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.

Why foreign leaders don't want to trust American officials again

Robert Reich, Alternet -  I spent much of this week talking with foreign officials who are in the U.S. for United Nations meetings. I was curious to know how they’re strategizing about the United States in the future — assuming Democrats do well in the midterm elections and Trump becomes a lame-duck president.

(None of my nine sources were heads of state; my stature doesn’t reach that high. But they were high enough to give me some useful insights.)

Here’s what I learned:

1. Most are thinking past Trump. They believe his influence is already waning, and his bellicose rantings show that he knows it. He’s still dangerous, they say, but not nearly as dangerous as he was, and he’s no longer capable of plunging the world into war. Every one of them told me he’s deeply unpopular in their countries.

2. They’re thinking in a timeframe of five to 10 years. They see Trump as a temporary phenomenon and assume the United States will “return to its senses.”

3. But — and here’s the part that concerned me — they’re unsure they can ever again rely on the United States for world leadership. Several pointed out that the fact Americans elected Trump for a second time reveals, in the words of one of them, “there’s something troublesome about your nation that transcends Trump.”

4. Even post-Trump, they see the United States as unstable and unpredictable. They don’t believe the country will fall into civil war, but they worry that policymaking will cycle between extremes because, in the words of another, “your extreme inequality will make it difficult to achieve any longer-term consensus.”

5. As a result, they’re looking ahead to a world where another nation, or group of nations, will take leadership on global issues that need to be addressed, such as climate change, AI, migration, widening inequalities, Putin’s aggression, and disease prevention.

6. Which nation or group? Another official put it to me this way: “We don’t trust China, the U.N. doesn’t work because of its security council, but the EU isn’t strong enough yet. Several of us are hoping that over the next decade the EU will be joined by Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and that this new EU — really, a World Union — will devise a structure that enables it to work collaboratively and forcefully for the good of the world.”

Donald Trump

Time - Ottawa's City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to remove President Donald Trump’s name from a residential street in the Canadian capital amid an increasingly hostile trade war.The motion to rename “Trump Avenue” in the city’s Central Park neighborhood was brought forward by River Ward councillor Riley Brockington on Sept. 9 and swiftly received support from other local officials. “I don't like the idea of anything that's named for Donald Trump, who's demonstrated hostility towards Canada,” Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said at a news conference after the vote.

Meanwhle. . . .

10 things airlines won't tell you about a missing bag

Trump and China

The Hill - Republican senators are expressing concern and dismay over President Trump’s lavish welcome of Chinese President Xi Jinping to a two-day summit in Washington after it was revealed earlier this month that Iran used Chinese satellite imagery to target U.S. troops in Jordan.

Republican senators were told of deepening military cooperation between Iran and China at a closed-door national security briefing Thursday, heightening their concerns about Trump’s red-carpet welcome of Xi at Joint Base Andrews.

GOP lawmakers called on Trump to confront Xi over reports that China has provided military assistance to Iran and demanded that China produce real concessions on trade, especially U.S. agricultural exports, concessions that have been elusive in Trump’s negotiations with China.

Electric vehicles

Axios - Soaring fuel prices are helping to boost electric vehicle sales in many countries, but the effect in the U.S. has been muted, fresh data shows. There's early evidence that the Middle East crisis is juicing demand for low-emissions energy tech, and EVs are an important piece of the puzzle.

Fully electric cars are estimated to hold steady at nearly 6% of U.S. new vehicle sales in the third quarter, per Cox Automotive, with modest and uneven growth in absolute volume terms (see above).

• That's the same percentage as the prior three quarters, after sales fell off a cliff when federal subsidies vanished.
• The share was higher and climbing, and peaked at 10.6% in Q3 of last year as buyers rushed to tap the expiring tax credits.

Yes, but: Higher gasoline prices, along with rising availability, are a factor behind used EV sales hitting a fresh record this quarter, Cox analysts find.

• EVs were 2.8% of the used car market in Q2 and Q3.

The intrigue: The report also sees market strength for hybrids, which suggests that pump prices' impact is spread across different kinds of powertrains.

Mortgage rates

Mortgage rates rose in 37 of the 50 states between Q1 2026 and Q2 2026, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its new report on the States Where Mortgage Interest Rates Are Increasing the Most, based on proprietary user data.  For the full report, please visit