Fake fake fake fake.

A US government report on children’s health cited “totally fabricated” studies to back up its findings, academics wrongly listed as the authors of those studies have said.

First released on 22 May, the report detailed causes of a “chronic disease crisis” among children in the US. An amended version was issued on 29 May after digital outlet NOTUS found it had used seven non-existent sources.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there were “formatting issues” and the report would be updated, but it did “not negate the substance of the report”.

Uh, no, citing sources that don’t exist is not a “formatting issue” – and citing sources that don’t exist very much does negate … Read the rest

Hmmm. Who is really biased and abusing power?

A federal appeals court on Thursday granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a lower-court ruling that struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration had earlier told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that it would seek “emergency relief” from the Supreme Court as soon as Friday if the tariff ruling [were] not quickly put on pause.

The judgment issued Wednesday night by the U.S. Court of International Trade is “temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers,” the appeals court said in its order.

…

The three-judge trade court panel — which included a

Guest post by Ryan Richter

At this point I hope we have all imagined the possibility of a future with economic prosperity and without fossil carbon-based motor fuels. You can use electricity and renewable sources for most things. OK, but what about everything else? Motor fuels and fossil carbon electricity generation aren’t the whole story by a long shot. There’s steel and aliminum, oh and also cement. And then there’s organic chemistry more generally – can’t you do that without burning the oil? Well, no, not today you can’t. This is what I want to take the knife to. We have the tools, but I don’t hear many people talking about how to really use them to full effect.

I’m … Read the rest

Paul Krugman is verklempt.

It will take me a while to digest this:

Quoting from the NY Times article then commenting:

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding in two cases that he vastly overstepped his ability to issue those expansive duties under federal law.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump in his campaign to strike a series of agreements that reorient the nation’s trading relationships, setting up a legal fight that could soon reach the Supreme Court.

The cases centered on the president’s use of a 1977 federal

A fool named Kate Nash lectures JK Rowling and the rest of us on feminism.

Germ, a spoken word track, consists of a repeated declaration that an unnamed “girl” is “exclusionary, regressive, misogynist” for raising concerns about transgender issues.

Nash has said it is transphobic to exclude trans women from female-only lavatories and sports, and declared in the track that she had “never felt threatened by a trans person”.

The track appears to reference the Harry Potter author posing with a cigar to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are legally male.

It states: “you can call a cigar a cigar” but “a cigar cannot be compared to a human being can it, you f—ing idiot”.

Jolyon telling us what feminism is and what we must do and when we must shut up.

"It is the responsibility of a feminist to be progressive, to learn from previous waves but to always be pushing towards a new one.

“Feminism must be intersectional. Feminism must not be used to bully and berate both cis women and trans people.” https://t.co/br8L9OHsuJ

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) May 28, 2025

… Read the rest

Who gets to define an emergency? Why, Donald Trump, of course. No one understands emergencies the way Donald Trump understands emergencies.

The Trump administration blamed “activist judges” on Thursday for blocking Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs as it looks to overturn a major legal blow to the president’s signature economic policy.

On Wednesday a US trade court ruled Trump’s tariffs regime was illegal, in a dramatic twist that could block the US president’s controversial global trade policy.

The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on the president’s whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.

Tariffs typically need to

Some men refuse to take no for an answer.

Imane Khelif is preparing to return to competitive women’s boxing in Eindhoven next month, threatening another major international controversy in a sport still reeling from the Algerian’s gold medal at the Paris Olympics.

Promoting this year’s Eindhoven Box Cup, Dutch organisers have released a poster declaring: “Proud that Imane Khelif is there again to defend her title.”

Don’t be. Enabling a man to cheat his way into a women’s match is not something to be proud of. And it’s his title he’s “defending” aka stealing.

While Khelif has made dramatic legal threats against Elon Musk and JK Rowling, accusing them of “cyberbullying” for their comments on the gender row,

The Telegraph informs us:

Kate Nash has taken an apparent swipe at JK Rowling in a new pro-trans single. Germ, a spoken word track, consists of a repeated declaration that an unnamed “girl” is “exclusionary, regressive, misogynist” for raising concerns about transgender issues.

Nash has said it is transphobic to exclude trans women from female-only lavatories and sports, and declared in the track that she had “never felt threatened by a trans person”.

And as we all know, if one person has never felt threatened by X, that is irrefutable proof that X is safe for everyone on the planet. There’s a bear racing toward you looking hungry, but don’t worry, I don’t feel threatened by that bear, … Read the rest

Aw look at Jolyon telling us how to feminist.

A classic from The Boys’ Book of Feminism.… Read the rest

Trump fires all the historians.

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.

President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.

These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.

The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since.

Later accusations that the documentation was partisan

Golly. I just cast my tiny vote in this and thus got to see the vote count, which is 96% Yes.

VOTE: Should biological male athletes be banned from competing in women’s sports?

See also: lions and tigers should be banned from kindergartens. … Read the rest

When it becomes too obvious that climate change is real, the thing to do is say we can’t do anything about it.

The world is facing a new form of climate denial – not the dismissal of climate science, but a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis, the president of global climate talks has warned.

André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct this year’s UN summit, Cop30, believes his biggest job will be to counter the attempt from some vested interests to prevent climate policies aimed at shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing.

Sort of the way you want to prevent firefighters from … Read the rest

Bad Kennedy informs us that all the scientific journals are “corrupt” and it’s only the fake ones that are any good, so he’ll be the all-fake boss of Medicare and the rest of it.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he may bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, instead proposing the creation of “in-house” publications by his agency —the latest in the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific institutions.

“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast. He also described the journals as being under

Men in women’s toilets: yes or no?

Murdo Fraser sees lawsuits in the future.

The announcement last week from the author JK Rowling that she has established a women’s fund to support legal cases for women who wish to protect their sex-based rights should be causing sleepless nights for Scottish Government ministers, and for the finance directors of public bodies such as local authorities and NHS boards.

All these organisations are now at risk of litigation which could see extensive payouts of taxpayers’ cash to women whose rights have been denied. Rowling’s generosity is entirely in character with her robust stance in speaking up for women who have suffered discrimination because of their gender-critical views.

This latest initiative will

NPR is suing.

National Public Radio on Tuesday sued President Donald Trump over his executive order to cease all federal funding for the nonprofit broadcaster.

Trump’s May 1 order violates the First Amendment’s protections of speech and the press and steps on Congress’ authority, NPR and three other public radio stations wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C.

The order “also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information,” according to the legal complaint against Trump and a handful of top officials and federal agencies.

NPR and three of its member stations — Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio and KSUT

It’s odd to see a human rights lawyer admitting that it didn’t occur to him to think about the trans issue from the point of view of a woman.

I am a human rights lawyer and professor at King’s College London. Until 2018, I supported all the demands of the transgender-rights movement. But since then, I have changed my mind.

Why? Because I finally understood that some demands conflict with the rights of women and are therefore unreasonable.

That’s quite the admission – that it took him a long time to realize that some trans demands conflict with women’s rights. It’s not as if we’re a tiny niche demographic, like Shaker biracial left-handed Indigenous lesbians or something. Women are … Read the rest

All the same bad stuff only much worse this time.

In President Trump’s first term, the Pentagon opposed his desire for a military parade in Washington, wanting to keep the armed forces out of politics.

But in Mr. Trump’s second term, that guardrail has vanished. There will be a parade this year, and on the president’s 79th birthday, no less.

The current plan involves a tremendous scene in the center of Washington: 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks (at 70 tons each for the heaviest in service); 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 other vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a dog.

Yay! The dictator gets to parade the … Read the rest

Imagine being an academic and seeing your union shout this:

At #UCU2025 We passed motions to reaffirm our commitment to trans rights.

We’ll keep fighting for inclusive spaces, supportive policies, and real solidarity.#TransRightsAreHumanRights #UCU2025 #UnionPower pic.twitter.com/xkamW4pnzs

— UCU (@ucu) May 25, 2025

We know that by “trans rights” they mean not the human rights that everyone has but special invented luxury rights that cancel the rights of other people, especially women. If men who call themselves women have the “right” to go everywhere women can go, then women don’t have some rights we’ve depended on for a long time. If men who call themselves women have the “right” to compete against women in sports then women lose the right … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on From the Solfatara crater.

Back in 1980, during my last year of high school, I went on a trip with a number of classmates to the eastern Mediterranean organized and chaperoned by one of our teachers. One of the last stops on the trip was Naples. The original plan was to go to Pompeii, but having arrived on a Monday, the site was closed. Plan B took us to Solfatara, which smelled of rotten eggs and featured many pools of boiling mud. The paths we walked along were roped to keep us from straying off into areas where the thin crust of rock might not have supported our weight, with … Read the rest