Health

Axios - About 1.75 million fewer kids were enrolled in Medicaid this January than at the start of the Trump administration, according to the most recent federal data.More recent state data tracked by the Georgetown Center for Children and Families shows that figure continuing to grow, said the center's executive director, Joan Alker.

Some children's hospitals are seeing an uptick in uninsured patients, said Aimee Ossman, vice president of policy at the Children's Hospital Association, though she noted most children remain eligible for Medicaid.

There are multiple factors contributing to falling child enrollment, including confusion around the impending work rules Congress enacted in last year's GOP budget law and the Trump administration's immigration crackdown that's discouraging some from enrolling their kids, Alker said.Kids qualify for Medicaid and its sister program, CHIP, at higher income thresholds than their parents, but that's often not communicated clearly to parents.

States are required to keep kids enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP for 12 months at a time. But paperwork verification remains difficult for some families, and Florida is continuing to remove kids whose families don't pay monthly premiums from CHIP.

While the uninsured rate since the start of 2025 hasn't been released, historic trends show that kids who lose Medicaid coverage tend not to get enrolled in other health insurance.

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Voting

MS NOW -   Just as some Democrats around the country fervently hoped, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s GOP primary runoff. Had Cornyn prevailed, he likely would have easily won re-election against Democratic nominee James Talarico. But with Paxton on the ballot, Democrats have at least a chance at nabbing the seat. This election is about more than control of the Senate, as important as that is. It also spotlights the issue of corruption, which Democrats can run on not just in Texas, but across the country.

Though for years Democrats have hoped that the right combination of circumstances could turn Texas blue, the state remains consistently red. Democrats have not won any statewide race since 1994. Cornyn was re-elected to his seat by nearly 10% in 2020 and Donald Trump won the state by 12% in 2024. Paxton’s record, however, gives Democrats new hope. Much like Trump, it’s hard to list the Texas attorney general’s scandals because there are so many of them.  MORE 

Roll Call - A federal court blocked Alabama from using its new congressional map in this fall’s elections, ruling Tuesday that it is still “intentionally discriminatory” against Black voters. The unanimous decision from a three-judge panel to grant a preliminary injunction adds to the legal drama around the state’s redistricting efforts, part of a flurry of fast-moving court fights that already includes a trip to the Supreme Court and rescheduled primary elections.

NY Times - South Carolina’s Senate refused to approve a Trump-backed voting map, which aimed to eliminate the state’s lone majority-Black district.

A judge in Florida let a new map there stand while a lawsuit against it moved through the courts. The map could give Republicans four additional House seats.

Best and worst states for disaster prepaedness

SmileHub - To highlight the states that understand the importance of disaster preparedness and the ones that need to improve, SmileHub compared the 50 states across 14 key metrics. The data set ranges from disaster relief charities per capita to medical reserve corps volunteers per capita to emergency management budget per capita.

Best States	Worst States
1. Vermont	41. Illinois
2. Massachusetts	42. Tennessee
3. Hawaii	43. Wyoming
4. Alaska	44. Kansas
5. Rhode Island	45. South Carolina
6. North Dakota	46. Alabama
7. Pennsylvania	47. Indiana
8. Utah	48. Arizona
9. Maryland	49. Nevada
10. South Dakota	50. Mississippi

Key Stats

• Pennsylvania has the most fire stations per capita – 49.2 times more than Hawaii, which has the fewest fire stations.
• Alaska has the most public health funding per capita – 5.1 times more than Nevada, which has the least public health funding.
• Massachusetts has the most physicians per capita – 3 times more than Mississippi, which has the fewest physicians.

To view the full report and your state’s rank

Word

“A system of fuzzy borders, in which powerful states treat territory as negotiable and sovereignty as conditional, is not a viable alternative to the liberal world order.” - Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, authors of “The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future”  Read now

SpaceX

Alternet -   Last week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX released its IPO prospectus in preparation for going public in June, and now that experts have had a chance to pore through its 277 pages, one analyst has bad news for interested investors: the company is a “trainwreck.”

This is according to Ed Elson, a prominent financial and tech analyst who is particularly well known among Gen-Z, who posted on Tuesday, “I read all 277 pages of SpaceX's IPO filing so you don't have to.” His nutshell assessment was not optimistic: “Losses up 700 percent. Revenue decelerating. 107x price-to-sales multiple. It's a trainwreck.” When you dig into its claims, he says, it’s “unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest.”

.... “After eighteen images of rockets in space, we learn that the company’s mission is ‘to extend the light of consciousness to the stars,’” writes Elson. “To accomplish this, the company plans to advance humanity ‘to Kardashev Type II status,’ which is defined in the document as ‘a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of its local star.’ Only a few pages in and it’s already starting to feel like an ayahuasca trip.”

This “psychedelic language,” notes Elson, is peppered throughout the pitch, with “The light of consciousness” mentioned ten different times, “human augmentation” mentioned eleven times, and “first principles” twenty-seven times. “AI gets a mind-boggling 1,251 mentions — more features than the word ‘Jesus’ gets in the Bible.”

Climate change

The Guardian -   The once-mighty ice sheets on Puncak Jaya, a mountain surrounded by dense rainforests in West Papua, Indonesia, have survived beyond projections they would disappear by 2026 but have shrunk to a fraction of their original size.

The most significant of the two remaining glaciers, which are known locally as “eternal snow” and referred to in English as the “eternity glaciers”, has lost 95% of its area since 2002, the expedition found.

“The ice will be gone: it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” said Klaus Thymann, a Danish explorer and the founder of Project Pressure, an environmental charity. “And ‘when’ is coming very, very soon.”

Tropical glaciers are mostly found in the Andes, but also exist in East Africa and Indonesia. They are rapidly losing mass as fossil fuel pollution heats the planet and melts the ice.

Thymann said “it might be weird to have an emotional reaction to an inanimate object” but documenting the loss of the eternity glaciers had left him tearful as he returned to camp after filming on a rare morning of clear skies.

“On a philosophical level, you take eternity – something that’s an abstract, human construct – and we are even now killing our own constructs,” he said. “It raises some very interesting questions, I think, around the little speck we are in geological time, and what amount of chaos we’ve managed to do in such little time.”

Tourism plummets

Irish Star -    In 2025, the U.S. saw approximately 4 million fewer international visitors compared to the previous year, marking a 5.5 percent drop in overseas tourism. Spending by foreign visitors also fell by more than $8 billion.

Following the slump in travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, last year's numbers represent the steepest annual decline in international tourism in nearly 20 years. Visitor numbers from countries around the globe, including Germany, India, France, Australia, Chile, and China, have decreased. The most significant drop came from neighboring Canada, with far fewer Canadians making the journey to the U.S. 

Polls

Donald Trump

Independent, UK -  U.S. President Donald Trump increased the refugee admissions ceiling by 10,000 for this year to allow more white South Africans into the country, a presidential determination reviewed by Reuters showed. The document, dated May 21, stated white South Africans of Afrikaner ethnicity face an emergency due to "incitement of racially motivated violence" by the government and political parties in the majority-Black nation. Trump, a Republican, froze refugee admissions globally when he took office in January 2025, but weeks later launched a programme exclusively aimed at white South Africans.

MSN -  A top doctor has sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump’s habit of falling asleep during meetings, saying it could be a sign of something sinister.  Trump, who turns 80 next month, has appeared to nod off during several engagements, most recently at a Memorial Day event at Arlington Cemetery on Monday. Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and the director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at the George Washington University Hospital, and also cardiologist to the late former Vice President Dick Cheney, has said this could be evidence of a “severe illness.”

Speaking about Trump’s long list of issues, ahead of his visit to the Walter Reed Medical Center for a checkup on Tuesday, Reiner honed in on Trump’s sleeping habits.

“The president has severe daytime somnolence. He falls asleep very often. He’s fallen asleep in the Oval Office on multiple occasions with people talking to him in the Cabinet room;"

Alternet -   After tearing down the White House East Wing without the legal authority to do so, President Donald Trump is now acting in a way which suggests he may have designs on the building’s iconic Ionic columns.  “President Donald Trump appeared absorbed by the White House’s columns on Monday, lingering for several minutes and running his hands along the stonework,” The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster reported on Monday night. “The row of columns framing the White House’s entrance seemed to arrest the 79-year-old president’s attention as he returned from Arlington National Cemetery after delivering a boastful Memorial Day speech.”

....“Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal arts commission, proposed replacing the Ionic columns with Corinthian columns, a more luxurious style preferred by Trump, The Washington Post first reported in March,” Forster wrote. In that Washington Post article, it was observed that “the Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, are considered the most luxurious in classical architecture and appear on buildings such as the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. They have long been deployed on Trump’s properties, and the president has handpicked them for his planned White House ballroom, too.”

Workers

Newsworthy News -   Wyoming’s wide-open promise now comes with a chilling footnote: it may be the most dangerous place in America to earn a paycheck. Wyoming’s workplace fatality rate has ranked at or near the top nationally, with 45 deaths in 2023 and 37 in 2024, far above typical state levels.

Transportation crashes, mining, agriculture, and construction drive most deaths, reflecting an economy built on high-risk work. Nonfatal injury and illness rates are also above the national average, suggesting a broader safety problem, not just statistical noise.

Military

Portside -   In April, President Donald Trump requested a $445 billion dollar increase to the defense budget, meaning the United States will be spending around $1.5 trillion on the military. Much of the largesse will benefit the “big five” war contractors: Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX (formerly Raytheon). 

Ukraine

NPR - Russia issued a warning that it will continue its mass strikes on Ukraine following weekend attacks that targeted every district in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The recent Russian attacks on Kyiv are viewed as a response to Ukrainian strikes targeting Russian oil facilities and military logistics. Negotiations to end Russia's war in Ukraine have stalled as the U.S. focuses on its conflict with Iran. The Trump administration has eased some sanctions on Russian oil exports to alleviate energy shortfalls during the war with Iran. 

Middle East

Headline USA -   US Central Command on Monday took credit for attacks on Iran after Iranian media reported explosions in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz. In a statement to CNN, CENTCOM spokesman Timothy Hawkins framed the attack on Iran as “self-defense” even though the strikes come as the US is enforcing a blockade on the country that’s part of the same war of aggression the US and Israel launched against the Islamic Republic on February 28.

Academic journals publishing fake AI generated stories

NBC News - A network of fake academic journals masquerading as legitimate publications has published more than a hundred AI-generated papers in recent months, in some cases using the names of real professors at top universities without their knowledge.

Vasant Dhar, a very real professor of data science and AI at New York University, was one of the academics caught in the slop onslaught. In late March, one of Dhar’s colleagues reached out to him about an odd new article listed under Dhar’s name in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (IJAIR). The paper also appeared on Dhar’s profile on Google Scholar, a service many academics use to track peers’ work.

The article’s content and style seemed different from Dhar’s previous papers — and for good reason. Dhar had not written the piece and did not know what his colleague was referencing. Upon reading the manuscript, Dhar soon concluded that the article was generated by AI and had somehow attached his name to the text.

Congress

NY Times -   A little more than five months ahead of the midterm elections, President Trump seems to be focused on virtually anything other than keeping Republican control of Congress.

He endorsed a MAGA challenger over Texas’s senior Republican senator, ignoring warnings that he could endanger the seat. He has boasted almost daily about his expensive and expansive new White House ballroom. He has minimized rising gas costs, waving off spiking prices at the pump as “peanuts” last week compared to what he is pursuing in Iran. And even as he engaged over the weekend in negotiations to end the Iran war that he began, Mr. Trump has made plain that he prioritizes his record abroad above domestic affordability, which he has dismissed repeatedly as a Democratic “hoax.”

For many, a new jaw-dropper came last week when Mr. Trump created a $1.8 billion fund to pay people who say they have been victims of “weaponization and lawfare,” including those who attacked the Capitol and law enforcement officers there, on Jan. 6, 2021.

Incensed Senate Republicans, many of whom lived through that day, returned home vexed by a president who appears set on pursuing his personal priorities ahead of the November midterm elections, even if doing so undermines his own party. They angrily abandoned Washington on Thursday without funding the president’s immigration crackdown or the $1 billion he wants for his ballroom.

Republicans know that their party’s fate rests with the president, according to interviews with numerous officials in recent weeks. Yet they also know there is not much any of them can do to make him help them.

MS NOW-   They may not have the gavels yet, but House Democrats are laying the groundwork for a number of investigations into President Donald Trump should they win control of Congress in November. Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif. — who’s set to chair the House Oversight Committee in a Democratic majority — told MS NOW that his team is “already preparing and gearing up.” 

“We’ve got a team on Epstein, we have a team on [Trump] family corruption, we have a team on DHS and ICE,” Garcia said. “Those teams are actively working on preparation, letters, research.”

Health

The Guardian - The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the Ebola outbreak is outpacing response efforts and countries neighbouring the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are at high risk from the disease.

“We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” said the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as he urged neighbouring countries to take immediate action.

Addressing an online meeting of the African Union about the outbreak, he also announced there had been 220 suspected deaths so far in the current Ebola outbreak and that he would travel to the DRC on Tuesday with Chikwe Ihekweazu, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme.

Hartmann Report -   America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us....And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.  More

Local prosecutors preparing to stop federal agents invading election sites

MS NOW -  As election officials across the country brace for the possibility of federal agents descending on polling sites in November, a nationwide coalition of Democratic district attorneys has vowed to prosecute any federal agent suspected of intimidating voters.

The announcement, first reported by Politico, comes shortly after President Donald Trump refused to rule out sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to election sites during the midterms. “I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump told reporters earlier this month.

The coalition includes prosecutors from Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Dallas and Northern Virginia, among other jurisdictions.

“We’re ready to go,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner told MS NOW’s Chris Jansing on Thursday. “In the same way that my office and the offices of these other members of this group have successfully prosecuted civilians and also prosecuted law enforcement, we will prosecute federal agents who try to interfere with elections.”

“It’s a crime in almost every jurisdiction to engage in election interference under state law,” he added, “and they better get ready for the handcuffs and the jail cell.”

Federal law prohibits voter intimidation and interference at polling sites. Many states also have statutes that criminalize voter intimidation.

in a statement.

Trump regime removes hundreds of Jan. 6 stories

Time-  The Justice Department has removed hundreds of news releases related to criminal prosecutions connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol from its website, it confirmed, characterizing the records as “partisan propaganda.”  The deletions include press releases documenting criminal charges, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentencing tied to the Jan. 6 attack, which saw supporters of President Donald Trump storm the Capitol in an effort to block the certification of his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. 

After a journalist noted on X last week that the Justice Department appeared to be “quietly” deleting the releases, the department’s rapid response account publicly confirmed over the weekend that they had been scrubbed from its website—but stated that there was “nothing ‘quiet’ about it.” 

“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the department wrote. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

The post comes days after the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who allege they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted by the government, as President Donald Trump and his Administration had repeatedly claimed Trump and his allies were during Biden’s presidency, as part of a deal to settle the President’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. 

Word

Cops beat a Man at the Diner — Unaware His Son Is a White House Security Chief.

CLICK HERE

Polls

InteractivePolls

2028 Dem primary crosstabs (among top 4 candidates) Black Dems Harris: 47% Newsom: 10% AOC: 6% Pete: 4% —— White Dems Harris: 21% Newsom: 19% Pete: 10% AOC: 6% —— Hispanic Dems Harris: 36% AOC: 13% Newsom: 11% Pete: 7% McLaughlin

Spending on Seniors’ Benefits Soon to Make Up Majority of Federal Budget

Headline USA - (Thérèse Boudreaux, The Center Square) -  More than half of the federal budget will go toward benefits for Americans 65 years and older by 2036, and that percentage is set to only grow, a recent congressional report finds.  The Joint Economic Committee’s 2026 report shows that non-interest federal spending on Social Security and Medicare payouts will climb from 45% to 52% over the next decade

“Given long-term demographic forecasts, this increase does not represent a peak, but rather a step in a continued upward trajectory,” the report notes. In recent years, the U.S. has racked up record-breaking deficits, pushing the national debt past $39 trillion. The federal government is on track to post a $2 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

More than 5 million face sewage and fuel links in Potomac River

Inside Climate News - The warning signs were years in the making. And yet, regulators failed to heed the writing on the wall, according to Dean Naujoks.  An investigator with the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, Naujoks spent three years documenting what he calls a systemic failure that culminated in dual environmental catastrophes now threatening the health of the entire Potomac River system, which is already stressed. 

In January, a 60-year-old sewer pipe known as the Potomac Interceptor, running along the Maryland shoreline of the Potomac, collapsed near the Clara Barton Parkway corridor in Montgomery County, releasing an estimated 243 million gallons of raw sewage into the river over approximately three weeks. 

But even before that spill, another crisis had already begun to unfold elsewhere in the watershed. At Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, a fuel system failure on Dec. 11 led to thousands of gallons of jet fuel entering the headwaters of Piscataway Creek, a tributary that feeds directly into the Potomac. The leak continued for months before state regulators were notified.

Stretching more than 400 miles, the Potomac River is a source of drinking water for more than 5 million people in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In April, American Rivers, a conservation nonprofit, named it the most endangered river in the country, citing both the sewage spill and the rapid expansion of data centers. 

Piscataway Creek, an 18.6-mile tributary of the Potomac, begins at the edge of Joint Base Andrews and slips back into the Potomac at Fort Washington Park. Its name derives from the indigenous Piscataway people, who’ve stewarded these waters for thousands of years and maintain a living relationship with the creek and the river to this day.

Health

NY Times -  The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.

A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.”

“We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.” MORE

Major U.S. Immigration Laws, 1790 - Present

Epstein files

Daily Beast -   Rep. Thomas Massie has claimed that Melania Trump “knows” Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t running his child sex abuse ring alone. Massie, 55, appeared on Meet the Press Sunday, and confirmed that he planned to personally reveal more names from the Epstein files after a lack of clear action from the acting attorney general.

“Todd Blanche is violating the law. There’s still millions of files they haven’t released,” he said.

“We know from talking to the victims’ lawyers that their own 302 forms haven’t been released. We know the files have been over-redacted....

The Republican, who lost his House primary last week, added: “I don’t think it’s possible to get to convictions with Todd Blanche at the top and with the FBI director, Kash Patel, at the top, because they have effectively both perjured themselves by saying there’s nobody else in the files.”  He then claimed of Donald Trump’s wife: “Even Melania doesn’t believe that. The first lady knows that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone.”

El Nino

New York Times - El Niño is the name given to powerful shifts in Pacific Ocean winds and water temperatures that can drastically transform global weather patterns. Over the centuries these natural patterns have sparked epic droughts and heat waves, and have intensified epidemics. Some academics even claim to see the fingerprints of El Niño on political and economic crises in ancient Egypt, or on the downfall of the Moche civilization in present-day Peru, more than 1,000 years ago. And in 1877 and 1878, a famine fueled by El Niño killed millions of people across the tropics, hardening inequities that, as one research paper put it, “would later be characterized as the ‘first world’ and ‘third world.’”

Right now, the world is entering a new El Niño phase. Researchers are warning it could be one of the strongest on record and are invoking this history as an admonition that natural forces, when they reach their highest magnitude, can lead to profound volatility and hardship.  In general, El Niño makes for wetter conditions in some parts of the Americas while suppressing the Atlantic hurricane season. The phenomenon raises the risk of dryness in South and Southeast Asia, Australia, and southern Africa.

Donald Trump

Alternet America -   Donald Trump is scheduled to undergo his third medical checkup at Walter Reed in 13 months on Tuesday. This is two more than presidents tend to need in a year if everything is fine.

The Washington Post reported Monday that independent physicians have been asking the White House to explain a number of things that are hard to miss: persistent bruises on the president’s hands, visibly swollen legs, and occasional public sleepiness. The White House says he’s in excellent health. This is also what they said last October, before quietly admitting that the visit involved a CT scan to rule out cardiovascular concerns.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, told the Post that the White House’s bruise explanation — too much aspirin, too much hand-shaking — doesn’t hold up.

“If you’re taking too much aspirin, one would likely take less aspirin,” he said. The bruises also appear on both hands, and Trump does not, as far as anyone can tell, shake hands with his left.

The White House response has been to publish what it calls a Wall of Shame, naming reporters and social media users who have noted that the president sometimes disappears from public view. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has alleged that Trump has the highest testosterone Mehmet Oz has ever seen in a 70-year-old, which is exactly the kind of medical opinion you’d expect from Mehmet Oz.

Biking risks

Live Long Newsletter - One UK study found that cycling to work carries a 41% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to driving or taking transit. A Copenhagen study estimated that cyclists gain up to 14 months of life expectancy from cycling, while the risk of injury costs five days—a 20-to-1 net gain.  In the U.S., though, accidents ranked third among leading causes of death in 2023, accounting for 7.2%. Bicycle deaths are up 37% in the past decade, rising as more people take up cycling, and as more cities add bike lanes.