President Trump and other administration officials are tempering expectations raised of an imminent agreement to end the war in Iran while Iranian officials have signaled there are still disagreements on key issues.
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Pope Leo XIV has called for AI advances to be slowed down while blaming the technology for fueling conflict around the world.
God help me, I love a Steely Dan needle drop thrown in for absolutely no good reason.
The American Music Awards celebrate fan favorites in the music world and feature performances from multiple artists.
House and Senate Republicans were fuming as they left Washington last week for a long holiday break. The source of the torment, however, was notably different on each side of the Capitol, and the distinctions forecast a clash between the chambers when Congress returns next month. While many Senate Republicans were furious with the Trump…
My son Marcus just turned 6. He has no idea that his mother had two brain surgeries before his first birthday or that a drug, created by research funded through federal dollars now at risk, saved my life before he took his first steps. He just knows that I’m his mom. To him, that’s the way it’s always been, but to me, it feels like a miracle.
There’s a version of this story where I’m no longer here for my kids — one where the research wasn’t there when I needed it, where the funding had been cut a decade earlier and the treatment simply didn’t exist. I think about that a lot, especially now as Congress considers cutting billions of dollars from the federal agencies that make such research possible.
I’m not a scientist or a policy expert. But I understand this: The drug that kept me alive for my children was built on a foundation of public investment.
In February 2020, I was 38 years old, 22 weeks pregnant and so sick I could barely get out of bed. Two urgent care clinics sent me home. You’re just nauseous. You’re pregnant. It’s fine. After my husband drove me to the emergency room, a scan revealed a baseball-size tumor in my brain. It was Stage 4 metastatic melanoma, with spots on my lungs, pelvis and back. Doctors never found a lesion on my skin.
I was pretty sure I was going to die. I wrote letters to each of my children — including the one I was still carrying — in case I wasn’t around to tell them the things I wanted them to know. The things a mother is supposed to say in person, over the years, that I might never get the chance to say.
What followed was a blur of decisions I barely remember. Brain surgery, a C-section at 34 weeks and two weeks recovering in the hospital while my newborn son was in the neonatal intensive care unit just down the street. We named him Marcus, after the neurosurgeon who saved my life.
Unfortunately, my tumor grew back. After my second brain surgery, my oncologist told us they had identified a marker in my cancer that made me a candidate for a combination immunotherapy regimen — two drugs, given together, every three weeks. My husband’s job between infusions was to feel the tumor on my back to see if it was changing. After my first dose, he told me he couldn’t find it anymore. We both thought he was missing it.
He wasn’t.
By October 2020, eight months after my initial diagnosis and after only four drug infusions, scans showed no evidence of disease anywhere in my body. My last infusion was in August 2020, and I’ve been in remission for more than five years.
The first time I sat in that infusion center, sobbing, I was in my 30s, surrounded by mostly elderly patients. I remember thinking: “I don’t belong here. I just had a baby. I have four kids.” What I know now is that I belong to a much larger community than I had realized: a subset of young people for whom certain cancer rates are increasing and of expecting mothers who were diagnosed while they were focused on fostering new life. Perhaps most important, I’m part of a community of people who were told their odds weren’t good and who are still here because someone, somewhere, spent years in a lab making connections that made survival possible — and had the federal government funding their tireless work.
My particular immunotherapy combination was approved by the Food and Drug Administration less than 10 years before it saved my life. It stemmed from decades of federally funded research into the immune system — the kind of painstaking, long-horizon science that doesn’t make headlines.
Now that pipeline is under threat. The Trump administration has proposed cutting $6 billion from the National Institutes of Health — the country’s medical research agency — for fiscal year 2027. This is the second year in a row that the administration has put NIH funding on the chopping block. Although Congress rejected some cuts last year, the odds of winning a cancer research grant have already shifted from roughly 1 in 10 to 1 in 25. Already, NIH spending on new medical research has slowed significantly.
Nongovernmental and philanthropic organizations are helping. For example, the nonprofit Cancer Research Institute — for which I am a volunteer patient advocate — has funded immunotherapy research since its founding more than 70 years ago. Its work includes research that established the critical immune checkpoint targeted by my drug, and it has committed emergency reserve funding to keep research going. But private giving cannot replicate the scale of what federal investment makes possible.
Already, NIH spending on new medical research has slowed significantly.
I’m a pediatric occupational therapist. I manage a household with four kids, ages 6 to 14. I sing in my church choir. I’m not a scientist or a policy expert. But I understand this: The drug that kept me alive for my children was built on a foundation of public investment. Taxpayers funded the research and the clinical trials. This country made a long bet on science, and I’m alive because it paid off.
Marcus doesn’t know any of this yet. He’s 6. He just knows that I’m his mom and that I show up. Someday I’ll explain what it took to make that possible — the surgeries, the science, the researchers who worked for years hoping for one breakthrough.
What I hope I never have to tell him is that our country decided to stop funding miracles like mine.
The post Cancer nearly left my kids without a mom. Funding cuts may halt the science that saved me. appeared first on MS NOW.
With Nicolas Cage starring as the Spider, the series, available in color and in black and white, is a retro reimagining of the well-known superhero.
As election officials across the country brace for the possibility of federal agents descending on polling sites in November, a nationwide coalition of Democratic district attorneys has vowed to prosecute any federal agent suspected of intimidating voters.
The announcement, first reported by Politico, comes shortly after President Donald Trump refused to rule out sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to election sites during the midterms. “I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump told reporters earlier this month.
The coalition includes prosecutors from Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Dallas and Northern Virginia, among other jurisdictions.
“We’re ready to go,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner told MS NOW’s Chris Jansing on Thursday. “In the same way that my office and the offices of these other members of this group have successfully prosecuted civilians and also prosecuted law enforcement, we will prosecute federal agents who try to interfere with elections.”
“It’s a crime in almost every jurisdiction to engage in election interference under state law,” he added, “and they better get ready for the handcuffs and the jail cell.”
Federal law prohibits voter intimidation and interference at polling sites. Many states also have statutes that criminalize voter intimidation.
The group is part of a nationwide coalition of local prosecutors called the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, formed earlier this year to combat Trump’s executive actions.
“The right to vote without fear of armed government agents at the polls is not negotiable, and it is not subject to the whims of a president,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, another member of the coalition, said in a statement.
Last week, Moriarty charged an ICE agent with assault and filing a false report after the officer shot a Venezuelan immigrant during the height of the administration’s Operation Metro Surge.
In Virginia, newly elected Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger is also taking action. On Wednesday, she issued an executive order aimed at helping election workers respond if federal agents turn up at polling sites in her state.
Last month, after voters in Virginia approved a Democratic-backed redistricting referendum, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the election had been “rigged.”
“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA! All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’” the president wrote, adding that “Democrats eked out another crooked victory!”
Krasner called the upcoming midterms “crucial” for the future of America’s democracy and said he feared the president would use federal agents “to try some kind of coup.”
“What he’s actually talking about is an army to steal the election,” he told MS NOW. “We are not having it. This group is not having it. Our allies and friends are not having it, and most importantly, millions of Americans are not having it.”
The post Local DAs warn federal agents against showing up at polling places, threaten prosecution appeared first on MS NOW.
I set out on an epic walk to avoid writing my novel. What I discovered was lessons on creative survival, a study on modern privilege —and delightful $19 smoothies.
President Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been subtle about his indifference toward Congress’ feelings on his planned 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery. During an event in the Oval Office last week, the president told reporters he doesn’t need congressional approval to build the arch.
“We don’t need anything from Congress,” he said.
Author Charlie Sykes said he believes Trump’s disinterest in congressional approval shows there’s “a red line.”
According to Sykes, Trump’s desperate attempts to work around congressional approval show the president’s grip on his caucus — and his ability to whip them into supporting all his whims and desires — may finally be slipping.
“Members of Congress do not want to vote for the ballroom … and they sure as heck do not want to explain to their constituents why the time when we have $39 trillion in national debt, they will build an arch, which no one asked for, no one can use, and for which he’s provided really no rationale,” Sykes told told MS NOW’s Ayman Mohyeldin on Thursday on “Deadline: White House.”
Sykes, author of the Substack newsletter “To the Contrary,” said the planned arch was the very definition of a “vanity project,” telling Mohyeldin, “[If] you look in the dictionary — ‘vanity project’ — it would be Donald Trump in the middle of a war, in the middle of economic anxiety, building a 250-foot arch, which will obscure the view of Arlington National Cemetery.”
He continued, “At least the ballroom, they tried to put some lipstick on it by saying, ‘We need it for security,’ or these various other things. What the hell do you do with an arch? You know, other than basically create another monument to Donald Trump’s massive ego.”
While some Republicans in Congress may have finally found their footing to oppose Trump, Sykes told MS NOW the same can’t be said for members of his administration, who continue to serve as a rubber stamp for the president.
“You’re seeing what Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, is willing to do with the Department of Justice,” Sykes said, referring to the newly announced “anti-weaponization” fund, which could dole out millions to the president’s supporters and allies. “It’s obvious by now that the qualification for being part of any of these alleged independent agencies is not just loyalty to Donald Trump, it is a willingness to take the most egregious actions.”
“It is if Donald Trump is testing them by saying, ‘What can I get away with? What can I make you do? What will you approve?” he added.
Skyes said the fund, the ballroom and the arch all serve as proof that Trump “foresees the federal government as an extension of his own ego.”
You can watch Sykes’ full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
The post Charlie Sykes slams Trump’s arch as a monument to his ‘massive ego’ appeared first on MS NOW.
