Most Americans are sick of plastic
use, but manufacturers continue to push the product on us. This holiday
season, is it possible to have a plastic-free celebration?
There’s no substitute for systemic policy change to regulate
plastic use, but individual actions on a mass scale can have an impact. They
can also be a dinner table conversation, potentially spurring cultural shifts
and inspiring local activism.
“None of us voted for more plastic,” says
Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond
Plastics. Enck, who served as regional administrator at the Environmental
Protection Agency in 2009, adds that “the reason we have so much plastic is
because there is a glut of fracked
gas on the market.”
Enck says it’s entirely possible to have a plastic-free
holiday season. She suggests forgoing disposable dinnerware for your Christmas,
Hannukah, or Kwanzaa meal. “You can rent glassware and plates and beautiful
reusable tablecloths and napkins from local vendors,” she says.
(RNS) — Timothy Snyder, a historian of the
Holocaust and Eastern European tyranny, has a tip for dealing with
authoritarianism: “Don’t obey in advance.”
So, when the university that granted me my doctorate and
educated four generations of my family was
asked by the Trump administration in July for lists of Jewish faculty
members, I held my breath. Would I be able to continue to be proud of the
University of Pennsylvania, the place I learned so much from?
In the past year, universities have varied widely in their
responses to demands from the Trump administration to fall into line on ridding
their campuses of wokeness and antisemitism. Columbia
University (my undergraduate alma mater) settled with the
administration, paying $21 million in return for restoring its federal research
grants.
It’s hard to see how cutting basic science research will help reduce
antisemitism. It will likely only cause Jews’ presence at a university to be
seen as somehow disruptive. (See the recent
arguments that women ruined the workplace.)
Other universities have variously complied with
administration demands or resisted, but a few, such as Barnard College
of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, acquiesced
and shared personal cellphone numbers of Jewish faculty. (Penn
refused, and is now being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission.) Nara Milanich, a Barnard history professor, said it
reminded her of 1930s Italy, when lists of Jews were put together by the local
government. “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars,” she
said.
It also troubled Milanich that the government appeared to be
“fishing” for reports of antisemitism: According to the Forward,
the University of California, Berkeley said it had provided the names of 160
individuals involved in cases of antisemitism. “Evidently, they don’t
have sufficient people to file lawsuits, so they have to go shake the trees to
find people?” said Milanich.
Lists of Jews are never a good thing. Amanda Shanor, a
professor at the Wharton School and Penn’s law school, told
The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper: “The history of government
demands for lists of Jewish people is one of the most terrifying in world
history. I hope that students, faculty, and staff — Jewish and non-Jewish alike
— will tell their family and friends about the government’s demand for a list
of Penn’s Jews.”
Neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge report that
the human brain moves through five "major epochs" as it rewires
itself from early development to late old age.
Each stage reflects a different
way the brain supports thinking, learning, and behavior as we grow, mature, and
eventually experience age-related decline.
A team from Cambridge's MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences
Unit analyzed MRI diffusion scans from 3,802 individuals ranging from newborns
to 90 years old. These scans track the movement of water through brain tissue,
which helps researchers map the networks that link one region to another.
Their findings, published in Nature Communications,
show that the brain's structure progresses through five broad phases. Four key
"turning points" divide these phases, marking ages when the brain
undergoes meaningful reorganization.
Trump continues baffling attack on FEMA. Is it another distraction?
By Carl David Goette-Luciak
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
A meeting that was supposed to chart the future of America’s disaster-response agency ended on Thursday before it could even begin.
The final report of a committee tasked by Donald Trump with reviewing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was scheduled to be presented and put to a vote Thursday afternoon. But shortly before 1 p.m., when the FEMA Review Council was scheduled to convene in Washington, a draft of the report was leaked to news outlets and the White House abruptly canceled the session.
The shakeup appeared to surprise even some of the review council’s own members, several of whom were still awaiting instructions outside the meeting’s planned location less than an hour before it was supposed to start, The Washington Post reported. Registered attendees only received notice of the meeting’s postponement after the event was scheduled to conclude. That announcement, a two-sentence email from the council’s designated federal officer, Patrick Ryan Powers, did not provide an explanation for the cancellation or a date for a rescheduled meeting.
The draft of the report signaled the review council’s plan to dramatically cut the agency even as climate change-fueled disasters increase, provoking swift condemnation from advocacy groups and emergency management experts. Critics panned the draft as a blueprint for weakening the nation’s primary emergency-response agency and shifting responsibility onto states unequipped and unprepared to manage crises alone.
Events, reports and analysis have converged this week to
underscore Donald Trump’s unique view of how the world should spin.
Beyond the fallout of defending U.S. strikes on suspected
drug boats, increasing threats of an undeclared war on Venezuela, the excesses
of a mass deportation campaign spiraling out of control, unending tariffs, and
flailing attempts to force Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia, we got a
new National
Security Strategy document that lays out Trump’s values as if they are
ours.
Together, they reflect the clear vision of an autocratic,
power-minded Trump who wants to dictate to Americans and the rest of the world
that they should forego human rights and democracy, recognize a U.S.
hemispheric dominance, and kowtow to us because of our national wealth, not our
ideals.
As
The New York Times concluded in an analysis of the strategic document,
“The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its
vast powers to make money” at the expense of support for dictators and caring
about those without wealth.
“Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a
global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing
migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing
them as sources of cash,” The Times analysis said.
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case to determine whether Donald Trump’s global tariffs are legal.
Until recently, tariffs rarely made headlines. Yet today, they play a major role in U.S. economic policy, affecting the prices of everything from groceriesto autosto holiday gifts, as well as the outlook for unemployment, inflation and even recession.
I’m an economist who studies trade policy, and I’ve found that many people have questions about tariffs. This primer explains what they are, what effects they have, and why governments impose them.
What are tariffs, and who pays them?
Tariffs are taxes on imports of goods, usually for purposes of protecting particular domestic industries from import competition. When an American business imports goods, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sends it a tariff bill that the company must pay before the merchandise can enter the country.
Because tariffs raise costs for U.S. importers, those companies usually pass the expense on to their customers by raising prices. Sometimes, importers choose to absorb part of the tariff’s cost so consumers don’t switch to more affordable competing products. However, firms with low profit margins may risk going out of business if they do that for very long. In general, the longer tariffs are in place, the more likely companies are to pass the costs on to customers.
On Saturday, December 6, soccer fans around the world found out where their favorite teams will be playing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Players and staff from 48 countries and territories will play 104 games across North America — and for the first time in history, Canada is hosting some of the games. Together, Toronto and Vancouver will host 13 matches.
In addition to the matches, 84 training sites and 178 practice fields will be spread across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Plus, tens of thousands of broadcasters from around the world will cover the games for their home countries.
Holding the games in three countries means that ease of crossing borders is a fundamental part of the World Cup going smoothly. Hundreds of thousands of players, staff, and fans will need to move across the U.S.-Mexico border and the Canada-U.S. border multiple times in order to attend the matches over the course of six weeks in June and July 2026. But already, months before the games begin, concerns are mounting over whether attendees will be able to enter the host countries at all.
The disintegration of Donald Trump’s mind—now obvious for
everyone to see—is metaphorical of the disintegration of our society. Unfitness
means that there is no one in charge of the government; there is no one home.
Rather, the appearance of someone being home makes him a prime
target for nefarious forces to do their mischief.
Sometimes the greatest threat to national security is
someone who can be leveraged and compromised—so as to parrot our enemies’
propaganda, to destroy American democracy from within, and to assist their rise
in global dominance.
One of these enemies is Vladimir Putin. Russian forces
launched 704 total missiles and drones against Ukraine overnight on December 5
to 6, 2025, heavily targeting railway and energy infrastructure in this proxy
U.S.-Russia war. The goal is to freeze our fellow pro-democracy Europeans, so
as to force them into submission as winter approaches.
The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are
apparently not the only ones who’ve paid the price for Donald Trump’s long
relationship with that notorious pedophile.
Epstein’s “partying” with Trump has apparently also led to
thousands of civilian deaths abroad, the collapse of America’s credibility
around the world, and a serious threat to the future of democracy in Europe….
In Epstein’s emails, he boasts of offering to advise
Russia’s senior-most officials about how to manipulate Trump: “I think you
might suggest to putin that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] lavrovcan
get insight on [Trump by] talking to me…”
Consider Trump’s secretive and beta-submissive behavior
toward Vladimir Putin, especially in Helsinki when he trashed our intelligence
agencies and sucked up to Putin, and more recently with his red carpet in
Alaska, and it’s impossible to ignore what this newest Epstein revelation
implies.
If Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is a direct or indirect
result of things Trump did with Epstein, it’s naked treachery. Consider the
pattern:… the Russian military targets … are not accidents of war. They’re the
deliberate targeting of civilians, children, doctors, classrooms, apartment
buildings, homes, and hospitals….
And all of this—the horror of what’s happening in plain
sight that’s the clear result of Trump’s repeated and pathetic kowtowing to
Putin—appears, from the Epstein emails, that it may be getting so much worse
over the past 10 months because Putin took Epstein’s advice and threatened
Donald Trump with exposure.
We still don’t know what was said in that room in Helsinki
because Trump covered it up, making sure we’d never know. He ordered his
American interpreter to move away from his private conversation with Putin, and
afterward seized and destroyed her notes.
Similarly and more recently, in Alaska, Trump dismissed his
aides and rode with Putin privately in his car where they engaged in another
lengthy, secretive conversation.
That’s the behavior of a man with something to hide,
who’s terrified by some horrible secret….
Eager to show he isn't the total screw-up most non-MAGA feel he is, Patel tweeted this yesterday to claim credit for the capture and arrest of THE WRONG GUY. No thanks to Patel, his false statement interrupted the investigation for the real killer who, at this writing, is still on the loose.
Children will die if proposed changes to federal vaccine
policy take effect, doctors warned today during a joint press conference with
representatives from six leading health organizations.
Experts were responding to a vote by members of the Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—all handpicked by Health and Human
Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—to
limit the use of hepatitis B vaccines in newborns, in spite of
evidence that the shots prevent
cancer and save lives.
“Children will
acquire hepatitis B and die as a result of these recommendations,”
said Aaron M. Milstone, MD, representing the American Academy of Pediatrics
(AAP). “My colleagues or I, not a committee member, will be the ones supporting
the parents of a dying child and trying to explain how they were let down and
lost a child from a preventable infection.”
The ACIP recommended vaccinating all healthy newborns
against hepatitis B at birth for 34 years, because mothers can pass the virus
to infants during delivery. That recommendation helped
to reduce the number of hepatitis B infections in children by 99%.
But last week, the ACIP voted to recommend a birth dose of
hepatitis B vaccine only for newborns whose mothers test positive for the virus or
whose infection status is unknown. Mothers who aren’t infected with hepatitis B
should discuss the risks and benefits with their health provider, the group
advised. Babies who aren’t vaccinated against hepatitis at birth should wait at
least 2 months for their first dose, the committee decided.
Experts note that blood tests aren’t always accurate,
producing “false negative” results about 5% of the time. About 90% of
infants exposed to hepatitis B at birth develop a chronic, incurable infection
that can lead to liver failure, liver cancer, and early death.
Babies and children also can be exposed after birth by
family members.
Research has shown that postponing an infected baby’s first
dose of hepatitis vaccine by 2 months could could
cause at least 1,400 preventable hepatitis B infections among
children, 300 additional cases of liver cancer, 480 preventable deaths, and
over $222 million in excess health care costs a year.
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