Health

WBLM - According to the American Cancer Society, more than 324,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed every year. That is simply a staggering number. To put it into perspective, 1 out of every 8 women in America will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.

Trump and Hegseth want men to boost their manliness

The Guardian -  Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, polls say male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.

Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.

In June, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced the FDA was removing a limitation on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) which stated that its safety and effectiveness “have not been established”. This was part of a suite of FDA changes that could make it much easier for men to be prescribed testosterone, potentially accelerating a boom in the number of men on TRT; already nearly 12m prescriptions were dispensed in 2025, from fewer than 1m in 2000.

A few weeks later the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced he was making testosterone screening compulsory for military service members over the age of 30, and offering voluntary screening for all members – part of an effort to forge what he calls a “High-T department of war”. Service members who are deemed to have low T will be offered state-sponsored replacement therapy.

Trump acolytes don’t only want to give men more testosterone, they are keen to castigate those who they think don’t have enough of it. Ken Paxton, campaigning for a Texas Senate seat that may decide the balance of power in Washington, has run ads casting his Democratic challenger, James Talarico, as “too low-T for Texas”. Trump’s most loyal adviser, Stephen Miller, called Talarico, a cisgendered heterosexual man, the “first transgender Senate candidate”.

Meanwhile. . .

How to cope with the stress of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice

Vaccines

The Congressional Insider - A federal judge in Idaho left the state’s Medical Freedom Act intact and affirmed that daycares cannot reject a child because a parent opts out of vaccines, according to the attorney general’s office and court reporting…..Attorney General Raúl Labrador said parents, not daycares, make kids’ medical choices. The state argued daycares cannot require injections as a condition for care.

Trump vs. the news media

The Guardian Donald Trump’s attorney general, Todd Blanche, argued that the administration was permitted to ban three news outlets from the White House because “it is a privilege and not a right to be there”. On Thursday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring the White House to temporarily restore the credentials of affected journalists at CNN, MS Now and Politico, and they were allowed entry to the executive complex. However, on Saturday CNN said its journalists were barred from joining the press pool traveling with the president on Air Force One.

Pressed to point to a specific report the administration objected to, Blanche seemed to suggest that any negative reporting about Trump must be inaccurate, saying: “The information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks is wholly and completely, almost 100% negative toward the president.” Without providing any evidence, Blanche repeated the administration’s position that the affected three outlets’ reporting amounted to a “national security problem”.

What's a humanities?

Sam Smith - Some five decades ago, my wife was director of the Washington Historical Society and I helped to start the DC Humanities Council. Recently we got word that the two organizations were merging.  It wasn't the first connection, for in the late 1970's Kathy Smith got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to train teachers in the history of DC.   Here’s something I wrote about humanities back in 1979

SAM SMITH, DC GAZETTE, 1979 - I have to confess something. I have strayed from the civic abstinence I promised on these pages a while back. I have once again joined a committee. But it's just a small committee and I think I can handle it. If not, drive me home and I'll never do it again. Promise.

The committee is called the DC Community Humanities Council. Fifty states and Puerto Rico have such committees - and the funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities that follow in their wake - but DC, through a combination of federal inertia and local indifference, has been years late to the gate. . .

I was invited to serve on the committee by the NEH for reasons that are not entirely clear, but presumably have something to do with what is known in the trade as "community outreach," or, as Senator Scoop Jackson put it even less felicitously the other day, providing another "rung on the spectrum." Since I had complained in print about the lack of a local humanities committee, I thought I ought to put some time where my mouth was. But there was another less honorable reason for my willingness to accept the invitation. You see, what the folks at NEH don't know is that not only did I graduate from college magna cum probation but I was so indifferent to the humanities and scholarship in general that my English instructor once sent me a neatly written card that read: "Mr. Cole requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." Many of the courses I did attend left me thoroughly befuddled. The first hint that joining the fellowship of educated men was going to be a treacherous business came when I returned to my room after the initial day of classes. I settled down to dash off a bit of Max Weber before supper. Ten pages in my heart went into a barrel roll and my hands began to rattle. I hadn't understood one word the man was saying. This exquisite form of panic would return many times over the next four years.

I struggled to separate the thoughts of Locke from the sermons of Cotton Mather; Veblin and Bentham congealed in my brain; Karl Marx was, as far as I could discern, the opiate of sadistic professors; and when I walked into an examination hall I was certain that all around me could balance more philosophers within the margins of a blue book than I. The die was cast early as one of my anthropology professors noted on a paper. "This is pretty good journalism," she wrote of my painfully conceived review of the Naga situation, "but it is bad anthropology." I left the ivy-bedizened halls vowing never to return and, in fact, never did except for an occasional guest talk to the class of a professor or two of eccentric tastes. So for me to be invited to share responsibility for the fate of the humanities with genuine, certified, dissertating scholars was too good an offer to pass up - not unlike an ex-con being asked to serve on a judicial nominations commission.

So of course I accepted. This first thing that happened was a friend, when I told her of the project, described herself as "one of nine people in the city who knows what the humanities are." I passed on the remark to an historian who asked, "Don't you think that figure is a little high?"

Right away I knew I was in trouble. One of the real pleasures of graduating from college is that seldom thereafter does anyone ask you to define your terms. I had been away from the academic world for twenty years and had sort of assumed that in the interim they had come up with handy definitions for things like the "humanities." But apparently we were heading for square one -- back to Humanities 10: "Define the humanities and illustrate by example, citing sources where applicable." .

It all came back. The slush of ideas, concepts, symbolisms, metaphors, imagery, and philosophies through which I had so laboriously slogged during college, and so assiduously avoided since, was underfoot once more and I could feel my socks getting wet and clammy.

I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions. Further, humanists have a reputation for not doing anything useful, so perhaps if I became associated with them, people would stop asking me to do things that were useful.

But that would hardly do when we had to go out and explain what we were about and why anyone should be interested. You can't tell a sullen scribe from one of the dailies who asks "What do you see as the role of the humanities in this city?" something like, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." So I decided I better find out what a humanities really was before the National Endowment blew my cover and decided that this community outreach business had gone far enough. Here is some of what I found:

The word humanities doesn't mean much to most people. Most people to whom it does mean much work on college campuses. For them it means pretty much what it did when I was in college: it's what you major in if you're not in the physical or social sciences, haven't decided what to do with your life or want to go to law school but would like to learn something first.

Here are some of the humanities: philosophy, comparative religion, history, ethics, literature.

Here is one thing the humanities have in common: you feel a little foolish listing them on a job application form.

That may be one reason that most people who know about the humanities are found on college campuses: no one else will hire them.

There's another reason: Some people on campus feel that the humanities shouldn't be talked about too much off campus. They feel the humanities are a profession and that you should have a Ph.D. to be "in" them. They want people to treat them like physicians and lawyers and CPAs and lieutenant colonels, so they call each other 'Doctor' a lot.

It is confusing because it suggests that you might need a license to think about literature, religion, history or philosophy. This is not necessarily true. It is still further confusing because humanities scholars, when they're not calling themselves 'Doctor,' call themselves "humanists." Off campus, the word sometimes has a different meaning. The woman down the street may be called "a real humanist" because she set up a senior citizen center or organized the heart drive, even though she doesn't know who Kierkegaard was. You can't be a humanist on campus without knowing who Kierkegaard was, no matter how much you raise for the heart fund.

Finally, it is confusing because in many people's minds, a doctor is meant to fix something. Humanist-type doctors are hard-pressed to prove that they do. And in our scientific and technological society, we tend to discount what can't be proved. There is no morality program you can slip into the computer, no antibiotic against cultural vacuity, no certifiable benefits to be achieved through an acquaintance with the past and no minimum daily requirement for literature.

I think a part of what the National Endowment for the Humanities is trying to do is to end some of this confusion. This is good because even though the word "humanities" is not used that much off campus, we use what it describes all the time. We just don't have a name for it.

We practice it without a license and without credit. Some of the biggest issues of our lives are concerns of the humanities. Like whether we accept a politician's definition of "acceptable risk" at a nuclear power plant. Like publicly funded abortions or legalized gambling or how we distribute political power .

These are also political questions and their philosophical, historical or religious core often gets hidden behind the politics, which is too bad because good politics is a poor substitute for a good philosophy, whereas good philosophy can makes good politics.

Our best presidents, for example, were those who convinced people not just of their politics but of its philosophical or ethical base. The New Deal, the War on Poverty, the civil rights legislation and the Peace Corps would never have gotten off the ground if people hadn't accepted the philosophy before the politics.

We need, as Martin Marty said, a place from which to view the world. The media and the merchandisers would like us to think otherwise. They want us to acquiesce in their plan to create packaged consumers for their packaged products - whether it be artificial eggs, a new TV series or a president. They would like us to want more than to be. The thing that keeps us in rebellion is a part of what the humanities are about. This is the revolutionary aspect of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It proposes to fund the dangerous notion that we can still think for ourselves. That we still want to know why we do things as well as when and how much it will cost. That we still have some choices left. . .

Whatever a humanities is, it used to be different. Rod French, a scholar at George Washington University who happens to be both an academic and a non-academic humanist, described it this way in a paper prepared for the National League of Cities:

"At the opening of the modern age, in the city states of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, humanist scholars and poets handled state correspondence, represented their sovereigns as diplomatic emissaries and wrote orations for great civic occasions. But already in the 16th century, this whole class of scholars began a long decline into disgrace and neglect. Their ambition and poor judgment was responsible in part, but they were also the victims of deep social changes. The rise of the middle class and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century further displaced humanists from positions of influence. And then industrialization placed a premium on a set of new skills. Those who persisted in studying the humanities were forced to the margins of public life. . . .In the Renaissance, the term humanist referred to men (almost exclusively} who dedicated themselves to the study of the humanities. That happened to mean to them the study of the literature and history and politics and ethics and art of classical Greece and Rome. Today, hardly anyone in public life feels they need a humanist and few humanists feel they need a public life . . .

"The only way to get the humanist down from the ivory tower is to drag him into public affairs. If his alleged contribution proves in actual experience to be trivial or ephemeral, then the game is up. If the managers of society refuse even to give his questions a hearing then we can conclude fairly that they are not really friends of the good society."

Here is one more historical note: Tocqueville called the French Revolution the first great event in history brought about by men of letters. The Russian Revolution was another. So, as late as this century, some humanists have been found relevant.

The National Endowment for the Humanities says that all programs funded by state humanities committees should have "scholars involved centrally." Artists can get money from their national endowment without scholars being centrally involved in their sculpture or dance. Governments are more leery of unformed ideas than they are of unformed stone, which may be why federally funded thinking must be accompanied by licensed personnel. I think humanities scholars should have to prove that their ideas are worth something, just like anyone else, but they're on the dole far less than most groups, there isn't much risk that they will turn into a mandarin class in the near future, and they need the money, so what the hell. You can always pull the anchovies off the pizza if you don't like them..

One of the problems with defining the humanities is that it is hard to do anything well without them. A doctor or a nuclear physicist who isn't also a humanist can cause a lot of trouble. One of the purposes of the humanities is to give some direction to the other things we do. The humanities are often at their most potent when they modify something else rather than being just an end. Of course, you don't have to justify interest in the humanities on the basis of social utility. After all, the Declaration of Independence ranked the pursuit of happiness only after life and liberty as a basic right. It hasn't fared so well since. The humanities, among other things, have to do with the pursuit of happiness. As Hubert Humphrey said when the bill establishing the National Endowment passed, "At last the Congress voted for fun; at last the Congress voted and said let's have something that celebrates the rights of man to sheer fun."

But, then again, we may be too late. Newsweek seems to think so. It ran a headline over a book review recently that read: "Albert Camus: The Last of the Humanists." I hope not. . .

So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future and not just exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.

If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along.

Middle East

Alternet -  Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) cast a tie-breaking vote that will allow President Donald Trump's war with Iran to continue.  The House has left Washington, but the Senate has remained throughout the week.

Word

Robert Reich

Trump wants to ignore Congress and cut nearly $1 billion in federal funding.

Time  - President Donald Trump said this week that he is seeking to cancel almost $1 billion in federal funding, sidestepping congressional approval and earning blowback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Using a controversial move known as a “pocket rescission,” Trump said he wants to nullify $810 million that Congress had approved for programs largely serving immigrants, minorities, and children.

The Trump Administration said that rescinding the funds is “consistent with the Administration's goal of ending the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to support non-citizens, putting Americans first.” But the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office and lawmakers from both parties have asserted that the move is an illegal sidestepping of the constitutionally protected separation of powers—chiefly, Congress's power of the purse.

The Administration invoked the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which allows the President to propose spending cancellations and gives Congress 45 days to approve them or see the funds released. However, the Administration submitted its request just five days before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30—all but ensuring the funds expire without congressional approval. —Rebecca Schneid/

American alcohol drinking is down

Time - The U.S. is in the midst of a temperance boom. Drinking rates have been steadily declining nationwide, with an August Gallup poll showing that only 54% of Americans ever consume alcohol—sharply down from 67% as recently as 2010. Now, a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine takes those findings a step further, reporting that younger adults in the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts—people born from 1981 to 2012—are driving that trend. Meanwhile, older Americans, aged 50-64, are actually consuming more alcohol than they used to, with rates increasing by more than one third since 2018.

History

Ten interesting facts about FDR

Voting

Alternet -  Yesterday, the six corrupt Republican ideologues on the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let the Trump regime go forward with their plan to create a national database of Trump-approved, GOP-approved voters that they intend to then force upon the states in violation of the Constitution. This overturned a June ruling from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who found the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.”

The Guardian - Election experts have warned Donald Trump's administration could use the crucial hours and days after November's midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting. With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election "counting window" is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.

While the US president's bid to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in ballots was rejected by the supreme court earlier this month, there is apprehension that Trump and his allies could use the period while votes are counted to amplify unfounded allegations in a bid to challenge results that don't go their way. More

The silent crisis of Americans in prime of life

Study Finds - Death rates for Americans between 25 and 44 years old jumped 71.2% in just eleven years, rising from about 140 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 to 239 per 100,000 by 2021. No other age group came anywhere close to that surge. Overdoses, suicides, car crashes, and chronic diseases appearing at increasingly younger ages are now cutting down people in the prime of their lives. ...Sixty countries had a lower risk of a person dying before age 40 than the United States did. That gap didn't open overnight. It has been widening since the 1990s, and it sped up sharply after 2010.

Health

365 Better Health - Five minutes of easy walking every half hour cut post-meal blood sugar spikes by about 60% in a Columbia-led study Keith Diaz shared on the TED stage.  Prolnged sitting hurts metabolic and vascular health; short movement breaks help. A five-minute walk every 30rolo minutes reduced blood sugar spikes by roughly 60%….Federal guidance has flagged prolonged sitting as a health risk factor.

43% of Americans view socialism positively

Deep State Tribunal -  A new Gallup poll finds 43% of Americans now view socialism positively, the highest level in the poll’s 16-year trend. Gallup reports a record 43% positive view of socialism since tracking began in 2010. Capitalism still leads at 55% positive, while free enterprise remains far stronger overall. Socialism now rates higher than big business in public favorability, 43% to 35%.

250 years of America's socialism

Ralph Nader - On September 18, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced it is launching a six-week, 20-state “Free Enterprise Express Bus” tour to back Republican candidates and “fight for free enterprise.” This big business lobby ignores the fact that, just like “capitalism,” American “democratic socialism” (supported by the voters for generations) is everywhere in our mixed-economy country.

 Here is an incomplete list of public goods, services, benefits, and institutions that Democratic candidates can invoke in asking their GOP opponents: “Which one of the following will you tell voters you want to get rid of?”

•  Public Lands – Parks and National Forests
• Public Schools and Universities
• Public Transit
• U.S. Postal Service
• Public Drinking Water Departments
• Public Electric Utilities
• Public Fire Departments
• Public Libraries
• Public Roads and Highways
• VA hospitals
• Mandatory Minimum Wages
• SNAP Food Stamps
• Unemployment Compensation Payments
• Social Security
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Head Start
• Peace Corps and AmeriCorps
• Meals on Wheels
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

The list can go on. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon begged the big drug companies to work on anti-malaria medicines. Malaria was the second leading cause of hospitalization for U.S. soldiers in that undeclared war. Big Pharma refused, saying there was too little profit in one-time anti-malarial shots, compared with medicines soldiers were taking every day. So, the Pentagon chose socialism, setting up its own drug development entity in its two military hospitals. Pentagon scientists and doctors developed three of the four anti-malaria drugs in use and offered them to any country for use, without imposing patent monopolies.

Probably one of the nation’s earliest and foremost mixed-economy-minded civic founders was Ben Franklin. A successful businessman, he also knew the meaning of the phrase later coined by Amory Lovins: “Markets make a good servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” Societies have many necessities that markets—meaning private companies—don’t supply when immediate profits are insufficient. Franklin helped create institutions to meet some of those needs: Philadelphia’s subscription Library Company, the volunteer Union Fire Company, and the Academy and College of Philadelphia, a precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. He also played an important role in colonial postal administration. These were not all government-operated public agencies, but they were civic institutions intended to serve broad public purposes.

Public works were crucial in enabling private business enterprises to flourish. Consider the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. It created a navigable commercial route between the Atlantic economy and the Great Lakes interior, reducing transportation costs and accelerating settlement and trade. The growth of the nation-building national post office is an example of a spectacular universal “democratic socialistic” public institution. 

When these and other socialistic enterprises generated consumer or worker demand, private corporate usurpers moved to undermine them, seize a piece of this governmental success and their publicly created value, rip them off as vendors, or persistently disparage these services to get the public to lose confidence in them. This corporate propaganda never stops. MORE

Suicide

Harvard Unversity -  As a leading researcher on suicide, Matthew K. Nock knows the subject’s grim statistics by heart. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Americans aged 10 to 34, trailing only accidents. It claims more lives around the world each year than war, genocide, homicide, and all other violence combined. And 50 percent of people who died by suicide saw a clinician in their final month, according to multiple studies in recent decades, including Nock’s own research.

For Nock, that last statistic is both agonizing and motivating. Some might take it to mean that the warning signs of suicide are imperceptible or think that suicide is somehow inevitable for those in the grips of extreme suffering. Nock, who is both a researcher and a licensed clinician, reads the statistic as a tragic gap in a clinical-care system rooted in scheduled therapy appointments, which can fail to detect the highly variable — and fleeting — nature of suicidal thoughts.

But two new statistics make Nock, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, cautiously optimistic: In a multiyear study of 600-plus high-risk adults and adolescents, his lab predicted 75 percent of suicide attempts and 87 percent of suicide-related events in the week before they occurred. (Suicide-related events refer to attempts as well as hospitalizations to prevent attempts.)

Major decline in children

New Republic - The global decline in fertility is one of the major stories of the twenty-first century—maybe even the major story. It is built into our brains, bones, and infrastructure that we live in a growing and expanding world, with a few older people scattered around and buses of children rolling up to overcrowded schools. This is very much not the world that is being born.

The statistics might be familiar, but they are jarring nonetheless. Over the past 50 years, the global fertility rate has fallen from four children per woman to just over two. Whatever is causing this is happening all around the world. In 1960, the average woman in the United States had 3.5 children; in India, Latin America, and the Caribbean, almost six. Today, the number is below two in all of these places.

This decline is having an incalculable effect on global politics. Many of our political debates are, just under the surface, about the fear of population decline. This is transparently the case for, say, Social Security and immigration. The crisis of Social Security comes from the decline of the working-age population; immigration, some argue, is the only realistic mechanism to prop it up. Our debates about education are shaped by the fact that there will be fewer and fewer kids to educate. Over the next 15 years, the number of high school graduates in the United States will fall by 12 percent, creating an enrollment cliff that is just as threatening to higher education as is artificial intelligence.  MORE

Donald Trump

New York Times: Trump Says Civil Rights Led to White People Being ‘Very Badly Treated’

Environment

 Democratic Conservation Alliance - Yosemite is our oldest national park and often considered the crown jewel of the parks system. But now, Donald Trump is considering handing over a large swath of the public land that makes up one corner of the park to a private developer intent on creating a resort accessible only by the super-wealthy.

China

The Hill -  The U.S. and China agreed to lower tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods each country imports from the other and launch new talks on artificial intelligence (AI) following President Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The agreements were part of an eight-point consensus reached during Xi’s three-day state visit to Washington, D.C., which ended Friday. 

A war with Cuba?

Alternet America -  America is eight months into a war with Iran, so naturally it’s time to open a second location.  CBS News has obtained an internal Army message that indicates the U.S. military is quietly building the capability to conduct a new ground operation. The message does not name Cuba, but several U.S. officials told the network the island is the target.

The message asks Army Reserve commands to report the availability of six types of units to U.S. Southern Command, including military police, medical teams and logistics support. With a deadline of 90 to 120 days, the earliest action possible could come in late December.

Trump's war against the press

The Hill - CNN reported its journalists have been barred from joining the press pool traveling with President Trump this weekend. They were set to board Air Force One Saturday to cover his visit to Knoxville for a college football game.

The outlet had been scheduled to serve as this weekend’s TV press pooler — a rotating group of journalists who cover Trump when space is limited and share information with other networks. But the White House announced Friday in a note to the press that CNN would no longer fill this role — the latest swipe in President Trump’s ongoing media outlet ban dispute.

The note did not list another outlet replacing CNN. 

Middle East

The Guardian - The UN human rights office has added 61 more companies to a blacklist of firms that it says are involved in violating Palestinian human rights through business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The vast majority of the total 214 companies, which are based in 11 countries, are Israeli. Five of the 158 companies listed last year were removed in the latest update.

The blacklist, first published in 2020, was born of a vote by the UN's human rights council, which has no ability to force companies to act. Its main goal is to name and shame businesses with ties to the settlements. It is unclear how the inclusion on the list has affected the companies financially. 

The Guardian -- Iran is awaiting an official US response to its proposal to reopen the strait of Hormuz within a week and resume nuclear talks in return for the lifting of the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, as Donald Trump was reported to have rejected the deal.

Although Iran is yet to receive his official response, the US president is said to be privately sceptical Iran would meet his demands to dismantle its nuclear programme, according to unnamed US officials cited by the Wall Street Journal.

Trump has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms in the US, the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, on Friday evening, he published a post on his Truth Social platform with a graphic showing a map with the strait of Hormuz renamed as the "Trump Strait".

Voting

CNN has some new, and revealing, information today on the Trump administration's plan to deploy 1,000 official election monitors (or possibly observers?) for the 2026 elections, as well as a Republican National Committee plan to send volunteers to polling sites in 22 states to monitor voting machines.

MS Now -  Nearly 50 million Americans age 18 to 29 can vote in the 2026 midterms. And 51% of them have no college experience, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE.

That’s partly because of which young people turn out. In the 2022 midterms, 50% of young people with a bachelor’s degree voted, compared with 20% of those whose highest level of education was a high school diploma, according to Census data compiled by CIRCLE.

Some argue that candidates could turn out more non-college-educated young people if they campaigned at places like job training centers, recreation centers and music festivals in addition to college campuses. 

Independent -  The Supreme Court has temporarily unblocked a controversial federal voter database ahead of November's midterms, granting President Donald Trump a temporary legal victory in his push against noncitizen voting.

The court’s three liberal justices issued a public dissent against the decision.

The emergency order permits state officials, for the time being, to access the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, to check the eligibility of individuals on their voter rolls. Participation in the SAVE initiative remains voluntary for states.

Its immediate effect on the coming midterms is likely limited because federal law prohibits states from conducting systematic purges of voter rolls within 90 days of an election, according to David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

The Nation  - - [Susan] Collins's undeniable gift for pork-barrel spending could now come back to haunt her, thanks to a new pay-for-play scandal broken on Tuesday by ProPublica. The ProPublica story focuses on Collins's links to Martin Kao, the former CEO of a defense contractor called Navatek. Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison for bank fraud and Covid relief fraud.

Prior to his conviction, Kao had provided damning testimony to the FBI about a political quid pro quo scheme he was working. Legally, defense contractors are not allowed to donate to campaigns, so Kao used shell corporations to donate to super PACs supporting politicians who promoted Navatek projects to the Pentagon. Collins and her office were in the crosshairs of the FBI investigation into Kao's activities, but the senator was saved from possible criminal charges by Donald Trump's reelection, which led the president to fire FBI agents working on the investigation (some of whom had also investigated Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election).

Newsworthy News -California just made seizing ballots and voting machines a felony, sharpening a state-versus-federal showdown over who controls elections. Governor Gavin Newsom signed 13 election bills creating new felonies tied to ballots and voting tech.

Key measures punish seizing ballots before certification and directing others to interfere with mail ballots. Supporters say the laws guard against interference by federal or political actors; critics warn of limits on police near polls.

A separate California deepfake law drew a federal court injunction on First Amendment grounds, signaling legal risks.

Sex and religion

The Atlantic -   In the popular imagination, religious faith and a thriving sex life don’t tend to go together. Movies, books, and TV shows depict religious couples as sexually inhibited or dysfunctional. For example, in Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel, Yesteryear—soon to be a movie starring Anne Hathaway—a Scripture-quoting tradwife puts up a good front for Instagram but is privately miserable with her husband, who not only is passive but also struggles to perform in the bedroom.

But the data tell a different story. According to our new report, published today by the Institute for Family Studies, no group of Americans seems to be having more sex—and more satisfying sex—than married men and women who regularly attend a place of worship. (This group is made up mostly of Christians, but also includes Jews and Muslims.) In fact, we find that the only Americans who have avoided the country’s “sex recession”—in which fewer and fewer men and women are having regular sex—are husbands and wives who attend religious services at least twice a month. In the 1990s, 64 percent of married people aged 20–54, both churchgoing and secular, had sex at least once a week, according to the General Social Survey. Now only 48 percent of secular couples (who never or rarely attend church) have sex weekly compared with 62 percent of their religious peers. In America today, the faithful are having more sex.

Health

Nautilus  - Uncertainty is something we hide from in medicine. As doctors, we exist to make things certain for our patients. We call it a diagnosis. We hone our skills and carry a toolbox of tests to provide it. And then we prescribe drugs to treat it.

When we meet uncertainty we cannot overcome, we get ill at ease. We grapple with uncertainty like a psychic beast in our minds and often hide it from our patients and colleagues. We know our patients are often torn with uncertainty about symptoms and what to do about them, but we're not very good at talking to them about uncertainty. Medical school teaches us to put on a confident face. It doesn't cover how to treat the symptoms of doubt. 

Health - More than 13,000 bottles of a common blood pressure medication are being recalled nationwide, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On Sept. 17, the FDA gave the recall the second-highest risk level, Class II, for a low chance of serious health consequences but a risk of temporary or reversible effects. The bottles of chlorthalidone, a prescription diuretic, were initially recalled on Sept. 3 due to “failed dissolution specifications,” which can impact the effectiveness of the pills.

Nor'easter coming to east coast

Washington Post - A nor’easter was gaining strength around 200 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, early Friday. The intensifying storm is forecast to slowly move north in the days ahead and may approach or push ashore in New Jersey on Sunday — while lashing the stretch from the Carolinas to Maine with rain and strong winds as 15-to-25-foot waves tower offshore. That will contribute to potentially serious coastal flooding and beach erosion.

Five major networks rejoin White House TV pool

The Hill - The five major television networks were back in the White House television pool on Friday following their standoff with the White House over CNN's access.  CBS broadcast the live feed for television outlets at the White House showing President Trump welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping back to the White House for the third day of his U.S. state visit, as well as the video feed of the two having tea with first lady Melania Trump and Xi's wife, Peng Liyuan.

CNN, which was banned by Trump from covering the White House a week ago, also carried the feed.  "CNN's access to the White House has been restored, and the TV pool appears to be functioning as normal," CNN anchor Pamela Brown said on air Friday morning.

"As of now, all systems are go," a person familiar with the pool told The Associated Press.

The development comes after CNN, along with MS NOW and Politico, regained their access to the White House on Thursday. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox announced earlier this week they were boycotting the television pool over CNN's exclusion from White House coverage. 

On Thursday, a judge ruled in favor of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, but journalists from the three outlets were initially denied entry into the White House. 

ICE

Drop Site Daily - U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a permanent injunction against ICE over conditions at the 26 Federal Plaza detention facility in New York City, writing in a 127-page opinion that officials “intentionally concealed or recklessly disregarded the truth” about compliance with his earlier orders and that ICE “objectively deprived detainees of sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care” by holding people far longer than the facility’s intended 12-hour limit.

Kaplan found detainees were also “severely restricted” from meaningfully accessing counsel, with phone calls limited to a few minutes and often overheard by ICE staff, calling the agency’s disregard of prior capacity limits “persistent, egregious, and, at a minimum, reckless, if not willful.”

The injunction requires ICE to provide at least 50 square feet of floor space per person, temperatures between 68 and 74 degrees, three daily meals, hygiene supplies, bedding for overnight detainees, an on-site medical professional at all times, and confidential attorney phone access.