mastodon 4.7.3+vivaldimodStudied desert ecology & botany in college many many years ago.
He “knows how to wind people up like Trump”, according to friends, and made his name in the UK with zany policy ideas including making the country sunnier using state-owned cloud busters.
Now the controversial strategist Steve Hilton, named the “pint-sized Rasputin” of Conservative politics, has become an unlikely frontrunner in the primary race for California governor.
His rhetorical flair remains familiar – credited with coming up with the “hug a hoodie” campaign for David Cameron’s government, Hilton is now claiming that a vote for him will make California “Califordable”.
The leading "Scientist" urging policymakers not to criminalize Kratom, a substance that has left a trail of death and addiction around the world, has routinely failed to disclose longstanding financial ties to the industry’s most powerful lobbying group, ProPublica has found.
University of Florida professor Christopher McCurdy has accepted travel reimbursements, donations to his university’s foundation and funding for an annual symposium on research into the leaf’s medicinal potential from the American Kratom Association — none of which has been disclosed in his conflict of interest statements or on the papers he publishes.
OTD 1943, Eight German Junkers Ju 88s shot down British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 over the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Spain and France, killing actor Leslie Howard and several other notable passengers. [Wikipedia]
Happy Pride Month to all. 🎉
An 18-year-old man has been charged with four misdemeanors after allegedly pulling down a trans woman’s skirt and underwear in the middle of Ohio’s Cedar Point amusement park on Tuesday evening.
When Cincinnati-based pharmaceutical company William S. Merrell applied for Food and Drug Administration approval for a German-made sedative in late 1960, it expected the application to sail through the process and be on store shelves in time for Christmas.
The drug, thalidomide, was not approved that year or the next. A persistent medical reviewer at the FDA kept the drug from being approved for general use. Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey's actions fundamentally changed the agency's testing and approval process, leading to the robust regulations that exist today.
President John F. Kennedy publicly praised Kelsey for sparing "us this terrible human tragedy which has been visited on families in Germany."
Except that wasn't entirely true...
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/26/nx-s1-5979047/us-thalidomide-survivors-want-recognition-government
#Thalidomide #BirthDefects #WilliamS.Merrell #pharmaceutical
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to have violated federal ethics law in significant ways when filing recent disclosures of his assets and liabilities, creating confusion about his net worth and holdings, a review by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.
Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, reported owning seven homes but said he earned no income from any. Yet all but one was listed for rent during the reporting periods, and some current residents and neighbors at those addresses confirmed that the properties were rented, the news organizations found. Receiving income and not reporting it is a violation of federal disclosure law, three ethics experts said.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ken-paxton-senate-financial-disclosures-ethics-law
#USA #Texas #paxton #FederalEthics #$$$
In September of 2024, during a Presidential Debate watched by roughly seventy million Americans, the man who is now president again looked into a camera and said that Immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating the pets of the people who lived there. “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said, with the specific gravity of a man reading a caption off a meme he did not personally verify, because that is exactly what he was doing.
https://hrnews1.substack.com/p/springfields-decline-started-long
#SpringfieldOhio #USA #WorkingClass #rich #wealthy #lies #trump #vance
