United States Institute of Peace files emergency motion to block carving of Trump’s name on its facade
While Donald Trump ponders demolishing the Kennedy Center unless his name is added to the memorial for the slain president, the United States Institute of Peace filed an emergency motion in federal court on Thursday asking a judge to block his administration “from carrying out plans to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of the iconic USIP headquarters building.”
The filing was made in a court battle that began in May 2025, when a federal judge ruled that Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or US Doge service, illegally took over the the non-profit thinktank created and funded by the US Congress through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.
Musk’s Doge staff fired most USIP employees in a late-night email in March 2025, and then forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.
In court, the USIP has maintained the organization is an independent creation of Congress and outside the president’s executive authority. The administration argues it is an executive branch organization, and pushed ahead, last December, with affixing Trump’s name to the exterior of the building, using bolted-on lettering. That change already offended the USIP board members who filed the suit, but carving Trump’s name into the stone, they argued on Thursday, “would cause irreparable harm”.
In the new filing, lawyers for the USIP argue that the administration, including Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have not followed the court’s order to maintain the status quo at the institute:
Rather, they continued to dismantle USIP and to actively undermine the organizational independence enshrined in USIP’s organic statute— including by affixing the President’s name to the building. Unsatisfied with the relative impermanence of external lettering, Appellants apparently now intend to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of USIP’s privately owned headquarters building while this litigation is pending. The building—which was largely funded by private donations to USIP as a tax exempt nonprofit corporation— is a work of expressive architecture designed to be “symbolic of USIP’s “independent “mission.”
Key events
Closing summary
This is where we end, for the day, our live coverage of the second Trump administration. Here are the latest developments:
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A canvasser for a Maine PAC who was paid to knock on doors in support of Republican senator Susan Collins faces criminal charges after being caught on a doorbell camera stealing a package from an absent homeowner’s porch.
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Donald Trump admitted that he had no idea what lead ammunition is after he signed an executive order permitting its use by hunters on federal lands, reversing a policy that was intended to protect bald eagles from ingesting lead and dying.
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Democrats pointed out that María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican who released a campaign ad telling Trump some of his “immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” voted to spend $70bn on immigration enforcement.
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A federal judge issued an order requiring the Trump administration to give notice before making any major changes to Kennedy Center.
Canvasser knocking on doors to support Susan Collins caught on camera stealing package from outside home
A canvasser for a Maine political action committee who was paid to knock on doors in support of Republican senator Susan Collins faces criminal charges after being caught on a doorbell camera stealing a package from an absent homeowner’s porch in Woolwich, Maine on Wednesday afternoon.
Video of the man, dressed in a red T-shirt with the name of the PAC, Stronger Maine, on the front and the name of the candidate, Susan Collins, on the back went viral after it was posted on Facebook by the homeowner.
Stronger Maine called the police and fired the canvasser immediately, a source who has worked with the group told the Bangor Daily News.
The Collins campaign said that the man was not employed by them.
According to Federal Election Commission records, more than half of Stronger Maine’s $2.6m in fundraising this year has come from from the Virginia-based conservative dark-money group Stronger America, which donated $1.4m.
Andy O’Brien, the former managing editor of a Rockland, Maine newspaper, pointed out on social media that the canvasser did a poor job of covering his tracks, because, before he grabbed the package and ran to his car, he left a flyer for Collins hanging on the homeowner’s front door.
The canvasser, who appeared to have the Latin phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) tattooed on his right arm, was later identified by the police and faces charges.
“Thank you Woolwich residents and Facebook detectives,” the local shariff’s office said in a statement on Thursday. “The package thief/political campaigner has been identified and charges will be forthcoming.”
The US Postal Service has stopped work on developing a computer system that was central to Donald Trump’s effort to limit mail voting after the supreme court rejected the planned to change to how mail ballots are delivered this week, postmaster general David Steiner told the Associated Press.
“There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything,” postmaster general David Steiner said in an interview.
Steiner, a former chief executive of Waste Management, Inc, said he is pressing Congress for changes that would help him resolve what he has called a “liquidity crisis.”
Trump’s efforts to largely eradicate mail voting would have turned the postal service into an arbiter of who is eligible to vote just months before this year’s midterm elections.
Steiner declined to take a position on Trump’s policy, presenting himself as the leader of an “independent agency of the executive branch” whose influence over the president’s order was limited to operational concerns.
“I don’t get to decide what rules that are put on us that I decide to accept or not accept,” he said.
‘I don’t know what the hell that means’, Trump says of executive order he signed to let hunters use lead ammunition
Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders to expand hunting and fishing on Thursday which, he told a gathering of outdoor industry leaders in the White House Rose Garden, mean “opening up millions of acres of federal land for our hunters and fishers.”
The orders seek to expand fresh and saltwater fishing and direct the secretary of the interior and other federal agencies to find ways to expand hunting, including of species not subject to certain endangered protection laws, within 90 days.
Those agencies will then have 180 days to propose rollbacks to federal restrictions against hunting and fishing on federal land and to find ways to expand using that land for recreation.
“This builds on our actions in August that opened up another 92 million acres of federal land across 32 states,” Trump said in remarks he largely read, and even hinted he did not entirely understand.
“We believe that public lands belong to the American people and to the public and hunters, fishers, and outdoorsmen should be able to access them and they weren’t able to,” Trump read aloud from a text he suggested his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, had prepared for him. “And this order also protects the use of affordable, traditional le-” Trump read, and then stopped to comment on what were supposed to be his own remarks.
“Well, this is pretty good. Is that- I never knew this was a problem, Doug. You’re going to have to educate me, but you put it in,” he said to Burgum, before continuing to read the text: “lead ammunition.”
The president then paused and looked up again to comment: “Is ammunition, lead ammunition was a problem, huh? Is it better than other ammunition? I assume, huh? That’s uh pretty good. I don’t know what the hell that means, but I know one thing: you wanted it, you wanted it, and I’m here for you,” he told the industry leaders assembled before him, who burst into applause.
“So, the order protects the use of affordable traditional lead ammunition,” Trump continued reading.
“That sounds good to me,” he said.
As Trump spoke, the website of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency within the Department of the Interior, still officially encouraged hunters to go “lead-free”, urging hunters to take advantage of “Lead-free ammunition incentives available at 26 refuges across 19 states” for the 2026–2027 hunting season.
“Protect wildlife by choosing lead-free ammunition this hunting season. Encourage other hunters to choose lead-free ammunition for all hunting, including big game,” the agency urged hunters, as of Thursday night.
The agency’s website even answers the question Trump apparently failed to ask: “Why choose lead-free hunting ammunition?” with the following information – now apparently to be discarded at his order:
Lead fragments on impact. Lead ammunition loses weight as small pieces strip from the front of the bullet or shot as it passes through an animal. These fragments are found farther from the wound channel than you may expect, and many are too small to see with the naked eye, making them difficult to remove.
Fragments reach scavengers. Lead fragments may be left in the remains after harvesting an animal, even after field dressing. Remains from field-dressed animals provide a food source for scavenging wildlife, including bald and golden eagles.
Lead-free ammunition leaves less behind. When ingested, a lead fragment no bigger than a grain of rice can sicken and even kill an animal the size of a bald eagle. Lead-free ammunition leaves little or no fragments behind that could be consumed by scavenging wildlife.
United States Institute of Peace files emergency motion to block carving of Trump’s name on its facade
While Donald Trump ponders demolishing the Kennedy Center unless his name is added to the memorial for the slain president, the United States Institute of Peace filed an emergency motion in federal court on Thursday asking a judge to block his administration “from carrying out plans to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of the iconic USIP headquarters building.”
The filing was made in a court battle that began in May 2025, when a federal judge ruled that Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or US Doge service, illegally took over the the non-profit thinktank created and funded by the US Congress through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.
Musk’s Doge staff fired most USIP employees in a late-night email in March 2025, and then forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.
In court, the USIP has maintained the organization is an independent creation of Congress and outside the president’s executive authority. The administration argues it is an executive branch organization, and pushed ahead, last December, with affixing Trump’s name to the exterior of the building, using bolted-on lettering. That change already offended the USIP board members who filed the suit, but carving Trump’s name into the stone, they argued on Thursday, “would cause irreparable harm”.
In the new filing, lawyers for the USIP argue that the administration, including Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have not followed the court’s order to maintain the status quo at the institute:
Rather, they continued to dismantle USIP and to actively undermine the organizational independence enshrined in USIP’s organic statute— including by affixing the President’s name to the building. Unsatisfied with the relative impermanence of external lettering, Appellants apparently now intend to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of USIP’s privately owned headquarters building while this litigation is pending. The building—which was largely funded by private donations to USIP as a tax exempt nonprofit corporation— is a work of expressive architecture designed to be “symbolic of USIP’s “independent “mission.”
Latvia bans Russian oligarch who paid for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding party, Umar Kremlev, and hockey star Alex Ovechkin
Latvia’s foreign minister, Baiba Braže, has declared two Russian nationals, Alexander Ovechkin and Umar Kremlev, personae non gratae, meaning that they are banned from entering the country.
As the Guardian reported, Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time leading goalscorer, appeared last week in a campaign ad for United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s parliamentary party, before returning to the US for another season as captain on the Washington Capitals.
ProPublica revealed this week that Kremlev, a Putin-connected boxing official, paid for, and attended, Donald Trump Jr’s wedding celebration on a private island in the Bahamas in May.
In a letter to the NHL’s commissioner made public on Wednesday, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, expressed “serious concern” over Ovechkin lending his celebrity to support “the dictatorial political party of Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, who actively works to oppress the people of Russia by outlawing freedom of speech and fair elections.”
Ovechkin, a longtime supporter of Putin, whose Instagram profile picture shows him with the Russian president, has attempted to cast his appearance in the party’s video as a patriotic act. In a statement to the media, the Capitals said that Ovechkin, while in Russia, “was asked by his country to participate in a video campaign”, without acknowledging that it was a partisan political ad not for the nation of Russia, but for the party supporting its dictatorial president who has waged a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine.
On Thursday, Ovechkin responded to questions about his appearance in the campaign video with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, the leading parliamentary candidate on the party’s list for upcoming elections, by saying, “I’m Russian and I support my country.”
“I’m for peace and love,” he added. “They asked me to do that, and I said yes.”
According to Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet based in Latvia, Putin’s political team first considered making Ovechkin a candidate for United Russia in the 2026 elections.
The Russian business news outlet RBC reported that when Russia’s state-owned polling firm tested the hockey star’s potential candidacy, they found that he would have been more popular than three of the top five candidates who were eventually selected.
“His results were decent,” a source close to Putin’s administration working on United Russia’s campaign told Meduza. “But not good enough for anyone to ask him specifically or force him to do it. And he didn’t want to do it. He understood it would take a lot of time… appearing in a video is easy”.
Democrats point out Florida Republican was actually for Trump’s immigration enforcement drive before she was against it
As our colleague Chris Stein reports, congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, released a campaign ad recorded outside the White House in which she told Donald Trump that some of his “immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” and warned him that he is alienating Hispanics who supported him in 2024.
Salazar is facing a tough re-election fight in a Miami-area district that is nearly three-quarters Hispanic, where recent polling shows her tied with her Democratic challenger Eliott Rodriguez, a former television news anchor.
Democrats responded to the ad by casting doubt on Salazar’s apparent break with Trump over immigration enforcement.
On social media, the Democratic party’s main account shared video of the congresswoman telling NBC News in April: “we have to fund ICE and DHS – ICE and Border Patrol.”
“Don’t fall for her lies. María Elvira Salazar has stood with ICE every step of the way,” the Democrats said in a caption to the clip of her April remarks supporting ICE funding.
Salazar was speaking at the time about the ultimately successful Republican effort to pass a $70bn bill to fund Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants through the end of his term.
When that funding bill narrowly passed the House in June, in a 214-212 vote, Salazar cast a crucial vote in favor of the measure to allocate $38bn to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), $26bn to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and $5bn more to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through September 2029.
Aaron Fritschner, an aide to Democratic congressman Don Beyer, commented on Salazar’s criticism of Trump’s immigration crackdown: “Salazar is correct about this but she is saying it to Trump in a campaign ad for her reelection after silently empowering harm and suffering for two years and voters aren’t going to be fooled about what she is doing or why she’s doing it”.
Here’s where things stand this afternoon:
A federal judge issued an order requiring the Trump administration to give notice before making any major changes to Kennedy Center. The order, the judge said, was meant to avoid confusion after the Kennedy Center abruptly closed on Wednesday, raising fears Trump would follow through on threats to demolish the building if he couldn’t put his name on it.
Canada’s Prime Minister welcomed an offer for closer ties with the EU, a proposal that drew Trump’s anger. The proposal — first made yesterday by the president of the European Commission — would see Canada granted a first-of-its-kind “associated member status,” an announcement that surprised European leaders and provoked President Trump to threaten new tariffs on the continent. Carney, giving remarks to European lawmakers gathered in France, seemed open to the plan in substance, and outlined places Canada and Europe could deepen ties, while those between Canada and its southern neighbor looked increasingly frayed.
A Republican congresswoman publicly rebuked Trump on his immigration policy. María Elvira Salazar, a GOP congresswoman, made a stark break with the president in a new ad asking him to rein in the excesses of his mass deportation campaign, which she said had left Hispanic Trump voters feeling “betrayed.” Salazar is fighting for reelection in a heavily Hispanic district that was once safe Trump territory, but that has since started looking competitive.
RFK Jr. headlined a gathering of anti-vaccine advocates in Washington, D.C. Children’s Health Defense, the organisation Kennedy led before becoming Health and Human Services secretary, welcomed its former leader back for an event in Washington, D.C. During his remarks, Kennedy touted how he was wielding his agency’s power to advance the movement’s goals from inside the federal government.
Facing backlash, the White House withdrew Trump’s pick to lead ICE. The former nominee, Lance Schroyer, was a former Oklahoma state trooper and onetime security guard for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. He’d faced pushback for not having any experience in the agency he had been put forth to run, during perhaps the most contentious period in its history.
Trump spoke with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday as the two countries eye an end to long-simmering trade disputes, Politico reported on Thursday. A US official who spoke to the outlet described the call as “constructive.”
The US and Mexico have been trying to hammer out disputes surrounding the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the North American trade pact Trump spearheaded in his first term but that he has since tried to revise.
Judge orders Kennedy Center to give 30-day notice before any major renovations… or demolition
Not long after President Trump threatened to tear down the Kennedy Center unless his administration is allowed to slap his name on it, a federal judge on Thursday ordered him to hit the brakes.
The order from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper mandated that the Kennedy Center tip off the public at least 30 days before making any significant changes to the structure – such as demolishing it.
The center is currently closed due to what its Trump-backed leadership calls safety issues caused by age and structural deficiencies.
But opponents fear that closing the center is a pretext for its demolition, or retaliation for Trump not being allowed to follow through on a plan for renovations that would see his name added to former President John F. Kennedy’s on the building’s facade.
Trump has done a lot to stoke those anxieties recently. In addition to his recent remarks, the president was photographed on Air Force One reviewing what appeared to be plans for the center’s demolition.
Facing backlash, the White House withdraws Trump’s pick to lead ICE
The White House on Thursday announced that it had withdrawn its nomination for Lance Schroyer, who President Trump had picked months earlier to serve as the new head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A former Oklahoma state trooper, Schroyer faced criticism for his apparent lack of formal experience working in ICE. His greatest connection to the agency appeared to be his previous stint on the security detail of Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary Trump chose to replace the ousted Kristi Noem.
A White House statement announcing the withdrawal of Schroyer’s nomination gave no reason for the move.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary and a longtime champion of the anti-vaccine movement, on Thursday addressed Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy organization he ran for years.
On stage at the organization’s event in Washington D.C., Kennedy touted his efforts to bring his agency’s force to bear on vaccines and processed food.
“For many years, you’ve asked questions from outside the government, as I did,” Kennedy said in a meandering hour-and-a-half-long speech. “And now I have the privilege and the responsibility of leading the department that can put the full weight of the federal government behind answering those questions.”
He continued: “That’s what this department has done for the past 19 months, under my leadership, and under the leadership of President Trump.”
Kennedy reassured the audience that he would continue to represent their interests, and that they “have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House.” He touched only once on the measles outbreak that recently killed four people in Pennsylvania, arguing that Americans should care about children “who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries” as much as those who die of infectious diseases.
Jon Kyl, a longtime Republican congressman from Arizona, died on Thursday, his family said in a statement.
Over three decades in Congress – first as a member of the House of Representatives, and later of the Senate – Kyl established himself as a quiet titan of Arizona politics. His family attributed his cause of death to complications from a neurological disease.
Kyl announced in a statement late last year that he would be withdrawing from public life after being “diagnosed with a neurological disease manifesting as dementia.”
“We know that Jon belonged to all of Arizona, a state he loved and explored with vigor, curiosity, and wonder,” Kyl’s family said in the statement. “Serving his state and nation in Congress was a privilege and responsibility he honored and respected. We are grateful for his full and meaningful public life.”
Kyl first joined the House of Representatives in 1987, an office he held before winning election to the Senate in 1995. He held his Senate seat until his retirement 2013, briefly returning by appointment in 2018 after the death of fellow Arizona senator John McCain.
Melody Schreiber
Representative Thomas Massie opened with a joke about his colleague’s return to Congress: “Senator [Mitch] McConnell has inspired my latest bill. It’s a term limit bill called Three Strokes and You’re Out,” he said.
“Some people try to say that I’m not effective enough up here. I’m so effective they had to take two and a half weeks off of the calendar to stop me,” Massie said. He said he’s calling the unexpected House recess “the Hegseth Holiday” because he’s unable to introduce articles of impeachment against the US defense secretary until after the midterms.
Massie says he called a newly elected Trump to ask him for the agriculture secretary position. Referring to RFK Jr, Trump asked, “Are you friends with Bobby? Is he too much for HHS? Don’t you think we need some vaccines?” Massie recounted.
House Republican releases campaign ad critical of Trump’s immigration policies
Chris Stein
A Republican congresswoman has released a campaign ad criticizing Donald Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement, in the latest sign that a key plank of the president’s 2024 re-election campaign has become a liability for his congressional allies ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“Mr President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Florida’s María Elvira Salazar says in a 30-second ad. “In July, 50% of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy.”
Salazar represents a competitive Miami-area district that is nearly three-quarters Hispanic, and where Trump won by a 15-point margin two years ago after a campaign in which he promised to carry out “mass deportations”. While his administration has implied that those targeted would be undocumented immigrants who committed crimes in the United States, in reality, a substantial portion of the people arrested since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 have no criminal record.
Salazar won re-election by a 20-point margin in 2024, but this year is facing a significant challenge from Eliott Rodriguez, the Democratic nominee and a former television news anchor. A poll conducted for his campaign late last month found him tied with Salazar.
“The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” Salazar said in the ad. “You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism. I’m not talking about giving them amnesty. I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land.”
Salazar’s ad is the latest instance of Republican lawmakers seeking to put distance between themselves and Trump before the 3 November elections, in which Democrats are vying to take back both the House and Senate. With gas prices high due to the war with Iran and Trump’s public approval low – including on key issues like handling of immigration – Democrats increasingly believe their candidates are competitive even in heavily Republican seats.
Kennedy Center says building closed temporarily due to ‘acute risks to public safety’
A top official at the Kennedy Center said that he closed the institution temporarily due to “acute risks to public safety resulting from continued structural deterioration” of the aging building.
Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer, said in a federal court filing seen by the Associated Press that the building will be closed for at least seven days to “assess existing safety risks in those portions of the main building exhibiting severe structural deterioration”.
The temporary closure, which occurred without notice yesterday, is separate from a vote on Tuesday by the Kennedy Center’s Trump-picked board to close the performing arts center indefinitely for repairs.
It was based on an inspection of the roof terrace canopy and a partial ceiling collapse earlier this month, Floca said. The closure may be extended after evaluation next week, he said.
The announcement of the closure came in response to a court case filed by Democratic congresswoman, Joyce Beatty, who is a trustee and sought an emergency court hearing to prevent what she called the building’s “unlawful closing’.
Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board, has led efforts to block Donald Trump’s name from being added to the facade of the building. Beatty told MSNOW she had a verbal confrontation with the president on Tuesday during a virtual board meeting.
The Trump-aligned board, chaired by the president, voted to close the center after a federal judge blocked the institution from returning Trump’s name to the building.
Trump, who was named the Kennedy Center’s chairman last year by loyalists on the board, said yesterday that his efforts to restore the aging building deserve recognition, “because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down. It’s in very, very bad shape, very dangerous shape.”
Congress has allocated $257m to cover the repairs, but Trump said they only would happen if the board was permitted to move forward with plans to add his name to the building.
Anti-vaccine advocates take victory lap ahead of address from RFK Jr. in D.C.
Melody Schreiber
As the death toll from the worst measles outbreak in decades mounts, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is headlining the Washington, D.C., conference of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, which he led for nearly two decades.
Longtime anti-vaccine activists celebrated their unprecedented role in the national conversation, at times expressing astonishment over the ways anti-vaccine sentiment has been elevated to the highest levels of the US government.
Kennedy, now serving as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), brings unusual attention to the conference, said Mary Holland, current CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD). “We have an opportunity today to speak to our colleagues and our friends in mainstream media,” she said at the event on Thursday.
The organization laid out its policy agenda, including plans to challenge state-level immunization requirements for school attendance, to recruit younger people to the aging organization, and to combat the installation of cell phone towers for fears of 5G and 6G.
“Never, never surrender,” said Andrew Wakefield, a former gastroenterologist whose medical license was revoked after he was found to have fabricated research indicating a link between vaccines and autism.
Recent polling suggests that one-quarter of Americans now have doubts about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines following a years-long campaign against immunizations by once-fringe actors. But the majority of Americans also disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the widening measles outbreak, which killed three people in Texas and Arizona last year and four people in Pennsylvania recently.
Being called the “largest anti-vaccine conference, probably in the world” is “a red badge of courage,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin. Johnson and Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, rehashed grievances over the Covid pandemic and the immunizations that were rapidly deployed to stem the tide of illness and death.
Paul repeated incorrect statements that only elderly people died from Covid, but he also suggested that deaths among those who were “thin and healthy” may have been attributed to genetic factors, proposing genetic testing to determine vulnerabilities. “There probably is in all likelihood some genotype that predisposes you to this,” Paul theorized. “If you could go in and figure out a genetic test — those are the things we should be looking for.”
Anti-vaccine activists became nervous earlier this year after the White House reportedly put the kibosh on speaking about vaccines before the US midterm elections. “February, March, April, May, vaccine reform got a little quiet, a little scary. You know, behind the scenes, we’re like, “Yeah, what happened?” said Michael Kane, CHD’s director of advocacy. He praised Rand Paul for bringing the anti-vaccine conversation back to the national stage.
Kane urged attendees to comment on the proposed HHS changes to the way it recommends vaccines, which experts say could sow confusion and chaos. “As we’re turning the corner and looking at the midterm elections, and this is now top priority — I mean, sometimes I gotta pinch myself,” Kane said. “Just a few years ago, we were the, you know, hated stepchild in the corner… Now we are a national movement that isn’t going anywhere.”
A Senate panel on Thursday voted in favor of President Trump’s pick to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, advancing him to face a vote by the full chamber, Reuters reported.
If his nomination clears the Senate, Brian Johnson – an executive for the banking giant Capital One – would become the head of an agency charged with protecting American consumers from abuses in the financial sector.
