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Trumponomics is back: Tech-bros are delighted, but the price of eggs is soaring

During the presidential campaign last year, Donald Trump made a series of speeches and appearances at economic clubs around the country. He didn't give the formal speeches other candidates give to crowds like that, which you'd expect to demonstrate some knowledge about finance and to express plans and policies aimed at meeting the challenges of the economy. He mostly just gave his usual stream-of-consciousness "weave" about whatever topic engaged him that day, interspersed with some rote words on the teleprompter written by a campaign staffer. But during the Q&A sessions, Trump was often stymied by questions for which he was totally unprepared.

Perhaps the most famous instance came at the Economic Club of New York, where someone asked him what he planned to do about the crisis in child care and he gave a meandering answer worthy of a fourth-grader's book report on a book he hadn't read. He began by saying that "child care is child care" and then suggested that imposing tariffs on imported goods would somehow fix the problem.

As the campaign wore on and tightened up after Joe Biden dropped out, Trump was forced to make some "populist" gestures for the rubes. His campaign staff was reportedly eager for him to talk about inflation so they assembled an event at his golf resort in New Jersey where he was surrounded by various food props. Instead he got caught up in his "weaves" and barely addressed the topic. They kept trying. A few weeks later he turned up at a grocery store and walked around as if it was the first time he'd ever been in one. It may well have been.

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Trump evidently believes he won the election because he used the word "groceries," which he thinks was a unique and brilliant innovation that he was the first to deploy in a presidential campaign.

But he never really explained how he intended to bring down costs. Tariffs were his No. 1 go-to answer for every economic question, followed by "drill, baby, drill" as the solution to inflation and "growth" as the answer to deficits. Those catchphrases were basically his entire economic plan, and in the midst of overwhelming backlash against the post-pandemic inflation of 2022-2023, that seemed to be all most voters needed to hear. Or at least it was enough for the plurality that put him in the White House.

Trump evidently believes he won the election because he used the word "groceries," which he thinks was a unique and brilliant innovation that he was the first to deploy in a presidential campaign.

There was a group of enthusiastic Trump backers who knew better, of course. The cyber-barons, CEOs and Wall Street big-money boys  understood that the only thing he was bringing to the table was more deregulation and bigger tax cuts, the Holy Grail of the billionaire class. Like most Americans, Trump supporters and Trump opponents alike, they don't believe most of what our new president says, which is one of the great sources of his power. They figure his tariff threats are empty, and if they aren't, the rich guys figure they can buy their way out of them. Just sending the message that any form of regulation or enforcement that hurts the bottom line is being dropped gets them rushing to pay tribute to a president who's desperate to be a member of their club.

Former Trump adviser turned podcaster Steve Bannon has been outspoken against the tech-bro oligarchy led by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who now sits at Trump's elbow. Bannon has even called Musk "evil" and vows to purge him from the MAGA movement. Then again, Bannon wasn't invited to the inauguration and Musk was, along with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Apple's Tim Cook, among other billionaires. They sat in the front row, while senators and members of Trump's incoming Cabinet were behind them. Everyone knows who's got the president's ear in this term, and it's safe to say none of them are worried about the price of groceries.

In his interview with Time magazine, Trump admitted that lowering costs will be "hard," and essentially told everyone not to get their hopes up. Since he's taken office, he's issued a flurry of executive orders and policy changes, from freezing cancer research, rescinding civil rights protections, muzzling public health communications and even pushing to build new coal plants to power his new AI initiative. That's not even the half of it, but none of that stuff will lower prices for consumers. If anything, he's going out of his way to do the opposite.

As NBC News reports, one of Trump's executive orders on his first day rescinded Biden's policy to study how to further "lower prescription drug costs for people on Medicare and Medicaid," as well as how to enhance the Affordable Care Act and increase protections for Medicaid recipients. Whether the Trump administration will seek to roll back the $35 monthly cap on insulin, the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap on prescription drugs or Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug pricing isn't clear, but he called those programs "radical" and "deeply unpopular," which is an outright lie. 

On Thursday, Trump spoke before the World Economic Forum and reiterated his threats of massive tariffs, which everyone with an eighth-grade education understands will cause prices to rise. He demanded that the Federal Reserve lower interest rates further and faster, saying later in the day that he "knows interest rates much better than they do." He once again claimed that "we have a deficit" with Canada and encouraged our northern neighbor to become the 51st state so the U.S. doesn't hit them with tariffs.

All of that is gibberish, but if he really does follow through on tariffs, the result will almost certainly be higher gas prices:

The irony here is thick. Trump claims that the inflation of three years ago was caused by high energy costs, and here he is promising to raise the price of gas. If he fulfills his threats to impose stiff tariffs on Mexico, look to see your grocery bills skyrocket as well.

You may remember that the rising price of eggs became the symbol of Democratic failure and was seen by many as the avatar of pain at the grocery store. Well, guess what?

Right now the U.S. poultry industry is under tremendous threat from H1N1 bird flu. It's making people sick and causing the price of eggs to skyrocket. That isn't Trump's fault, but the price spike of 2023 wasn't Biden's fault either. But Trump's freeze of NIH programs and his muzzling of public health agencies is also going to lead not just to potentially deadly health outcomes but higher costs as well. Not to mention that it will be difficult for the public to get any accurate information about the threat. Let's hope this doesn't turn into another pandemic.

Trump claims that the inflation of 2022 was caused by high energy costs, and here he is promising to raise the price of gas. If he imposes tariffs on Mexico, look to see your grocery bills skyrocket as well.

But don't despair. Trump did sign an executive order requiring all government agencies to figure out ways to lower the costs of everything. They'll report back to him with their plans in a month, so I'm sure it'll all be taken care of.

Since the election, Trump has spent most of his time hobnobbing with billionaires and obviously not giving the price of groceries a second thought. Perhaps Americans have moved on and don't care about the price of eggs anymore. Maybe they're thrilled at the prospect of invading Greenland, Canada and Panama, all at the same time. If not, Trump may see his approval rating take a precipitous dive as he pals around with cyber-barons and makes money for himself hand over fist while most Americans watch their paychecks continue to shrink for no good reason. 

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about Trump's return to the White House

We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump thinks

Donald Trump has a thing for Greenland. First, he wanted to buy the Arctic island. Then, his son visited for a photo-op. Now, he refuses to rule out using the U.S. military to seize it.

Decades ago, the value of Greenland was indeed its strategic location between superpowers and its unique mineral resources. No longer. Today, Greenland’s value is the ice that covers 80 percent of the island. Keeping Greenland’s ice frozen preserves at least a trillion dollars of wealth generation, according to a 2020 study, and would help prevent trillions of dollars in estimated losses by 2100. If we let all that ice melt, global sea level will rise 24 feet higher than it is today. Low-lying farm fields, factories, homes, and large swaths of cities including New Orleans, Miami, Jakarta, and Mumbai will mostly vanish beneath the waves unless we spend even more building barricades to keep the ocean out.

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What matters now is cooling Earth’s climate to preserve Greenland’s ice and with it, our collective coastal future. Yet, the president continues to view the island nation through an antiquated lens of power: possessing the land of others to generate wealth and to keep perceived enemies at bay.

Trump’s fascination with Greenland is not a new idea. For more than a thousand years, colonial aspirations have shaped the island’s history. The Norse, Danes, Nazis, and Americans came to Greenland chasing territory and natural resources, and for military domination of the Arctic.

Consider Erik the Red, who migrated from Norway as a child, and was later banished from his home in Iceland for murder. In 985 C.E., he sailed deep into a southern Greenland fjord. On a patch of flat coast, Erik established Brattahlíð, the first of what would become about 500 Norse farms on the island. Within a few hundred years, the Norse had vanished. We now know that climate change had pushed sea level almost 10 feet higher in southern Greenland, flooding their settlements and contributing to their demise.

Nearly a thousand years later and a 10-minute boat ride across the fjord from Brattahlíð, U.S. military bulldozers built a mile-long airstrip at the start of the Second World War. Stopping there to refuel on their one-way journey to the European theatre, U.S. bombers rumbled past the Norse ruins.

The president continues to view the island nation through an antiquated lens of power: possessing the land of others to generate wealth and to keep perceived enemies at bay.

The Americans were not alone. On the desolate East Greenland coast, Nazi meteorologists radioed coded weather reports to Germany, critical information for accurate battlefield forecasts because weather in Europe comes mostly from the west. This was the first hint that Greenland was strategically valuable both in war and as a piece of Earth’s climate system.

As the Cold War heated up, the American occupation of Greenland expanded. The sprawling U.S. airfield at Thule, only about 2,800 miles from Moscow, housed atomic weapons and 10,000 men. Camp Century, the Army’s nuclear-powered base, hummed inside the ice sheet. It was the start of a grand plan that would have intermediate range tactical nuclear missiles moving back and forth through ice sheet tunnels. This atomic shell game would cover an area about the size of the state of Alabama. But in just a few years, that fever dream faded as the snow tunnels collapsed and long-range ballistic missiles diminished Greenland’s deterrent value.

By the late 1960s, American soldiers were going home because occupying the Arctic was no longer as strategically meaningful. Abandoning bases, the military left an assortment of hazardous materials in their wake: at Camp Century, 10,000 tons of waste including persistent and toxic organic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls, lead, asbestos, and millions of gallons of frozen sewage; and at Thule, a harbor contaminated with plutonium when a nuclear weapon, carried by a crashed B-52 bomber, disintegrated on impact.

In recent years, the Danes have been tidying up that mess, base by abandoned base. But no one has been meaningfully cleaning up the global atmosphere. Since the combustion of fossil fuels started in earnest about 1850, humans have added greenhouse gases sufficient to warm Earth by an average of more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; the Arctic is warming several times faster.

Like an ice cube on a sultry summer day, Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, and that water, flowing into the ocean, is steadily raising sea level globally. The rising ocean is now endangering our national security.

Consider that Naval Station Norfolk, the largest military port in the world and home to five of 12 U.S. aircraft carriers, is now sinking beneath the waves. Worldwide, more than half a billion people live within 25 feet of sea level, according to a 2019 study. If Greenland’s ice continues to melt, rising seas will submerge their homes and farms, like those of the Norse. What follows will be the largest human migration in history.

Greenland’s ice wouldn’t be melting if several decades of moral appeals to address climate change had effectively engaged people and politicians. But those pleadings, often couched in apocalyptic tones, have fallen flat. We need a different approach.

I suggest that advocating for climate stability as a strategic and economic imperative — an idea that politicians across the ideological spectrum could support — is our best hope to keep Greenland’s ice frozen and thus the seas from rising further. The U.S. military, integral to the Cold War occupation of Greenland and respected by most Americans, provides an example of just such an approach.

Military and intelligence planners are acutely aware of the strategic threat that climate change presents globally as droughts, floods, and heatwaves destabilize food supplies and regimes. They know that climate change is a threat multiplier and catalyst for conflict. The increasing frequency of rare, extreme, and potentially destabilizing climate events now makes global geopolitics ever more uncertain.

The experience of the U.S. military shows that taking action to reduce climate impacts can be both an economic and strategic win. At bases around the world, engineers have expanded the use of renewable energy while building local microgrids with battery storage for reliable, 24/7 power. Stepping away from fossil fuels is already saving millions of taxpayer dollars in energy costs while reducing supply chain and operational vulnerability.

In a way, Donald Trump has it right. We need Greenland — not the land, but the ice. Keeping that ice frozen means cooling our rapidly warming world, specifically, the Arctic. Decarbonizing the global economy is a critical first step. Next, we need to develop and test technologies, both mechanical and natural, that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Only then will Earth cool sufficiently to keep Greenland’s ice on land and out of the ocean.

Our planet’s temperature, not politicians’ ambitions, will determine whether the ice remains on Greenland or melts and pours into the global ocean.

The last time Earth was as warm as it was in 2024 was likely more than 100,000 years ago — a time when sea level rose at least 20 feet, reshaping the world’s coastlines. Some of that water came from Greenland’s melted ice. Even greater melting and sea level rise happened 400,000 years ago. Our planet’s temperature, not politicians’ ambitions, will determine whether the ice remains on Greenland or melts and pours into the global ocean.

Remember Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. Four feet of sea-level rise floods the lower lawn. Six feet and the Atlantic Ocean may trickle into the lobby. Melt Greenland’s ice sheet and only Mar-a-Lago’s upper story and tower protrude above the waves. Our collective actions over the next decades will determine the future of Earth’s ice and thus, global sea level.

President Trump, the most strategic choice now is not buying or seizing Greenland but working globally to save its ice sheet, because what happens in Greenland has yet to stay in Greenland.

Paul Bierman is a geoscientist and professor of natural resources at the University of Vermont with 40 years of experience studying glaciers and ice sheets. His latest book, “When the Ice is Gone,” recounts the military, climate, and scientific history of Greenland.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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about climate change

Donald Trump is not waiting for RFK Jr. — he has already started his war on public health

Robert Kennedy's Senate hearing to review his nomination to head Health and Human Services (HHS) is set to begin next Wednesday. Still, Donald Trump is not waiting for his candidate to get confirmed before launching a full-scale war on public health.

For weeks now, some Democrats have tentatively expressed hopes that the vaccine denialist and former Democrat might not be so bad, pointing to Kennedy's statements about promoting healthy food as evidence that he might have good qualities. Kennedy's critics pointed out that empty rhetoric about nutrition and exercise is a standard deception ploy from anti-vaccine activists. It's designed to make their hatred of preventive medicine seem "reasonable," but is insincere, as evidenced by the lack of interest in doing anything substantive to improve public health. 

Kennedy skeptics are swiftly being proved right.

McDonald's-loving Trump has not made even a whisper of a hint of a move toward "better school lunches," but on the real meat of Kennedy's agenda — waging all-out war on public health services — Trump is moving full steam ahead. One of his very first actions in office was to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO), which Trump has hated since 2020, when they kept undermining his efforts to paint the COVID-19 pandemic as a "hoax."  Kennedy has hated WHO even longer, and not just because of his opposition to global vaccination campaigns that save countless lives. He and his organizing partners have fought WHO's efforts to prevent the spread of HIV, improve birth control access, or protect health care access for gay people. Kennedy refuses to accept that HIV causes AIDS, instead blaming it on what he imagines are "lifestyle" choices among gay men, even though, globally, most HIV-positive people are women and girls. 

As many folks warned, Kennedy's priority was never going to be "healthy food," but making sure that infectious diseases could spread more easily at home and abroad. On the "at home" front, Trump has already kick-started Kennedy's agenda, which is objectively pro-virus. As Science reported, Trump imposed a large number of restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), "including the abrupt cancellation of meetings including grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel."

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The cancelations could destroy a large number of annual research grants, which could slow down or stop important studies in disease treatment and prevention. This, too, is in line with Kennedy's overt hostility towards any scientist working to prevent infectious disease. When he was still a stunt candidate for president, Kennedy spoke at an anti-vaccine conference and promised that, when he was in charge of NIH, "We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years." By which he meant he would block research into preventing and treating infectious diseases. Trump throwing a wrench into the ability of the NIH to fund infectious disease research looks very much like the first step in Kennedy's scheme to lay waste to medical infrastructure to protect people from such illnesses. 

Kennedy's bizarre hatred of germ theory isn't the only item on the anti-health agenda. A HHS-run website informing American women of their reproductive rights was taken down mere hours after Trump was sworn in on Monday. The site didn't just help women seeking abortion learn where it is still legal to do so. It reassured women that birth control is still legal and that it's mandatory for most insurance plans to cover it. Kennedy sometimes makes pro-choice noises in public, but his actions suggest he's eager to pander to the religious right on this issue. He's been meeting with anti-choice Republicans and appears amendable to their views. He's signaled a willingness to go with the Project 2025 plan to rescind the FDA approval of the abortion pill. 

All this might seem like esoteric policy to most Americans, but it's tied to an anti-health agenda that could dramatically impact millions of people's ability to get even basic health care. The New York Times reported Thursday that congressional "Republicans are passing around an extensive menu of ideas to cover the cost of a massive tax cut and immigration crackdown bill." At the top of the list? What they hope could be a $100 billion cut to Medicaid, a program that now covers nearly 1 in 5 Americans. Similarly, billionaire Elon Musk, with his shady "government efficiency" study group, has been eyeballing massive cuts to Veteran Affairs, as a way to cut taxes for rich people like himself. 

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Those programs are incredibly popular, creating a political firewall that may tank the plans to lay waste to the health care of millions. But Trump and Musk's hostility to federal employees is already doing damage. On Thursday, Veterans Affairs was forced to issue an exemption from the White House’s federal hiring freeze for the department's health care positions after days of outrage and panic. In one of the more satisfying moments of the week, this reality was even felt by MAGA influencer John Basham, who took to Twitter to plead for the restoration of his wife's nursing job offer, which was initially rescinded by Trump's order. 

It's good to see someone who richly deserves it suffering so, but it, unfortunately, points to a larger issue: these hiring freezes will interfere with the lives of those who rely on federal funding. Not that Trump will care, no matter how much whining his voters do on Twitter.

Trump also signed an executive order this week to terminate President Joe Biden's successful efforts to lower the prices of many common pharmaceutical drugs. The drug price move ties off the thread that ties Kennedy and Trump's views together: health care should be a privilege of the wealthy, and not a basic human right. Kennedy's vague words about healthy eating might sound good on paper. In practice, he's setting up a pretext to deny healthcare access to lower-income people, by saying they deserve to be sick because they supposedly didn't take care of themselves. It's why Kennedy is so hostile not just to vaccines, but any acknowledgement of infectious disease. It's a lot harder to blame the victim when the illness is caused by a virus. If he's confirmed to HHS, this attitude will prevail. The talk about healthy eating will almost certainly not translate into helping people access better food. It'll just be an excuse to blame people's "lifestyles" when public health declines on Kennedy's watch. 

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“The last leg standing”: Jan. 6 civil lawsuit seeks to hold Trump responsible for attacks on police

President Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office this week comes much to the dismay of those who hoped his criminal prosecutions would result in accountability for his alleged crimes. It is also a disappointment to those who hoped that merely seeing the flurry of criminal charges against him, especially former special counsel Jack Smith's 2020 election subversion case, would convince enough Americans of the threat he poses to democracy.

But in the wake of Trump's now-moot criminal cases in Washington, Florida and Georgia, alongside his unconditional discharge in the New York hush-money case, a spate of lawsuits are still seeking to hold Trump, the Proud Boys and other defendants to account for the role they played in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

One such civil case, Smith v. Trump, filed in August 2021 on behalf of eight U.S. Capitol police officers harmed during the Jan. 6 riot, also seeks to prevent further political violence under the new administration, with one of its lead litigators arguing it may fill the gap left by Smith's own defunct prosecution of Trump. While they hope a potential ruling will set the record straight on the impact of Jan. 6, the plaintiffs also seek damages and for a jury to find Trump liable for conspiracy, among other violations of federal and district laws. 

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Edward Caspar, co-lead litigator and acting co-chief counsel for the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argues that the lawsuit is one of the last standing legal efforts to hold Trump accountable.

"Civil liability is really the only way that can address [the harm to officers], and it might be the last leg standing, but it's certainly one of the most important means of securing accountability for the events of Jan. 6," he told Salon in a phone interview. 

That importance, he added, is underscored by Trump's 2021 impeachment hearings, return to the presidency and his immediate pardoning of some 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 rioters. 

About 140 police officers were assaulted during the attack on the Capitol, including around 80 members of U.S. Capitol Police, according to the Department of Justice. One Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, suffered from a stroke and passed away following injuries he sustained while on-duty.

The eight Capitol police officers suing in Smith v. Trump argue that they suffered significant physical, psychological and emotional injuries as a result of Trump and his allies' actions to block the certification of the 2020 election. They say they were "violently assaulted, spat on, tear-gassed, bear-sprayed, subjected to racial slurs and epithets, and put in fear" as they "risked their lives to defend the Capitol from a violent, mass attack," according to the complaint.

Those injuries, they wrote, persist to this day. 

Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said in a phone interview that Smith v. Trump, alongside the other Jan. 6 civil cases, could end up being among "the most important cases out there" precisely because Trump's criminal charges have disappeared. 

"With courts making findings that this activity was within Trump's capacity as a candidate and not in his capacity as president, it could be that the civil cases are where we see liability," McQuade told Salon. She added that the 1997 Clinton v. Jones decision holds that, unlike in criminal cases, a sitting president "can be forced to defend a civil lawsuit."

In addition to seeking injunctive relief, and compensatory and punitive damages for the harm inflicted upon them, the plaintiffs ask that a jury find the defendants liable for six offenses, ranging from conspiring to interfere with civil rights to violating a D.C. bias-related crimes act, assault and battery.

They accuse the defendants, in part, of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 law that criminalizes "a conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to prevent federal officers from doing their jobs," according to Darrell A.H. Miller, a scholar of civil rights and constitutional law at the University of Chicago. 

"In the 19th Century, the targets of violence and intimidation were the freedmen and their federal government allies in the South," Miller told Salon, arguing that the law addresses just the kind of circumstances that were presented on Jan. 6, 2021. "In the 21st century, the target was those responsible for securing the peaceful transfer of power in the very seat of national government."   

The plaintiffs were among the group of officers who worked to secure the Congress and protect lawmakers and their staff from the mob that broke into the Capitol. In the lawsuit, they describe suffering physical injuries from being physically attacked by rioters, being exposed to noxious pollutants deployed by the attackers and suffering emotional harm from the experience. 

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McQuade compared the plaintiffs' lawsuit to the civil cases that arose from the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a far-right terrorist killed one person and injured dozens more. At the conclusion of one such lawsuit, a federal jury found the white supremacist organizers liable for conspiracy to intimidate, harass and harm, and awarded the plaintiffs $26 million in damages.

"That is, I think, some measure not only for the individual plaintiffs to get accountability and some compensation for their losses, but I also think it allows history to record that harm occurred and that courts of law found that the law was broken," she said. 

Distinguishing Smith v. Trump from the other three pending Jan. 6 civil cases is its extensive list of nearly 40 defendants, Caspar told Salon, which includes Trump, his 2020 campaign, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, as well as their leaders Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes — who were both sentenced in 2023 for federal seditious conspiracy over their roles in organizing the Capitol attack. 

The lawsuit has already begun its merits discovery period, in which the parties exchange relevant evidence for fact-finding regarding the claims, for the groups and individuals named in the suit. That part of the case, Caspar said, is moving forward "full steam ahead," with discovery set to end in July. 

The part of the case against Trump, while on a parallel track, is progressing differently, however, due to the court considering Trump's motion to dismiss the case. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing for his actions on Jan. 6 and has argued that presidential immunity should shield him from civil liability. 

Miller said that while existing precedent from the Nixon administration offers presidential immunity for official acts, the basic questions regarding Trump's ability to invoke it in these suits revolve around whether his participation in the events of Jan. 6 was in his official capacity or private capacity as a presidential candidate.

Should the case proceed to trial, however, the summer 2024 Supreme Court decision extending presidential immunity for official acts to criminal cases could "present a wrinkle" by limiting "the ability of a litigant to use information or evidence that comes from 'official' actions, which could keep a jury from seeing some evidence critical to proving the civil conspiracy," he added. 

Special counsel Jack Smith found a way around that hurdle in his case against Trump. After last year's Trump v. United States decision required Smith to tailor his Jan. 6 subversion case against Trump to remove "official" acts, the prosecutor cut out an unindicted co-conspirator and allegations about Trump's interactions with his staff at the White House. References to private actions, like Trump's campaign speech on the Ellipse, which critics say incited a riot at the Capitol, remained in the superseding indictment.  

Such actions already form the bedrock of the claims against the president in Smith v. Trump. In fact, a 2023 federal appellate court ruling in a related Jan. 6 lawsuit — Blassingame v. Trump — also pointed to Trump's Ellipse speech in its denial of his immunity claim, determining that he was acting in his capacity as a candidate. 

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia consolidated Smith v. Trump, Blassingame v. Trump and four other lawsuits last year for the purposes of discovery and summary judgment on the immunity question. Because the appellate court based it's 2023 ruling on facts presented by the plaintiffs, it allowed for Trump to dispute their allegations and introduce his own facts pertaining to his immunity claim for consideration in the district court. Discovery on that matter ended last month. 

Caspar said Trump's legal counsel is expected to file a brief arguing his immunity in the case by the end of this month, and the plaintiffs will submit their responses to the U.S. District Court in February.

Trump's lead attorney did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Asked whether the lawsuit could hold Trump to any kind of account given that his criminal cases collapsed and he's returned to the White House, McQuade suggested that it could. While civil actions can come up short in dolling out justice, civil liability still offers some form of accountability in addressing harm done to plaintiffs, she said.

"In some ways, a civil judgment could help make [the plaintiffs] whole, perhaps even more so than a criminal case could," she argued, adding that, because Trump can't pardon himself or the other defendants in lawsuits, "the civil case could do a better job of holding him accountable than a criminal case could in this situation."

Caspar said the plaintiffs are hoping that by laying bear the full breadth of the "human harm" Jan. 6 caused, the case will also encourage Americans to mend their differences through the political process — and prevent that kind of political violence from ever happening again. 

Physically attacking and brutalizing others just because your chosen candidate lost the election is "not something that you get to do and get away with," Caspar said, voicing what the plaintiff's hope the public internalizes from the case. "There are consequences for engaging in that kind of lunacy, and we hope that when the public sees the public evidence as a result of this trial, they'll understand the harm done to individuals and to the country by the kind of violence that took place."

But Miller said he's skeptical that would be the outcome. Given the election result, he said he doubts any judgment against the defendants — Trump included — would have an effect on the American public's perception.  

Instead, he argued, "this is a lawsuit for posterity, to prevent the truth of January 6 from being erased from history."

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NASA doubles down on Moon-shot goals in Artemis mission, awarding $24 million to space contractors

After years of delays, NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon commenced in a big way more than two years ago, starting with the unmanned Artemis 1 in November 2022. The legacy is continuing now with NASA announcing on Thursday that it is awarding new study contracts to nine companies in seven states with a combined total of $24 million. Those companies will develop strategies and technologies for humans to live and work on the Moon.

The beneficiaries include Blue Origin, which is controlled by Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Other companies include Intuitive Machines, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, MDA Space, Moonprint, Pratt Miller Defense, Sierra Space and Special Aerospace Services. They will provide a wide range of scientific and technological services, from developing spacecraft and solving biological problems to figuring out the logistics of advanced space travel.

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“These contract awards are the catalyst for developing critical capabilities for the Artemis missions and the everyday needs of astronauts for long-term exploration on the lunar surface,” Nujoud Merancy, deputy associate administrator of Strategy and Architecture Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. “The strong response to our request for proposals is a testament to the interest in human exploration and the growing deep-space economy. This is an important step to a sustainable return to the Moon that, along with our commercial partners, will lead to innovation and expand our knowledge for future lunar missions, looking toward Mars.”

Artist's rendering of astronauts managing logistics on the lunar surface.Artist’s rendering of astronauts managing logistics on the lunar surface. (NASA)

The Artemis campaign began under President Donald Trump’s first term with the goal of reviving U.S. Moon exploration. In the interim, the Artemis program has been beset with technical and logistical issues, but Trump and his adviser SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have vowed to sweep through those issues in his second term. Their goal is to put America not just on the Moon, but also on Mars, though it’s not clear if humans could actually survive there or not. Three weeks ago, Musk said that the Moon is a “distraction” and that a manned mission to the Red Planet would take precedence over moon bases. 

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Student loan debt is growing among older Americans

When you think about student loans, you probably imagine a fresh-faced 23-year-old working an entry-level job or a 30-year-old getting their master’s degree after a few years in the workforce.

But many student loan borrowers are older Americans, and more have joined them in carrying debt. More than 3.5 million at or above the age of 60 hold student loan debt, collectively amounting to over $125 billion, according to 2023 data from the think tank New America. 

And even though some are living off substantial nest eggs or healthy retirement accounts, others are barely surviving on a fixed income. That makes paying their student loan bills much harder, especially since many have been forced to retire due to age, health or both. 

Around 6% of adults age 50 and older — 7.2 Americans — haven't paid off their student loans, according to Urban Institute's August 2022 analysis. Among those borrowers, 8%, or 580,000 individuals, are behind on payments. The median amount of delinquent debt was approximately $11,500.

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Reasons for student loan debt

The student loan debt burdening older adults comes from two main sources: their own student loans, and student loans taken out on their children’s behalf (also known as Parent PLUS loans). As of 2022, Parent PLUS loans equaled about $106.3 billion and had increased about 63% in seven years. 

"Parent PLUS loans are the fastest growing loan group," said Student Loan Planner consultant  Meagan McGuire.

Begun in 1980, Parent PLUS loans were created to help parents finance their children’s education. Undergraduate students can only borrow either $31,000 or $57,500 in total, while the average annual tuition is $38,270. That can leave a huge gap that grants and scholarships simply can’t fill.

However, through Parent PLUS loans, parents can take out 100% of the cost of attendance. There is no aggregate limit on how much a parent can borrow. And if they have multiple children, they can take out Parent PLUS loans for all of them. Parent PLUS loans are much easier to acquire than private student loans.

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Private student loans require decent credit (usually a credit score of 640 or higher) and a current income source. Parent PLUS loans are much easier to get. There is no minimum credit score; all you need is a relatively clean credit history. 

"To be eligible for a Parent PLUS loan, the borrower must not have an adverse credit history,” said Mark Kantrowitz, author of "How to Appeal for More College Financial Aid." “An adverse credit history involves either a two-year lookback for a serious delinquency (more than 90 days) or more than $2,085 in debt in collections; or a five-year lookback for a default, foreclosure, repossession, bankruptcy discharge, tax lien, default determination, write-off or wage garnishment."

The downside? Parent PLUS loans have higher interest rates and fewer repayment options than regular student loans. For the 2024-25 school year, Parent PLUS loan rates are 9.08% compared to 6.53% for undergraduate student loans.

And because there’s no official credit check, parents can often end up borrowing more than they can actually afford to pay back.

Many parents take out Parent PLUS loans with the understanding that their child will graduate, find a good job and make payments on their behalf. However, Parent PLUS loans are only in the parent’s name. And if the child can’t afford to pay back those loans, the parent remains legally and financially liable. 

This can create an awkward family dynamic — not to mention a dicey financial situation.

If you default on your student loans, the federal government can garnish your wages, including Social Security benefits

The only way to transfer Parent PLUS loans to the child is if they refinance the loans into their own name. There’s no way to do this on the federal level — the child will have to refinance with a private lender, "assuming the child has the ability to be approved and their credit is worthy of a refinance," Mcguire said.

Ignoring those loans can have drastic consequences. If you default on your student loans, the federal government can garnish your wages, including your Social Security benefits. This can leave older adults in an even worse position. 

What are the repayment options?

Income-contingent repayment. Even though Parent PLUS loans are not eligible for the same range of repayment plans as regular student loans, they still qualify for income-contingent repayment (ICR), extended repayment and the graduated repayment plans. 

The ICR plan is the only plan available that offers loan forgiveness. If you have a low income and choose the ICR plan, your monthly payment may be as low as $0. After 20 or 25 years on the ICR plan, your remaining balance will be forgiven. However, you may have to declare the forgiven amount as income on your taxes. 

Discharge. Older adults who are disabled may qualify for the federal government’s Total and Permanent Disability Discharge. This program is only available if you yourself are disabled; a child’s disability does not count.

"A borrower on fixed income may be able to qualify for an income-driven repayment plan with a very low payment"

Bankruptcy. Filing for bankruptcy can be fairly straightforward if you have credit card debt or are underwater on your mortgage. But discharging student loans through bankruptcy is notoriously harder. According to Kantrowitz, you can only qualify for bankruptcy if you prove that your loans are causing you “undue hardship.” 

But because borrowers with federal loans can choose from forbearance, deferment or income-driven repayment, it’s that much more challenging to prove undue hardship.

“A borrower on fixed income may be able to qualify for an income-driven repayment plan with a very low payment, even a zero payment, which will prevent bankruptcy discharge as an option,” Kantrowitz said.

What to do if you have private student loans?

Parents who took out private loans for their children have an even harder road than those with federal loans.

Private loans do not come with income-driven repayment plans, disability discharge or loan forgiveness programs. They’re also not even easy to discharge in bankruptcy. 

One of the only options is to refinance your private student loans. You can refinance to a longer repayment term, which will result in a lower monthly payment. This can make it easier to manage your payments if times are hard. 

However, refinancing also depends on your credit score, income and debt-to-income ratio. If you have a high student loan balance and a relatively low income, refinancing may be close to impossible.

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Hegseth paid $50k to sexual assault accuser as part of confidentiality agreement

Pete Hegseth revealed to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault.

Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense shared the details of his settlement with the unnamed accuser in a letter that was obtained by CNN. A police report released earlier this year outlined the allegations from 2017 in detail. The then 30-year-old woman was a staffer for a California Republican group. Hegseth's accuser said she met the former Fox News host when he was a keynote speaker at a Republican women's conference. The unnamed woman said that her memory got "fuzzy" after having a drink but she "remembered saying 'no' a lot.” Hegseth admitted to having sex with the unidentified woman but has maintained that their encounter was consensual. Monterey Police ultimately didn’t file charges against the Trump nominee.

Hegseth’s settlement with his accuser has been public knowledge since November when it was revealed by the Washington Post. Hegseth's attorney told the outlet that his client reached an agreement with the woman to avoid potential "blackmail."

"Hegseth strongly felt that he was the victim of blackmail and innocent collateral damage in a lie that the Complainant was holding onto to keep her marriage intact,” attorney Timothy Parlatore said at the time.

Parlatore took the same tack with CNN after the amount of the settlement was uncovered, saying that the case was made based on "false claims" and a settlement was reached for the sake of time.

“As we said from the beginning, these were false claims that we settled for nuisance value, much less than it would have cost to defend,” Parlatore told CNN.

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Hegseth’s alleged sexual misconduct and payoff constitute some of the more serious charges against him, though Senate critics have pointed to a number of other shortcomings. Hegseth's mother wrote in a 2018 email that he had abused “many” women “in some way.” She later recanted her claims on Fox News. Hegseth’s former sister-in-law alleged that the Army vet mistreated his ex-wife to the point that she feared for her safety.

Hegseth’s former coworkers at a veterans’ advocacy organization say he was constantly intoxicated and fostered a hostile work environment, allegations that GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins pointed to in statements announcing their opposition to his confirmation.

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GOP lawmakers’ lewd texts kept House from subpoenaing Hutchinson in Jan. 6 probe: report

A sexting problem in the GOP could have kept Republicans from interrogating a key political target.

The Washington Post reports that Republicans avoided subpoenaing Mark Meadows' former Chief of Staff Cassidy Hutchinson last year to avoid the embarrassing fallout of her testimony. An aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson worried Hutchinson could bring up sexually explicit texts from GOP representatives.

As part of a GOP-launched probe into the bipartisan committee to investigate Jan. 6, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., floated issuing a subpoena for the former White House aide’s testimony. According to correspondence reviewed by the Post and an anonymous source with knowledge of the event, a Johnson aide warned Loudermilk that a subpoena risked exposing “sexual texts from members who were trying to engage in sexual favors.” In an email, another Johnson staffer reportedly told Loudermilk’s office that Hutchinson could “potentially reveal embarrassing information.”

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The subpoena plan was part of a broader GOP effort to poke holes in the work of the previous Jan 6 Committee, including Hutchinson’s testimony that Donald Trump ignored warnings about potential violence.

Johnson denied that he spoke out against bringing Hutchinson to testify.

“I had nothing to do with that, the decision not to issue a subpoena to Cassidy Hutchinson was made by the chairman of that committee, and that’s Barry Loudermilk,” Johnson said on Thursday, following the Post's report. The speaker claimed that Hutchinson had already agreed to cooperate with the committee, and thus a subpoena wasn’t needed. 

On Wednesday, Johnson carried on Loudermilk’s effort to relitigate Jan. 6 and the subsequent investigation, empaneling a subcommittee to probe the work of the original committee.

“House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is still more work to be done,” Johnson said in a statement.

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“I have the right to make a deal”: Trump pauses TikTok ban

TikTok is staying in the U.S. for now, but its future remains uncertain.

President Donald Trump this week paused a ban on the app and said he has "the right to make a deal" to try to save it. Legal experts questioned whether he can override a federal law that bans it. And the app's China-based parent company appeared open to brokering an agreement.

General Atlantic CEO Bill Ford, a board member of TikTok's parent company ByteDance, said he is "optimistic we will find a solution,” Bloomberg reported Thursday.

“There are a number of alternatives we can talk to President Trump and his team about that are short of selling the company that allow the company to continue to operate, maybe with a change of control of some kind, but short of having to sell," Ford told Bloomberg Television. 

Trump signed an executive order on Monday that delays enforcement of a TikTok ban until April. The ban resulted from a law that required its sale to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19. TikTok briefly shut down in the U.S. as the deadline approached but restarted after Trump pledged his support.

Trump later told reporters he's looking to have the U.S. government broker a deal for 50% control of the app, and would be open to Elon Musk or Oracle's Larry Ellison purchasing it. Trump said he believes the app is worth $1 trillion. 

“Give half to the United States of America and we’ll give you the permit,” Trump said, calling the platform “worthless” without a permit.

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TikTok's days had appeared numbered after the Supreme Court on Jan. 17 unanimously upheld the federal law requiring its sale. The Court sided with the U.S. government, which argued the app poses a national security risk because it can track and collect data on 170 million American users. 

Trump tried to ban TikTok during his first term and find an American buyer before he lost his reelection bid.

He said last year that he still had concerns TikTok carries security risks, but that young people would go “crazy” without it. After using it to court younger voters, Trump said he had found "a warm spot" for the app. 

TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump's swearing-in, and the platform hosted an inauguration party in Washington that featured right-wing content creators.

"We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive," TikTok told Business Insider.

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“Highly offensive”: ADL sours on Musk over puns that “trivialize the Holocaust”

The Anti-Defamation League spoke out on Thursday over a series Nazi Germany-themed puns posted by billionaire Elon Musk, slamming what it called “inappropriate and highly offensive jokes that trivialize the Holocaust.”

Musk's post contained the names of several German leaders who engineered the Holocaust in a Thursday morning post to X. The Tesla CEO and Donald Trump confidant was clearly trying to prod people who criticized his appearance at Trump's inauguration. During his speech, Musk used a gesture that fascism experts labeled a “Nazi salute.”

“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!” the X owner said. "Bet you did Nazi that coming."

In a quote-tweet, ADL CEO Johnathan Greenblatt warned Musk that it was “inappropriate and offensive to make light of..a singularly evil event.”

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“Making inappropriate and highly offensive jokes that trivialize the Holocaust only serve to minimize the evil and inhumanity of Nazi crimes, denigrate the suffering of both victims and survivors and insult the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah,” the ADL said in a statement from its official account.

The ADL had defended Musk earlier in the week, saying his stiff-armed salute was “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” Musk made the gesture before telling the crowd that “the future of civilization is assured,” a phrase critics noted resembled the neo-Nazi “14 Words,” a slogan the ADL classifies as a hate symbol.

Other Jewish groups disputed the defense, including Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish action group that circulated a petition calling for the ADL to revoke its defense.

It's not the first time that Musk has found himself facing accusations of antisemitism. Months before Musk backed Donald Trump’s presidential bid, the ADL slammed his endorsement of a post claiming Jewish people were pushing “hatred against whites.”

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“A big one, huh?”: Trump signs order to declassify JFK, MLK assassination files

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday which he says would declassify federal records surrounding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"That's a big one, huh? A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades," Trump said in the Oval Office while signing the order. "Everything will be revealed." 

The president directed an aide to “give that to RFK Jr.,” Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services department and the son of the senator who was killed while running for president in 1968.

In his first term, Trump delayed releasing all records on John F. Kennedy’s assassination on the advice of administration officials, but said on Thursday that further delays are “not consistent with the public interest.”

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“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” the executive order read. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”

The order set a 15-day deadline for Cabinet agencies to report a plan for declassifying documents related to President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963. It set a 45-day deadline for documents related to RFK and MLK’s assassinations.

Not everyone was impressed by the order, though. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s sole grandson, said there was “nothing heroic about” Trump’s order and slammed him for using JFK as a "political prop.” 

"The truth is a lot sadder than the myth — a tragedy that didn’t need to happen," he wrote on X. "Not part of an inevitable grand scheme. 

Trump vowed on the campaign trail to declassify broad swaths of files on President Kennedy’s killing and the 9/11 attacks. The '60s assassinations and the 2001 terrorist attack have long been fodder for conspiracy theorists who believe the government was involved, either directly or in a retroactive cover-up. Trump was cagier about sharing documents of more recent vintage craved by conspiracists, declining to commit to the release of files related to the death of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump, a a long-time associate of Epstein's, said in June that he was "less" open to declassifying the Epstein files “because you don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that world.”

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Over 40 years later, Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” is still doing what you want it to do

Tina Turner's Grammy award-winning album "Private Dancer" is receiving its flowers once again — this time via a jam-packed 40th-anniversary edition containing a "lost" track, set to be released via Rhino Records on March 21.

Originally released in 1984, "Private Dancer" sold over 10 million copies worldwide and reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200. Decades later, it remains a staple in music collections. Following Turner's passing at age 83 in 2023, her extensive catalog is being revisited, breathing new life into old favorites—and even revealing a few surprises.

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The meteoric success of "Private Dancer" allowed Turner to land on her own two feet after fleeing from her physically and mentally abusive marriage to Ike Turner, who leeched upon her talents during the early days of her career as a soul singer. 

Gaining global rock stardom along with critical and mainstream recognition, "Private Dancer" won three Grammys in 1985, including Record of the Year for "What’s Love Got to Do with It."

In the latest reissue of the album, fans will not only find a good opportunity to revisit many of Turner's biggest hits, but they'll get to hear a new/old track for the very first time, “Hot For You Baby."

Written by Australian songwriters George Young and Harry Vanda and produced by John Carter, the previously unreleased song never made the final cut of "Private Dancer" and, according to CNN, it's "unclear" how it got lost but, judging by the reviews rolling in, it's a happy mystery that it found its way back to us.  

Referring to the track as "effortlessly cool and cheery at the same time," The Associated Press celebrate Turner's "husky tone" on "Hot For You Baby."

In The Sunday Times of London review, they write that the song "is certainly a reminder of what a unique singer Turner was," detailing that "she screams the words in a throaty, guttural fashion, managing to sound powerful, friendly, sexy and fun all at once; a considerable achievement."

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The new reissue of "Private Dancer" also includes a previously unreleased television instrumental of “Let’s Stay Together” and a dub mix of “What’s Love Got to Do With It” — along with music videos from Turner's legendary '80s era.

Even though in the months following Turner's death a 55-song compilation of her greatest hits was released to honor and celebrate the 50 years of her solo career after her divorce from Ike, there can never be too many Tina albums to add to the collection.

Listen to "Hot For You Baby" below:

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GOP Sens. announce opposition to Hegseth nom, saying they won’t “compromise” on “character”

Pete Hegseth has lost the support of two GOP senators ahead of a final confirmation vote.

Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense still seems to have a majority of senators in his corner. However, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, voted with Democrats against a motion to invoke cloture on Hegseth’s nomination. The motion passed 51-49 with the support of the rest of the GOP caucus on Thursday.

“I cannot in good conscience support his [Hegseth’s] nomination for Secretary of Defense,” Murkowski explained in a Thursday post to X, saying Hegseth’s “accomplishments do not alleviate my significant concerns regarding his nomination.”

Murkowski cited concerns about both “allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking,” saying that Hegseth showed a "lack of judgment that is unbecoming of someone who would lead our armed forces." The allegations had surrounded Hegseth since his nomination was announced. Earlier this week, senators received an affidavit from Hegseth’s former sister-in-law claiming Hegseth’s ex-wife feared for her safety at times during their marriage.

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"I believe that character is the defining trait required of the Secretary of Defense, and must be prioritized without compromise," Murkowski wrote. "The leader of the Department of Defense must demonstrate and model the standards of behavior and character we expect of all servicemembers, and Mr. Hegseth’s nomination to the role poses significant concerns that I cannot overlook."

In a statement explaining her no vote, Collins highlighted Hegseth’s lack of experience and demonstrated understanding of the Department of Defense.

“I am concerned that he does not have the experience and perspective necessary to succeed in the job,” Collins said in a statement.

Both senators alluded to Hegseth's previous statements surrounding women in the military. Hegseth has a long history of claiming women don't belong in combat roles within the military and said as much directly as recently as November. Murkowski questioned if his post-nomination about-face was genuine, saying that women in the military "deserve to know that their leader honors and values their commitment to our nation." Collins said she was "not convinced that his position on women serving in combat roles has changed."

Senators Collins and Murkowski’s votes alone are not enough to prevent Hegseth’s confirmation, though they represent a major backlash against Trump’s most radical picks from the centrists in his party. Hegseth's confirmation is due to come up for a final vote on Friday.

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“Midas Man” fumbles the legacy of Beatles manager Brian Epstein

Directed by Joe Stephenson, "Midas Man" is a curiosity. As subjects for biopics go, Beatles manager Brian Epstein is long overdue. Unfortunately, "Midas Man" feels like a missed opportunity to get at the heart of this tragic figure, the visionary architect of Beatlemania.

In terms of texture, "Midas Man" has the look and feel of a made-for-television movie, particularly given the way that the film glosses over much of Epstein’s story and wholesale omits some aspects altogether. 

"Midas Man" features Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (“The Queen’s Gambit”) in the title role. As Variety recently reported, the film’s production was notoriously fraught with a host of ancillary issues, yet Fortune-Lloyd gamely infuses Epstein’s character with welcome senses of daring and vulnerability. Sadly, any hope of authenticity largely begins and ends with his performance. 

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As a biographical figure, Epstein’s short life was plagued with tension and drama. At times, "Midas Man" seems to approach these moments with an odd sense of blankness. During Epstein’s lifetime, homosexuality was criminalized in Great Britain, forcing him to live a closeted lifestyle. To its credit, "Midas Man" doesn’t shy away from this aspect of his persona. But even still, the film fails to take full advantage of the everyday tensions that pocked his existence. And when it comes to his long-rumored dalliance with John Lennon (Jonah Lees) during a Spanish vacation, "Midas Man" is entirely mute, eliding the situation altogether.

Indeed, Epstein’s relationship with the Beatles—the most significant facet of his professional achievement—is reduced to a series of wisecracks from the bandmates. Other than Epstein’s overarching belief in their talent when others ignored them, the film never truly leans into the nature of his association with those four lads from Liverpool. In terms of secondary characters, Charley Palmer Rothwell positively shines as George Martin. By contrast, Jay Leno seems miscast as Ed Sullivan, strangely rendering the legendary showman into a gangster persona.

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Perhaps most significantly, "Midas Man" serves as a cautionary tale of sorts about the urgent need for facticity in contemporary cinema. Today’s viewers simply expect more when it comes to films that address historical figures. Decades ago, movie audiences were eminently more forgiving when it came to filmmakers’ claims about needing to reshape history to accommodate the silver screen.

Love the Beatles? Listen to Ken's podcast "Everything Fab Four."

Take "The Buddy Holly Story" (1978), for instance, in which Gary Busey portrayed the legendary singer-songwriter from Lubbock, Texas. In those pre-Internet times, we were simply happy to have a movie about Holly, no matter how many liberties the filmmakers took with his life story. But those days are gone. And this is where "Midas Man" fails the test: it simply doesn’t feel like a genuine telling of Epstein and the Beatles’ incredible story. If anything, it comes off like Beatles-lite. In short, our expectations in terms of authenticity reign supreme, and folks like Sam Mendes, who is preparing to tell the Beatles’ story across four films, would do well to heed this warning.

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“Blatantly unconstitutional”: Judge blocks Trump executive order ending birthright citizenship

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s day-one order to end birthright citizenship for the children of non-citizens.

Responding to a request from officials in Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour issued a restraining order against the Trump administration's move to redefine the rights established in the 14th Amendment. Trump's order was set to take effect on Feb. 19 but will remain on hold until a case from those three states makes its way through the courts.

In the suit filed on Tuesday, attorneys for those states said that Trump's order would affect hundreds of thousands of children currently in the United States. In total, 22 states have sued the Trump admin over the order.

In the hearing on Thursday, Judge Coughenour called Trump's order "blatantly unconstitutional." The Ronald Reagan appointee said the move from Trump's administration "boggles the mind" and flies in the face of long-established interpretations of the 14th Amendment. 

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While the Trump administration's attorneys argued that the states had no standing to sue in advance of the order's implementation, Coughenour disagreed in his Thursday ruling. The judge said that states stood to lose out on federal funding and that residents within the states could be deprived of their rights. He said Trump's order would pose “immediate, ongoing, and significant” harms that “cannot be remedied in the ordinary course of litigation.”

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump claimed in the order that undocumented immigrants’ children were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, a notion Coughenour rejected.

“Are they not subject to the decisions of the immigration courts?” he asked. “Must they not follow the law while they are here?”

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Beating high food costs in 2025: How to save money while prioritizing health, simplicity and taste

Grocery shopping in 2025 comes with many challenges and can feel more daunting than ever to navigate amidst rising food costs. However, there are some strategies to employ to ensure that your supermarket trips are both easier and cheaper, helping you make smart, economical choices that make shopping — and eating — as pleasurable as they should be.

To help you shop smarter and save money in 2025, Salon spoke with Dr. Michael Swanson, Chief Agricultural Economist of the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, about myriad topics that will improve your supermarket budgeting and experience in the year to come.

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Now, when it comes to putting together a budget, or simply getting a good handle of the amount of money you might be putting out per month (for example), Swanson recommended having a general, top-line idea. "I would start with my health objectives," he said. "Do I want to promote exercise and control or reduce weight? Do I prefer to buy organic or local produce? Do I have access to bulk buying?"

Once you've achieved this, Swanson recommends seeing "if they line up with my spending and whether I need to reduce it by a little or a lot."

"If a significant reduction in spending is needed, I would consider giving up convenience first," Swason said. "Most of the cost of food comes from the amount of preparation that happens after the farm. For example, many vegetables can be purchased in a simpler format, like carrots, and then peeled at home for a significant savings. Over time, these changes add up."

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Beyond that, I also asked if any buzzy food terms or descriptors might just be superfluous, to which Swanson told me: "Regenerative is a phrase that doesn’t have an established meaning from the USDA. If the USDA and the FDA don’t have established standards for a category, it is not possible to verify a product’s value or claims." 

When it comes to brand names, though, Swanson is not opposed.

"In our Thanksgiving menu research, we found that some brand names were actually better on pricing than the store brand. It is an item-by-item question to answer," he said. So, if you or your family abides by a certain "we only buy ___," then please do continue that — while it may be somewhat nostalgia or brand loyalty, it also might help with your bank account, too.

Of course, protein often becomes a focal point of most food shopping trips. Swanson recommends being mindful and intentional when it comes to protein, which he labels "a major cost category . . . but also essential for health." He adds "Protein is always a major cost category, but it is also essential for health. The first thing to eliminate is any food waste in this category. The second thing is to get familiar with portion sizing. Some growing adolescents need much more than the average adult, for instance."

One example, in this case, would be purchasing a whole chicken — or even a rotisserie chicken — which might stretch further and even help fill out additional meals (like stirring leftover meat into a soup base), as opposed to buying a package of only breasts or thighs. This can help you save several dollars per pound.

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Portion sizing applies to more than just protein, though, which can then also be considered in other aisles, too. Swanson is a proponent of club stores, though he notes that they can sometimes sell in excess if you're only buying for a one or two person household. “Club stores are a great option because prices are great, but the quantities can be difficult to manage for one or two people,” he said.

Conversely, Swanson suggests starting buying groups with friends, family or neighbors, which would allow for the bulk purchases to go further than they would otherwise. “It might only work for certain items and times, but it’s a creative way to bond," he said. He also cautions that some bulk purchases may not always be practical: “They can force shoppers into buying things that might need to be stored for long periods of time. That second roll of aluminum foil might sit in the closet for months.” 

Maybe a joint-supermarket coalition with your family, friends or neighbors might be the way to go?

I also asked Swanson if people should be shopping weekly, bi-weekly, a few times a month, or more or less, to which he said "Reducing the number of trips reduces the temptation to buy what you don’t need. Having a list and sticking to it is also a fundamental technique. That said, food storage can be an issue. In smaller apartments, someone will have to shop more often, but can bring that shopping discipline to the fore."

Food is a pleasure and always should be, no matter your income bracket. Ideally these tips can provide some guidance, understanding or even strategic approaches for the best ways to ensure you're getting all of the food you need — and some of the treats you want, too. 

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“The Rachel Maddow Show” has begun its 100-day watch. Let’s hope the host can bring us through this

On Monday, when MSNBC’s cameras cut back to the studio directly after Donald Trump’s second inaugural speech, our first glimpse was of an exhausted-looking Rachel Maddow. It’s hard to recall what she said, but her face was unforgettable – she wore the countenance of someone ready to go full Rip Van Winkle and check out for a century. (Stars: they're just like us!)

Maddow, the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” is in the same boat as everyone else in the United States, maybe in a worse position depending on how far the Leader decides to take his vengeance threats.

On CNN, as media analyst Oliver Darcy noted in his Status newsletter, an extremely muted version of Jake Tapper described the ceremonial proceedings without mentioning that the current president is a twice-impeached convicted felon.

Following a leisurely period of once-a-week broadcasts, Maddow pledged to cover the first 100 days of . . . this.

“To be fair to Tapper, he was not alone,” Darcy pointed out, describing the lack of firepower across all TV news coverage. “It was like the invasion of the body snatchers — familiar faces delivering the news, yet devoid of the passion and conviction that once defined them, as if their former selves had been hollowed out,” Darcy concluded.

And Maddow? In those moments after Trump shuffled off the dais, she was the spiritual mirror for everyone else who watched an inaugural address that her MSNBC colleague Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary to Former President Joe Biden, described as not like those in “normal times.”

“Typically a president is not discussing themselves, even though they won. The country elected them. They are discussing the country they’re about to govern,” Psaki said. This one was more of a campaign speech than a message communicating a vision.

Psaki has lived in the Beltway beast’s raging belly and withstood its acid. Maddow isn’t that far removed from it, but still, we understand her concern. Following a leisurely period of once-a-week broadcasts, she's pledged to cover the first 100 days of . . . this.

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A few hours later, presumably after a short nap and perhaps a long talk with her maker, “The Rachel Maddow Show” returned with its host's standard strong coffee blend of history, sermonizing and pep talk.

Maddow opened with a tale of former Vice President Andrew Johnson’s extreme inebriation on the day Abraham Lincoln was sworn in for a second term, and listed the commonalities between Johnson and Trump. Both were impeached, and both refused to attend their successors’ swearing-in. Trump did not kiss the Bible, a la drunk Andrew Johnson in 1865, but neither did he put his hand on the Bible as he was sworn in.

“We get one of these guys every 160 years or so, whether we need it or not,” she said, “except now . . . we've had this one twice. And why do we deserve that?”

Maddow has resurrected her old fire except, perhaps, with more awareness her show might be one of the few remaining cable news places where a liberal pundit and her interview subjects (NBC News justice department reporter Ryan Reilly and Yale historian Timothy Snyder joined her on Monday) can lay out the stakes without mincing words.

“Trump's transition into his second term in office has not been covered in the media broadly as a debacle, but I think objectively speaking, it has been a debacle,” Maddow said. “I mean, just describing what has happened in this transition, it's like no other transition we have seen other than the other bad Trump transitions in modern times. It's been error and humiliation upon error and humiliation.”

In Monday’s 25-minute intro, Maddow briskly ran through the parade of nepotism, cash-grabbing, grifting, and down payments on favors from foreign leaders happening in plain sight.

In the main, she focused on the crass displays of fealty from billionaires followed by Trump’s blanket pardoning of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, commuting the sentences of those convicted of sedition, including the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

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Maddow referred to Musk's “Roman salute” thusly – which is both accurate and gets around any gripes about the world’s richest man being compared to a certain guy who led a beer hall putsch just over a century ago. “The Roman salute is a thing,” she intoned, in case viewers weren’t picking up what she was putting down.

On night 2, Maddow was energized as she recalled the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, OH., drilling down on a fake charity called The Ohio Clean Water fund. That was her gateway into calling attention to Ohio congressman Michael Rulli (R-OH) hiring Mike Peppel, one of the scam charity's co-founders, as his communications director.  

“What is Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio thinking?” Maddow asked incredulously. “I mean, it’s possible he’s not thinking anything about this at all, I don’t know how he thinks.” Then she mentioned the other headline Rulli is best known for in his district: firing his gun at a teenager who he claimed was bow hunting on his property.

Since forgetting recent history appears to be the American condition, here’s a reminder that “The Rachel Maddow Show” earned MSNBC its highest ratings during the first Trump administration, thanks to its host’s knack for deftly placing each day’s lunacy into historical context.

Maddow’s main purpose was to praise Ohio’s local news extensive coverage of Rulli and Peppel's wrongdoing as an example of journalism’s ability to expose politicians’ shamelessness, expressing the hope these men will be pushed to the point of acknowledging their shame again.

As is true in Ohio, so it might be on Capitol Hill, Maddow proposes, where reporters pressed senators on their view of Trump’s pardoning violent insurrectionists and received no real or morally defensible answers.

“What they are effectively going along with here by not raising objections . . . is something that they cannot justify,” Maddow concluded following a litany of footage featuring senators refusing to dissent with Trump’s blanket pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters. She presumes, possibly incorrectly, that these senators felt “stomach-churning self-loathing” at going along with Trump’s decree.

“That feeling of being unable to say anything rational or true that justifies Trump throwing open the prison doors for 211 actively incarcerated people, many of whom were there for violently assaulting police officers . . . that sickening feeling, maybe that – maybe that is what will save the country,” she said Tuesday, adding, “or at least, slow its descent.”

Since forgetting recent history appears to be the American condition, here’s a reminder that “The Rachel Maddow Show” earned MSNBC its highest ratings during the first Trump administration, thanks to its host’s knack for deftly placing each day’s lunacy into historical context.

After Biden took office, Maddow reduced her regular on-air presence to once a week and led live coverage of political events. As of Monday, she’s back to her old weeknight slot, with her colleague Alex Wagner ceding her Tuesday through Friday berth through April 30.

Theoretically.

Who knows what TV news will look like in 100 days? From Nielsen’s year-end numbers for 2024. Fox News’ competitors have much to worry about. It has drawn 72% of the primetime cable news audience since the election, while MSNBC was down 57% since Trump was re-elected, with CNN down 49%.

But the TV news industry — aside from Fox, which has regained most favored nation status with Trump by offering nonstop worshipful coverage while trumpeting disinformation — has a lot more to worry about than plummeting ratings.

As MSNBC noted to Deadline, its viewership also took a nosedive after the 2016 election, only to enjoy four of its most-watched years in its history. Maddow led that charge.

This time, however, MSNBC’s and CNN’s anchors and journalists find themselves in a much direr news environment. On Wednesday, Darcy reported that layoffs were expected to hit CNN and NBC News on Thursday. ABC News staffers are also expecting cuts. Reportedly Maddow herself was not immune to her network's austerity measures; according to a November report by The Ankler, she took a $5 million pay cut in her recently renegotiated five-year contract.

Six days before Trump was inaugurated, MSNBC president Rashida Jones stepped down, and senior vice president for content strategy Rebecca Kutler stepped into her duties in the interim.

CNN’s reporters, though, were directly muzzled by network chief Mark Thompson, who insiders told Darcy called a meeting on Sunday and advised the staff to refrain from pre-judging Trump and “cautioned against expressing any outrage of their own,” Darcy wrote.

As a further reminder, before he was elected, Trump threatened to direct the Federal Communications Commission to revoke NBC’s and ABC’s broadcast licenses. ABC’s parent company Disney settled a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the broadcast network’s news division that experts agree it could have easily won. Furthermore, the company made a $15 million donation to his future presidential museum.

That may inform NBC's decision to describe Elon Musk's gesture on its website's video as "forcefully [touching] his heart, before raising his hand and saluting supporters" even though everyone who saw it understood it to mean something, ahem, we couldn't not see.

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Maddow didn’t mention any of that prologue on Monday because there was more than enough to cover by the time her show started. Likening Trump’s actions to authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Chile and Peru, Maddow explains that while this is novel in American history, it is also knowable in world history.

As Americans, she said, we’ve dealt with corruption and political violence before, citing the Civil War.

“But before each of those things has been treated as a calamity and a scandal. This time it’s a platform,” Maddow said. “This is textbook authoritarian takeover 101 tactics, which means today and literally over the next few days, they're going to see what they can get away with, and how much they can cow people into not opposing what they're doing and not speaking out about what's wrong with it.”

“More than ever,” she continued, “this is not a time to pretend this isn’t happening. You’re going to want to have a good answer when you get asked what you did for your country when your country started to take a turn this radical."

This is where one might say it’s good to have Maddow back on weeknights to make sense of this 100-day plunge, except none of us want to be here – not even Maddow, probably.

But, “we are here. It's happening in our lifetimes. Well, we are citizens responsible for the fate of our country,” she said Monday, concluding her monologue with, “All hands on deck.”

Left unsaid was, "And good luck to us all."

"The Rachel Maddow Show" airs weeknights at 9 p.m. ET on MSNBC.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story reported that the teen was trespassing and has been corrected to reflect that was Rulli's claim, not what documents show.

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The rise of the hag: Hollywood’s fear of older women has gotten worse with age

Every awards season has its narrative. And this year’s is forming around a handful of actresses, all in their late fifties or older, giving bravura performances in films that deal with the thorny complexities of aging, acceptance, and desire. "Babygirl," starring Nicole Kidman, spins an erotic fantasy out of the power exchange between a female executive and her much younger lover. Pamela Anderson’s rejection of beauty standards — and the subsequent reinvention of her public image — dominate coverage of "The Last Showgirl." And Demi Moore became an Oscars frontrunner when she told women to “put down the yardstick” in her Golden Globes acceptance speech for "The Substance." 

The back half of 2024 did see a rise in artistic interest in the inner and/or sex lives of middle-aged (and older) women — The New York Times ran a trend piece about it, leading its discussion of horny fiftysomethings in pop culture by evoking the image of Kidman mid-orgasm. But the admiring, even celebratory, tone of these paeans to hot actresses remaining hot well past Hollywood’s traditional expiration date masks the shadow side of this phenomenon: The wizened, terrifying hag. 

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“Hagsploitation” movies, also known as “psycho-biddy” horror pictures, go back to the 1960s, when the success of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" launched a wave of exploitation films hinging on older actresses losing their minds in all sorts of campy ways. Today’s hags serve a different purpose, shaming older women — “this is what you really look like,” they hiss — back into suppressing their sexuality. As the swinging nurses and freewheeling hippie chicks of the ‘60s and ‘70s had their dark counterparts in the rape-revenge subgenre, so are the middle-aged awakenings of today being met with parallel depictions of hags.

What is a hag? A hag is an older woman who is not “well-preserved,” whose breasts sag and whose skin hangs loose and crepey over deteriorating muscles. She wears no makeup, makes no attempts to hide her wrinkles, and the sight of her is assumed to be so repellant that her naked body is both jump scare and punchline. Her value to patriarchal society, as a sex object or as a mother, has long since passed. She does not perform femininity on any level, and yet she continues to stubbornly exist. 

"Hagsploitation” movies, also known as “psycho-biddy” horror pictures, go back to the 1960s, when the success of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" launched a wave of exploitation films hinging on older actresses losing their minds in all sorts of campy ways.

"The Substance" is notable for holding competing impulses — both the enforcement of, and liberation from, beauty standards — within the same film. Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) resents the male executives who have declared her irrelevant, but she is so entrenched in beauty culture that she doesn’t know any other way to exist. So she makes one last desperate bet in an attempt to maintain her power. It’s a losing one, of course. They always are. 

But while the film ultimately lands on the side of rejecting these pressures, it indulges in the same impulses it’s critiquing along the way. Director Coralie Fargeat films both Moore and her “younger, more beautiful, perfect self” Sue (Margaret Qualley) in extended nude scenes, and her camera divides Qualley into parts with the precision of a butcher. Fargeat’s gaze is subjective, and we’re meant to understand that Elisabeth’s self-hatred and inner conflict are being projected outwards in the film’s more grotesque scenes. 

This is particularly true when Elisabeth starts mutating in response to her/Sue’s “misuse” of the titular substance. And what form do these mutations take? Thinning hair, blotchy skin, the swollen and deformed joints that come from severe arthritis. A hag. Here’s where the theme begins to fall apart: Respect yourself, or you might get a rotten witch finger, the film seems to be cautioning — a message that still posits a hag’s body as something to be feared. 

Womanhood is also split into multiple aspects, all of them sinister, in the "X" trilogy, which began in 2022 with "X" and concluded in 2024 with "MaXXXine." There’s also a doubling aspect to the female leads in "X" — here, Mia Goth plays both wannabe porn star Maxine and elderly farmer's wife Pearl, the latter through layers of prosthetic makeup. Pearl also resents her younger counterpart for the attention she gets from men, and — without revealing too much — takes that resentment to extremes. 

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But there are no layers to "X"’s commentary. We are meant to be straightforwardly disgusted by the scene where Pearl attempts to have sex with her husband, to the extent that it’s shot like any other kill scene in the movie. Her sexuality and her madness are intertwined, and both make her monstrous. Do we feel sorry for her? Maybe. Do we identify with her, or want to be like her? Definitely not. 

The body of an elderly woman is also used for shock value in "The Front Room," the most exploitative film covered here, in which a pregnant college professor (Brandy) who specializes in “the goddess” has her life overtaken by her husband’s hyper-religious stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter). The encroaching threat of step-grandma’s bigoted “traditional values” is fair enough. But the real horror here is incontinence — Solange s**ts the bed and wets herself quite often, a real sophomoric touch from director Sam Eggers (yep, Robert’s brother). 

The first time we see Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), the elder of two women at the center of the Danish film "The Girl with the Needle," she’s naked, too. But this sinister anti-mother — again, without revealing too much — has diabolical intentions, which she hides in the angelic guise of an underground adoption agency. And while she is a villain, she believes that she’s doing the right thing. She’s a bridge between more straightforward hags and the reverent version of the archetype that shows up in "April," a Georgian film that recently screened at Sundance and hits theaters April 25.

"April" opens with the image most of these films build to: A naked old woman with sagging breasts, trunk-like legs, and a bald head, portrayed by an actor in a full-body prosthetic suit. She wanders a black void in knee-high water, evoking the darkness and wetness of the womb. The camera lingers on the hag long enough that the shock value dissipates. Look a little longer, and you’ll notice one unnerving detail: She has skin-like membranes over her eyes. She’s a startling supernatural detail in an otherwise intimate, realistic film, and she is explicitly tied to the main character, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili). 

Nina is an OB-GYN with a stellar reputation at the hospital where she works — and a sketchier one outside of it, where it’s an open secret that Nina performs abortions on the side. Her job is threatened because of it, but Nina is devoted to her work, and is willing to absorb the hatred and violence — physical, sexual and institutional — of her community in order to protect its women. “No one will thank you, and no one will defend you,” a colleague (who’s also her ex) tells her. “I know,” she replies. 

Nina is an outcast who lives on the margins of society because she is providing an essential service, one that no one wants to acknowledge and no one else will do. This ties her to the witches of centuries past, who also served as scapegoats for their villages’ sins. As the camera roams the countryside, godlike and unnoticed, we hear the hag’s breath rattling on the soundtrack. Hag, witch, abortionist, healer, martyr— she embodies them all. 

By making Nina a principled, devoted servant of the most helpless women in society, one who helps free them from the bondage of motherhood — in another scene, Nina prescribes birth control pills to a teenage bride in secret — "April" reinvents the hag as a figure of liberation. She is a woman who exists outside of, and indeed in opposition to, the world of men. As a result, she is extremely dangerous, and extremely powerful. Maybe even something to aspire to. 

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Netflix is raising prices after surge in subscribers

Netflix says it's hiking prices following a surge in subscribers late last year. 

The streaming service's standard monthly membership without advertisements will rise from $15.49 to $17.99. A standard account with ads will increase by $1 to $7.99. The premium tier will increase by $2 to $24.99.

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Netflix announced the price increases on Tuesday. It said 19 million new subscribers signed up in the last quarter of 2024, its largest jump ever. Netflix now streams to 302 million people around the world. It previously raised prices on its standard plan in 2022.

Netflix credited the surge in subscribers to its live sporting events, such as a Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match in November that drew 108 million viewers and was the most-streamed sporting event ever. Netflix also hosted two NFL games on Christmas Day, averaging 30 million viewers. 

Season Two of "Squid Game" boosted subscriptions, as did WWE "Raw" broadcasts on Mondays, Netflix said. 

Other streaming services, including Disney, Max, Peacock and Apple, have increased monthly fees in recent years.

Netflix said its revenue increased 16% last quarter, bringing it to over $10 billion for the first time in its history.

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Sean “Diddy” Combs sues grand jury witness for $50 million in defamation lawsuit

Sean "Diddy" Combs has filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against a man who claims he has videos of Combs allegedly sexually assaulting celebrities and people who appear to be minors.  

Last year, Courtney Burgess became a figure in the surrounding chatter surrounding Combs' arrest for sex trafficking and racketeering. During media appearances on the cable network, NewsNation, Burgess brought up the matter of the videos of Combs' alleged encounters and, in October, said he testified in front of a grand jury considering additional charges on Combs, The New York Times reported.

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Now, Burgess and Nexstar — NewsNation's parent company — are at the center of Combs' lawsuit filed Wednesday, in which he claims that Burgess' interviews on NewsNation may prevent Combs from receiving a fair trial in his upcoming May court date. Combs is seeking damages from Burgess and Nexstar for amplifying the accusations in multiple interviews.

According to Combs' lawsuit, there are no such videos in Burgess' possession, furthering that Burgess is “fabricating outlandish claims and stirring up baseless speculation” about Combs, claiming the allegations have caused severe harm to his reputation to the pool of jurors in the federal case against him.

“People who heard and believed the defendants’ lies have accused Combs, on social media that is consumed by hundreds of millions of viewers each and every day, of being a debauched ‘monster’ and a pedophile,” the suit states.

Burgess told The Times in a phone interview, “I’m standing by my word.”

“He had a lot of nerve to want to sue somebody when he’s going to rot in jail for all of the things he’s done,” he said of Combs.

This lawsuit is the first that the disgraced music mogul has filed since a litany of sexual assault lawsuits were filed against him. Combs has repeatedly denied all accusations of sexual assault and abuse. He has pleaded not guilty in the federal sex trafficking case against him.

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Republicans on North Carolina’s Supreme Court signal support for election denial

The North Carolina Supreme Court dismissed an appellate court judge's legal effort to overturn his electoral defeat on Wednesday, allowing the election protests to proceed in the trial court. 

Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, the court said, improperly bypassed state law holding that election result challenges must begin in the Wake County Superior Court. The state Supreme Court, however, allowed the temporary pause on election certification to stand. 

The court's five Republicans concurred in full, while the bench's lone Democrat partially dissented. Three GOP justices also signaled an embrace of Griffin's argument that the North Carolina Board of Elections erroneously and unlawfully counted tens of thousands of invalid votes.

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Riggs asks North Carolina Supreme Court to reject "unlawful" GOP bid to throw out thousands of votes

Griffin trails incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, in the state's Supreme Court race by just 734 votes. In his election petition, he asked the North Carolina Supreme Court to force the state Board of Elections to throw out more than 60,000 votes cast by voters he says are ineligible because they either did not provide driver's license or social security numbers on their voter registration applications, failed to include photo IDs with their absentee ballots or never physically resided in North Carolina. Tossing those votes would deliver him a victory.

The North Carolina Board of Elections denied Griffin's election protests on the same grounds in mid-December, prompting his suit. Riggs, who has removed herself from the case and since intervened as a defendant, argues that Griffin's ask threatens to disenfranchise thousands of eligible North Carolina voters after the election has occurred. 

Riggs said in a statement Thursday that, while she agreed with the court's decision, she is "disappointed" that it has opened the door to prolong the matter. 

"Voters elected me to continue serving on the North Carolina Supreme Court 79 days ago, and my election is the last uncertified race in the country," she said. "I will continue to make sure that the more than 65,000 voters who Griffin seeks to disenfranchise have their voices heard. No matter how long it takes, I will not stop doing what is right."

In its Wednesday order, the court suggested it is broadly in agreement with Griffin's arguments, citing previous legal precedent that held that allowing unlawful votes to be counted alongside lawful ballots "effectively 'disenfranchises'" voters who cast legal ballots.

Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, defended Griffin's election protests in a concurring opinion. He rejected critics' claims that the appellate judge's request was anti-democratic.

"It is understandable that petitioner and many North Carolina voters are questioning how this could happen," Newby wrote, describing it as "highly unusual" that Griffin's 10,000 vote lead on election night was transformed into a 734 vote deficit by the end of the week. "Petitioner has a legal right to inquire into this outcome through the statutorily enacted procedures available to him."

Winning an election by such a thin margin in North Carolina is not unprecedented, even in state Supreme Court races. Newby himself was declared the victor of North Carolina's 2020 Supreme Court race by just 401 votes cast out of nearly 5.4 million, following two recounts — one machine and one hand-to-eye — according to the state Board of Elections. His opponent, then-Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, conceded the election as the second recount neared completion, and the Election Board certified the result in mid-December of that year.

Two other Republican justices, Phil Berger Jr. and Tamara Barringer, joined Newby in his concurrence Wednesday and submitted concurring opinions themselves. Barringer argued that the court should suspend the ordinary procedure of passing election protests through lower courts and instead proceed to a decision on the merits.

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In her partial dissent, Justice Anita Earls noted her disagreement with the state's decision to maintain the temporary pause on election certification. Griffin, she said, did not satisfy the requirement that he "show likelihood of success on the merits of his case" to warrant granting the injunction. She further rebuked what she called the court's "signal" of its "preferred outcome."

"I do not join in that signal," she said. "We cannot overturn the results of an election on potentials."

Republican Justice Richard Dietz also submitted a concurring opinion, holding that Griffin's petition should be barred because it seeks to discard ballots from people who lawfully voted under the rules in place at the time of the election, which would violate election law principle described in a 1983 federal case. 

"I acknowledge that this Court has never recognized the version of the Purcell principle described in [Hendon v. North Carolina State Board of Elections] and, until we do, our state courts are not bound to follow it," he said. "But I believe now is the time."

Dietz dissented in the court's decision earlier this month to block election certification on the same grounds.

Griffin filed election protests in the Wake County Superior with the same claims shortly after filing suit in the state Supreme Court last month. That court can now proceed in considering his claims. Wednesday's order has also made Riggs' request for oral argument in the case moot.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is also considering the case following an appeal from Riggs. It will hear oral argument on Jan. 27. 

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FDA bans Red No. 3, but experts warn of ongoing gaps in food safety regulations

The Food and Drug Administration announced last week that it will revoke authorization for FD&C Red No. 3 in food and ingested drugs under the Delaney Clause of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Red No. 3, a synthetic food dye, gives products like candies, frosting and frozen desserts their bright, cherry-red color.

The decision follows a 2022 petition and studies showing cancer in male rats exposed to high levels of the dye. While the cancer-causing mechanism is specific to rats and does not occur in humans, the Delaney Clause prohibits the FDA from approving additives shown to cause cancer in humans or animals, regardless of exposure levels.

“The Delaney Clause, enacted in 1960 as part of the Color Additives Amendment to the FD&C Act, prohibits FDA authorization of a food additive or color additive if it has been found to induce cancer in humans or animals,” the agency wrote in a Jan. 15 statement. “This is not the first time the agency has revoked an authorization based on the Delaney Clause.”

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After much back-and-forth, the FDA officially bans usage of Red Dye No. 3 in food and drugs

In 2018, for instance, the FDA withdrew authorization for certain synthetic flavors—including benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, and eugenyl methyl ether—used to mimic flavors like mint, cinnamon and citrus in processed foods.

Food and drug manufacturers who use Red No. 3 in their products will have until January 15, 2027, or January 18, 2028, respectively, to reformulate their products.

Public health advocates see the announcement as a win after years of pushing for stricter oversight of synthetic dyes due to their links to hyperactivity in children and potential carcinogenic properties. The FDA, for example, banned Red No. 3 in cosmetics in 1990, stating that “high doses of the color additive can cause cancer in laboratory animals.” However, some experts argue that the FDA’s delayed action on Red No. 3 highlights larger systemic issues. The agency itself acknowledges that “FD&C Red No. 3 is not as widely used in food and drugs when compared to other certified colors.”

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With many other synthetic dyes still in regular use, the ban raises questions about broader regulatory gaps.

According to the Center for Science for the Public Interest (CSPI), last week’s ban is a step in the right direction, but “the FDA and Congress have a long way to go to reform the broken food chemical regulatory system.” The organization asserts that the FDA has failed to effectively monitor the safety of chemicals after they come to market, leading the agency to announce plans for developing an enhanced framework for post-market food chemical safety assessments in 2024. However, that doesn’t address immediate concerns about synthetic dyes and additives currently on American grocery store shelves.

“All Americans deserve foods free from harmful food additives,” said CSPI’s Principal Scientist for Additives and Supplements, Thomas Galligan. “Removing Red 3 and other unsafe, unnecessary food chemicals from our food supply is a critical step for protecting consumers. We hope to see FDA and Congress act soon to reform the broken federal regulatory systems that have allowed unsafe chemicals to enter and stay in our food supply for so long.”

Several synthetic food dyes remain in use today, each with its own applications and controversies. Yellow 5 (Tartrazine), a lemon-yellow azo dye, is among the most widely used and recognized food colorants. Approved in the U.S., EU, Canada, and beyond, it’s found in dairy products, beverages, desserts candies and more. However, it’s also one of the synthetic dyes most often linked to adverse reactions.

"We hope to see FDA and Congress act soon to reform the broken federal regulatory systems that have allowed unsafe chemicals to enter and stay in our food supply for so long."

Yellow 6 — used in brightly colored treats like AirHeads, Jolly Ranchers and Skittles, as well as snacks like Cheetos and Doritos — adds a vivid orange-yellow hue to products. Similarly, Blue 1 (Brilliant Blue) and Blue 2 (Indigo Carmine) are synthetic dyes that give a greenish-blue and royal blue tint, respectively, to candy, ice cream, beverages and baked goods. Green 3 (Fast Green FCF) is another synthetic dye used in food, drugs and cosmetics, lending a blue-green shade to various products.

Meanwhile, Red 40, one of the most controversial dyes, has recently faced increasing scrutiny. Children are most commonly exposed to Red 40 through cereals, juices, sodas and ice cream.

One major concern among food safety and public health experts is that the FDA relies on outdated studies—some over 70 years old—to establish acceptable daily limits for synthetic dyes. Newer research presents evidence that might prompt reconsideration of those limits. For instance, in 2021, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) published a report revealing that the seven most widely used food dyes — Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 — can contribute to or exacerbate neurobehavioral problems in some children.

The report highlights evidence linking synthetic dyes to hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity, particularly in children with ADHD. Diagnoses of ADHD in U.S. children have risen from 6.1% to 10.2% over the past two decades, and while genetic factors play a role, environmental exposures, including food dyes, may increase susceptibility.

Human "challenge studies" showed that synthetic dyes can trigger neurobehavioral effects in sensitive children. These studies typically involve removing dyes from a child’s diet to establish a baseline, followed by reintroducing controlled doses of dyes to measure behavioral changes. Animal research has also found that dyes like Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 affect brain activity, memory, learning and behavior — even at doses below current regulatory thresholds.

Notably, children are exposed to higher levels of synthetic dyes than adults, primarily through brightly colored foods like cereals, juices and candies.

That’s one of the reasons that, in September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that will prohibit schools from serving foods containing six artificial food dyes, including Red 40.

“Toxic dyes in food that put kids at higher risk for hyperactivity and other neurobehavioral issues that interfere with learning have no place in our schools,” Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, said at the time. “We’ve known for years that synthetic food dyes endanger our health, but the FDA has failed to take action to protect the public.”

Ronholm continued, “California’s landmark new law will help ensure that kids are not exposed to harmful dyes in food at schools that can endanger their health.”

That ban will go into effect on Dec. 31, 2027. Other states, including New York, Maryland, Illinois and South Dakota, have considered bans on Red 40, but none have passed legislation yet.

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Oscar nom snubs and surprises: Despite some exciting nods, this tight race looks even more uncertain

In the weeks leading up to the Oscar nominations, the race typically begins to narrow and a clearer picture of the films that will be selected for each category by Academy voters presents itself. But this year, the race only became hazier and more bizarre as time went on. Movies like “Anora,” “Maria” and “The Brutalist” — which looked like sure things for slots in the big five categories only a few months ago — became less certain as late-breaking wildcard contenders like “Wicked” and “Conclave” picked up steam among general audiences, and in turn, Oscar voters. 

Despite the Oscars being more global and diverse than ever, it seems like Academy voters have yet to shed their pretenses when considering truly noteworthy work that doesn’t fall neatly into a box.

Then, there was the question of “Emilia Pérez.” Despite dividing critics and audiences with its controversial depiction of a trans cartel leader who uses gender-affirming surgery transition as a redemptive arc, the film scored big at this month’s Golden Globes. Though the Globes represent a body of solely international voters, it was impossible to ignore the whopping 10 nominations they bestowed upon the film. That was echoed this morning by the Academy, which honored “Emilia Pérez” with an even more astonishing 13 nods, including a history-making nomination for star Karla Sofìa Gasćon, who became the first openly trans actor to be nominated for an Oscar. 

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“Emilia Pérez” also took home Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy at the Jan. 5 Globes ceremony quickly, which spotlighted the film as Netflix’s top contender at the Oscars, shuffling “Maria” to the bottom of the deck. “The Brutalist” took home the parallel award at the Globes, collecting gold for Best Motion Picture, Drama, and Best Director. But the sprawling epic made with a shoestring budget failed to make a splash among Screen Actors Guild voters, ultimately being shut out of the SAG Awards’ top category by “Wicked.” And, of course, there’s “The Substance,” the little movie that could. The body horror hagsploitation film was a surprise hit at the box office and has been stunning awards voters too, rubbing up alongside “The Last Showgirl” as a showcase of long-overlooked dramatic talent. 

With the dash to Oscar Sunday heating up to a sprint, watching Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott announce the nominations certainly warmed up a chilly winter morning. But which of these films managed to pull ahead in the race and which were left out in the cold with a snub? Read on to check out the biggest surprises and the most jaw-dropping snubs of the 2025 Oscar nominations.

SURPRISE: Demi Moore has “The Substance”

With more than four decades of film work under her belt, Demi Moore finally scored her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her thrilling work in “The Substance.” Moore went full-tilt ferocious in French director Coralie Fargeat’s latest film as aging Tinseltown star Elisabeth Sparkle, who takes a mysterious anti-aging drug that promises her beauty and success. The twist? A younger, more perfect version of herself emerges from her back for seven days, and has complete control of Elisabeth’s life despite both women technically being the same person. Moore is astounding in the film; hilarious, audacious and all too real in the ways she layers her character with firsthand experience in a discriminatory industry. It’s not just a well-deserved nod, but a new chapter for Moore.

SNUB: Marianne-Jean Baptiste shut out of a nail-biting category

The Best Actress in a Leading Role category has been shifting nonstop in the weeks leading up to Oscar nomination morning, and there were three deserving actresses all in contention for the unsettled, eleventh-hour spot: Pamela Anderson, Fernanda Torres and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Unfortunately, it was Jean-Baptiste, who wowed critics with her searing, unforgettable turn in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” who was ultimately excluded. Jean-Baptiste turned in a remarkable performance as Pansy, a beleaguered mother and wife who boils with rage and confusion that she can’t quite understand. While Jean-Baptiste’s stunning show was nominated for a BAFTA, it would’ve been nice to see her up for gold stateside as well.

SURPRISE: “Nickel Boys” and “I’m Still Here” break through for Best Picture

The Best Picture race has been tight over the last few months, and with “Nickel Boys” and “I’m Still Here” largely missing from the big categories among industry voting bodies, it was a delightful shock to see them make it into Oscar competition. While both films have their technical strengths, they’re best considered as entire works, stirring in the ways that they play with image and memory to stay with the viewer long after the credits have rolled. While “I’m Still Here” was a shoo-in for a Best International Feature nomination, making it into the main category is a significant win for Brazil, which has only had two other films nominated in this group in Oscars history.

SNUB: The “Challengers” score failed to electrify Oscar voters

Despite pulling in for a big win at the Golden Globes earlier this month, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsating electronic score for Luca Guadagnino’s sex-and-sweat-filled tennis drama “Challengers” missed out on a nomination for Achievement in Music, Original Score. (Not to mention it failed to pick up a nod for its kinetic editing as well.) While other nominated films like “The Brutalist” and “Conclave” had decently memorable arrangements, there’s no denying that Reznor and Ross’ thumping beats were some of the most thrilling original compositions at the movies last year. One look at social media and you’ll find just about everyone echoing that sentiment. Perhaps a little throbbing techno was too unconventional for the more buttoned-up Academy members?

SURPRISE: Sebastian Stan lands a nom for playing Trump, three days after the inauguration

Sebastian Stan has had a landmark awards season so far, drawing attention for both “A Different Man” and “The Apprentice,” and winning a Golden Globe for the former. But it was Stan’s work in “The Apprentice,” a biopic about the early years of Donald Trump’s career that telegraphed his eventual rise to power in politics, that connected with Academy voters. Late last year, Stan spoke openly about how he was offered a spot for the "Actors on Actors” conversations conducted by “The Hollywood Reporter,” which never ultimately happened due to other performers being too cautious to talk about Trump. If Stan can pull off a win in this category, amid the second Trump regime — sorry, administration — look out for an acceptance speech that will have the world (and the president) talking.

SNUB: It really was the last show, girl

Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” was already doing better in this year’s awards race than most people initially thought it would. The film picked up steam among viewers who finally got to see it after dragging its feet to a wide opening, going on to pull multiple acting noms at The Golden Globes. Perhaps it was the lack of long-term audience buzz that hindered the movie’s chances at the Oscars, because it was shut out from the nominations entirely. Given that Jamie Lee Curtis was a one-time Oscar winner already and that she was nominated for a BAFTA for “The Last Showgirl,” some pundits thought that Curtis might edge out the film’s lead, Pamela Anderson, for a supporting nom. As it turns out, it wasn’t in the cards for either actress, which is a tough blow for Anderson considering the momentum behind her stirring onscreen comeback. But on the bright side, Anderson’s success has revitalized her dramatic career and put her into a new echelon that both audiences and Anderson herself thought she might never get to. Mark my words: This isn’t the last we’ve seen of this showgirl.

SURPRISE: Fernanda Torres is, indeed, still here

The aforementioned contentious Best Actress race might have brought a major snub for Marianne Jean-Baptiste, but it also gave us a huge surprise in Fernanda Torres, nominated for her extraordinary performance in “I’m Still Here.” As Eunice Paiva, the wife of a real-life disappeared Brazilian political prisoner, Torres turned in one of the most revelatory performances of any film last year. Watching her work, it’s no shock that she managed to pull ahead of other one-time contenders like Nicole Kidman and even Pamela Anderson. Torres is notably stoic in the face of sudden loss, and holds her family — and the film — together with a beautiful, maternal love. In that respect, Torres’ nomination is a bit poetic, too. The only other Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Oscar is Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who was nominated in 1999 for “Central Station.” The extra kismet cherry on top? Both Torres and Montenegro play Eunice Paiva at different stages of her life in the “I’m Still Here.”

SNUB: The most towering achievement in directing is nowhere to be seen

While Brady Corbet is on the fast track to Oscar gold with the buzz around “The Brutalist” surging, the film that critics famously touted as “monumental” pales in comparison to RaMell Ross’ phenomenal direction in “Nickel Boys.” Corbet’s work is certainly admirable, but much of it is flash with very little substance at the heart of the film itself. Ross, however, took an unconventional approach for “Nickel Boys,” shooting the film with a first-person vantage point, meaning that viewers could see the film through a character’s eyes. Other directors might’ve relied on this technique as a gimmick, but Ross used it as a way to stare into a viewer’s soul, directly communicating the vitality being snuffed out of his characters as they toiled at a segregated reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Ross’ work is unparalleled, especially when compared to James Mangold’s efforts in “A Complete Unknown,” which were nominated instead. Mangold’s film is a straightforward, unremarkable biopic; Ross’ is an incomparable masterwork. Despite the Oscars being more global and diverse than ever, it seems like Academy voters have yet to shed their pretenses when considering truly noteworthy work that doesn’t fall neatly into a box.

Check out the full list of 2025 Oscar nominees. 

The 97th Oscars ceremony will air Sunday, March 2 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT

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“Excluding Indians”: Trump admin questions Native Americans’ birthright citizenship in court

In the Trump administration’s arguments defending his order to suspend birthright citizenship, the Justice Department called into question the citizenship of Native Americans born in the United States under the 14th Amendment, citing 19th-century law that excluded Native Americans from birthright citizenship.

In a case on Trump's birthright citizenship executive order coming out of Washington, Justice Department attorneys quote the 14th Amendment, which reads that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and hang their one of their arguments on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

“Under the plain terms of the Clause, birth in the United States does not by itself entitle a person to citizenship. The person must also be ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States,” the filing reads.

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The Justice Department then goes on to cite the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which predates the 14th Amendment by two years. The Justice Department attorneys specifically cite a section of the act that notes that  “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”

The Trump administration then goes on to argue that the 14th Amendment’s language — the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — is best understood “to exclude the same individuals who were excluded by the Act —i.e., those who are ‘subject to any foreign power’ and ‘Indians not taxed.’” 

The Justice Department attorneys return to the topic of whether or not Native Americans should be entitled to birthright citizenship later in their arguments, citing a Supreme Court case, Elk v. Wilkins, in which the court decided that “because members of Indian tribes owe ‘immediate allegiance’ to their tribes, they are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are not constitutionally entitled to Citizenship.”

“The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes. If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is,” the Trump administration argued.

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