“After Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said the 1.3-million-member organization would not endorse either candidate in 2024, making the Teamsters the only one of the nation’s ten major unions not to endorse Harris, joint councils of the Teamsters have endorsed Harris and Walz on their own. These endorsements matter not only for votes, but also for get-out-the-vote efforts in crucial Midwestern states. Also crucial to Pennsylvania is today’s endorsement of Harris by members of the state’s Polish American community, who expressed concern that Trump would enable Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Poland. There are 800,000 people of Polish descent in Pennsylvania.
On Sunday, a bipartisan group of 741 national security leaders—some of the biggest names in the field—endorsed Harris. “To the American People,” they wrote. “We are former public servants who swore an oath to the Constitution. Many of us risked our lives for it. We are retired generals, admirals, senior noncommissioned officers, ambassadors, and senior civilian national security leaders. We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We are loyal to the ideals of our nation—like freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—not to any one individual or party.
“We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles. First, we believe America’s national security requires a serious and capable Commander-in-Chief. Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable. Each generation has a responsibility to defend it. That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.
“This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.
“We do not make such an assessment lightly. We are trained to make sober, rational decisions. That is how we know Vice President Harris would make an excellent Commander-in-Chief, while Mr. Trump has proven he is not up to the job.”
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The lawsuit, seeking ‘multiple billions of dollars,’ opens a new front in the legal battles with oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues.
The attorney general of California, Rob Bonta, sued Exxon Mobil on Monday alleging that the oil giant carried out a “decades-long campaign of deception” that overhyped the promise of recycling and spawned a plastic pollution crisis.
The lawsuit, filed in superior court in San Francisco, argued that people were more likely to buy single-use plastics because of a false belief, promoted by Exxon Mobil, that they would be recycled. Mr. Bonta said the company is a leading producer of a key component used to make single-use plastics. The suit seeks unspecified damages that Mr. Bonta estimated would amount of “multiple billions of dollars.”
In an interview, Mr. Bonta said plastic pollution was “fueled by the myth of recycling, and the leader among them in perpetuating that myth is Exxon Mobil.”
Exxon Mobil responded sharply, saying California officials knew for decades that their recycling system was ineffective. “They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others,” the company said in a statement. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills.”
The case opens a new front in the legal battles against oil and gas companies over climate and environmental issues. More than two dozen state and local governments, including California, have sued companies for their role in the climate crisis, making claims that the companies deceived the public in a quest for profit. None have gone trial yet. (click page 2 to continue)
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized at-home use of FluMist, opening the door for needle-shy people to have easy access to a nasal spray vaccine that is potentially lifesaving.
The approval will allow, for the first time, an alternative to the annual flu shot that parents and caregivers can give to children and that adults can use on their own outside of a health-care setting. It would still require a prescription and is expected to be available from an online pharmacy next fall.
AstraZeneca, which makes the treatment, said it would start a FluMist Home website, where people can fill out a questionnaire that will be reviewed by a pharmacist before the treatment is shipped to a person’s home. The mist will remain available from prescribers as an in-office treatment. The current out-of-pocket cost for a dose is about $35 to $45, but may be less depending on insurance coverage.
“Today’s approval of the first influenza vaccine for self- or caregiver-administration provides a new option for receiving a safe and effective seasonal influenza vaccine potentially with greater convenience, flexibility and accessibility for individuals and families,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the F.D.A.’s vaccine center, which authorized the at-home option.
The agency required the company to study whether its instructions were clear and whether at-home administration was feasible. The agency concluded that it was, but advised caregivers to give the spray to those who are 2 to 17 years old.
The flu takes a steep toll that varies greatly from year to year, according to an F.D.A. summary of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 2010 through 2023, hospitalizations have ranged from 100,000 to 700,000 each year, and from about 4,900 to 51,000 people have died.
FluMist was first approved by the F.D.A. in 2003 for people ages 5 to 49; since 2007, it has been authorized for people as young as 2 years old. The spray contains a weakened form of live flu virus that is applied inside the nose.
According to the C.D.C., the nasal spray has largely been found to be as effective as the shot, except for children in 2009, a year of particularly high levels of flu cases. Since then, the formula of the spray has changed, according to the agency, which said studies outside the United States found it to have similar efficacy to the shot.
Dr. Abraar Karan, a Stanford infectious disease doctor, said he saw a lot of flu patients in urgent care. He added that many said they had meant to get a vaccine, but found that the major challenge was basic logistics: making an appointment, missing work and building in time to feel tired or achy after receiving the vaccine.
He said the new approval would ideally go a long way toward preventing more flu cases.
“A lot of it is actually just reducing those logistical barriers,” Dr. Karan said. “And so an at-home platform, I think, will increase uptake, and that will increase uptake quickly, which is really the key before the season starts picking up.”
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A new guest in the Graystone Park @ 8th & Columbia!
This first year Glaucous-winged Gull, trying to act like a heron, enjoyed a refreshing bath in the waterfall pool, then strolled away, enjoying the sun last Thursday…
There’s a CNN presidential debate on October 23rd, and Kamala Harris has already confirmed she will be there. But Donald Trump is too chicken to face her again, and says he won’t do it, offering the lame excuse that “it’s too late.”
Ed note: I grew up in the mostly red state of Ohio–a state that has produced more President’s than all others (7) except for Virginia (8). To understand Trump voters, you might want to read David Giffels book “Brainstorming Ohio–to understand America.” Ohio has all elements of America–urban, rural, rust belt, manufacturing, agriculture, higher education, southern (Cincinnati) and a bit of Appalachia. It’s no accident that Springfield is a focus for Republican generated disinformation. Voters have swung from Obama to Trump to Biden. The main issue for many is job security and the economy as the November ’24 election approaches.
Singing not only helps allow it to move through the body but it alchemizes what grief can become.
By Lauren DePino in the NYT Magazine
Since I first started singing as a little girl, I yearned to become some incarnation of Whitney, Mariah and Celine. By my 20s, I was working as a funeral singer, still pining for the big time. In 2004, I thought I had come exceedingly close to embodying the diva trifecta from my childhood — I auditioned for “American Idol” and made the cut from tens of thousands to 200 hopefuls. I told producers that funeral singing was my steadiest gig, thinking that the job would soon be moving to my rearview.
But when the platinum-haired reality-show producer lifted his slate eyes from his tea, steam rising to his chin, I didn’t expect what came next. “Stick with singing at funerals,” he said. “You can sing a lion to sleep … but you don’t have enough diva potential.” His posh British accent made each word sting more.
I winced. My chest clenched. I thought back to that gangly, intense child who discovered that sounding beautiful was something she could do. I ached to book stadiums. Yet, here was this Hollywood gatekeeper sending me the message that not only was funeral singing a low bar, but the only one I could aspire to.
When I first sang at a funeral, at age 10, at the invitation of a music teacher, I remember trembling as I headed up the church aisle. But when I heard my own voice ring out, calming yet strong, my anxiety melted away. It was as if my scrawny body was becoming something bigger, something more. In the years that followed, I lost sight of what a sacred, purpose-rich privilege it was to lend my voice to those who were mourning — to let it become theirs, to allow it to give breath to sentiments not yet realized.
By the time I auditioned for “American Idol,” I had sung at hundreds of funerals. I had worked with dying people who requested, matter-of-factly, that I, then only a teenager, stand with them at their piano and run through a hymn they wanted sung at their memorial. I regularly performed with the same organist, and we named our most requested set list “Standard Operating Procedure,” which included “On Eagle’s Wings” (“Iggle’s,” we joked, in Philly-speak) and “Prayer of St. Francis” (“St. Frank”). For secular funerals, “My Way” and “Hallelujah” ruled. (Continue by clicking on page 2)
The Olympian reported that a new study from Consumer Affairs ranked Washington as having the best public education system on the West Coast and top five in the nation. The report highlighted Washington’s high salaries for teachers, best in the nation need-based financial aid program for higher education, above-average student test scores on reading proficiency tests and the ACT college entrance exam. The report also ranked Washington’s higher education system number four in the country.
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Ed note: It’s so hard to give up our established beliefs, even when hard evidence disproves them. I was taught in medical school that, “The questions don’t change, but every few years the answers do.” It’s sad and frustrating when one holds on to discredited beliefs or adopts firm positions on flimsy evidence. I hope you’ve read at some point “The Cry and the Covenant” by Morton Thompson. It tells the story of the medical establishment’s resistance in the 1800’s to the innovative and life-saving practice of handwashing! There are still lessons to be learned.
By Pamela Paul Opinion Columnist in the NYT (thanks to Ed M.)
You probably know about the surge in childhood peanut allergies. Peanut allergies in American children more than tripled between 1997 and 2008, after doctors told pregnant and lactating women to avoid eating peanuts and parents to avoid feeding them to children under 3. This was based on guidance issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2000.
You probably also know that this guidance, following similar guidance in Britain, turned out to be entirely wrong and, in fact, avoiding peanuts caused many of those allergies in the first place.
That should not have been surprising, because the advice violated a basic principle of immunology: Early exposure to foreign molecules builds resistance. In Israel, where babies are regularly fed peanuts, peanut allergies are rare. Moreover, at least one of the studies on which the British advice was based showed the opposite of what the guidance specified.
As early as 1998, Gideon Lack, a British pediatric allergist and immunologist, challenged the guidelines, saying they were “not evidence-based.” But for years, many doctors dismissed Dr. Lack’s findings, even calling his studies that introduced peanut butter early to babies unethical.
When I first reported on peanut allergies in 2006, doctors expressed a wide range of theories, at the same time that the “hygiene hypothesis,” which holds that overly sterile environments can trigger allergic responses, was gaining traction. Still, the guidance I got from my pediatrician when my second child was born that same year was firmly “no peanuts.”
It wasn’t until 2008, when Lack and his colleagues published a study showing that babies who ate peanuts were less likely to have allergies, that the A.A.P. issued a report, acknowledging there was a “lack of evidence” for its advice regarding pregnant women. But it stopped short of telling parents to feed babies peanuts as a means of prevention. Finally, in 2017, following yet another definitive study by Lack, the A.A.P. fully reversed its early position, now telling parents to feed their children peanuts early. (continued)
George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, conservative columnist George Will, more than 230 former officials for presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and 17 former staff members for Ronald Reagan have all recently added their names to the list of those supporting Harris. Today more than 100 Republican former members of Congress and national security officials who served in Republican administrations endorsed Harris, saying they “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” They cited his chaotic governance, his praising of enemies and undermining allies, his politicizing the military and disparaging veterans, his susceptibility to manipulation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to overthrow democracy. They praised Harris for her consistent championing of “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
It is unprecedented that, of the five living Republicans who were nominated by their party for either president or vice president, only one is supporting the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has joined his daughter, former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, in endorsing Democrat Kamala Harris. Former President George W. Bush has not endorsed Harris, but he is definitely not backing former President Donald Trump, and neither is Paul Ryan, the one-time Republican Speaker of the House who ran for vice president in 2012. The guy at the top of the 2012 ticket, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, has made his antipathy to Trump very clear and he seems to be edging in the direction of a Harris endorsement.
Only the 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate, the intellectually fatuous Sarah Palin, is standing up for Trump. It is not hard to imagine that her running mate, the late, great Sen. John McCain, would never join the Trump team. McCain’s son, 1st Lt. Jimmy McCain, suggested as much when he recently joined the ranks of those supporting the Harris/Walz ticket.
And the army of conservative rebels for Harris is growing. It includes an impressive number of people who served in the Trump White House who now insist the man from Mar-a-Lago should never be allowed in the Oval Office again. There are also numerous military leaders and several veterans of Ronald Reagan’s administration who are supporting the Democratic candidate because they think Trump is in thrall to autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Trump has an epithet he applies to everyone on this growing list of Republican detractors: RINOs — Republicans In Name Only. In truth, a more accurate moniker for the likes of Cheney and Romney would be TROUTs — Traditional Republicans Opposing Unhinged Trumpism.
These stalwarts of sane Republicanism have seen their party morph into an extremist personality cult. Far from proving themselves disloyal by opposing four more calamitous years of Trump’s self-aggrandizing misrule, the TROUTs are serving the best interests of their party — and their country.
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Ed Note: According to the Heather Cox Richardson newsletter, “On CNN yesterday morning, Vance admitted to Dana Bash that he had created the story of Haitian immigrants eating pets. He justified the lie that has shut down Springfield and endangered its residents by claiming such a lie was the only way to get the media to pay attention to what he considers the crisis of immigration. Once the pet-eating story was debunked, Vance said that Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV and tuberculosis in Ohio; in fact, new diagnoses of HIV dropped from 2018 to 2022, and the director of the Ohio Department of Health says there has been no change in TB rates.
That a politician of any sort would lie to rally supporters against a marginalized population comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook, which seeks to build a community around the idea that the people in it are besieged by outsiders. But when that politician is running for vice president, with the potential to become the president if anything happens to his 78-year-old running mate, who is the oldest person ever to run for president, it raises a whole factory of red flags.”
Trump posited that Haitian immigrants who have relocated to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating local pets.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said in a now-viral response. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
But that has not lessened the impact on community members in Springfield.
Navigating bomb threats, as well as the closure of schools and municipal buildings due to those threats, members of the Haitian community in Springfield have continued to try to work peacefully amid the national attention. (continued)
Two years after federal health officials approved the sale of over-the-counter hearing aids, some Apple AirPods owners may soon be able to access the medical device in the comfort of their home with the click of a software update.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Apple’s new “Hearing Aid Feature” which will amplify sounds for people with perceived mild to moderate hearing impairment. The Apple feature, coming this fall via a free software update, will only work with AirPods Pro 2 ear buds and iOS 18-compatible iPhones or iPads. It is intended for adults 18 or older.Sponsor Message More than 30 million American adults have some degree of hearing loss. But only 1 in 6 Americans with hearing impairments between the ages of 20 and 69 actually use hearing aids due to high cost, lack of accessibility, poor customer satisfaction and stigma, according to the National Council on Aging.
Research shows that if left untreated, hearing loss can increase the risk of social isolation, depression, cognitive decline and frailty. Meanwhile, other studies suggest that using hearing aids may reduce the frequency or severity of those health problems in older adults as well as possibly lead to a longer life.
With the new feature, Apple AirPods owners will be able to check their hearing at home through a five-minute test and adjust their sound settings based on their hearing.
“Your AirPods Pro are transformed into a personalized hearing aid, boosting the specific sounds you need in real time, like parts of speech or elements within your environment,” said Sumbul Ahmad Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, in an announcement video.
For years, advocates for people with hearing loss have been calling for more affordable and accessible medical devices. It paved the way for the FDA in 2022 to approve hearing aids to be sold without a prescription. But according to the National Council on Aging, hearing aids can still be costly — pricing from $99 to $7,000 as of this year. (AirPods Pro 2 are priced at $249.)
Meredith Resnick, a spokesperson for the Hearing Loss Association of America, said she hopes Apple’s new hearing aid feature will help spread awareness and reduce stigma around hearing loss. But she added that most over-the-counter (OTC) devices — including Apple’s — mainly serve people with mild to moderate hearing loss.
“OTC hearing aids won’t be for everyone, but we hope they help some adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss take a first step towards treatment sooner. An OTC hearing aid, for example, may help someone who needs some situational hearing help, but isn’t at the level of wearing a device all day,” she said. Sponsor Message The FDA approval came after a clinical study with 118 subjects with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. The results showed that the subjects who used Apple’s hearing aid feature “achieved similar perceived benefit as subjects who received professional fitting of the same device.” The FDA added that “no adverse events related to the device were observed in this study.”
“Today’s marketing authorization of an over-the-counter hearing aid software on a widely used consumer audio product is another step that advances the availability, accessibility and acceptability of hearing support for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss,” Dr. Michelle Tarver, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement.
Ed Note: The iOS 18 update will roll out today, September 16, at 10:30 PM in India. iPhones that are slated to get the update are iPhone 16 series, iPhone 15 series, iPhone 14 series, iPhone 13 series, iPhone 12 series, iPhone 11 series, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and iPhone SE (second generation or later).
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It was the quirky aspects of science that researchers celebrated at this year’s Ig Nobel award ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Actual Nobel laureates gave out the ten prizes.
“This is the first in-person, with everyone together in one room, ceremony we’ve done since before the pandemic,” says Marc Abrahams, the founder and organizer of Ig Nobel event and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research.
On Thursday night, Abrahams stood before a packed audience in one of MIT’s largest lecture halls. “We honor some remarkable individuals and groups,” he said. “Every Ig Nobel prize winner has done something that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”
Plants that see
“I feel my research fits really well on this prize because I receive a lot of critiques about the paper,” says Felipe Yamashita with a chuckle, a botanist and one of the award winners.
He has a somewhat alternative view of plants. “I believe that plant[s] can see,” he asserts. “I don’t know how they can see. They don’t have an eye, but I’m pretty sure they can understand what’s going [on].”
Yamashita just finished his Ph.D. in botany at the University of Bonn. His thesis focused on a kind of plant called Boquila trifoliolata found in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile and Argentina. A decade ago, a paper came out saying that B. trifoliolata can change its lobed or rounded leaf shape to mimic the leaf shape of other plants.
Those authors speculated it was due to chemicals or microbes, but Yamashita and his collaborator had their doubts. “We didn’t really agree with that,” he says. “Then we said, ‘OK, let’s do another experiment [that] prove[s] that maybe [the plants] have some vision.’ ”
Yamashita’s experiment was simple. He grew several of the plants on a trellis divided by a couple shelves. These opaque barriers blocked the lower part of the plant from the upper part. Along the top of the trellis, Yamashita wove an plastic plant with slender, unlobed leaves. The artificial plants didn’t have the chemicals or microbes that might trigger the shape mimicry response.
When the real plant grew, the leaves below the shelves were lobed. But “almost all leaves that were growing close to the plastic leaf copied the plastic leaf shape,” says Yamashita. That is, the mimic leaves were longer, and less lobed.
Yamashita thinks the real leaves sensed the shape of the plastic leaves by detecting where they were letting light through and where they weren’t. “So the leaf grow one way, not the other way,” he says. “One direction, not the other direction.”
It’s a kind of seeing, concludes Yamashita. He says it may function as camouflage to help the plant blend in with its neighbors to reduce being munched on by some herbivore. The results were published in the journal Plant Signaling & Behavior.
A myth of old age
Another Ig Nobel recipient is Saul Justin Newman, an interdisciplinary scientist at Oxford University.
“I was joking to my family,” he recalls. “Every scientist dreams of the Nobel, but my dream had a typo and I’m perfectly happy.”
Newman snagged his award for his research showing that data related to some of the longest-lived people on the planet is riddled with errors.
“For example, the world’s oldest man has three birthdays, one of which seems to be a deliberate fraud.” he says. “In Japan, 82% of the 100-year-olds turned out to be alive on paper — and dead in reality.”
The list goes on. “I had a lady reach 103 in a freezer,” says Newman.
He admits at first, these results sound kind of humorous. But there’s something pernicious going on.
“Picture your father dies or your mother dies at the age of 95,” he explains. “You’ve got no job and their pension check turns up the week after they’re dead. All you have to do for that pension check to keep turning up in perpetuity is not register the death.”
Newman says it’s easy to get away with. And he’s found a link between people who reach remarkable ages on paper and places in the world where there’s a hefty amount of pension fraud.
“It’s dissonant because all of these places don’t rank very highly on any other metric of survival,” he says.
Other Ig Nobel winners this year included a prize for the study of the swimming ability of dead trout. Another demonstrated a technique for separating drunk worms from sober ones.
Abrahams closed the award ceremony with these words:
“If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight — and especially if you did — better luck next year.”
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Julie Manet (or Girl with a Cat), 1887, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Detail.
I like cats and I’m sure that many of you do, too. A fascinating animal, the cat has earned itself an important place in culture, literature, and art. Artists gave it a rich variety of symbolic meanings.However, at times they seem to hide these cute creatures from our sight. Can you spot the cats in their paintings? Beware, though, if you don‘t spot all the cats, you will have to sing along to the song.
1. Superstitious Cat – Hieronymus Bosch
Cats in famous paintings: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1500, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
Hieronymus Bosch’s (c. 1450–1516) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights is full of symbolic references. It illustrates the human journey between divine influence and diabolic temptation, between salvation and damnation. For example, in the moment of Creation, God is presenting Eve to the astonished Adam. Here, we should think of love, harmony, and wonder at a world that does not know sin. However, close to Adam, we spot a big cat carrying prey in its mouth. In this Paradise, it symbolizes the arrival of evil, even before the appearance of the tempting serpent. (continued)
Cats in famous paintings: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1500, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Detail.
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