Civil Liberties

Aaron Siri, the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — President-elect Donald Trump’s presumptive nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services — petitioned the federal government on Friday to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

Siri, a prominent conspiracy theorist like Kennedy, has already filed a petition to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines, including those that protect against hepatitis B and COVID-19.... Read Original Article

Americans spend more time on average living with diseases compared to people in other countries, according to a recent study from the American Medical Association. Published in the journal JAMA Network Open,  the retrospective study found that Americans live with diseases on average for 12.4 years. The main diseases with which individuals live long-term in the United States are mental illness, substance use disorder and musculoskeletal conditions.... Read Original Article

On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”... Read Original Article

A pair of satellites astronomers hope can create an artificial eclipse were launched from a site in India last week. Beginning in 2025, each satellite will cause a periodic eclipse that lasts for six hours, much longer than the few minutes caused by natural eclipses.

In addition to conducting this experimental maneuver, the so-called ESA’s Proba-3 mission will observe a slice of the Sun’s ethereal corona difficult to perceive from Earth.... Read Original Article

Earlier last month, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth’s average temperature in 2024 had been on average 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. This was the major threshold established in the 2015 Paris climate accord as a dangerous milestone for our species, in which temperatures are so hot, that collapse of major ocean and atmospheric systems and mass extinctions follow.... Read Original Article

The residents of a small North Carolina town are suing Duke Energy, one of the largest utilities companies in the world, for its role in contributing to climate change. In the process, they are continuing a nationwide trend of communities suing oil companies, and now utilities, for contributing to global heating.... Read Original Article

Before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became a top science adviser to Donald Trump — a once-and-future president who openly denies environmental science — the dynastic New York lawyer was such a prominent environmentalist that he literally became a “waterkeeper,” someone dedicated to conserving natural bodies of water from pollution. For more than 20 years, Kennedy helped lead the “Waterkeeper Alliance” he co-founded until leaving in 2020 to “devote himself” to vaguely defined “other issues.”... Read Original Article

Venus, the second planet from our Sun, vividly demonstrates why the greenhouse effect makes life impossible. With an average surface temperature of roughly 1000º F (500º C) under a toxic atmosphere primarily composed of thick carbon dioxide, no lifeform known to inhabit our third planet from the Sun can dwell on its neighbor.... Read Original Article

Plastic pollution is choking the planet. From the bottom of the Mariana trench to the top of Mount Everest, there is little escaping the problem. Regardless, treaty negotiations to end plastic pollution collapsed on Sunday after the event in Busan, South Korea closed without the nations firmly agreeing to put limits on plastic production.... Read Original Article