Hard Pass

A leading U.S. health official on Sunday urged people to get inoculated against the measles at a time of outbreaks across several states and as the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status.

“Take the vaccine, please,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator whose boss has raised suspicion about the safety and importance of vaccines. “We have a solution for our problem.”

Oz, a heart surgeon, defended some recently revised federal vaccine recommendations as well as past comments from President Donald Trump and the nation’s health chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about the efficacy of vaccines. From Oz, there was a clear message on the measles.

⚠️ baby alert ⚠️

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42837516

Hatred promoted as heroic defiance of censorship, daring to say the unsayable, is a poisoned arrow aimed at the achilles heel of liberalism – its dutiful tolerance of illiberal opinion.

These issues would be hard enough to navigate if it were just a challenge of balancing state control, public interest and private enterprise in a single jurisdiction with clear lines of democratic accountability. It is far from that.

The concentration of digital power is an ocean away, wielded by companies whose bosses are, at best, quietly complicit in Donald Trump’s assault on the US constitution and, in the case of X’s Elon Musk and Palantir’s Peter Thiel, vigorous advocates and enablers of the new US despotism.

It seems like a bubble craze

The bosses at a Maine shipyard are offering overtime to workers there if they attend a speech by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, according to workers at the facility.

Hegseth is reportedly set to tour Bath Iron Works on Monday and give a speech on the recently announced “Trump” class battleship, according to the Bangor Daily News.

When the bosses reached out to workers for volunteers to attend the speech, however, few hands went up, according to one worker, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The speech is slated for Monday afternoon, shortly before a shift change, which means that workers who attend would need to stay past their normal work hours — and anyone who shows up would be required to stay until the event is over.

The Washington Post told staffers today that it was moving forward with a sweeping round of layoffs that was part of a “broad strategic reset” of the storied newspaper, which will include eliminating the sports desk, severely cutting back on its international coverage, dismantling its books section, and restructuring its local news team.

Though it was not immediately known exactly how many employees would be impacted by the cuts, it had previously been reported that about 100 staffers from the newsroom could be laid off, and as many as 300 employees from the broader company would face terminations.

However, after emails were sent to staffers on Wednesday morning, it is expected that roughly one-third of staff — about 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom — will be laid off, with some staffers saying that this was a “bloodbath”.

Murray revealed that the paper would be “shrinking” its foreign news bureaus and drastically altering its local metro coverage.