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His attacks have grown more sweeping, with Kennedy suggesting he will clear out "entire departments" at FDA, including the agency's food and nutrition center. The program is responsible for preventing foodborne illness, promoting health and wellness, reducing diet-related chronic disease and ensuring chemicals in food are safe.

If confirmed, Kennedy in principle could overturn almost any FDA decision. There have been rare cases of such decisions in previous administrations. Under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, HHS overruled FDA approval decisions on the availability of emergency contraceptives.

Unwinding FDA regulations or revoking approval of longstanding vaccines and drugs would likely be more challenging. FDA has lengthy requirements for removing medicines from the market, which are based on federal laws passed by Congress. If the process is not followed, drugmakers could bring lawsuits that would need to work their way through the courts.

Kennedy, who has said "there's no vaccine that is safe and effective," would be in charge of appointments to the committee of influential panel experts who help set vaccine recommendations to doctors and the general public. Those include polio and measles given to infants and toddlers to protect against debilitating diseases to inoculations given to older adults to protect against threats like shingles and bacterial pneumonia as well as shots against more exotic dangers for international travelers or laboratory workers.

— "We need to act fast," Kennedy was reported to have said during an a Scottsdale, Arizona event over the weekend. "So that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave." [...] Kennedy wants half of the NIH budget to go toward "preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September. "In the current system, researchers don't have enough incentive to study generic drugs and root-cause therapies that look at things like diet."

Kennedy has not focused as much on the agency that spends more than $1.5 trillion yearly to provide health care coverage for more than half of the country through Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act. [...] Instead, he's been an outspoken opponent of Medicare or Medicaid covering expensive weight-loss drugs, like Ozempic or Zepbound. Those drugs are not widely covered by either program, but there's some bipartisan support in Congress to change that.

In its new lawsuit, Ben & Jerry's says that Unilever has breached the terms of the 2022 settlement, which has remained confidential. As part of the agreement, however, Unilever is required to "respect and acknowledge the Ben & Jerry's independent board's primary responsibility over Ben & Jerry's social mission," according to the lawsuit.

But, according to the lawsuit, "Ben & Jerry's has on four occasions attempted to publicly speak out in support of peace and human rights. Unilever has silenced each of these efforts."

According to its website, AWSN will be available in 65 countries and will be dedicated exclusively to women’s sports featuring some of the world’s largest sports leagues, such as the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), The International Basketball Federation (FIBA), the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL).

On a mission to increase representation while filling a gap in global broadcasting, Goldberg partnered with CommonSpirit and Jungo TV to co-found the network. Inspired by her childhood passion for sports, the entertainer says AWSN has been 16 years in the making.

Sue Gordon, who served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence — the nation’s top career intelligence post — shared her big concern: What if America just doesn’t meet the moment? What if, coming out of the pandemic, America just fails to step up as great powers, adversary nations, partisan polarization, and rising income inequality upends the global system that has kept watch for 80 years? “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

As I wrote then, “There are massive economic, societal and security benefits that come from being the world’s leading superpower. What happens if we’re not anymore? Imagine a U.S. that doesn’t attract top talent. What if the next great innovations happen in Europe or Asia instead of Silicon Valley? What if Chinese venture capitalists get first crack at the hottest deals in the world?”

Hundreds of Bethesda video game workers, who work on titles like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls, are going on strike across the country. Workers in Maryland and Texas are walking off the job, claiming that the company has failed to address their remote work concerns at the bargaining table, and has begun outsourcing quality assurance work without the union's agreement.

The union is looking to limit the percentage of quality assurance testers the company outsources in comparison to the number of full-time workers present in its bargaining unit. It would not share details on where Microsoft has chosen to outsource labor to.

The union is also seeking a more flexible remote work policy. ZeniMax workers are currently required to go to the office twice a week, and many, the union says, are being denied their remote work requests. Eichner says that the company has repeatedly ignored the union's remote work proposal.

While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology into this, everybody is affected by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy, because everybody is using technology, all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse. This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising.

Our phones are beset with notifications trying to "growth-hack" us into doing things that companies want, our apps full of microtransactions, our websites slower and harder-to-use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to somebody who dared to consume their content for free. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds with AI-generated slop because despite being the customer, we are also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more, our dating apps have become vehicles for private equity to add a toll to falling in love, our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam — both in our emails and on our phones — and at this point in our lives we're probably agreed to 3 million pages worth of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit.

And these are issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts (three spam calls, two spam texts), we look at our bank balance (two-factor authentication check), we read the news (a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it, or a login screen because we got logged out somehow), we check social media (after being shown an ad every two clicks), and then we log onto Slack (and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications appear).

Modern existence has become engulfed in sludge, the institutions that exist to cut through it bouncing between the ignorance of their masters and a misplaced duty in objectivity, our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world interfered with by powerful forces that are too-often left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack from applications, websites and devices that are built to make us do things rather than operate with the dignity and freedom that much of the internet was founded upon.

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The result is a landmark win for local climate advocates, most notably outgoing Governor Jay Inslee, who helped establish the climate program in the first place and has been among those leading the campaign to keep it.

“Washingtonians said loud and clear that they value clean air and clean water — and they don’t want to go backwards,” Inslee said in a press release reacting to the election results. “We also send a message around the country about what is possible for smart climate action that invests in communities.” Along with environmental groups, many big businesses in the state, including oil major BP Plc, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., pushed to defeat the measure.