News Releases

  • Funding for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Programs

    Last week, the funding for thousands of programs offering mental health and substance use services was halted when the Trump administration suddenly cut $1.9 billion in funding to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Approximately 2,800 grantee organizations were impacted. But the Trump administration quickly reversed course, reinstating the funding just a day later.  For The Guardian, Melody Schreiber writes that these programs are now feeling “whiplash.”  MELODY SCHREIBER; [email protected]     Schreiber is a freelance health and science journalist.  Schreiber told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “When the [letter announcing cuts to SAMHSA] went out, there had been…


  • Israel Literally Bulldozes Relief Agency, Trump Expands “Board of Billionaires and War Criminals”

    Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, just condemned Israel bulldozing the headquarters of the relief group in Jerusalem as Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated: “A new level of open and deliberate defiance of international law, including of the privileges and immunities of the United Nations, by the State of Israel.”


  • Why Was Controversial Hepatitis B Vaccine Trial Halted?

    A controversial U.S.-funded study on hepatitis B vaccination of newborns in Guinea-Bissau has been cancelled. The $1.6 million project, funded under Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., drew outrage over its withholding of vaccines proven to prevent disease from hepatitis B. Guinea-Bissau has a high burden of disease from hepatitis B.


  • Assessing Trump Administration’s New Food Pyramid

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently released a new food pyramid for dietary guidelines  and commissioned a report justifying those guidelines. The report was reviewed by several individuals with financial ties to food companies as well as beef and milk industries’ trade groups, according to The Lever. “The updated guidelines put high-protein diets based on meat and milk atop the food pyramid, despite Americans already overconsuming those protein sources based on previous guidelines.”


  • RFK Jr. Adds Anti-Vaccine Members to CDC Committee

    Following up on his firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) last year and replacing them with new anti-vaccine members, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed two more anti-vaccine committee members this week.


  • Israeli “Ceasefire” Kills 100 Children; Plans to Resume Full Onslaught

    The Times of Israel reports this week: “The IDF has drawn up plans to launch renewed intensive military operations in Gaza in March, with an offensive targeting Gaza City aimed at pushing the Yellow Line ceasefire demarcation west toward the coast of the enclave, further expanding the IDF’s control of the territory, an Israeli official and an Arab diplomat told the Times of Israel.” 


  • Trump’s Threats to Iran: What’s the Record of “Humanitarian Intervention”?

    “President Donald Trump is threatening military intervention against Iran, based on reports that the Iranian government has massacred thousands of innocent demonstrators. However, we should not forget that previous U.S. interventions have also been justified by reports of mass atrocities, which later proved greatly exaggerated or fabricated altogether.”


  • Israel and ICE

    “Silicon Valley firms supplied the software and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump’s policies. Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in 2015, becoming the bread and butter of ICE’s surveillance capacities by mining personal data from thousands of sources for government authorities, converting it into searchable databases, and mapping connections between individuals and organizations. By 2017, conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were becoming essential too, signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens’ and residents’ personal information. … Where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically. …”


  • Attack on Venezuela: Illegal, Based on Lies

    “ After months of propaganda claiming Maduro is the head of the dangerous drug-smuggling cartel, the U.S. government has admitted it was all a ruse in order to kidnap a sitting head of state.”


  • “Dismal” Democratic Leadership Boosts GOP’s Midterm Prospects

    Writing in The Guardian last week, Solomon asserted that the party’s governing body, the Democratic National Committee, “is now replicating the kind of tacit disdain for rank-and-file Democrats that fueled the 2024 catastrophe. … A party unable to publicly examine its own failings is unlikely to climb out of the rut that proved so helpful to Donald Trump in 2024.”


  • FTAA: Crossroads at Miami Summit

    JOSEFINA HERNANDEZ PONCE and PEDRO EUSSE and SEVERINA RIVERA, Hernandez Ponce is a sewing machine operator and president of SITEMEX, the only union in the sweatshop garment industry in Mexico. The union was founded last year after two years of efforts which began when Hernandez Ponce and four other workers refused to eat the factory…

  • Behind the “Special Relationship”

    GREG PALAST Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His investigative reports appear on BBC Television and in the Guardian Newspapers of Britain. He said today: “Blair, like Margaret Thatcher before him, faces revolt within his own party. They believe he lied to get Britain into Bush’s…

  • Mr. Bush Goes to London

    MILAN RAI The British author of Regime Unchanged, a just-released book on the invasion of Iraq, Rai is in the U.S. until November 25. He said today: “President Bush recently said in an interview with the BBC of the war on Iraq: ‘War is my last choice, not my first choice.’ In March 2002, a…

  • * Iraq * Israel * WTO — Interviews Available

    MEDEA BENJAMIN Benjamin, the founding director of the international human rights group Global Exchange, is also co-founder of the Occupation Watch Center in Iraq. Paul Bremer, in Washington mid-week, repeatedly cited the Iraqi Governing Council in his remarks. Benjamin said today: “The Bush administration wants the Iraqi Governing Council to rubber-stamp policies coming from Washington…

  • * Medicare Profiteers * Jobs * Mutual Funds * HealthSouth

    ALAN SAGER DEBORAH SOCOLAR Sager and Socolar are co-directors of the Health Reform Program at Boston University’s School of Public Health. They have recently released a report entitled “New Medicare Rx Benefit Means Big Profits for Drug Makers.” The report finds that “an estimated 61.1 percent of the Medicare dollars that will be spent to…

  • Interviews Available: Families of Military and 9/11 Victims

    JARI SHEESE Sheese owns a small business in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her husband is stationed in Iraq. She said this afternoon: “He had just dropped me a line telling me that he’d be getting around by helicopter and that made me feel better — then a helicopter gets downed killing 16. We find some way to…

  • Interviews Available on Iraq: * Invasion Fatalities * Visitors in the U.S. * More Attacks? * Like Vietnam?

    CARL CONETTA Co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, Conetta wrote the just-released report “The Wages of War: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Fatalities in the 2003 Conflict.” Conetta said today”Reviewing U.S. combat data, battlefield press reports, and Iraqi hospital surveys, we have found that approximately 13,000 Iraqis (plus or minus 16.5 percent or 2,150) were…

  • Interviews Available: Bush vs. Facts

    Analysts are available to scrutinize some of President Bush’s claims, including those from Tuesday’s news conference, focusing on Iraq and the recent attacks there: BUSH: “I would assume that they’re [the suicide bombers] either, or, and probably both Ba’athists and foreign terrorists.” FACT: “There are a growing number of interviews with Iraqi resistance fighters that…

  • Welfare Policy: Interviews Available

    With welfare legislation for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families reauthorization making its way through the House and Senate, interviews with the following are available: LIZ ACCLES Accles is with the Welfare Made a Difference National Campaign, which is organizing with a host of other groups the “Shirts Off Our Backs Day” in Washington, D.C. —…

  • Bush’s Asia Trip: Interviews Available

    MARGO OKAZAWA-REY Director of the Women’s Leadership Institute and a visiting professor at Mills College in California, Okazawa-Rey has authored a number of papers about U.S. bases in East Asia. She said today: “Many activists in South Korea, the Philippines and Okinawa/Japan are opposing their governments that support U.S. policies, largely due to political and…

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