACIP members – which means there are no new vaccination recommendations coming from the committee, even as new vaccines are approved.

Israel

MS NOW -   He serves a mostly ceremonial role. But in a matter of days, Israeli President Isaac Herzog will wield significant power as he decides which political party will have the first chance to build a government — a move that could determine the fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an exclusive interview with MS NOW, Herzog said he would not bow to pressure from President Donald Trump to benefit his friend Netanyahu, whom Trump endorsed last week.

“I don’t think the president of the United States or anybody else can intervene in my discretion — the discretion has to be based on certain facts, and we will see what the facts are,” said Herzog. “There will be a lot of pressure, though, regardless.”

Herzog said he has “huge respect” for Trump and welcomes any dialogue, but the decision will be his, and his alone.

Rubio Urges Cubans to Work With CIA

Prime Chronicle - Secretary of State Marco Rubio used his verified X account to call on Cubans to “seize this opportunity” by forming a discreet partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency to create change in Cuba. The post pointed to failed promises, corruption, and privileges for a few as drivers of discontent. The message did not cite a program or channel. It also did not explain what actions were sought or how participants would be protected.

Donald Trump

Newsweek- President Donald Trump has said he does not "give a damn" about potential criticism of his remarks boasting that the United States is making a "fortune" from high oil prices, as American motorists continue to face elevated gasoline costs.

Speaking at a rally in Georgia on Saturday, October 24, Trump said advisers had warned him against highlighting the financial gains associated with rising oil prices, suggesting the comments would invite criticism over the cost of fuel for ordinary Americans.

In footage of the rally shared online, Trump claimed the US oil and gas industry was making billions of dollars amid the conflict in the Middle East, presenting higher oil prices as a source of financial gains for the country.

Alternet - President Donald Trump is flooding the Supreme Court with a baker's dozen cases in an unprecedented legal blitz, at least according to a recent report. "The Supreme Court is already confronting President Trump’s agenda this term, but a lot more is still coming," reported The Hill's Zach Schonfeld on Sunday. "The administration is petitioning the justices to take up 13 additional cases, The Hill’s analysis of the court’s docket shows."

He added, "Unlike lower courts, the justices choose which cases they hear. They’re still taking up cases for this term, meaning the battles could be resolved as soon as next year."

Schonfeld continued, "From transgender troops to an asylum ban, from foreign student deportations to horseracing, here’s where the Supreme Court could soon get involved." 

Newsworthy News - CNN anchor Anderson Cooper ran a segment showing President Trump’s repeated public comments about men’s bodies after Trump again praised Ohio official Jon Husted’s physique. The segment included Trump quotes about looking at a man’s buttocks, shoulders, feet, and overall build. Cooper introduced a supercut that stacked these remarks side by side. The clips focused on what Trump said, not on audience reaction. The format made the pattern quick to spot for viewers at home.

My university is proposing to offer shorter degrees. Others should follow suit.

Trump regime

The Guardian  - The number of people who receive food stamps has dropped from 41.6 million in July 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Act took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, a 13% decrease, according to the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program. While Donald Trump and other Republicans have said the changes incentivize people to find jobs, elected officials, non-profit leaders and people with food insecurity say the changes simply make it harder for Americans to feed their families.