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…

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.” 

“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.”

“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. …”

“ 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.”

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.”