AFP USA

Nine former leaders of the top US health body sounded the alarm Monday about the Trump administration’s evisceration of the agency and warned that vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr is “endangering every American’s health.”The blunt guest essay in The New York Times marks the latest in snowballing attacks on the US health secretary after the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was recently fired by President Donald Trump after just weeks in her post.Susan Monarez was fired last week after clashing with RFK Jr and reportedly refusing to commit to supporting his vaccination policy changes. The ouster triggered the resignation of at least four top officials and plunged the agency deeper into chaos.”We ran the CDC: Kennedy is endangering every American’s health,” warned the opinion piece penned by nine former leaders of the historically independent agency who served under every president, Democrat or Republican, from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump.What Kennedy has done to the CDC and the nation’s public health system — “culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced,” the experts wrote.They mentioned how Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers; weakened programs aimed at protecting Americans from cancer, heart attacks and more; and, during the country’s largest measles outbreak in decades, focused on “unproven ‘treatments’ while downplaying vaccines.”He also championed federal legislation that is expected to kick millions of people off their health insurance, they said.”This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings,” said the experts, including doctor Anne Schuchat, who served as CDC acting director in Trump’s first term.The blistering criticism comes one day after Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned in protest from his role as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases after Monarez was ousted, warned that “the firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down” at the agency.Meanwhile Trump said he wants more information released publicly about the “various Covid Drugs” introduced during the pandemic.”Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree!” Trump posted on Truth Social.”With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW.”

President Donald Trump’s drive to retain control of the US Congress by rewriting the Texas electoral map is playing out in part in a largely Latino, low-income patch of Houston that smells of chemical plants and oil refineries.It’s called Manchester Park and, for decades, it has been part of District 29, which was firmly held by a Democratic lawmaker. Now, in the recent redo of the map, with which Trump’s Republicans hope to eke out five new seats to protect their slim majority in Congress, that hold is in jeopardy.People in Manchester Park live near an oil refinery and endure the pollution it spews, health risks and low-wage jobs as they go about their lives.Their Democratic representative in Congress, Sylvia Garcia, who has roots in Mexico, is popular: people see her as a champion for their cause.”She has done a lot for the community. And if they take us out of this district…” said local resident Ludivina Moreno, her voice trailing off.”We don’t know who we are going to get and if they are going to advocate for the community,” said Moreno, 46, standing in the doorway of her home.The Texas state legislature recently passed the redrawing of the electoral map — a tactic known as gerrymandering — even though Democrats tried to prevent a vote by leaving the state en masse.   Some districts that were mainly Latino or Black — and which Trump lost in the 2024 election — were broken up to dilute support for Democrats.These patches of Democratic support have been added to Republican-majority districts to help Trump’s party in next year’s mid-term elections.Specifically, the overhaul means District 29 will go from being 70-percent Latino among people of voting age to just over 40 percent, according to Cristina Morales, a Democrat who serves in the Texas state legislature.She noted, however, that turnout among this demographic was not always strong.And Manchester Park is no longer part of District 29.Morales said that the neighborhood’s residents needed representation, rather than being drowned out in the redistricting.”Having Sylvia Garcia’s voice in Congress has meant their struggles were not ignored. With the new map, Manchester Park would lose that advocacy in Washington — a devastating loss for a community that needs strong, fair representation the most,” she said.- Gerrymandering -State voting maps are usually redrawn every 10 years after a census is conducted, but it is not uncommon for political parties to attempt to gerrymander districts if they consider themselves at a political disadvantage.Both parties have engaged in the practice, although Democrats have proposed rules to restrict it nationally.Trump is facing low second-term approval ratings, as he undertakes an overhaul of large swaths of US policy, from mass deportations to sweeping trade wars.”The felon in the White House wants five more Republicans, because he knows that his policies, his ideas are not working,” US Congresswoman Garcia said of Trump.Trump was convicted in May 2024 on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to a porn star.”He knows that he has plummeted under 40 percent approval rating, and he knows that they could lose the elections next year,” she told AFP.Tommy Swate, an 80-year-old Republican who supports Trump, said he still backs Garcia as a legislator for Manchester Park.”I’ve always supported the Democrats in this district, but I’m really a Republican. But I support who I think the best person is and not what party they belong to,” he said.California, under Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, has counterattacked against the Texas redistricting move by pushing a similar drive to gain five more seats in Congress for Democrats in his state, offsetting any Republican gains.Garcia said Republican-led states like Florida, Ohio and Indiana might also be planning redistricting to help Trump.”Redistricting now has become a big power play. And the sad part is, you know, it shouldn’t be this way,” she said. “If we’re going to have changes to maps after every election, it will be chaotic.”

The videos are strikingly lifelike, featuring bikini-clad women conducting street interviews and eliciting lewd comments — but they are entirely fake, generated by AI tools increasingly used to flood social media with sexist content.Such AI slop — mass-produced content created by cheap artificial intelligence tools that turn simple text prompts into hyper-realistic visuals — is frequently drowning out authentic posts and blurring the line between fiction and reality.The trend has spawned a cottage industry of AI influencers churning out large volumes of sexualized clips with minimal effort, often driven by platform incentive programs that financially reward viral content.Hordes of AI clips, laden with locker-room humor, purport to show scantily clad female interviewers on the streets of India or the United Kingdom — sparking concern about the harm such synthetic content may pose to women.AFP’s fact-checkers traced hundreds of such videos on Instagram, many in Hindi, that purportedly show male interviewees casually delivering misogynistic punchlines and sexualized remarks — sometimes even grabbing the women — while crowds of men gawk or laugh in the background.Many videos racked up tens of millions of views — and some further monetized that traction by promoting an adult chat app to “make new female friends.”The fabricated clips were so lifelike that some users in the comments questioned whether the featured women were real.A sample of these videos analyzed by the US cybersecurity firm GetReal Security showed they were created using Google’s Veo 3 AI generator, known for hyper-realistic visuals.- ‘Gendered harm’ -“Misogyny that usually stayed hidden in locker room chats and groups is now being dressed up as AI visuals,” Nirali Bhatia, an India-based cyber psychologist, told AFP.”This is part of AI-mediated gendered harm,” she said, adding that the trend was “fueling sexism.”The trend offers a window into an internet landscape now increasingly swamped with AI-generated memes, videos and images that are competing for attention with — and increasingly eclipsing — authentic content.”AI slop and any type of unlabeled AI-generated content slowly chips away at the little trust that remains in visual content,” GetReal Security’s Emmanuelle Saliba told AFP.The most viral misogynistic content often relies on shock value — including Instagram and TikTok clips that Wired magazine said were generated using Veo 3 and portray Black women as big-footed primates. Videos on one popular TikTok account mockingly list what so-called gold-digging “girls gone wild” would do for money.Women are also fodder for distressing AI-driven clickbait, with AFP’s fact-checkers tracking viral videos of a fake marine trainer named “Jessica Radcliffe” being fatally attacked by an orca during a live show at a water park.The fabricated footage rapidly spread across platforms including TikTok, Facebook and X, sparking global outrage from users who believed the woman was real.- ‘Unreal’ -Last year, Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, found 900 Instagram accounts of likely AI-generated “models” — predominantly female and typically scantily clothed.These thirst traps cumulatively amassed 13 million followers and posted more than 200,000 images, typically monetizing their reach by redirecting their audiences to commercial content-sharing platforms.With AI fakery proliferating online, “the numbers now are undoubtedly much larger,” Mantzarlis told AFP.”Expect more nonsense content leveraging body standards that are not just unrealistic but literally unreal,” he added.Financially incentivized slop is becoming increasingly challenging to police as content creators — including students and stay-at-home parents around the world — turn to AI video production as gig work.Many creators on YouTube and TikTok offer paid courses on how to monetize viral AI-generated material on platforms, many of which have reduced their reliance on human fact-checkers and scaled back content moderation.Some platforms have sought to crack down on accounts promoting slop, with YouTube recently saying that creators of “inauthentic” and “mass produced” content would be ineligible for monetization.”AI doesn’t invent misogyny — it just reflects and amplifies what’s already there,” AI consultant Divyendra Jadoun told AFP.”If audiences reward this kind of content with millions of likes, the algorithms and AI creators will keep producing it. The bigger fight isn’t just technological — it’s social and cultural.”burs-ac/st

US President Donald Trump’s ultimate aim in sending troops to American cities is to seize control of elections in 2026, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Sunday, calling such deployments “an invasion.”Trump — who has unleashed unprecedented military patrols in Los Angeles to curb protests against his immigrant deportation drive and to Washington to combat what he deems out-of-control crime — has said he’s also considering sending troops to Baltimore, Chicago and other cities.Democrat Pritzker said there had been no effort by the Trump administration to coordinate such plans with officials in Illinois, a Democratic stronghold. The other cities Republican Trump has threatened to send troops to are also controlled by his political rivals. “He’d like to stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections. He’ll just claim that there’s some problem with an election, and then he’s got troops on the ground that can take control,” Pritzker told CBS Sunday show “Face the Nation.”The governor said any deployment of troops against his state government’s wishes would be “an invasion with US troops, if they in fact do that.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier told the network she would be adding resources to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Illinois, but that any decision to send National Guard reservists or other troops was up to Trump.If troops are sent along with ICE, “they’ll be in court pretty quickly, because that is illegal,” Pritzker said.- ‘Scaring people’ -Trump has been typically scathing in his dismissal of Pritzker’s previous criticism.”Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.”He is CRAZY!!! He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming!” CBS cited a sharp drop in crime during the ongoing troop deployment in Washington, which is in its third week. Homicides are down 41 percent, robberies 69 percent and carjacking 83 percent, the network said.CJ Jackson, a 35-year-old Chicago resident who works in a smoke shop, said a National Guard deployment in the Windy City would be “a great idea.” “We got some teenagers out of control here,” he said. “They shoot kids every day.”But 24-year-old Greta, a shop worker who did not want to give her last name, said she was “a little bit nervous” about the potential for military troops on the street.”There’s bad parts of every city… I think it’s scaring people more than it’s making people feel safe.”Trump has mentioned only Democratic-run cities in discussing potential troop deployments, despite high violent crime levels being spread across a number of cities, including in Republican-controlled Missouri, Texas and Tennessee.Asked if the president would consider sending troops to Republican-controlled cities and states, Noem said: “Absolutely. Every single city is evaluated for what we need to do there to make it safer.”

Senior experts who recently resigned in protest from the top US public health agency denounced Sunday growing politicization of the organization, warning of a breakdown in the “firewall” between science and ideology.US President Donald Trump plunged American health policy and scientific rigor deeper into crisis this past week when he fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, after less than one month on the job.Monarez had clashed with vaccine skeptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr over his vaccine policy overhaul. Vaccines are safe and effective, according to overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, but critics say the Trump administration has gone out of its way to sow doubt, especially regarding Covid-19 vaccinations.Monarez’s ouster triggered the departure of five other senior CDC officials, including Demetre Daskalakis as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.”I’ve been worried for months,” Daskalakis told the ABC News Sunday show “This Week, speaking of the impact the gutting of the historically independent CDC agency will have on public health.”The firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down,” he said.Daskalakis added that based on what he has seen since Trump’s January inauguration, and the packing of a critical immunization advisory committee with people who share Kennedy’s skepticism on vaccines, “they’re really moving in an ideologic direction, where they want to see the undoing of vaccination.”Another expert who resigned in protest, doctor Debra Houry, who served as the CDC’s chief medical officer, said she knew of no agency scientist who has briefed Kennedy since he took up his post.”I think it’s going to be very difficult to” trust the CDC moving forward, she told CNN Sunday.As for members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) set to meet in mid-September, Houry warned it will be staffed with people who are “known to be against vaccines.”Kennedy dismissed all members of the influential group and replaced them with his own nominees, in a move that sparked concern in Congress, even among Republicans.- ‘Under assault’ -Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who chairs the Senate health committee, has called for the indefinite postponement of the September 18 ACIP meeting due to a “lack of scientific process being followed.”Former CDC director Tom Frieden spoke critically of the chaos at the CDC, an institution central to improving American health outcomes for more than 80 years.”Public health is under assault,” he told CNN, pointing to Kennedy’s systematic “undermining” of vaccine infrastructure.”They’re destroying our health protections. We are less safe.”Another former CDC head, Richard Besser, said he worries Americans will be at “incredible risk” when the next health crisis strikes.”With the director being removed, senior leadership leaving, I have great fears for what will happen to this country the next time we face a public health emergency” including the next pandemic, he told ABC News.Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, who is on the health committee with Cassidy, said in a blistering opinion piece in Sunday’s New York Times that Kennedy’s “longstanding crusade against vaccines” should disqualify him from running the Department of Health and Human Services.Kennedy “is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign,” Sanders wrote.

The entire population of Gaza would be relocated and the United States would take control of the Palestinian territory under a plan being considered by the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported Sunday.The enclave reduced to rubble in Israel’s war prompted by the Hamas attack of 2023 would be transformed into a trusteeship administered by the United States for at least 10 years, the newspaper said.Another goal of the plan modeled on President Donald Trump’s stated vision of making it the “Riviera of the Middle East” is to transform Gaza — land which the Palestinians want to be part of a future state — into a tourism resort and high tech hub, said the Post, which viewed a 38-page prospectus outlining the initiative.It calls for at least temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s population of two million, either through “voluntary” departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction, the newspaper said.Gaza residents who own land would be given a digital token by the trust in exchange for the right to develop their property. Recipients can use this token to start a new life somewhere else or eventually redeem it for an apartment in one of six to eight new “AI-powered, smart cities” to be built in Gaza, according to the plan.The Post quoted people familiar with the trust’s planning and with administration deliberations over postwar Gaza.The State Department did not immediately reply to an AFP request for comment. Trump stunned the world earlier this year when he suggested the United States should take control of the Gaza Strip, clear out all its people and build seaside real estate.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the proposal, which was heavily criticized by many European and Arab states.Trump chaired a meeting last week on postwar plans for Gaza but the White House did not release a read-out afterward or announce any decisions.The body that would administer Gaza under the plan now being considered would be called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, said the Post. The Post said the proposal was developed by some of the same Israelis who created the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distributing food inside the enclave amid much criticism from aid groups and the United Nations.On July 22, the UN rights office said Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid in Gaza since the GHF started operations, nearly three-quarters of them in the vicinity of GHF sites.

Buzzy horror flick “Weapons” returned to the top of the North American box office in its fourth week of release, earning $12.4 million over the Labor Day holiday weekend, industry estimates showed Sunday.The Warner Bros. movie, starring Julia Garner and Josh Brolin, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of a group of children from the same school class.”Weapons,” which briefly ceded the top spot to Netflix’s animated hit “KPop Demon Hunters” last week, has so far made $134.6 million in the United States and Canada, according to Exhibitor Relations.In second place was the 50th anniversary re-release of Universal’s summer shark thriller “Jaws,” making $9.8 million over the Friday-to-Monday period.”Doing this kind of business, 50 years after the original release, is impressive,” said analyst David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research.”Caught Stealing,” a crime flick from Sony starring Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz, debuted in third place at $9.5 million.Disney’s “Freakier Friday,” the much-anticipated sequel to the 2003 body-swapping family film which again stars Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, came in fourth at $8.3 million.And in fifth place was Searchlight’s “The Roses,” a remake of the 1989 dark comedy “The War of the Roses” starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, at $8 million.This time, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman play the couple whose marriage descends into resentment.Rounding out the top 10 were:”The Bad Guys 2″ ($6.2 million)”The Fantastic Four: First Steps” ($6 million)”Superman” ($3.3 million)”Nobody 2″ ($2.4 million)”The Naked Gun” ($2.25 million)

Floating blue paddles dance on the waves that lap a dock in the Port of Los Angeles, silently converting the power of the sea into useable electricity.This innovative installation may hold one of the keys to accelerating a transition away from fossil fuels that scientists say is necessary if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”The project is very simple and easy,” Inna Braverman, co-founder of Israeli start-up Eco Wave Power, told AFP.Looking a little like piano keys, the floaters rise and fall with each wave. They are connected to hydraulic pistons that push a biodegradable fluid through pipes to a container filled with accumulators, which resemble large red scuba tanks. When the pressure is released, it spins a turbine that generates electrical current. If this pilot project convinces the California authorities, Braverman hopes to cover the entire 13-kilometer (eight-mile) breakwater protecting the port with hundreds of floaters that together would produce enough electricity to power 60,000 US homes.Supporters of the technology say wave energy is an endlessly renewable and always reliable source of power.Unlike solar power, which produces nothing at night, or wind power, which depends on the weather, the sea is always in motion.And there is a lot of it.- Tough tech – The waves off the American West Coast could theoretically power 130 million homes — or supply around a third of the electricity used every year in the United States, according to the US Department of Energy. However wave energy remains the poor relation of other, better-known renewables, and has not been successfully commercialized at a large-enough scale.The history of the sector is full of company shipwrecks and projects sunk by the brutality of the high seas. Developing devices robust enough to withstand the fury of the waves, while transmitting electricity via underwater cables to the shore, has proven to be an impossible task so far.”Ninety-nine percent of competitors chose to install in the middle of the ocean, where it’s super expensive, where it’s breaking down all the time, so they can’t really make projects work,” Braverman said.With her retractable dock-mounted device, the entrepreneur believes she has found the answer.”When the waves are too high for the system to handle, the floaters just rise to the upward position until the storm passes, so you have no damage.”The design appeals to Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.”The Achilles heel of wave energy is in the costs of maintenance and inspection,” he told AFP.”So having a device close to shore, where you can walk on a breakwater and then inspect the device, makes a lot of sense.”Sharman, who is not affiliated with the project and whose laboratory is testing various wave energy equipment, said projects tend to be suited to smaller-scale demands, like powering remote islands.”This eight-mile breakwater, that’s not a common thing. It’s a rare opportunity, a rare location where such a long wavefront is available for producing power,” he said.- AI power demand – Braverman’s Eco Wave Power is already thinking ahead, having identified dozens more sites in the United States that could be suitable for similar projects.The project predates Donald Trump’s administration, but even before the political environment in Washington turned against renewables, the company was already looking beyond the US.In Israel, up to 100 homes in the port of Jaffa have been powered by waves since December. By 2026, 1,000 homes in Porto, Portugal should be online, with installations also planned in Taiwan and India.Braverman dreams of 20-megawatt projects, a critical capacity needed to offer electricity at rates that can compete with wind power. And, she said, the installations will not harm the local wildlife.”There’s zero environmental impact. We connect to existent man-made structures, which already disturb the environment.”Promises like this resonate in California, where the Energy Commission highlighted in a recent report the potential of wave energy to help the state achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. “The amount of energy that we’re consuming is only increasing with the age of AI and data centers,” said Jenny Krusoe, founder of AltaSea, an organization that helped fund the project.”So the faster we can move this technology and have it down the coastline, the better for California.”

A US guided missile cruiser, USS Lake Erie, was seen crossing the Panama Canal from the Pacific to the Caribbean Friday night, after the Trump administration deployed warships near the coast of Venezuela.AFP journalists saw the naval vessel passing through one of the canal’s locks at around 9:30 pm (0230 GMT Saturday) and navigating east toward the Atlantic.The United States has said the deployment of warships to the southern Caribbean, near Venezuela’s territorial waters, was an anti-drug trafficking operation.”I didn’t know the ship was going to pass… I was surprised,” Alfredo Cedeno, a 32-year-old health technician, who took photos of the cruiser, told AFP.The Lake Erie had been moored for the past two days at the Port of Rodman, at the canal’s Pacific entrance.Washington has accused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of leading a drug cartel and has doubled the bounty for his capture to $50 million.The United States has, however, made no public threat to invade Venezuela.Caracas announced on Monday the deployment of 15,000 security forces to the Colombian border for anti-drug trafficking operations. A day later, Venezuela announced that it would patrol its territorial waters with drones and navy ships.Maduro also claimed to have mobilized more than four million militia members in response to US “threats.” The 567-foot-long (173 meters) USS Lake Erie displaces 9,800 tons and is based in the port of San Diego, California.