2+ week, 4+ day ago (125+ words) New York State Sex Offender Registry/AP House Democrats on Wednesday released a set of emails in which Jeffrey Epstein called President Trump "the dog that hasn't barked" and alleged that Trump had once spent "hours at my house" with a sex trafficking victim. "[Trump] has never once been mentioned," Epstein wrote in a 2011 email. In another 2019 email, Epstein wrote to the writer Michael Wolff, of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislane [Maxwell] to stop." The shocking correspondences, part of 23,000 additional documents in the Epstein case, further tied Trump to Epstein despite the president's repeated and vehement insistence that he did not know about his longtime friend's sex trafficking. Kiera Butler and Julianne McShane...

1+ week, 2+ day ago (229+ words) Despite the anti-vaccine proclivities of the US Department of Health and Human Services under its secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency's public-facing sites about vaccines had remained largely unchanged, reflecting scientific consensus. That is, until Wednesday. In an emailed response to a request for comment from Mother Jones, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon repeated those statements and added, "We are updating the CDC's website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science." The chair of this committee is Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is also a physician and cast the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his post. On social media, critics of the new change have pointed out that Cassidy appeared to require the old language to stay on the site as a condition of his vote to confirm: "We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago (510+ words) Megyn Kelly mused on Wednesday about whether "pedophile" was really the right word for a man who "liked 15-year-old girls."Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for. But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows "somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything," and "this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile." "Or anything else," added Ungar-Sargon. In fact, we don't know. The comments read as something of a shift for Kelly. Back in 2023, she lashed out against Republicans who were defending British comedian and right-wing darling Russell Brand against rape allegations from three adult women and one minor. (Brand was charged…...

4+ day, 2+ hour ago (130+ words) Lily Meyer4 minutes ago What makes a good children's book, and how much does it matter if a children's book is good? "Kids are weird! They're joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross." AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct. Only instinct and imagination can tell you what Sandra Boynton means when she writes in "Dinosaur Dance!that "Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH." A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite. Jackie Flynn Mogensen and Henry Carnell...

1+ week, 1+ day ago (165+ words) Sage Smiley (left), news director at KYUK, and Morris Alexie visit Nunapitchuk village in Alaska. Alexie manages relocations caused by climate change.Katie Basile When a typhoon hit Alaska, public radio station KYUK was on the air, broadcasting critical information about conditions, evacuations, and search and rescue operations. An estimated 1,600 people were displaced, and many were saved in the biggest airlift operation in state history. "The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives," said Sage Smiley, KYUK's news director." KYUK covers an area the size of the state of Oregon, but after Congress passed the Rescissions Act over the summer, it lost 70 percent of its operating budget. Republicans have targeted public media since its inception in the late 1960s. But this is the first time they have successfully ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago (223+ words) Rachel de Leon/Mother Jones "A lot of people are going to feel terrified, petrified, scared of what's going to happen next," Presby said in a viral clip of the podcast. Much to the fear of the disabled and low-income people who rely on it, Congress voted to pass the OBBB in early July, which will lead to around $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the course of the next decade." People like Presby and Fraser, said Kristianna Moralls of the Self-Determination Institute, "are able to use these Medicaid funds for helpers who teach cooking and cleaning, money management, so they can live more independently and be part of their community." Fraser goes surfing to help with his core strength'people with Down syndrome can have low muscle tone'which also helps his mental health. He hires a surfing coach as a very…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago (648+ words) Navy veteran Buzz Grambo in Baltimore, Maryland on the scooter he uses to chase ICE.Justin Gellerson Isabela Dias8 minutes ago Recently, Clifford "Buzz" Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online only reached 16 mph and wasn't cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So, Grambo bought a Segway MAX G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph. "The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was," he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. "They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ha-ha bitches, I got a new scooter!" "I told…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago (241+ words) Another longtime CDC employee who works in communications said, "The best way I can put it is it feels like we're on a hijacked airplane." Several employees noted that there had been no warning about the new page before it was posted'in fact, said the NCIRD staffer, even department leadership had "only learned about it today when somebody saw it the same way everybody else did." "I don't even know who is updating these web pages, or if anyone at CDC has anything to do with any of that," said another staffer who works on immunizations. Department supervisors told employees that "their understanding is that these updates to the website are not coming from CDC. Somebody at the HHS level is going in and changing these pages." HHS did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. On the other…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago (543+ words) Siblings Timothy and Ally Rodriguez, outside the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn on Tuesday, hope Zohran Mamdani will both deliver on his affordability agenda and make Muslim New Yorkers feel more at home.Julianne McShane Timothy Rodriguez'has lived in New York all his life. But the notion of a Muslim mayor never entered the realm of possibility for him. That changed Tuesday when Zohran Mamdani's victory made him New York's first Muslim and South Asian mayor-elect. "It's a big win for New York City, of course, it's a big win for Muslims," Rodriguez, 35, told me after news of Mamdani's win broke on Tuesday night. "I'm happy to see change and that these things are possible." "A lot of Muslims don't feel like they have a place here," Timothy said. He hopes that, like former President Barack Obama, Mamdani can "inspire" other…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago (1129+ words) More Epstein files could, in theory, be coming soon. That's because, at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson will finally swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who has promised to provide the final congressional signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on a'bipartisan bill to release government files [] More Epstein files could, in theory, be coming soon. That's because, at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson will finally swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who has promised to provide the final congressional signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on a bipartisan bill to release government files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. That would include flight logs, names of people and entities with ties to Epstein, sealed settlements, and internal Department of Justice (DOJ) communications related to the case. The…...