Bill Cassidy offered jabs to thousands of inmates at Louisiana's maximum-security prison in the early 2000s. A decade before that, he set up vaccine clinics in middle schools, a model hailed nationally as a success.

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Today, a year after now-Sen. Cassidy warily cast the vote that ensured Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s ascension to that role, the Louisiana Republican's life's work -- in medicine and in politics -- is unraveling.

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Last year, on the day Kennedy was sworn in a thousand miles away in Washington, Louisiana's health department stopped promoting vaccines, halting its clinics and advertising. Its communications about an ongoing whooping cough outbreak in the state have nearly ceased. It took months for the state to announce last year that two infants had died from the illness. A Louisiana child's death from the flu was confirmed this January, and a couple of cases of measles were reported last year.

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Pew asks an interesting question:

Americans are more likely than people in other countries surveyed in 2025 to question the morality of their fellow countrymen, according to Pew Research Center surveys in 25 countries.

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country.

In nearly all countries surveyed, more people say that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality.

The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).

Because we have never asked this question before, we don't know whether a majority of Americans have long held a skeptical view of the ethics of fellow Americans, or if it's something new - and if so, what's driving it. But partisan politics appear to play a role.

Yeah, I'd say so. And one of the parties is led by a man whose entire political career was built on grievance and hate for anyone who doesn't lick his boots, using crude insults and endless threats against them. He governs as the president of only his own followers and punishes those who aren't. So this makes perfect sense.

Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%).

That's because it's true. They elected a criminal to the presidency knowing exactly what he did and they didn't care. That's immoral. Sorry.

Yesterday, DOJ released the three interview reports from a woman who alleged she was abused by Donald Trump that it had previously withheld.

As NPR notes, DOJ is still withholding a number of materials (notes from her interviews and, far more importantly, details about the handling of the interview) relating to the accusation. That matters because, it is now clear, DOJ withheld -- and is still withholding -- the originals of the interview reports.

And that matters given the timeline of the accusations and the fact that, just days before Epstein suicided, the victim claimed Epstein and Trump spoke about blackmail.

Here's what the timeline looks like:

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This is a story about a song.

Six years ago, seventeen-year-old Finn Rooney killed himself in his home in Walden, Vermont. A couple days later, his community held a bonfire in the parking lot of Hazen Union High school in Hardwick. Hundreds of people came. Tom Gilbert, who organized the bonfire, asked his friend Heidi Wilson to write a song for the occasion. The song was called Hold On. She made sure it was a song everyone could sing. And they did.

Now people are singing this song all over the world. People in Minneapolis have been singing it to ICE agents. They're singing it for their neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses. They're singing it in Wales and Australia and Ireland in solidarity with the people of Minneapolis. Peole are singing it all over, to give each other some comfort and some courage.

This is a story about where that song came from and where it's gone.

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A worker inspecting equipment at the Huitengliang wind farm in Xilin Gol League, Inner Mongolia, China, on 17 January 2025
Photograph: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

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Wind turbines stand on the mountain peak at Niushou Mountain Wind Farm in Qingtongxia City on 2 January 2026
Photograph: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

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Is this an American war? It surely is, in the sense that Americans will bear some of its consequences. And it surely is, in that American voters are among its causes, having brought Donald Trump to power. But in its causes and in its purposes, one sees very little that connects directly with the people or the institutions of the United States of America.

If we examine the origins, or what we can discern of them, we get an inkling of something rather different: a closed domain of international oligarchs, exploiting the state's power and patriotic sentiment, while creating a world order in which the American state is much weaker, or simply ceases to function. An oligarchical corridor.

Is the war American in its origins? Can we find the genesis of Trump's war against Iran in the United States? There is of course a domestic politics to the war. Trump has already telegraphed that he wants to exploit this war to try to fix ("federalize" ) the elections of November 2026, and preserve his power with artificial majorities of supine Republicans. But that would work with any war. And, for all we know, by the summer or autumn Trump may well have moved on to another war in Cuba, or yet another one after that.

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary, ICE Barbie cosplayer, luxe air travel enthusiast, and future defendant on a fuckton of human rights violation charges Kristi Noem is out, promotefired suddenly today by Donald Trump for we don't even know what real reasons. (She got beat up on TV, by Republicans/she said Trump Himself personally okayed $200 million in "Make Kristi Great Again" Super Bowl ads, take your pick but it's one of those.)

In Trump I, everybody was fired or quitting all of the time -- Trump had, at last count in our heads at the moment, 147 attorneys general -- but in this somehow worser term, Trump has declined to can even the most embarrassing fucknozzles, so as not to give the media "a scalp." Somehow Kristi Noem failed to clear the bar, which was under the ground, and so she is cut.

Noem will leave DHS at the end of the month. Perhaps she will take a few more field trips to personally stand in front of scary shaved-headed tattooed inmates in El Salvador (who actually weren't actually any of our deportees, not that that matters) or to rappel from a helicopter to bash in every door in an apartment building, no warrants required, and put every resident -- citizen and immigrant, grownup and child alike -- zip tied onto a bus. Fuck if we know why that never made the NYT or WaPo front pages.

She is to be replaced, if Trump gets his request (he presumably will!), by Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who may have secured the job this week when he pretended to know all about War Things like what does war smell like and what does war taste like. Mullin, a wealthy plumbing contractor, has never served in any branch of the military or seen combat, but he's already demonstrating he has the flair for military cosplay that made Noem so qualified for her job.

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Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced a new bill that would make this country a much nicer place for everyone to live, at the expense of taxing billionaires 5 percent a year -- an amount that, as billionaires, they could not possibly miss or even notice is gone.

Now, I think this is a pretty great idea. In fact, I think it should be more than that -- both because we need it to fund our country and take care of our people, and because, at a certain point, all that is left to buy for these people is power that no individual person should have.

But over at Fortune magazine, they have a slightly different take, as you may be able to surmise from the headline "Bernie Sanders' billionaire tax would soak about 900 people to fund $3,000 checks for the middle class."

You know, they tried so hard -- what with the "soak" and all -- but it still does not quite tug at one's heartstrings the way I imagine they intended. Largely because of the whole "$3000 check" thing.

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Unsurprisingly, the editorial board of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, which is now fully in its Breitbart era, was even more critical of the bill, which they hilariously claim "would strangle America's golden goose."

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Two weeks ago, British police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Four days later, they arrested Peter Mandelson on the same charge. Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister who ran both the Nobel Committee and the Council of Europe, is under investigation. Miroslav Lajčák, the former president of the UN General Assembly, is under investigation. French prosecutors opened a probe into former culture minister Jack Lang. Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway is facing scrutiny over hundreds of emails she exchanged with Epstein.

Across the Atlantic, the response from the United States government has been virtually nothing, and the reason for that silence is the story I am about to tell you.

If you have been following my work, you know why I think that is. Last month I published a piece connecting Jared Kushner to Jeffrey Epstein through Deutsche Bank. I showed you how prosecutors asked about merging those investigations one month after Epstein died, how the compliance officer who flagged both accounts was fired, how the banker who oversaw the overlap was found hanged while the FBI was trying to interview him, and how 102 politically exposed persons were hidden inside Deutsche Bank's system by a single employee and never identified.

Since then I have kept digging and what I found is bigger than Deutsche Bank and Kushner. If the connections suggested in these documents hold, the implications would rank among the most significant national security story in modern American history.

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Recently-revealed notebooks belonging to a late paleontologist contain the missing information needed to help researchers finish their study of a remarkable fossil discovered nearly three decades ago.

In 1999, Dr. Richard Kohler found the fossil fish during a research trip to Pitt Island, in the Chatham Islands. He saw the three-dimensionally preserved, mummified fossil in an almost unreachable section of cliff above Waihere Bay, on the western coast of the island.

Kohler walked 3 km back to his accommodation in Flowerpot Bay to borrow a ladder and returned to the area to carefully retrieve the fossil in several large and very heavy blocks. Back in Dunedin, he took the fossil to the University of Otago's Department of Geology where Emeritus Professor Daphne Lee says she and the late Professor Ewan Fordyce were "suitably impressed" by the find.

"It was quite unlike any other fish fossil known from Aotearoa New Zealand," Lee says.

The late Dr Richard Kohler points to a fossil fish he found on Pitt Island. The fossil is the subject of a new research paper. Credit: University of Otago

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