Experts: Biden’s failure to enforce his “red line” could result in “worst of all possible outcomes”

President Joe Biden lamented earlier this week the "devastating" and "heartbreaking" images of the carnage in the southern Gaza city of Rafah after an Israeli airstrike engulfed a makeshift camp of displaced Palestinians in flames and killed 45 people, calling on Israel to better protect civilians.

But even after applying pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's war cabinet, Biden's administration indicated Tuesday that the attack had not crossed the "red line" he established that would lead the United States to take action and impose consequences — an assertion that's confounded foreign policy experts.

"If this doesn't count as a red line, what does? What does it actually take to cross the red line?" Dr. Sarah Parkinson, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, told Salon, adding later: "Is the standard so extreme so as to be completely meaningless for any protection of civilian life or invocation of international humanitarian law?"

The president drew a line in the sand for Israel in an interview with CNN earlier this month, threatening to withhold shipments of some U.S.-manufactured munitions, including controversial 2,000-pound bombs, if Israel proceeded with its invasion of Rafah and attacked population centers.

Israel threatened ICC prosecutor over war crimes probe amid “coordinated effort” with Trump: report

In response to Sunday's bombing, White House spokesman John Kirby on Tuesday said that Israel had not begun a "major ground operation" in Rafah. State Department spokesman Matt Miller also said that the Israel had not carried out the sort of offensive that it waged in Gaza City and Khan Younis, where the ground incursions killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in a day and destroyed buildings.

“We still don’t believe that a major ground operation in Rafah is warranted. We still don’t want to see the Israelis, as we say, smash into Rafah with large units over large pieces of territory,” Kirby said, according to The Washington Post. The Sunday tragedy, he continued, “speaks very clearly to the challenge of military airstrikes in densely populated areas of Gaza, including Rafah, because of the risk of civilian casualties, which of course happened terribly in this case, a horrible loss of life.”

Taking note of the 37-pound bombs Israel said it had used in the attack, intended to kill Hamas officials it said were present in the city, Kirby added that if "it is in fact what they used, it is indicative of an effort to be precise and targeted" given the bombs' relatively smaller size.

But Kirby's response to the horror at the refugee camp is "mincing words" and "splitting hairs," argued Parkinson.

Neighborhoods like Tal al-Sultan, the site of the tent encampment burned Sunday, and Al-Mawasi, another southern Gaza area designated for displaced Palestinians in which an airstrike Tuesday killed 21 people (Israel has denied responsibility for the bombing), are "functionally" the population centers that Biden's red line was intended to safeguard, she explained. More than one million Palestinians, in response to Israeli orders, have evacuated Rafah to areas that have "almost no infrastructure, no sanitation, no water, no commercial centers" and have since been attacked "without forewarning."

"By any objective measure I can think of, the red line that was laid out by this administration has been crossed," Parkinson said. "So now if the Biden administration does not follow through with what it promised it would do if this red line was crossed, it's a loss of credibility. It makes it look like Biden is incredibly weak in a partnership with what is considered to be one of the U.S.'s closest allies."

For several weeks this spring, the Biden administration held meetings with Israeli officials in an effort to persuade the country to pursue targeted raids and strikes in Rafah instead of conducting a full-scale ground invasion, the Post reported. U.S. officials voiced concerns over the how a major operation in the city would affect the around 1.3 million Palestinians who were sheltering there after eight months of violence and multiple displacements.

As part of those talks, U.S. officials warned that Israel could not further displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Rafah without providing basic infrastructure, food and water. But since the beginning of the Israeli military's push into the city, about 1 million Palestinians have evacuated Rafah without those provisions, the Post notes, and both Israel and Egypt have limited aid into Gaza.

Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza in October after Hamas militants conducted an attack, killing nearly 1,200 Israelis and seizing around 250 hostages. Israel's counteroffensive has since killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations, and its occupation of the territory has caused Gaza's health system to collapse and created a humanitarian crisis characterized by a worsening famine and increased risk of disease.

Though Biden and his aides sought to avoid the mass death and destruction that the war has seen — images of charred bodies and parents burning alive as their children screamed added to the gruesome picture over the weekend — his staunch support of Israel and the growing Palestinian death toll has deepened his political challenges, the Post noted.

"Biden has been in a bind from the very beginning because he was going to pay a political price, regardless of what policy he adopted," Dr. Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Salon. "If he put real pressure on Israel, which he hasn't done, he was going to pay a price from [the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee], various parts of the Israel lobby and wealthy donors who he wants to contribute to his campaign.

"But if he takes the other path, which is basically what he's done, he's alienated young people and he's alienated the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and he's made himself look every bit as heartless as Donald Trump," Walt said.

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In the days before the airstrike, Biden administration officials felt they had influenced Israel's operational plans in Rafah enough to prevent a massive loss of civilian lives, three U.S. officials told Axios Monday.

White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan had several hours of discussions with senior Israeli officials about the Rafah operation while in Israel last week. One senior U.S. official told Axios that Sullivan felt that Israel's updated plans for the Rafah invasion had adequately addressed many of the administration's concerns, allowing them to see the possibility of the operation occurring without crossing Biden's "red lines." That determination led the U.S. to pull back some of the opposition it had to the expansion of the Rafah invasion, which included Sunday's strike.

Biden believed that expressing unconditional support for Israel would lend to increasing his influence over the country, encouraging Israeli leadership to listen to him, Walt speculated. "But eight months have gone by, and there's no evidence that Netanyahu and his cabinet are listening to Biden or [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] at all," he argued. "Instead, they've both humiliated Biden and Blinken repeatedly, but they've also pursued a course of action that is isolating Israel and not getting rid of Hamas."

If Biden were to "pay a political price regardless" of his policy toward Israel, then "he should have done what was in America's interest and what was in the interest of international law and international order," Walt explained. The Biden administration "hasn't even tried to explain how its policy is good for America, how it's making America more secure, or more prosperous, or defending a set of values that we claim to uphold," he said. "But they don't even bother to make that case because you can't."

Sunday's airstrike marked the deadliest event in the southern Gaza city since Israel began its attacks there, taking place just days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to immediately cease all military operations in Rafah. Officials with the Gaza health ministry reported that women and children were among those killed in the blaze.

Netanyahu on Monday said the airstrike was a "tragic mistake" and was not intended to cause civilian casualties. The Israel Defense Forces announced an investigation into the bombing and said the strike had been carried out based on intelligence that senior Hamas officials planning attacks in the West Bank were present.

On Tuesday, Kirby highlighted Netanyahu's comments and said the Biden administration would wait for the IDF to release the results of its investigation, according to The Post.

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But as they wait and Israel's offensive in Rafah continues, more people and entities state-side and internationally grow increasingly outraged with Israel — and by association, with the Biden administration's policy regarding Israel and Gaza.

The Saudi Arabian government on Tuesday denounced in "the strongest terms the continuous genocidal massacres" committed by the IDF, affirmed the military's "violations of all international and humanitarian resolutions, laws, and norms" and emphasized how it places the "credibility of the institutions of international legitimacy at stake," in a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter.

Its condemnations follow Spain, Ireland and Norway each officially recognizing a state of Palestine in a concerted effort to pressure Israel to curtail its assault in Gaza as well as protests in Israel against Netanyahu over his handling of the war.

In the U.S., young people, a demographic key to Biden's 2020 electoral victory, have pressured the president for months to change course lest he threaten his prospects for re-election in November.

Prominent progressive lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. called the airstrike "an indefensible atrocity," adding on social media that "it is long past time for the President to live up to his word and suspend military aid."

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., joined Ocasio-Cortez in her opposition, writing on X: "Horrific and gut wrenching images coming out of Rafah last night. How much longer will the U.S. stand by while the Israeli military slaughters and mutilates Palestinian babies?"

The additional foreign policy impact of Biden's support of Israel, then, is that the U.S. is "rapidly losing credibility," Parkinson said, arguing that "a lot of the world is actually looking down the line to November and thinking about the foreign policy implications of a Biden loss in November as well."

"The administration is trying to have it both ways," Parkinson added, highlighting as a sign Kirby's exchange with a reporter who questioned how many "charred corpses" Biden would have to see before he considers a change in policy. "It doesn't want to have any risk of being portrayed as not standing with Israel, but it is also trying to demonstrate, theoretically, some care for international humanitarian law protection of civilian life as well as for the long standing ramifications of this level of violence occurring in the region."

But Biden's approach, Walt warned, could result in the "worst of all possible outcomes here" when his administration eventually feels "they have to really crack down" on Israel.

"If they do that, then they will pay a political price here at home but only after thousands of people have died and after America's image in much of the world has been shredded," Walt said.

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Vivek Ramaswamy uses his 8.4% BuzzFeed stake to unsuccessfully push layoffs, right-wing hires

Vivek Ramaswamy, one-time Republican presidential candidate, gave BuzzFeed management his vision for mass layoffs and far-right voices on the platform, after acquiring an 8.4% stake in the online media company.

In a letter to the BuzzFeed Board of Directors, Ramaswamy wrote that the company was “caught without a viable strategy” amidst the death of the social internet model. Citing plummeting share prices and declining revenue, the self-proclaimed “serial founder” urged for shake-ups.

Among Ramaswamy’s demands: hire “talents” like Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher, or Candace Owens to “challenge your audiences.” This came as part of his proposal to expand creator-led audio and video on the platform, one of three phases outlined in Ramaswamy’s plan.

Ramaswamy also pushed for the media company to return to “start-up size,” arguing that the board should only keep producers of the “highest-value content.” Putting it bluntly, “large-scale headcount reductions.” BuzzFeed, which in February laid off 16% of its workforce amidst a sell-off of Complex, wouldn’t be alone if it underwent a massive labor force cut.

The candidate, who ran for president on small government and massive federal layoffs, dropped out after coming in fourth during the 2024 Iowa caucus. He has since backed the Republican victor-apparent and former President Donald Trump, careful to keep criticism to a minimum in order to angle for a high-level role in a potential administration, a gambit which was ultimately in vain.

Ramaswamy is not the first big-money voice to venture into the news publication business. Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013 for a quarter of a billion dollars. Rupert Murdoch famously built a media empire, controlling the British and Australian media markets while snatching up American imprints like the New York Post. Patrick Soon-Shiong took control of the Los Angeles Times and a slew of other papers – before slashing its workforce by 20% earlier this year.

Ramaswamy told board members to suppress their “temptation to reject what you are about to hear on partisan grounds,” while BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told Ramaswamy that his skepticism came more so from his central plan to “turn BuzzFeed into a creator platform for inflammatory political pundits.”

“We’re definitely not going to issue an apology for our Pulitzer prize-winning journalism,” Peretti said in response to another demand of Ramaswamy’s, to apologize for its “failures.”

Trump considering Elon Musk for advisory role in second administration

Donald Trump is reportedly considering Elon Musk for an advisory role during a possible second term, deepening the already present ties between a new Trump administration and the nation’s wealthiest business owners.

Per The Wall Street Journal, the pair correspond by cell phone multiple times per month and, according to people familiar with their talks, "the role hasn’t been fully hammered out and might not happen," but "the two men discussed ways to give Musk formal input and influence over policies related to border security and the economy."

Trump and Musk met in March to discuss the possibility of a donation from the Tesla CEO, looking to close the gap in cash reserves between Trump and Biden. But the potential job is a new indication that Trump wants to give the ultra-wealthy an even closer hand in government affairs.

X Corp. CTO Musk, in recent moves to rebrand himself as a staunch conservative, has reportedly alienated key demographics who purchase electric vehicles and plunged Tesla sales in the process. His political interests have centered immigration, restrictions on transgender rights, and the economy.

His claim that undocumented immigrants were laying the “groundwork” for a terror attack was parroted by Trump in his Bronx rally, proclaiming that migrants were prepping an “army.”

Musk is also a fan of Trump-aligned transphobic rhetoric, banning the word “cisgender” from Twitter after far-right pundits attacked the term.

Musk has so far opted not to officially tip the scales, writing in a post on X that he was “not donating money to either candidate for U.S. President” as of then.

Still, Musk, who re-activated Donald Trump’s Twitter account after the site’s previous management had shut it down following the January 6th insurrection, is a powerful Trump-world figure.

“I miss a dominant masculinity”: Jerry Seinfeld looks to turn back the clock on gender roles

Jerry Seinfeld, a warrior against cancel culture in comedy, says he misses “dominant masculinity,” despite acknowledging that he “get[s] the toxic thing.”

In an appearance on conservative commentator and journalist Bari Weiss’s podcast, Seinfeld said he “always wanted to be a real man,” citing examples of masculinity like JFK, Muhammad Ali, Sean Connery, and Howard Cosell after Weiss joked that she “didn’t ask [his] pronouns.”

The comedian concluded that he “never really grew up,” instead embracing the “childish pursuit” of comedy. The pair went on to discuss what they viewed as challenges plaguing comedy in the modern era.

On Weiss’s position that “censoriousness” had overtaken comedy, Seinfeld argued that “punching down,” or attacking someone in a position of less power, isn't real.

“Comedy is an extraordinarily simple binary outcome event. Is it funny? Or it isn’t. Nobody cares, really, about anything else,” the “Seinfeld” creator said. “What we really hate is when someone does something that’s not so funny, and we didn’t laugh, and now I’m gonna criticize it.”

The comedian, who delivered a commencement speech at Duke University’s graduation earlier this month, faced strong condemnation for his support for Israel from a group of students, who walked off in protest. He asked students who remained if it was “worth the sacrifice of occasional discomfort to have some laughs,” per the New York Times.

Further on in the chat with Weiss, Seinfeld also cited an “agreed-upon hierarchy” as a factor in his nostalgia for the early 1960s, in which his film "Unfrosted" takes place, chiding a broader equality as a source of discomfort in the modern era.

“Its [hierarchy] absolutely vaporized in today’s moment,” the comic said. “I think that is why people lean on the horn and drive in the crazy way that they drive, because we have no sense of hierarchy. And as humans, we don’t really feel comfortable like that.”

Seinfeld, who last month argued that TV comedy’s declining ratings had “the extreme left and PC c**p, and people worrying so much about offending other people,” to blame, released “Unfrosted” earlier this year to a 43% favorable rating on the site Rotten Tomatoes.

Amy Coney Barrett’s husband is representing Fox’s parent company in court

Yet another SCOTUS Spouse is posing serious conflict-of-interest questions on whether justices should disclose their partners’ work.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s husband, Jesse Barrett, is representing Fox Corporation in a defamation lawsuit, Rolling Stone reports. The SouthBank Legal managing partner “represented a prominent media company in a lawsuit alleging defamation,” per his website, referring to Redmond v. Fox Television Station LLC.

The case, which lists Barrett as an attorney for Fox, stems from Illinois man Lavell Redmond’s claim in the suit that Fox’s inaccurate reporting “directly led to Redmond being arrested and wrongfully charged with violating the reporting requirements of the sex offender registry.” The case is being argued in the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Barrett was under no legal obligation to disclose the client list of her partner on mandatory ethics forms, though advocates say the top court’s ethics rules need serious improvements. The Barretts attended Notre Dame Law School together for a year, each clerking for judges and working gigs in the private sector before Amy Coney Barrett made her way to the Federal Judiciary. Jesse Barrett then opened a D.C. office for his firm mere months after his wife’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The curious practice of not disclosing potential conflict of interests arising from a justice’s spouse was noted by Politico in 2022, writing that Justices Thomas, Roberts and Barrett all chose to leave details about the work of their partners off their ethics forms.

The Supreme Court Justice’s colleagues’ spouses have been in the news recently, too. Justice Alito’s wife was thrust in the spotlight of discussions over the waving of a flag in support of attempts to overturn the 2020 election when Alito told members of congress that “[his] wife is fond of flying flags.” Justice Thomas’s wife played a sizable role in those same attempts to overturn the election.

All three instances of spousal political involvement have raised ethics questions into the impartiality of the three justices, who make up half of the conservative wing of the court. Supreme Court watchdogs worry that increasing conflicts and compromises to justices’ ethics pose a legitimacy crisis that demands intervention.

“Either we just accept a Supreme Court that is compromised beyond measure, and where there's no recourse,” James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University, previously told Salon. “Or the other branches have a constitutional duty and power to step in and promote due process."

Cannes best actress winner Karla Sofía Gascón sues French politician following “transphobic insult”

Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón — who won best actress along with "Emilia Pérez" co-stars Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Zoe Saldaña at this year's Cannes film festival — has filed a lawsuit against a far-right French politician who publicly criticized her historic win. The remarks, according to multiple advocacy groups, were transphobic.

Gascón, a one-time telenovela star who transitioned in 2018, plays the titular character in director Jacques Audiard’s musical comedy. The film debuted to a nearly 10-minute standing ovation, according to Variety. Per reports, Netflix will distribute the film in the United States, while distributor Pathé has secured an Aug. 28 release in France.

"It is therefore a man who receives the prize for female interpretation at Cannes," Marion Maréchal, a high-ranking member in the Reconquête party, wrote in a post on X in response to Gascón's win. "Progress for the left is the erasure of women and mothers."

According to Variety, Gascón, the first trans woman to win the Cannes prize, filed suit after six LGBTQ+ advocacy groups lodged complaints against Maréchal on her behalf, citing a "transphobic insult." Etienne Deshoulières, an attorney for Gascón and the advocacy groups, told Variety that Gascón hoped to give weight to the complaints by filing a lawsuit.

Under French law, Maréchal's "sexist insult related to gender identity" is punishable by a 3,750 euro fine, while a one-year imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros could be assessed for "transphobic insult," Variety notes.

Maréchal, a candidate for European Parliament, is the niece of Marine LePen, whose presidential bids as leader of the National Front party in 2012, 2017 and 2022 failed. Maréchal’s Reconquête party, which borrows its name from the Spanish Reconquista — the expulsion of Muslims from the country — represents far-right, Great Replacement-esque ideology in France.

Watch the trailer for "Emilia Pérez" below via YouTube:

Drug that regrows teeth to be tested in humans this September

Losing your teeth is one of many folks' greatest fears and is fodder for many disturbing nightmares. Replacing lost teeth is yet another dreadful experience, not just because visiting the dentist can be uncomfortable, but also due to the high cost and often invasive nature of such oral procedures.

But someday a drug could change that, making it easy to regrow one's teeth just like a lost fingernail or your hair. New research from Kyoto University Hospital in Japan has already regrown teeth in the mouths of mice and ferrets, prompting experts to prepare for human testing, according to New Atlas.

How white should your teeth really be?

The intravenous treatment works by suppressing activation of the uterine sensitization-associated gene-1 (USAG-1) protein, which inhibits tooth growth. Experiments on animals succeeded with no apparent ill side effects, giving researchers confidence that they can test it on humans.

From September 2024 through August 2025, scientists will test the drug on 30 human males between the ages of 30 to 64. If such clinical research succeeds without serious side effects, the research will move on to testing the drug on humans between the ages of 2 and 7. Finally, they will test it on patients with partial edentulism, or missing teeth they develop due to environmental factors later in life. If things go according to plan, it can be expected to be a more widespread treatment around 2030 and will no doubt confuse the heck out of the Tooth Fairy.

"We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence," lead researcher Katsu Takahashi, head of dentistry and oral surgery at Kitano Hospital, said to New Atlas. "While there has been no treatment to date providing a permanent cure, we feel that people's expectations for tooth growth are high."

Poor dental health has been linked to a wide range of illnesses, from heart and brain diseases to gingivitis, so an option to regenerate the bones in one's skull is likely to be very attractive if it works.

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“People might call him an ahole, but he’s my ahole”: Dennis Quaid is firmly pro-Trump

Actor Dennis Quaid during a recent appearance on "Piers Morgan Uncensored" affirmed his support for Donald Trump in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

"As president, the only thing I liked about Trump was everything he did," Quaid said during the Tuesday interview with the British conservative media personality, per Entertainment Weekly. While he noted that he has not always backed Trump, who has been criminally indicted four times, Quaid argued that a vote for MAGA this November "just makes sense."

"I was ready not to vote for Trump until what I saw as — more than politics — I see a weaponization of our justice system and a challenge to our constitution," he said. "People might call him an a**hole, but he's my a**hole."

Quaid, who is portraying former Republican president Ronald Reagan in the upcoming biopic "Reagan" also told Morgan that "it took a long time to take the role because I was overwhelmed by it."

"It really sent fear down my spine, which is an indication that I should probably do that, because it get me out of my comfort zone," he said. "But it took me a while, I guess because I idolized him a bit. And I didn't want to bring that into it."

Trump is “the opioid of all opioids”: Ken Burns abandons “long-standing attempt at neutrality”

Filmmaker Ken Burns offered an ominous message about the potential threats another MAGA presidency could impose during a recent commencement address at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

“For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens,” Burn said, later adding that he had been forced to "suspend my long-standing attempt at neutrality” because “there is no real choice this November."

"There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route," he continued. "The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, 'a bigger delusion,' James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies.

"Do not be seduced by easy equalization," Burns continued. "There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer."

Report: Diddy accusers could face a federal grand jury, as violent college stories surface

The latest update in the ongoing media flurry around Sean "Diddy" Combs could see his accusers stand before a federal grand jury in New York City to testify about their alleged assault at the hands of the disgraced rapper and producer.

A CNN report published Wednesday indicated that women who have accused Combs of sexual assault have been told that they could be brought before a federal grand jury by investigators to serve as witnesses, which could lead to Combs' subsequent indictment, per two sources who spoke to the outlet.

Over the past several months, Combs has faced a number of civil lawsuits alleging sexual assault, drugging, and sex trafficking. In March, federal agents raided two of his estates in connection to the sex trafficking probe. Combs has denied the civil lawsuits' veracity. In December of 2023, he claimed in an Instagram post that "individuals looking for a quick payday" were deliberately trying to "assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy."

"His career is effectively done": Experts assess footage of Diddy's assault on Cassie, his apology

However, those denials may have been undermined this month, when a piece of evidence emerged in connection to Combs' relationship with his ex-girlfriend of more than a decade and one of the people to sue him, Cassie Ventura. Surveillance footage of Combs physically assaulting Ventura during a 2016 stay at the InterContinental Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles, went viral. Ventura's suit stated that the Bad Boy Records founder and billionaire mogul was a "serial domestic abuser, who would regularly beat and kick Ms. Ventura, leaving black eyes, bruises and blood."

While Combs and Ventura had reached an undisclosed settlement, the recently released footage reverberated across the internet, with Combs ultimately posting a response in which he said, "I was f***ed up. I mean, I hit rock bottom. But I make no excuses. My behavior on that video is inexcusable."

CNN's sources indicated that the potential witnesses have not yet been readied for testimony, noting that the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agency is still amassing evidence and being as thorough as possible to ensure that any potential indictment will be "bulletproof." As CNN noted, HSI looks into various forms of organized criminal activity, including narcotics smuggling. “It’s much bigger than just these lawsuits,” one of the sources said. Per CNN's sources, multiple accusers have already spoken to investigators on several occasions, with some even sharing evidence that may be of use. Such evidence has included a video obtained from one of Combs' estates. While it has not yet been discerned whether the tape was taken during the March raids, a source asserted, "They are contacting people that they’ve found on the tapes."

CNN's Wednesday update follows a report on Combs published Tuesday by Rolling Stone detailing his alleged history of violent behavior that spanned as far back as his college days at Howard University. The outlet claimed to have spoken to 50 sources connected to Combs' social and professional lives in some way.

One source claimed to have witnessed Combs, then known by his nickname Puff, "acting crazy" and "beating" his then-girlfriend outside one of the university's buildings. Another Howard student who reportedly saw the attack said that Combs was using what appeared to be a belt to hit the woman "all over the place.” The witness added that Combs appeared “super angry” and was “screaming at the top of his lungs," and that the woman was “trying to defend herself a little bit. She was crying. And we were telling him, ‘Get off of her.’ We were screaming for her.” Combs “whupped her butt," they said. "Like really whupped her butt."

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“Top Chef” sputters with a ill-conceived challenge — but the LCK victory is a worthy contender

Spoilers abound, so shield your eyes if you didn't see last week's episode of "Top Chef" just yet!

Another week, another lackluster episode of "Top Chef." This has become too common of a pattern, really. There's something inarguably frustrating about this season, frankly, so that's . . . dispiriting. Especially as the series remains one of my all-time favorite shows, reality or otherwise.

Alas, not all is lost. Savannah scored another win (albeit a pretty gnarly cut, which is a word I hate using, but it's fitting here), Michelle rebounded (again), Dan continued to perform well (and be refreshingly honest) and Danny's consistent competence — and love for carrots — continued.

"Top Chef" contestants had to put their spin on a classic Door County fish boil — but what is it?

I was disappointed to see Soo go out, though I do concur that his dish didn't look especially terrific and the flavor seemed a bit muddled, and I was definitely let down by Manny's dish — but I'm glad he stuck around. It was also great to see some of my favorite alum, though I do think some odd maneuvers by some of them may have also impacted the end result of the episode.

"Last Chance Kitchen," on the other hand, concluded with a result that I didn't anticipate, but one that made me quite happy.

Here are the rest of my takeaways for episode 10 of this season of "Top Chef," titled "Door County Fish Boil."

The Quick Fire was fun (the idea of a meat raffle is wild?), Danny's Jimmy Nardellos and harissa relish with labneh and mint sounded amazing, and I got a kick out of the notion of going from a Chateaubriand to bologna and canned corned beef. Kudos to Savannah on pulling out that win!

Also, since being a constant in Quick Fires, I find that Tom's energy is much sillier and lighter, sort of akin to his persona in LCK? He seemed unenthused in the beginning of the season so I'm happy to see this shift.

I loved Dan's comment which sort of summed up my whole opinion on the challenge: "You don't boil fish, you poach fish."

Danny's carrot slaw and Dan's Southeast Asian boil probably had the top dishes here, though Michelle was certainly a top contender again with her Houston-influenced boil.

It was odd to see everyone's dishes look so … flat? Plain? This wasn't my favorite challenge. I think some of the critiques were odd and also, let's be frank: It's hard not to play it safe when you're simply cooking fish in boiling water in some contraption on a beach.

Speaking of, Dan clearly should have had some sort of accommodation: The physical component of that challenge, on a beach, no less — was nothing to scoff at. Also, I noticed that the pots almost never "boiled over," which was apparently the point of the kerosene throw, so I'm also confused by that.

It's a bummer to see Soo go. I really think if he had just edited his Fish Boil dish, it could've been much stronger and he may not have even landed in the bottom, which I assume would've resulted in Manny being sent home. I also question if Gregory's shopping was a hindrance more than a help, unfortunately. Also, hearing that his dish "tasted like a raw casserole" if obviously pretty damning in and of itself.

Gail even noted that his charred pineapple beurre blanc was one of the best bites of the day.

Where Mei's advice to Manny was clearly trying to better his final dish, I didn't get that impression from Gregory's shop for Soo. Interesting to see Manny's pushing back on Mei, when it was really a great suggestion, compared to Soo's sort of being more accommodating and open-minded, which obviously didn't work out well.

On the other hand, Shota is magnificent and I loved seeing him. He was so kind, helpful and encouraging to everyone throughout the entire episode. I also liked seeing Jeremy, who I think is a very under-appreciated Top Chef winner, and I always love seeing Sara and Mei.

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Loved Savannah's quotes in this episode, from the encouraging, momentous "I've turned something on and I think it's dangerous" to the bluntness of "my brain is not connecting to the rest of my body" after her injury.

Savannah's complete lack of focus from the instant she cut herself was so completely evident, which was discouraging, but thank goodness for her QF win! I do think she would've been fine regardless, though, since I really think the boot was explicitly between Manny and Soo. I loved the sound of her bold and spicy smashed tofu salad and think Shota was a magnificent "shopping partner" for her.

In the episode, Danny remarked that "Savannah has found her voice and made her presence known," which I thought was interesting. Exposition by-way-of-competitors-confessionals is always an interesting reality television trope, if you will, and I found this to be an compelling one.

I've also noticed that Tom often tends to defend her in judges' table, repeatedly, so I hope that that portends positive outcomes for her down the road!

I'll also say that I think a final six of Savannah, Laura, Michelle, Dan, Danny and Manny is actually one of the strongest groups of "endgame" cheftestants that we've had in a (non-All Stars) season in quite a while, actually. I think the odd editing and production choices have hindered a group that is actually very, very talented.

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I loved the LCK challenge of sort of highlighting all of the previous Quick Fires, which reminded me of when "Survivor" used to have challenges in the endgame that were essentially highlighting (and using props) from challenges in the beginning of the season.

Tom isn't wrong; some of the dishes in LCK this season have been truly impressive, and in most cases, even eclipsing the "main" competition dishes.

Also, it feels like Kristen and Tom are legitimate, actual pals, which is sort of fun and wholesome, right? Also, I actually laughed out loud when Soo hid his beer from Mei as if he was being reprimanded by a teacher or something.

I really like the Amanda/Laura friendship, which I felt was a little under-edited until their dual boot. Their being the only two left in LCK felt like somewhat of a "full circle" moment, after having watched them be eliminated together and then wind up in the finals of "Last Chance Kitchen."

It would've been cool to see a further fleshing out of their relationship, which was clearly mutually respectful and very friendly, instead of some of the negative Laura content that felt somewhat shoehorned into the show.

I'm sort of obsessed with the Laura win from an edit perspective: She's arguably the only person who got a negative edit all season . . . and she’s the LCK winner? For “casual” fans, they’re probably still hoping for Rasika, and out of the final competitors, I think Soo/Amanda would’ve had the edge.

Personally, though, I am so hype for Laura because I love her flavor profiles, her delicate, lighter dishes and food and I am so glad she won, but again, the editing choices remain befuddling this season. Her saucework is amazing!

Found it interesting, too, that Kevin seemed so visibly un-enthused with Laura's win. Perhaps the only time all season, sans his boot from the main competition and from LCK, when he wasn’t beaming and smiling.

Anyway, I loved Laura's cooking "zeytinyagi", her notion to celebrate vegetables that aren't overused and how she always has such a light hand, along with her emotional, celebratory response when she won. Her food is unique and unvarnished to me, which is a rarity on this show, and I love the ballsiness to serve vegetables cooked in olive oil as your LCK finale dish — and winning, nonetheless!

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Farmworkers face high-risk exposures to bird flu, but testing isn’t reaching them

Farmworkers face some of the most intense exposures to the bird flu virus, but advocates say many of them would lack resources to fall back on if they became ill.

So far, only two people in the United States have tested positive after being exposed to a wave of bird flu spreading among cows. Those people, dairy farm workers in Texas and Michigan, experienced eye irritation.

Scientists warn the virus could mutate to spread from person to person like the seasonal flu, which could spark a pandemic. By keeping tabs on farmworkers, researchers could track infections, learn how dangerous they are, and be alerted if the virus becomes more infectious.

Clues from bird flu’s ground zero on dairy farms in the Texas Panhandle

But people generally get tested when they seek treatment for illnesses. Farmworkers rarely do that, because many lack health insurance and paid sick leave, said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for the national group United Farm Workers. They are unlikely to go to a doctor unless they become very ill.

Strater said about 150,000 people work in U.S. dairies. She said many worker advocates believe the virus has spread to more people than tests are showing. “The method being used to surveil at-risk workers has been very passive,” she said.

Federal officials told reporters May 22 that just 40 people connected to U.S. dairy farms had been tested for the virus, although others are being “actively monitored” for symptoms.

Federal authorities recently announced they would pay farmworkers $75 each to be tested for the virus, as part of a new program that also offers incentives for farm owners to allow testing of their dairy herds.

Officials of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they recognize the importance of gaining cooperation and trust from front-line dairy employees.

CDC spokesperson Rosa Norman said in an email that the incentive payment compensates workers for their time contributing to the monitoring of how many people are infected, how sick they become, and whether humans are spreading the virus to each other.

She noted the CDC believes the virus currently poses a low risk to public health.

But Strater is skeptical of the incentive for farmworkers to be checked for the virus. If a worker tests positive, they’d likely be instructed to go to a clinic then stay home from work. She said they couldn’t afford to do either.

“That starts to sound like a really bad deal for 75 bucks, because at the end of the week, they’re supposed to feed their families,” she said.

Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, said that in her state, health officials would provide short-term medical care, such as giving farmworkers the flu treatment Tamiflu. Those arrangements wouldn’t necessarily cover hospitalization if it were needed, she said.

She said the workers’ bigger concern appears to be that they would have to stay home from work or might even lose their jobs if they tested positive.

Many farmworkers are from other countries, and they often labor in grueling conditions for little pay.

They may fear attention to cases among them will inflame anti-immigrant fervor, said Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Societies have a long history of blaming marginalized communities for the spread of contagious diseases. Latino immigrants were verbally attacked during the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic in 2009, for example, and some media personalities used the outbreak to push for a crackdown on immigration.

Bethany Boggess Alcauter, director of research and public health programs at the National Center for Farmworker Health, said many workers on dairy farms have been told very little about this new disease spreading in the cows they handle. “Education needs to be a part of testing efforts, with time for workers to ask questions,” she said.

These conversations should be conducted in the farmworkers’ language, with people they are likely to trust, she said.

Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said public health officials must make clear that workers’ immigration status will not be reported as part of the investigation into the new flu virus. “We’re not going to be the police,” he said.

Dawn O’Connell, an administrator at the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a press conference May 22 that nearly 5 million doses of a vaccine against H5N1, the bird flu virus circulating in cattle, are being prepared, but that officials have not decided whether the shots will be offered to farmworkers when they’re ready later this year.

The CDC asked states in early May to share personal protective equipment with farm owners, to help them shield workers from the bird flu virus. State health departments in California, Texas, and Wisconsin, which have large dairy industries, all said they have offered to distribute such equipment.

Chris Van Deusen, a Texas health department spokesperson, said four dairy farms had requested protective equipment from the state stockpile. He said other farms may already have had what they needed. Spokespeople for the California and Wisconsin health departments said they did not immediately receive requests from farm owners for the extra equipment.

Strater, the United Farm Workers official, said protective equipment offerings need to be practical.

Most dairy workers already wear waterproof aprons, boots, and gloves, she said. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect them to also wear N95 face masks in the wet, hot conditions of a milking operation, she said. Plastic face shields seem like a better option for that environment, especially to prevent milk from spraying into workers’ eyes, where it could cause infection, she said.

Other types of agricultural workers, including those who work with chickens, also face potential infection. But scientists say the version of the virus spreading in cows could be particularly dangerous, because it has adapted to live in mammals.

Strater said she’s most worried about dairy workers, who spend 10 to 12 hours a day in enclosed spaces with cows.

“Their faces are approximately 5 inches away from the milk and the udders all day long,” she said. “The intimacy of it, where their face is so very close to the infectious material, is different.”

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Try the iced coffee drink Ina Garten calls “delicious rocket fuel”

If you're looking for a new coffee drink to make at home this summer, domestic maven and all-around icon Ina Garten has got you covered. And if you're especially looking for a real caffeine boost, you'll be comforted by the fact she refers to the drink as "delicious rocket fuel."

As Stacey Leasca writes in "Food & Wine," Garten hosted restaurateur Danny Meyer — founder of New York City's Union Square Hospitality Group — on her Food Network show "Be My Guest" and served him a brunch with a "Vanilla Coffee Shakerato."

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6lnNxkRw7L/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=b1102e40-f67a-4d76-8614-db1f2e9fb137

The simple recipe is also on the Barefoot Contessa website; containing only espresso (or strong coffee), sweetened condensed milk, simple syrup, pure vanilla extract and ice, the drink is perfect for a burgeoning barista who wants something a little more special than a standard cup of joe. Ina's recipe instructions also state "I use the 'long' rather than 'short' setting on my espresso machine. You can certainly make this with strong coffee as well."

Of course, Ina's version could also be made hot, instead. You could also omit the sweetened condensed milk if you're avoiding dairy (or sugar), and the vanilla and simple syrup could either be homemade or store-bought. Omit the syrup altogether if you're looking to go sugar-free.

The drink offers endless tweaks to best suit your tastes.

“That’s not the law”: Expert rejects Trump lawyers’ complaints about judge’s jury instructions

The instructions provided to jurors in former President Donald Trump's Trump's trial Wednesday are largely routine — but will prove crucial in allowing the 12 jurors to weigh the "avalanche" of testimony provided by prosecutors, legal experts told Salon.

"We have one of the biggest cases in our nation's history," said Southwestern Law School professor Richard Lorren Jolly. "We're a deliberative democracy. And there's something incredibly beautiful about that, and whether a conviction results or an acquittal, this is how the system is supposed to work."

Manhattan prosecutors have alleged that Trump was part of an illegal scheme to ultimately use $130,000 of Trump's money to keep information from the voters and unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.

Trump himself has questioned the supposed political bias of jurors, and proclaimed himself the victim of a vast Democratic witch-hunt.

"Mother Teresa could not beat these charges," Trump said on his social media platform Wednesday. "These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged!"

But legal experts say the 55 pages worth of jury instructions provided by Judge Juan Merchan provide an important blueprint that continues to educate jurors on our legal system as they begin deliberating on weeks of testimony.

"Judges use what has been done before and what has been accepted in the past, so they're not doing this from scratch," Nancy Marder, a professor at Illinois Tech Chicago Kent College of Law and director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center, said. "So I do think it provides an important roadmap for the jurists once they get into the jury room and start deliberating."

And legal experts said they hope the jury instructions themselves will build confidence in the process.

"There's been a lot of attacks on this idea that the jury is somehow unqualified or politically biased," Jolly told Salon. "And those have always been attacks on the juries and institution going back hundreds of years, but our constitutional commitment to it is on full display here."

Legal expert calls out Trump lawyer's "blatant and wholly inappropriate" closing message to jury

WHAT THE JURY INSTRUCTIONS SAY

Former federal prosecutor Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, said much of the instructions are routine.

"How you assess the credibility of witnesses, theories of accomplice liability, those types of things, that's all pretty standard," she said.

But the jury instructions do reflect discussion among the judge, prosecutors and the defense about how the jury should approach some of the most crucial aspects of the case, including how jurors should weigh Trump's alleged role.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, with prosecutors saying that audio recordings, internal business records and witness testimony prove he was scheming to kill damaging stories about alleged extramarital sex ahead of his 2016 campaign and disguising reimbursements for the hush money to fixer Michael Cohen as legal fees — all in violation of state and federal election law and state tax law. Each count carries up to four years in prison, which Trump would likely serve concurrently if convicted. Trump denies the charges, as well as the alleged sexual encounters.

Merchan's instructions in part read: "Under our law, a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when, with intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof, that person: makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise."

That means jurors have to weigh whether Trump made or caused the falsification of business records including ledger entries, checks, vouchers and invoices — some of which have Trump's signature on them.

Then, jurors have to decide whether Trump caused the falsification of records with an intent to defraud: defined as "a general intent to defraud any person or entity" that can include, but isn't limited to, depriving another of property or money.

The instructions say that the intent to defraud has to include committing, aiding or concealing "another crime."

"Another crime could be any crime," Adam Shlahet, director of the Brendan Moore Trial Advocacy Center at Fordham Law, said. "There's no limitation on only this kind of crime or only that kind of crime. It's any crime, and it's not an element of the charge to prove the person is guilty of that other crime. Just as long as their intent at the time was in furtherance of or to conceal another crime."

He added: "They don't need to have succeeded in that crime. And they don't need to have failed in that crime."

The juror instructions make clear that prosecutors are alleging that Trump intended to commit, aid or conceal a violation of state election law section 17-152. That statute, Merchan said, "provides that any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of conspiracy to promote or prevent an election."

Trump's attorneys had asked the judge to instruct the jury that they would have to unanimously agree on what "unlawful means" were used in this alleged scheme.

"The court rejected that because that's not the law of New York," McCord said. "New York says the jurors don't, all 12, have to agree what the unlawful means are here."

Merchan said jurors can consider three unlawful means: a violation of federal election law, falsification of other business records or violation of tax laws.

"Trump's counsel recognized when he argued for something different last week that that's New York law, but what he had said is basically in these extraordinary circumstances where the statutes are being used here with respect to a former president, and in these circumstances, we think it's within the judge's discretion to require unanimity," McCord said. "And the judge rejected that so that one could be meaningful, depending on how deliberations go."

The instructions also lay out how jurors should approach the hard-to-define concept of reasonable doubt.

"The law recognizes that, in dealing with human affairs, there are very few things in this world that we know with absolute certainty," reads the instructions. "Therefore, the law does not require the People to prove a defendant guilty beyond all possible doubt. On the other hand, it is not sufficient to prove that the defendant is probably guilty. In a criminal case, the proof of guilt must be stronger than that. A reasonable doubt is an honest doubt of the defendant's guilt for which a reason exists based upon the nature and quality of the evidence."

Shlahet said that excludes far-fetched — or as the jury instructions says, "imaginary" — doubts.

"If you really applied proof beyond a reasonable doubt, there's an argument that nobody would ever get convicted, right, because you could always have reasonable doubt," Shlahet said. "But if you focus on the word reasonable, and it's those doubts that are unreasonable, not real, just kind of far-fetched, what-if scenarios, then that is perfectly unreasonable, though. But it's tricky."

Retired federal trial judge Gregory Mize, a jury trial expert teaching at Georgetown University Law Center said if there's a conviction, the defendant can appeal if he or she believes there's been a "misstatement" in jury instructions.

"And an appellate court would determine if that was an improper or incorrect statement of the law, and that that error led to an unreliable verdict," Mize said." Sometimes there's something called harmless error. And sometimes a technical legal error does not lead to a reversal, because it's so minor compared to all the other aspects."

JURORS LACK WRITTEN COPY OF INSTRUCTIONS

Though the Manhattan court released the text of the jury instructions — jurors themselves don't have access to a physical copy.

That means the jurors —which includes at least two lawyers — have to rely on their own notes.

"In other federal courts, jurors can be given a written copy of the instructions," Marder said. "I think it's harder for jurors. People listen and learn in different ways, and I think it's important that they hear the instructions, but I think it would be helpful if jurors could also see the instructions and take a copy into the jury room.

Fordham Law School professor Cheryl Bader said in her experience, jurors across jurisdictions typically lack access to written jury instructions.

"It is interesting that when it's such a kind of law, heavy instruction, jurors are expected to sort of lay people expected to sort of absorb this law and apply it," Bader said.

Bader noted the instructions touch on tricky concepts, including campaign finance law.

The defense decided not to call their campaign finance expert as a witness after Judge Merchan reaffirmed a pretrial ruling that would prevent the expert from interpreting election law.

Bader said it's possible that on the other hand, such an expert could have provided jurors with more insight into how to weigh the alleged underlying election crime.

Marder said that jurors have received important legal education throughout the trial, as prosecutors and the defense have made arguments and the judge has emphasized the importance of being impartial: "They're not just hearing the instructions cold."

Jurors can also send notes to the court with any problems or questions about the instructions the judge read aloud to them Wednesday.

"Judges have pattern jury instructions that have been vetted by linguists and veteran lawyers and judges," Mize said. "And it's the best possible statement in their view, these jury instruction committees. And even with all of that work, it can be very difficult to put a legal concept into ordinary language."

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HOW JURORS COULD RELY ON JURY INSTRUCTIONS

In closing arguments, Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche argued that jurors couldn't believe the testimony of Cohen, who served time in federal prison on perjury and tax fraud charges.

McCord said the jury instructions, which outline how to judge witness testimony, will prove crucial to how jurors determine Cohen's testimony.

"His credibility will be judged based on the application of these instructions about how to determine the truthfulness and accuracy of the testimony of each witness," McCord said. The jury "could find that it rejects in whole a witness testimony and they think that the person essentially intentionally testified falsely as material fact and therefore, you could reject it all. Or they could just reject whatever part they think is untruthful or wrong, accept the other parts."

Prosecutors allege that Trump's campaign went into overdrive to quash salacious stories after the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape, which witnesses said stoked concerns among Trump and others about his electoral prospects.

Trump's team argues Cohen decided to pay off adult film star and director Stormy Daniels on his own without informing Trump, and that Trump was chiefly concerned about how his wife would respond to any story about an extramarital affair.

Jeffrey Abramson, emeritus Professor of Law and Government at the University of Texas at Austin, said jurors may have an easier time weighing the prosecution's evidence alleging the falsification of business records.

"Were the records falsified? Yes," he said. "Were they done with Donald Trump's permissions and knowledge? A little bit harder. They'll have to ask themselves, why was this done in the first place?"

Bader said she thinks the prosecutors' case would strongly prove the misdemeanor of falsification of business records — and she said she wonders why the defense didn't ask the judge to allow jurors to consider that lesser charge.

"That sometimes creates a compromise verdict," Bader said. " It gets more complicated when you have this additional intent requirement, that Trump intended to conceal or commit another crime."

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Blanche, meanwhile, used his closing statements to argue that business records accurately describe Cohen as being paid for performing legal work for Trump. Cohen said he did "very minimal" work for Trump in 2017 when he got paid $420,000 in monthly installments.

Blanche argued there's a lack of evidence that directly ties Trump to the case, and that jurors can't rely on Cohen.

Shlahet said it's fair and expected for the defense to make that argument — particularly given that witnesses have testified that it was Trump's signature on checks to Cohen.

"It is a weakness of the prosecution's case that they don't have a direct admission from Donald Trump saying: 'You know, I was glad you didn't put the truth in those business records,'" Shlahet said. "The prosecution doesn't have that."

But, he added: "Nor does any prosecution really ever have that."

Meanwhile, the jury instructions make clear that jurors shouldn't solely rely on Cohen.

"Under our law, Michael Cohen is an accomplice because there is evidence that he participated in a crime based upon conduct involved in the allegations here against the defendant," read the instructions.

The instructions tell jurors they cannot convict Trump on Cohen's testimony "unless it is supported by corroborative evidence tending to connect the defendant with the commission of that crime."

McCord said it's a misconception that circumstantial evidence is any less important or worthy in a criminal case: "Direct evidence and circumstantial evidence are equally valuable evidence that can be considered by the jury and one is not lesser than any other."

She pointed to the pile of evidence offered by prosecutors, including text messages and phone records, meetings between Cohen, Trump and others corroborated by other witnesses as well as handwritten notes. Such notes include exhibits where Trump employees detailed an outline of a plan to reimburse Cohen to the tune of $420,000 for a $130,00 payment to Daniels on top of other costs, including a bonus.

"It could have some, you know, at least an initial blush, some persuasiveness," McCord said. "But it kind of starts to fall apart when you dig into it, because there's lots of other things that corroborate Michael Cohen, including the notes of Allen Weisselberg and bank statement that explains exactly how they get to the $420,000 reimbursement."

Jurors do have a lot of evidence to work with, according to Abramson.

"I'm not making any prediction here, but I don't think the absence of a smoking gun given the avalanche or cascading effect of so much testimony and so much record trail isn't necessarily going to be an obstacle from the jury is taking that last step," said Abramson, who authored the book "We, the Jury: the Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy."

about Trump's criminal trial

Sam Alito blames wife after neighbor pokes holes in his flag story: “She refused” to take it down

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito says he was "not even aware" of the upside-down American flag waving outside his Virginia home in the days after the January 6 insurrection, telling lawmakers Wednesday that he won't recuse himself from cases involving Donald Trump and the former president's claim of immunity from prosecution.

In a letter to members of Congress, distributed by the Supreme Court and reported on by CNN, Alito argued that the controversy was much ado about nothing. The missive comes after The New York Times cast doubt on the justice's previous assertion that the upside-down flag, a symbol of distress adopted by election-denying Trump supporters, was in response to a fight with neighbors — a fight, the Times reported, that actually took place a month later than claimed.

The Times also reported that an "Appeal to Heaven" flag, favored by far-right Christian nationalists, flew outside Alito's beach house in New Jersey.

"The two incidents you cite do not meet the conditions for recusal," Alito wrote. "As I have stated publicly, I had nothing whatsoever to do with the flying of that flag. I was not even aware of the upside-down flag until it was called to my attention. As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused."

Alito again insisted that the flag was related to a dispute with neighbors, despite the holes in that story. "My wife's reasons for flying the flag are not relevant for present purposes, but I note that she was greatly distressed at the time due, in large part, to a very nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement."

The "Appeal to Heaven" banner was also his wife's fault, Alito said, writing that she is "fond of flying flags." He continued: "She may have mentioned that it dates back to the American revolution, and I assumed she was flying it to express a religious and patriotic message."

"A reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that this event does not meet the applicable standard for recusal," he added.

The letter, addressed to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., was one of two that Alito sent to members of Congress. In another, he defended the flags on free speech grounds.

"My wife is a private citizen, and she possesses the same First Amendment rights as every other American," he wrote.

Several legal experts have challenged that argument before, noting that judges, owing to their positions, are not private citizens and are required to avoid even the appearance of bias.

“Super Size Me” at 20: How America’s obesity conversation has evolved and stalled

In the late documentarian Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 film “Super Size Me,” it’s clear that he’s casting McDonald’s as the villain from the moment a choir of kids begin enthusiastically singing the “Fast Food Song,” a novelty tune-turned playground standard by the Fast Food Rockers, a three-member band who met at a British fast-food convention in the early aughts.

You know how it goes.

Between slightly cheeky lyrics like “I think of you and lick my lips, you've got the taste that I can't resist” and “you’re chunky and hunky, I'm coming back for more” is the ear-worm of a chorus: McDonald's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut. McDonald's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut.

It’s an intentional choice, having kids shout out the lyrics instead of just hitting “play” on the track. A key argument in Spurlock’s documentary — which infamously saw him consuming McDonald’s for three meals a day for a month while tracking the mental and physical health effects — is that fast-food companies knowingly unleashed menu items with highly addictive qualities and substandard nutrition on a generation of Americans who didn’t fully understand the impacts consuming those meals would have on their bodies.

Churches are preaching the Gospel of Lizzo now

That includes members of what health professionals at the time of the film’s release had taken to calling the “Happy Meal generation,” the cohort of children who had grown up having fast-food marketed specifically to them with promises of fun and flair. That’s actually one of the reasons Spurlock embarked on filming; in 2003, the parents of two adolescent girls sued McDonald’s, alleging the company’s “making and selling their products [were] deceptive and that this deception has caused the minors who have consumed McDonalds' products to injure their health by becoming obese.”

Yet running parallel to this argument in “Super Size Me,” which came out 20 years ago this month, is a palpable level of disgust.

This is largely leveled at McDonald’s and their food (I think of a scene early in Spurlock’s journey when he decides to deconstruct a flabby Filet-O-Fish that had obviously been under the heat lamp for too long, complete with a yellowing smear of tartar sauce). However, peppered throughout the 98-minute documentary are also ample shots of overweight Americans — specifically their stomachs and backsides.

Every time the camera zoomed in on a thigh dimpled with cellulite or revealed a waistline extending past one’s belt, there was a clear, if unstated, implication: The same food that elicited that level of disgust from Spurlock contributed to bodies that were also worthy of disgust or disdain. This was clearly reflected in a lot of the coverage of the McDonald’s lawsuit, in which the girls at the center of the litigation were frequently referred to as “McFatties,” including by the New York Post.

Keep in mind, “Super Size Me” was released during the advent of what would soon become the peak “weight loss TV” era, during which wellness adjacent-personalities like Jillian Michaels of “The Biggest Loser” could scream at contestants struggling with their weight and it would be written off as entertainment. This paved the way for MTV’s 2006 documentary “Fat Camp” and litany of similar projects: “You Are What You Eat,” “Three Fat Brides, One Thin Dress,” “Extreme Weight Loss” and “My 600-Lb. Life.”

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Underpinning both the documentary and the subsequent glut of weight-focused television was the question of who was to blame for the rising rates of American obesity, which former Surgeon General of the United States David Satcher declared an epidemic in 2000. In his introduction to “Super Size Me,” Spurlock even asks the question: “Where does personal responsibility stop and corporate responsibility begin?”

While the merits of the documentary itself have since been debated and refuted (Spurlock refused to share his food log for the experiment, and later revealed he was heavily drinking at the time which could have skewed the health results) the question of how personal responsibility plays into obesity has only grown more complicated, thanks both to the advent of the Health At Every Size movement and blockbuster weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.

This has introduced a critical moment for the contemporary discussion around obesity, as everyone from Oprah Winfrey to “South Park” has weighed in with a take — and it also offers an opportunity to reflect ow our attitudes towards obesity have, and haven’t, changed in the two decades since the initial release of “Super Size Me.”

For instance, in her live broadcast with Weight Watchers earlier this month called “Making The Shift: A New Way to Think About Weight,” Winfrey urged viewers to do away with the shame surrounding one’s weight. She shared a story of how Joan Rivers “challenged” her to lose 15 pounds during an interview in 1985, a story she also recounted in her cookbook “Food, Health and Happiness,” which was released earlier this year.

"As we reconcile the shame stories we have all experienced, I’m on a mission to keep this conversation going and help us better understand the complexity of weight health."

“Joan sat behind Johnny’s big wooden desk, telling me that she didn’t want to hear my excuses and that I shouldn’t have let this happen,” Winfrey wrote. “The audience laughed nervously as she wagged her flawlessly manicured finger at me, pointed out that I was still 'a single girl,' and challenged me to come back 15 pounds lighter next time she hosted. And the whole time I just sat there smiling breezily, wanting nothing more than to crawl under my chair.”

The livestream came off Oprah’s public admission that she had used medication to help maintain her weight at a healthy level.

“As we reconcile the shame stories we have all experienced, I’m on a mission to keep this conversation going and help us better understand the complexity of weight health and how we can use the science and what we know now to enhance our lives,” Winfrey said.

Exactly two weeks later, “South Park” released a special double-part episode called “South Park: The End of Obesity” on Paramount+. In it, as Salon Senior Editor Hanh Nguyen wrote, the entire town of South Park is attempting to get their hands on weight loss drugs, with varying results.

“As with everything ‘South Park,’ anyone and everyone is fair game for satire,” Nguyen wrote. “There's the American healthcare system, which proves too Byzantine for the boys to navigate when trying to obtain medical help for their friend Cartman. Meanwhile many of South Park's adult residents seem to have gamed the system or received the drugs illegally, and are now holding weight loss parties where crop tops appear mandatory. A few like Stan's mom Sharon, however, are out of luck. Her insurance won't cover the drugs since she doesn't have diabetes, so she instead has turned to an alternative.”

The alternative is simply getting a prescription for Lizzo, a reference to the singer behind body positive hits like “Juice” and “My Skin.” Lizzo has been a vocal proponent of the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement, which centers on the belief that healthy habits, like eating well and exercise, should be done to enhance wellness rather than to simply lose weight. In a fake advertisement for the product, an announcer promises that “"Lizzo makes you feel good about your weight, and it costs 90% less than Ozempic . . . In case studies, 70% of patients on Lizzo no longer care how much they weigh.”

Sharon eventually offers her own first-person testimonial after trying Lizzo: “I've lowered my standards and my expectations. I don't give two s**ts!"

The idea that the HAES movement encourages complacency or glorifies obesity is a common argument among its detractors, including Jillian Michaels of “The Biggest Loser” and early-2000’s weight loss television fame. In 2020, she actually challenged the assertion that Lizzo should be celebrated for encouraging her fans to love their bodies as they are.

“Why are we celebrating her [Lizzo’s] body? Why does it matter?” Michaels said during a segment on BuzzFeed News’s AM2DM show. “Why aren’t we celebrating her music? ‘Cause it isn’t going to be awesome if she gets diabetes.”

Michaels later posted a longer comment on social media, writing: “As I’ve stated repeatedly, we are all beautiful, worthy, and equally deserving. I also feel strongly that we love ourselves enough to acknowledge there are serious health consequences that come with obesity — heart disease, diabetes, cancer to name only a few. I would never wish these for ANYONE and I would hope we prioritize our health because we LOVE ourselves and our bodies.”

However, as indicated by the renewed cultural emphasis on weight and weight loss, American culture is still struggling with what exactly prioritizing one's health actually looks like just as much as they did two decades ago.

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Georgia Republican tries to “set the stage” for a November election challenge, won’t certify primary

A Republican member of the election board in Georgia's Fulton County is refusing to certify May 21 primary election results, demanding that she first be given unusual access to “essential election materials and processes."

According to the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official, Julie Adams, wants "lists of all qualified county electors showing those who signed in at polling locations as well as those who returned absentee ballots, the numbers of votes cast on particular machines and during advance voting, information on provisional and “drop box” ballots, digital images of ballots as they were cast, and all absentee ballot applications and envelopes, among other data."

The rogue board member was a former director of the conservative Tea Party Patriots and one of two people nominated to the five-person board by the Fulton County Republican Party. Though her move to abstain and file a lawsuit did not stop the board from voting to certify last week's election, Adams has caused alarm as former President Donald Trump and members of the Republican Party routinely threaten to overturn elections that do not go their way.

Fani Willis seeks to reinstate Trump charges, an "implicit concession" a trial won't happen soon

Adams has asserted that “the board has not and clearly should be monitoring our elections," and that "it’s time to fix the problems in our elections.”

Aaron Johnson, a Democratic member of the board, noted that Fulton County, which encompasses the city of Atlanta, is the most heavily watched county in Georgia, and that the board's certification is part of a long process to ensure the election was legitimately conducted. “The State (Election) Board still has to certify,” he said. “It’s a continual process, it’s not something that ends today. The problem that we have in Fulton County is the continuous misrepresentation of what actually is going on.”

Last Friday, the Georgia Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee stepped in to foil the case, which Georgia party chair and U.S. representative Nikema Williams said was a "transparent attempt to set the stage" for a fight to block certification for the 2024 presidential election if Trump is defeated. He and 18 co-defendants are already being charged in an alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, where Joe Biden beat Trump by just under 12,000 votes.

Adams and her lawyers say that a ruling in her favor by Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville would be "consistent with Georgia’s policy of building public trust and confidence in Georgia’s elections.” She is also taking aim at the county elections director, who she said should not conduct an election “with no oversight or access” by the board.

In response, the director told Adams that she and other board members could have observed the "reconciliation" of election results before certification. The problem was that she did not seek the materials on time before the certification deadline.

Avocados are a “green gold” export for Mexico, but growing them is harming forests and waters

Consumers' love for avocados in the United States seems to know no bounds. From 2001 through 2020, consumption of this fruit laden with healthy fats tripled nationwide, rising to over 8 pounds per person yearly.

On average, 90% of those avocados are grown in the southwest Mexican state of Michoacán. As with other foods that have become trendy, such as acai berries, or widely used, such as palm oil, intensive avocado production is causing significant environmental damage.

My research on 20th-century Latin American environmental history examines how the transnational movement of people, foods and agricultural technologies has changed rural landscapes in Latin America. Currently, I'm writing a book on the development of a global avocado industry centered in Michoacán, the world's largest avocado-growing region.

Michoacán has a large Indigenous population and an economy based on agriculture, fishing and ranching. CrazyPhunk/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

My research shows that raising avocados is economically beneficial in the short term for farmers, which in Latin America typically means medium-sized operators and agribusinesses. It also helps growers – people in rural areas who grow subsistence crops. Over time, though, every serving of avocado toast takes a toll on Michoacán's land, forests and water supply. Rural growers, who lack the resources of large-scale farmers, feel those impacts most keenly.

The environmental effects of monoculture

Michoacán is the only place on earth that grows avocados year-round, thanks to its temperate climate, abundant rainfall and deep, porous volcanic soils that are rich in potassium, a vital plant nutrient. Even under favorable conditions, however, monocultures are never environmentally sustainable.

Introducing homogeneous, high-yielding plant varieties leads growers to abandon native crops. This makes the local ecosystem more vulnerable to threats such as pest infestations and reduces food options. It also erodes fertile soils and increases use of agrochemicals.

Monoculture also can drive deforestation. Mexican officials estimate that avocado production spurred the clearance of 2,900 to 24,700 acres of forests per year from 2010 through 2020. And it's resource intensive: Avocado trees consume four to five times more water than Michoacán's native pines, jeopardizing water resources for human consumption.

Avocados generate billions of dollars in export revenue for Mexico, but growing them imposes heavy costs at home.

Bred in California

Avocados have been a part of the Mexican diet since ancient Mesoamerica, but the Hass – the most popular variety worldwide today – was bred in modern California.

In the late 19th century, scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture embarked on a mission to collect and send home samples of food plants from around the world. The goal was to adapt and grow these plants in the United States, reducing the need for food imports.

Collecting plant genetic material from Latin America and imposing quarantines on avocados from Mexico starting in 1914 provided vital support for the development of a U.S. avocado industry. Farmers in California and Florida bred multiple strains from the material that USDA explorers collected. But U.S. consumers in the early 1900s weren't familiar with this new food and hesitated to buy avocados of various textures, sizes and colors.

In response, farmers began selecting plants that grew avocados with small seeds, abundant flesh, hard skin, a creamy texture – and, most importantly, high yields. According to industry lore, Rudolph Hass, a postman and amateur horticulturalist in Southern California, stumbled on a new variety in the late 1920s while trying to propagate a variety called Rideout.

Within several decades, the Hass became the dominant avocado grown in California. By the 1950s, Mexican farmers who had connections with U.S. brokers had introduced the Hass south of the border.

How the Hass changed Michoacán

In the early 1960s, Michoacano cantaloupe farmers acquired lands to expand their production by growing avocados. Soon they focused on exclusively producing the Hass.

Many local Indigenous Purhépecha people, along with non-Indigenous campesinos, or country farmers, rented or sold land to the emerging avocado farmer class. In the 1980s, campesinos began to grow the fruit too. This was an expensive, long-term undertaking: It took four years for the trees to produce marketable avocados, but growers had to buy the trees, clear land for them and provide water, fertilizer and pesticides to help them grow.

Cantaloupe farmers could afford to invest capital for four years with no cash return. Campesinos had to rely on loans or remittances from family members abroad to develop avocado orchards.

As production expanded, agrochemical distributors, tree nurseries and packing houses sprouted on Purhépecha lands, clearing native pine trees and eroding the fertile soils. Mexico passed a law in 2003 that prohibited clearing forests for commercial agriculture, but by this time campesinos in Michoacán were already growing Hass avocados on a large scale.

The guacamole wars: NAFTA and avocados

After the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, California avocado farmers lobbied to maintain a quarantine that the USDA had imposed on Mexican avocado trees in 1914 because of an alleged plague. After three years of drought in California and testing of Michoacán orchards for pests, Mexico began shipping Hass avocados to the U.S. in 1997.

However, the only region the USDA certified to send avocados to the United States was Michoacán. Mexico had to allow the USDA to station agents in Michoacán to verify that certified orchards fulfilled agreed conditions to minimize the risks of plant diseases.

Companies such as Calavo, a California-based produce distributor, began to buy, pack and ship avocados grown in Michoacán to U.S. customers. In the process, they became major competitors for California avocado farmers.

Beyond monoculture

Today, avocados are one of the most-regulated exports from Mexico. However, these rules do little to address the industry's environmental impacts.

Farmers in Michoacán continue to clear woodlands, spray agrochemicals, exhaust aquifers and buy Purhépecha communal property, converting it to smaller, privately owned lots. Rising profits have spurred violence and corruption as some local authorities collude with organized crime groups to expand the market.

In 2022, the U.S. briefly suspended Mexican avocado imports after a U.S. plant safety inspector in Michoacán received a threatening phone call.

Visiting Michoacán on Feb. 26, 2024, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar pledged that the U.S. would modify its protocol to block imports of avocados grown in illegal orchards. However, this won't restore local ecosystems.

As I see it, expecting small-scale growers to protect the environment, after the ecology and economy of Michoacán has been radically altered in the name of free markets and development, puts responsibility in the wrong place. And boycotting Mexican avocados likely would simply lead growers to look for other markets.

Diversifying agriculture in the region and reforesting Michoacán could help to restore the Sierra Purhepecha's ecology and protect the rural economy. One Indigenous community there is successfully growing peaches and lemons for the domestic market and avocados for the international market, while also planting native pines on their communal lands. This is a potential model for other farmers, although it would be hard to replicate without state support.

In my view, importing avocados from different areas of Mexico and the world to reduce the Hass market share may be the most effective environmental protection strategy. In 2022, the USDA approved imports of avocados grown in the Mexican state of Jalisco. This is a start, but Jalisco will follow Michoacán's trajectory unless the U.S. finds more sources and promotes more avocado types.

As U.S. eaters' tastes become more adventurous, sampling avocados of different sizes, shapes, textures, tastes and origins could become a decision that's both epicurean and environmentally conscious.

Viridiana Hernández Fernández, Assistant Professor of Latin American Environmental History, University of Iowa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump, expecting a guilty verdict, complains that “Mother Theresa could not beat these charges”

As jurors began deliberating Wednesday, former President Donald Trump appeared outside court in Manhattan and again portrayed himself as a victim of a "rigged" system.

"Mother Theresa could not beat these charges," he told reporters. "These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged. The whole country's a mess between the borders and fake elections and a trial like this, where the judge is so conflicted he can't breathe."

Trump has long chafed at Judge Juan Merchan, who he claimed "very, very corrupt," in particular for granting a prosecution request for a gag order that barred him from attacking witnesses, court staff, jurors and Merchan's family. It did not shield Merchan himself, however, and Trump appeared to violate the order several times without consequence.

As the trial closed, The Hill reported, Trump also complained that Merchan prevented him from invoking the advice-of-counsel defense that he acted reasonably based on the advice of lawyers around him, even though it was so far-fetched that his own team earlier declined to use it.

Trump posted on his website, Truth Social, that he didn't "EVEN KNOW WHAT THE CHARGES ARE IN THIS RIGGED CASE—I AM ENTITLED TO SPECIFICITY JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE. THERE IS NO CRIME!" Despite this claim, the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records are available for everyone to read. If Trump is found guilty, he could be moving out of Mar-a-Lago for a state prison.

The ephemeral organ: Researchers look closer at the placenta

When Mana Parast was a medical resident in 2003, she had an experience that would change the course of her entire career: her first fetal autopsy.

The autopsy, which pushed Parast to pursue perinatal and placental pathology, was on a third-trimester stillbirth. “There was nothing wrong with the baby, it was a beautiful baby,” she recalled. We’re not done, she remembers her teacher telling her, go find the placenta.

The placenta, a temporary organ that appears during pregnancy to help support a growing fetus, didn’t look as it should. Instead, it “looked like a rock,” said Parast. As far as they could tell, no one had ever examined this patient’s placenta through her pregnancy, and it was her fifth or sixth stillbirth, Parast recalled.

Medicine or myth? The dubious benefits of placenta-eating

Every year, there are approximately 5 million pregnancies in the United States. One million of those pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 20,000 end in stillbirth. Up to half of these pregnancy losses have unidentified causes. Recent and ongoing research, though, suggests that the placenta may hold the key to understanding and preventing some pregnancy complications, such as preterm birth and maternal and infant mortality. A closer look at the placenta — including its size and function — may have a significant impact on stillbirth rates.

Still, the placenta and its pathologies have largely been understudied, some clinicians say. There are multiple reasons why: the difficulties in studying a fleeting and dynamic organ, the limitations in researching pregnant people, a lack of scientific consensus, few prospective studies, and the absence of standardized pathology reports on placentas.

Some groups are working to change that. The placenta “is this complex organ that’s critical to support fetal development, so you would think we know everything about it,” said David Weinberg, project lead for the Human Placenta Project, or HPP, an initiative by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The project has awarded studies more than $101 million from 2014 to the fall of 2023 to develop better assessment tools for the placenta while it is growing inside a pregnant person.

In the U.S. every year, 1 million pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 20,000 end in stillbirth. Up to half of these pregnancy losses have unidentified causes.

Placental research is an area of obstetrics that is sorely lacking, according to Weinberg. While limited research has been done on abnormal placentas after delivery, the HPP research teams realized in early meetings that if they wanted to improve outcomes, they’d need to know more about what a normal placenta does over the course of pregnancy. They are one of several U.S. based teams tackling this issue.

The shift in research is a welcome one for Parast, who is now director of the Perinatal Pathology Service and co-director of the Center for Perinatal Discovery at University of California, San Diego, and has received HPP funding for some of her work. But more should be done, she added, including adopting a more cooperative approach to applying new findings: “If we’re going to do this right, we have to come at it with this mindset.”

The human placenta does a lot of work for the fetus; it is, effectively, the fetal lungs, kidneys, and digestive track. It’s also one of the only organs in the animal world that consists of two separate organisms — with tissues from both the mother and fetus — as well as the only temporary organ.

The placenta evolves across a pregnancy, too, continuing to support the developing fetus while interacting with the maternal environment, said Weinberg. The research has, so far, shown that issues with the placenta — its size, its placement, its microbiome — can signal health problems with both pregnant person and fetus, such as preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, preterm birth, and stillbirth.

As researchers have tried to develop ways to observe the placenta throughout the course of an entire pregnancy, they’re facing challenges, though. It’s difficult, for instance, to study the organ before a birth, due to potential risks both for the woman and for her developing fetus. Pregnant women have been historically excluded from medical trials according to National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women's Health. The potential reasons include threat of legal liability should the study harm the fetus, and the complex physiology of the pregnant body.

https://youtu.be/nM4nYjIkPd8?si=bom8d2z9Jbw2q2LB

The NICHD's Human Placenta Project is developing better assessment tools for the placenta while it is growing inside a pregnant person. Such work could have a significant impact on stillbirth rates. Visual: NICHD/YouTube

Because research on pregnant women faces so many restrictions, the largest body of placental research has been done after birth in a pathology lab. Here, the organ is typically only examined after a poor pregnancy outcome, such as stillbirth or placental abruption, in which the placenta pulls away from the uterus wall and causes heavy bleeding.

Placental pathology, though, has also long had limitations. “No one in their right mind was studying placentas,” said Harvey Kliman, director of the Yale School of Medicine’s Reproductive and Placental Research Unit, when recalling the early years of his pathology training in the 1980s when the organ was particularly understudied. As a medical student, he said, “I was discouraged from going into OB/GYN. I was told you can’t really do research on pregnant women. This is still basically true.” Conducting OBGYN research can be particularly challenging compared to other fields of medicine, he added.

While the advanced pathology residents were working on cancer, Kliman said newer residents started in the basement morgue performing autopsies on placentas and fetuses. Even today, there is a hierarchy in pathology, and placental pathology is at the bottom, he said, akin to “scrubbing toilet bowls in the Navy.”

“A placenta review after loss can take up to six months, because there’s no priority — there’s no patient on the table,” said Kliman. Most pathologists, he added, “don’t see the human side of this at all. I deal with patients every day. This is very real to me.”

The human placenta does a lot of work for the fetus; it is, effectively, the fetal lungs, kidneys, and digestive track.

Parast said that the culture of pathology is partly responsible for lack of placental recognition, because they often work in isolation from each other: “If there’s a perinatal pathologist, they’re the only one. So few people are doing this.”

Historically, getting pathologists to come together and agree on the details of placenta work is difficult; to change that, Parast has been working with PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy, a nonprofit that aims to end preventable stillbirths, along with other advocacy groups such as Star Legacy Foundation. Parast has also pushed the Society for Pediatric Pathology to come together and standardize the way placental autopsy reports are written. This a big complaint among obstetricians and advocates, she said, because when it comes to the reports as they are now, “no one understands them.” She added that clinicians also need more training on how to interpret them.

Placenta research is also hampered because of how science is done more broadly, said Michelle Oyen, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Competitive grant proposals and funding incentives tend to dissuade collaboration and methodology sharing. But building improved obstetrical outcomes requires collaboration between engineers and OBGYNs, she explained. Historically, she added, there hasn’t been a relationship between those fields unlike other areas of medicine, such as orthopedics or cardiology.

Also at issue are shame and stigma around pregnancy loss — and women’s health in general. “It’s not just about the science, it’s about the fact that these problems are much bigger than most people understand,” Oyen said, referring to the systemic, gender-based obstacles in medicine. And NIH funding, which supports biomedical and health research disproportionately goes to diseases that primarily affect men, according to a 2021 study published in the Journal of Women's Health.

Furthermore, a 2021 study in the journal Science showed majority female teams of inventors are much more likely to pioneer new inventions in women’s health than majority male teams, said Oyen, “so it is a patriarchy issue.” With the majority of patents being held by men, “there is a balance problem there.”

That may be changing. “Women’s health is having a moment. Those of us who have been working quietly on this for 25 years are laughing about it,” she added. “Like we’ve been doing this this whole time, and suddenly, you’re really interested in it.”

Research efforts like the Human Placenta Project aim to build a new research base on the ephemeral organ. Now, 10 years into the HPP, researchers have a better understanding of the organ and its role in pregnancy outcomes. They are developing tools to monitor the placenta non-invasively, Weinberg said, such as advances in magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasounds, both of which can help better visualize the placenta and its blood flow.

“We’re at a point of clinical validation,” he said. “Researchers think they have a measure that can indicate whether or not a fetus may be a risk.” Prospective studies are the next step.

Unfortunately, none of these projects will be market ready in the near future, he said, although he argues that the project has brought national attention to the placenta.

“I do believe the HPP raised global awareness,” said Weinberg. “Things that seemed sci-fi not that long ago are now a possibility.”

Still, some clinicians and advocates are disheartened by what they feel is slow progress with big projects like the HPP, including Kliman and the advocacy groups PUSH and Measure the Placenta. Kliman’s placental research has highlighted the role of a small placenta as the leading cause of stillbirth. An unusually small placenta, he said, is a stillbirth risk because fetuses can grow too large for it; this may cause the fetus’s growth to stagnate, or make the organ simply give out.

Diagnosing a small placenta is “low-hanging fruit,” he said, estimating that it could prevent 7,000 stillbirths per year.

“Things that seemed sci-fi not that long ago are now a possibility.”

A recent study that Kliman co-authored in the journal of Reproductive Sciences showed that in the pregnancy losses they studied, one-third of previously “uncategorized” stillbirths can be attributed to a small placenta. His team reviewed clinical data and placental pathology for more than 1,200 unexplained pregnancy losses and determined that the number one cause of stillbirth is a small placenta. This article, the most popular Reproductive Sciences article of 2023, has hopefully opened up a door to confirming where these losses are coming from, he said.

In 2009, together with his father, an electrical engineer and a mathematician who has since passed away, Kliman developed a 2D ultrasound measurement tool called Estimated Placental Volume which takes about 30 extra seconds at a routine ultrasound. But although the tool launched 15 years ago, getting it implemented has proven difficult.

Whether or not his EPV tool will become standard across obstetrics is still uncertain, he said. “We’re dealing with a paradigm change and there’s a lot of resistance to changing the paradigm.”

Other groups are also developing new tools for placental health. Oyen, for instance, is part of In Utero, a $50 million program funded by Wellcome Leap, a U.S. program which aims to halve stillbirth rates globally. For research on the placenta — and maternal and fetal health more broadly — the stakes are particularly high, she said: “Right now, all of the statistics on maternal and fetal mortality are going in the wrong direction in this country.” Although fetal mortality rates have held relatively steady in the most recent years for which there is data, Oyen emphasized that stagnating is not improvement.

Oyen’s team is working to develop new ways to see how oxygen flows in and out of the placenta, using high resolution imaging and modeling. The models could help determine how the placenta is working and, ultimately, detect if there is growth restriction.

The project follows a collaborative model with more than 15 teams around the world made up of biomedical engineers, clinicians, and computer scientists. Because of this, Oyen argued, the project is more nimble than traditional research: “We have all these data sharing agreements. We share techniques, we share information within this program. This is a model for how we have to move forward.”

“OBs need to come out and say we need this. If there’s a little bit of a push from the OBs, our societies will catch on.”

Getting obstetricians to implement these new findings in placental research will be the next big push, and in the U.S., that means taking the consensus to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — the herald of standard of care practices and guidelines for obstetricians.

Professional societies need to develop guidelines, Parast said: “OBs need to come out and say we need this. If there’s a little bit of a push from the OBs, our societies will catch on.”

More than 20 years ago, when Parast processed her first placenta, the one that looked more like a rock than an organ, she and her teacher identified accumulation of protein-containing material that indicated an underlying condition, possibly autoimmune, she said, which may have restricted the fetus’s growth. Had someone looked at this patient’s placentas sooner, said Parast, her multiple stillbirths may have been prevented with treatment.

about reproductive health

“Going after their accusers”: “Fallen Idols” producers on Nick Carter and backlash against #MeToo

To believe or not to believe. That is the question.

It sits squarely at the heart of "Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter," Investigation Discovery's docuseries that delves into sexual assault allegations made against Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter through interviews with his accusers.

Key among those participants is Melissa Schuman, who was a member of the late '90s and early aughts girl group Dream as a teenager. In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Schuman published a blog post claiming that Carter had raped her at his Santa Monica apartment in 2003. In "Fallen Idols," Schuman's account of her experience, coupled with testimony from Carter's other accusers and the intense backlash all the women received, underscores the challenges faced by accusers who come forward against high-profile figures with vehement, dedicated fanbases.

"You're now seeing a new wave of people being accused who now are affirmatively going after their accusers," Michael Hirschorn, executive producer of "Fallen Idols," tells Salon. "And this story, I think, is pretty remarkable in terms of the degree of aggression and vitriol in the responses."

Backstreet Boy Nick Carter accused of rape by teen pop singer

According to Hirschorn, the social and legal reckoning spurred by #MeToo in film and television is something the music industry has not necessarily seen yet. "I was really struck how over the past eight years . . . that the film and TV business had really been profoundly transformed by the #MeToo accusations," he says. "And it felt that it had really been reformed; whereas the music business felt like it was kind of operating pretty much as is. And a lot of the people who were running the music business in the aughts, '90s — even the '80s — are still there. So there are a lot of stories still to be told. And the music business, everybody knows, is a tough and uncompromising place, and especially a tough place for young women. So it felt that that was a timely and important story."

"You're now seeing a new wave of people being accused who now are affirmatively going after their accusers."

Separate from serving as an exposé of the allegations Nick Carter faces, "Fallen Idols" also examines younger brother Aaron Carter's mental health and substance abuse issues as well as the Carter family's reportedly fraught dynamic, providing new insights into the dark underbelly of meteoric stardom for young stars. "We also wanted to look at the way young men who come up in this industry are treated and the way that both of those things influence the choices that people make and that many people of that generation will potentially empathize and relate to," says "Fallen Idols" showrunner Elissa Halperin.

Check out the full interview with Hirshcorn and Halperin below, in which they discuss how "Fallen Idols" came to be, the mixed blessing of growing up in the spotlight, and the complexities of going public in the digital age.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Backstreet Boys performs during the DNA World Tour at the Grand Arena, Grand West on May 16, 2023 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Dereck Green/Gallo Images via Getty Images)"Fallen Idols" provides an in-depth look into allegations made by a number of women who have alleged sexual assault against Nick Carter, who was the It Boy of the Backstreet Boys. I'm curious to learn more about what the conversations were that led to "Fallen Idols." Why now?

Michael Hirschorn: The project started with an excellent British producer named Natasha Bowler, who had been investigating for various European outlets, #MeToo issues in the music business. She's the person who initially got in contact with the three women and really built trust over a period of time. So she then brought the project to me . . . and once the project was a go, Elissa joined as the showrunner and really took over the making of it.

The why now for me — I think there are a number of answers. One is I used to run programming at VH1 roughly at that time in the 2000s and was kind of aware of a lot of what was happening in the music business. And I was really struck sort of, how over the past eight years — which I think is probably the time span of #MeToo — that the film and TV business had really been profoundly transformed by the #MeToo accusations. And it felt that it had really been reformed, whereas the music business felt like it was kind of operating pretty much as is. And a lot of the people who were running the music business in the aughts, '90s —even the '80s — are still there. So there are a lot of stories still to be told. And the music business, everybody knows, is a tough and uncompromising place, and especially a tough place for young women. So it felt that that was a timely and important story.

Two other quick things, and I'll let Elissa jump in. There was a specific point, this is like in '22 when we were talking to Natasha. California — and I'm going to get the specific legalities wrong — had initiated a variety of look-back laws that basically temporarily suspended the statute of limitations to allow people who felt that they were victimized during that time period to come forward and initiate civil suits and potentially criminal actions. And there are other states that have done similar things. And so we had a sense in '22 that there was going to be a second wave of #MeToo starting in 2023. And boy, did that turn out to be the case. So I think everything that's in the news right now, you're seeing a pretty significant reckoning around some of these issues. And the music business I think mirrors what was happening seven or eight years ago in the entertainment business more generally.

And then I think the last point, which I think deserves some attention, is the shift in the way that people who are being accused post-Johnny Depp have chosen to be far more aggressive in their responses to these accusations. So the first wave was really people would either apologize or just go silent for a period of time or would defend themselves against the charges. You're now seeing a new wave of people being accused who now are affirmatively going after their accusers.

And this story, I think, is pretty remarkable in terms of the degree of aggression and vitriol in the responses. Now, of course, we're not the people to say who's right and who's wrong. And I think depending on which prism you look at it through, you're either talking about a person who has been unfairly maligned or misunderstood, who is righteously fighting back. Or it could be somebody, if you believe the women, who is attempting to snuff out a legitimate complaint. And these are women who chose in our documentary to not only come forward and, I think, bravely tell their stories but also have been willing to undergo a really brutal legal process that's still ongoing.

When you first reached out for interviews, who was the first to respond? I'm curious to learn who was the most challenging to get for the docuseries. Were there any discussions about trying to get Paris Hilton or other members of Dream to participate?

Halperin: Yeah, definitely. When I came on to the project, the women were on board and Aaron [Carter] had recently passed away. And that had expanded the scope of what the documentary was. So I think we were really looking at it from this full 360 outreach perspective that we really wanted to represent all sides in some form. We reached out early to Nick Carter's camp to offer — we didn't necessarily expect he would take it — but we wanted to offer the being in communication. And they provided a lot of legal documents as well as some voices, which were all included in the documentary that would help to shed light on his perspective. And I think we really just tried to cover all of our bases and be as thorough as possible in terms of anyone who really had a personal connection to the story to have an opportunity to speak out. And we did reach out to Paris Hilton, who unfortunately declined to personally participate.

Dream (l-r): Diana Ortiz, Ashley Poole, Holly Blake-Arnstein and Melissa Schuman on 01.03.2001 in Köln / Cologne. (Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance via Getty Images)

What were the challenges in making an exposé about this popular boy band member, especially since these cases are still ongoing?

Elissa Halperin: So it definitely is challenging. One of the things to note is that when I came on to the project, and when Michael started the project, none of these lawsuits had been filed yet. So we had our suspicions that they were going to be filed based on that look-back window. But I don't think that any of us were prepared for the number, and the defamation claims, and the counterclaims to the defamation claims. So I think that even with the awareness that there might be litigation, it turned out to be more complicated than I think any of us expected.

"We did reach out to Paris Hilton, who unfortunately declined to personally participate."

And so we just really wanted to be mindful the whole time that these are stories where the people who were immediately involved in them have two very different points of view that are currently being fought out in court and that we needed to report that with integrity and to really do our due diligence to understand that while also giving these women a platform where they felt safe and taken care of to share their story. And I think we approach every story that way, where anyone who comes into our space and agrees to speak with us and wants to tell their story, that we treat them with respect and we want them to be comfortable. And we want to allow them to say what they came to say. And I think that we had a lot to keep in mind while doing that, and we were very transparent about the fact that we were going to do our diligence about that. But that treating people respectfully was from beginning to end a top priority.

What kind of considerations were made or accommodations were made to make the key women participants who alleged abuse feel safe while discussing their stories?

Halperin: Well, I think there were a lot of conversations with building trust. Natasha had built a very extensive relationship with the women. And then when Michael came on board, I know he had to also earn their trust. And when I came on board, the same thing. I don't think any of us took that trust for granted and didn't value it. And I don't think we took it for granted any step of the way. And then there were also support services offered each step of the way as well. We were in conversation with attorneys. So I think we really tried, on the women's side, any time there was a concern or anything, we made ourselves very available to talk through anything. We offered opportunities for them to stop if they needed to.

So aside from discussing the alleged assault that Melissa Schuman went through, the series also shows the pressures that she endured as a former member of Dream to project sexiness as a teenage star. What was important about presenting this specific aspect of her experience in the industry?

Halperin: I think we've been talking a lot as a culture a little bit more about this particular period and the way that women were treated, both by the audiences and just by bosses and managers and publicists and everything. There's been a lot of coverage on Britney Spears and the way that we treated her, on Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, all of these young women. And I think we wanted to represent that part of the story and looking at the way women were treated.

But I think a big thing about this as well was that we also wanted to look at the way young men who come up in this industry are treated and the way that both of those things influence the choices that people make and that many people of that generation will potentially empathize [with] and relate to.

Hirschorn: And also the retailing of extremely young people as pop stars and performers. And it's notable that Lou Pearlman was the guy who initially put them together. Puffy [Sean Combs] was the person who initially put Dream together.

Especially now with that we're seeing with Diddy, [aka Sean Combs.]

Hirschorn: Yes, exactly. Ironies abound. There was the fact that Aaron Carter was younger than 10, and he was touring. And, if what his former tour manager says is true, he didn't have his family around and was performing six days a week on Broadway. And it was only 20 years ago, but it feels like ancient history in a way.

Singer Aaron Carter performs at Gramercy Theatre on March 3, 2013 in New York City. (Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images)Aaron Carter obviously had a very tragic story and passed away when he was only 34. I was wondering what was particularly delicate or challenging in telling Aaron's story alongside this exposé of Nick's alleged wrongdoings.

"Everyone who had some interaction with Aaron felt that he was somebody that they cared a lot about and he cared a lot about them."

Hirschorn: He was somebody who was genuinely close to these women, who people close to him had really warm and passionate feelings about. I was really struck by the degree to which everyone who had some interaction with Aaron felt that he was somebody that they cared a lot about and he cared a lot about them. But at the same time, he clearly had mental health issues, clearly had addiction issues. And so his standing as a witness and a source is questionable. And the things that he was alleging were significant, serious, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't put our thumb on the scale too much in either direction to say, "Don't believe anything this guy says," or "Everything he says should be taken as gospel."

So I think the trick that Elissa and the team really had to tackle was how to weigh everything properly. And if we did our job right — we can't answer all these questions for you, but we can, I think, raise some interesting questions and hopefully start a conversation.

Halperin: I think Aaron's story is such a tragic story. And I think it intersected with the women's story and I think it intersects with Nick's story and I think it's interesting to really look at these two brothers who were so famous together at that same period and just look at where each of them went. From the allegations that are against Nick — but also, Nick seems to have really settled into this happy domestic life. Nick still has his fame and his supporters. And Aaron, I think, while there was so much warmth for him that we experienced, he really seemed to be struggling with a lot. So I think it was really interesting to look at that.

After Aaron spoke out supporting Melissa and some of Nick's other accusers, whether as a direct result or not, he was targeted incessantly online. How would you say that the digital age has helped or hindered making "Fallen Idols"?

Hirschhorn: I think like everything else in our culture, social media has hyper-politicized everything and turned every conversation debate into team sports. And you have, I think, more in this story than many other stories that are similar to it, this intense fan base, largely composed of women, as it happens, who believe that Nick Carter cannot do any wrong, that he is perfect and personified.

And then at the same time, coming out of the #MeToo movement — and I think it's going to come into play in the story — believe all women, the idea that victims or alleged victims are always right and always to be believed. And so it makes it very difficult to suggest that some things might live in a gray area and that there's nuance and that there's the possibility that a similar event could be perceived differently by the people involved. And that, then exacerbated by all the legal activity that's happening, made both the stakes very high and the journalistic decisions that needed to be made very complicated and involved a lot of debate on our part about, "How do we navigate through that?" knowing that it was possible that nobody would be happy with what the result was.

Notably, the docuseries features several self-proclaimed Nick Carter/Backstreet Boys super fans who vehemently refute the claims of sexual assault against him. And to me, it was noteworthy that they were all women. What were the conversations around the decision to feature these participants, and were there any challenges in getting them to participate? Because obviously, the nature of the documentary is exposing Nick Carter's alleged behavior.

Halperin: So the reason why we wanted to include the fans is because I think immediately when I came onto the project, I was struck by how devoted a fan base Nick had after more than 30 years — that Nick Carter and Backstreet Boys fans were so exceptionally devoted to that band and had grown up with them. And there was so much to that, so much to that emotional connection that I felt like that was interesting to explore, both from a nostalgic perspective and wanting to hear memories of that time and that idea of, "This is the first person I fell in love with. Everything was about this." And I think a lot of people can relate to that. And then I think their devotion, and maybe not even all these specific women, but the fan base's devotion to Nick's reputation and Nick's guilt or innocence feels so personal. And I think we felt like that was a part of the story. And I think it was somewhat challenging.

We obviously wanted to protect the women who were participating in the series at the outset. But we also asked everyone the same questions about Nick Carter and how they felt about the current allegations. So I think we really wanted that voice. And I think we were clear on what our intentions were with that.

"Fallen Idols" shows a fair amount of the online doxxing, the trolling, the death threats and the stalking that happened as a result of Melissa and the other accusers speaking out about the alleged assault. How much did you actually decide to show in the docuseries itself relative to what you were actually exposed to when you interviewed them?

Hirschorn: It's interesting because any time you get into social media, you can very quickly go down a rabbit hole and get into really dark, weird, f***ed-up spaces. And there were a number of avenues that we decided not to pursue because they were so murky, so complicated, so hard to explain. And the web of relationships was so complicated that we sort of decided, unless we had two more hours to get into them, it was not worth doing. And at a certain point, all web controversies turn into every other web controversy. So I think we wanted to really get at the most salient aspects of it. And I think the psychological aspects of it; specifically in Aaron's case, he sort of seemed to invite some of that attention because he was really putting himself out there asking people to engage with him. And so to a certain degree, we wanted it to be understood that he wasn't purely a recipient.

There were a few online personalities, Molly Golightly, Ganval, etc., who targeted Melissa, and then later Aaron. Were these people that you considered trying to have participate in "Fallen Idols," or did you not want to include them?

Halperin: We actually did have conversations with them. And ultimately, they were not a part of the series, either by their decision or our decision.

We've talked about how Aaron Carter's mental health and rapid decline is extremely heartbreaking to watch. What were the considerations you made with his family about showing that? Were you in contact with his family about showing certain footage and sensitive clips and just his vulnerability in that regard?

Halperin: Melanie, his fiancée at the time, was included in the documentary. And she's Prince's mother, and she gave her consent in that way. And also, Aaron really lived his life very publicly online. Much of what we depicted were things he put out there. And so I think it was helpful to see that I think his intention was to show his full self, struggles and all.

There's a "Sesame Street" clip that is particularly poignant that you show because it features Nick and Aaron together talking about sibling disagreements. There's this rinteresting family dynamic and discussion that "Fallen Idols" really delves into. How did you stumble onto that clip? And why was it added in near the end of the series?

Halperin: I think, actually, we were just kind of going through all of our old archive, just as much archival as we can find. I have to credit our series director Tara Malone because she always loved that clip so much. And we played it for Melanie and Prince, partially because of the fact that we thought Prince would enjoy seeing that kind of thing. But I think we were really struck by that as well. And that image of just the love that was there and just seeing where it went, I think for us it was really emotionally powerful to include.

How would you say the "Fallen Idols" team and the accusers prepared for the response from what will undoubtedly be many naysayers? Are the women primed for this, given the intense retaliation they've already received and experienced for years?

Hirschorn: They haven't seen it. We did not agree to show it to any of the relevant parties before it airs. So we don't know. And they should answer for themselves. I think the fact that they've all initiated lawsuits, have been through depositions, which can be pretty brutal . . . And in Shay [Ruth]'s case, in particular, held a press conference. My sense is that they're fairly prepared for it, given what they've already gone through.

We touched on this sort of resurgence of #MeToo that's happening right now. What do both of you hope that "Fallen Idols" contributes to the ongoing #MeToo discourse? W

"The fan base's devotion to Nick's reputation and Nick's guilt or innocence feels so personal."

Hirschorn: That's a tough question to really comprehensively answer. I mean, we're not looking for any specific result. I think we're interested in having a useful conversation about how this generation of entertainers was brought up, how a certain generation of us was taught to behave. And can there be a fruitful conversation moving forward about how to come up with a better method for dealing with these young stars and their proper care and feeding. Because one of the most tragic stories is it's always these very young stars when they become grown-ups who are really, really struggling, both from the alleged accused side and from the alleged victim side.

Halperin: Yeah, I think opening up a conversation that has more nuance and that allows for us to look critically at all sides and all choices and try to kind of find a way to move the conversation forward in a way that isn't quite so polarizing. That can be more respectful and that can be more allowing for thoughts and ideas and nuance. I mean, I think to me that was a lot of what I thought about. And if "Fallen Idols" can spark any of that, I think that's valuable.

The Backstreet Boys were the One Direction and the BTS of the early aughts. What do you expect the reaction to this docuseries will be and what do you hope it will be?

Hirschorn: We expect and we're already seeing a very highly polarized response, which I think is very much in tune with how so many debates are played out through social media and the public square in general. And what we would like is something that's a bit more nuanced and a bit more textured. And we tried to make something that left you with some empathy for everybody involved. Whether we succeeded or not, or whether that's even possible in this environment, is very much an open question.

"Fallen Idols" is now streaming on Max.

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“That’s what I’m trying to tell you”: Cannon confused by legal questions in Trump documents case

Judge Aileen Cannon has been criticized for letting unresolved legal issues pile up in Donald Trump's classified documents case, but the Trump appointee has herself bristled at the notion that she is delaying justice. While "it may not appear on the surface that anything is happening," Cannon recently snapped at a prosecutor on special counsel Jack Smith's team, "there is a ton of work being done."

According to a New York Times report, while plenty of legal work is done behind the curtain, prosecutors and legal experts are annoyed over what is plain to see: that Cannon has granted full hearings on even the most far-fetched issues that Trump's legal team has raised — and then declined to rule decisively on those issues, consciously or not playing into the former president's strategy of delaying the trial until after the 2024 election.

Trump, who is charged with stealing classified national security documents, including nuclear secrets, and hiding them at his Mar-a-Lago estate, could have the case dropped altogether if he's elected president again.

"The fight is fixed": Legal expert calls out Judge Cannon as "MAGA activist in a black robe"

There is no indication that Cannon is ready to have the case go to trial, despite handling it since last June. At seven public hearings, the Times reported that Cannon has raised eyebrows by repeatedly asked the same questions and not appearing to grasp the answers she received.

For example, when Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta, asked Cannon to make prosecutors turn over their internal messages so he could better argue that the charges were brought vindictively, Cannon asked him what he actually wanted from the government. Woodward responded that he wanted anything that mentioned him by name, before Cannon asked him to say it again, but more "slowly."

“All right,” she said, looking through her notes. “So I understand your request. It’s, quote, ‘All documents, communications concerning Mr. Woodward.’”

Prosecutor David Harbach then argued that the claims were "fantasy" — Woodward asserts that a Justice Department official threatened his career during a meeting about the case — and that the law prohibits defense counsel from sniffing around government communications. But Cannon seemed to miss the point, asking Harbach repeatedly about whether or not he had the messages that Woodward wanted, even as Harbach impressed upon her that Woodward had no evidence that could justify the surrender of any messages.

Exasperated, Harbach all but shouted that Woodward's request had no legal or factual standing. "That is what I'm trying to tell you," he said. Cannon responded by telling Harbach that he needed to "calm down."

The contentious exchanges Cannon has had with prosecutors stand in contrast to her more gentle treatment of Trump's lawyers, prompting critics to accuse her of bias.

"Regardless of her motives," the Times noted, "Judge Cannon has effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing."

Alito neighbors contradict his story of how a pro-insurrection flag ended up outside his home

On Feb. 15, a couple living across from Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito's home called Fairfax County police to complain that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been harassing them. According to The New York Times, the Alitos were in an escalating feud over the other couple's decision to display a yard sign that used profane language to denounce former President Donald Trump.

Initially, Justice Alito claimed that the decision to fly an upside-down flag outside his Virginia home was a response to the couple lobbing a vulgar insult at Mrs. Alito following the Jan. 6 insurrection, an encounter in which both sides accused the other of aggression.

"I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag," the justice claimed earlier this month. "It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs."

However, Fairfax County authorities confirmed that the incident with the neighbors actually happened on February 15, per the Times, long after the inverted flag — a sign of distress and a symbol the pro-Trump movement to overturn the 2020 election — was first raised outside the Alitos' home.

Emily Baden, one of the neighbors, told the Times that she and her then-boyfriend were taking out the trash that February day when Mrs. Alito herself used an expletive and called them "fascists" as her husband, the Supreme Court justice, looked on in silence. Baden said she in turn yelled at Mrs. Alito, using an expletive and reminding her that she was "representing the highest court in the land." Another time, Baden alleged, Mrs. Alito appeared to spit towards her vehicle as she drove past the Alitos' home.

Neither of the Alitos have commented on another provocative flag that was displayed at their New Jersey beach home. The "Appeal to Heaven" flag, spotted there in the summer of 2023, is widely used by supporters of the January 6 attacks and members of Christian nationalist movements.

The incidents have raised serious concerns about Justice Alito's impartiality and appears to have violated the Supreme Court's ethics code against making nakedly political statements. Several legal experts have called on Alito to recuse himself from the presidential immunity case brought by Trump.

"This is after the insurrection, so it's really him weighing in, getting involved publicly in a dispute over the insurrection," Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush who worked with Justice Alito on his 2006 Senate confirmation, previously told Salon. "When the house is used this way, I'd be shocked that she would do that without talking about it with him first."

Trump lashes out against Robert De Niro after the actor warned he could “destroy the world”

Donald Trump lashed out at Robert De Niro after the actor appeared at a Biden campaign press conference with campaign officials and former U.S. Capitol Police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, who were injured in the January 6 insurrection. The conference, which took place outside the courthouse where Trump was hearing closing arguments in his hush-money sex case, marked an unusual foray by Biden's campaign into Trump's legal woes, a topic it had generally avoided earlier this year, according to the Associated Press.

"I never knew how small, both mentally and physically, Wacko Former Actor Robert De Niro was," Trump railed on Truth Social. "Today, De Niro, who suffers from an incurable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, commonly known in the medical community as TDS, was met, outside the Courthouse, with a force far greater than the Radical Left – MAGA."

The "far greater force" Trump referred to was 20 or so Trump supporters gathered at the park nearby, waving flags that read phrases like "Trump or Death," wearing "Make American Great Again" apparel and chanting slogans such as "Juan Merchan is corrupt," referring to the judge presiding over the trial. After the press conference ended, they continued to follow and heckle De Niro.

The actor has provoked the ire of Trump's supporters since he began appearing more often in Biden campaign materials, including an ad that aired last week. Trump, who continues to be embroiled in his own theater of sorts, mocked the actor for going "WAY DOWN IN VALUE" since he voiced his support for Biden.

“I don’t mean to scare you. No, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you,” De Niro told reporters. “If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted.”

The actor, a New Yorker, mocked Trump's own history with the city.

“We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another crappy real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot,” he said. “I love this city. I don’t want to destroy it. Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city but the country, and, eventually, he could destroy the world.”

After being elected president, Trump changed his primary residency to Florida, where he often holds court at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

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Avocados are a “green gold” export for Mexico, but growing them is harming forests and waters

Michoacán has a large Indigenous population and an economy based on agriculture, fishing and ranching. CrazyPhunk/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The environmental effects of monoculture

Avocados generate billions of dollars in export revenue for Mexico, but growing them imposes heavy costs at home.

Bred in California

How the Hass changed Michoacán

The guacamole wars: NAFTA and avocados

Beyond monoculture

In 2022, the U.S. briefly suspended Mexican avocado imports after a U.S. plant safety inspector in Michoacán received a threatening phone call.

Trump, expecting a guilty verdict, complains that “Mother Theresa could not beat these charges”

The ephemeral organ: Researchers look closer at the placenta

“Going after their accusers”: “Fallen Idols” producers on Nick Carter and backlash against #MeToo

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you”: Cannon confused by legal questions in Trump documents case

Alito neighbors contradict his story of how a pro-insurrection flag ended up outside his home

Trump lashes out against Robert De Niro after the actor warned he could “destroy the world”

“People might call him an ahole, but he’s my ahole”: Dennis Quaid is firmly pro-Trump