Baker Mayfield mocks Tommy DeVito's celebration as the Bucs embarrass the Giants 30-7WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a polio survivor, responded critically Friday to a report in The New York Times that a key lawyer and longtime adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. Kennedy, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has been a longtime critic of childhood vaccines and has baselessly tied widespread vaccine use to the rise in childhood autism. McConnell, who still deals with the effects of the disease as a child, said the vaccine has saved lives and any attempt to stand in the way of its availability would be a grave mistake. “The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease,” said McConnell in a statement to NBC News. “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous." According to the Times, Aaron Siri is currently an adviser to Kennedy, who is working to identify candidates to serve in federal health positions. Siri filed the petition in 2022 while representing the Informed Consent Action Network. The anti-vaccine organization is closely aligned with Kennedy. A Kennedy spokeswoman confirmed to The New York Times that Siri is advising Kennedy, but that the two men had not discussed his application to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. In response to the story by The New York Times, Katie Miller, a spokesperson for RFK Jr, told NBC News in a statement, "The Polio Vaccine should be available to the public and thoroughly and properly studied." Siri referred NBC News to his X account for two statements responding to the article, which he said "begins (and ends) with defending a certain polio vaccine, IPOL, which is not the polio vaccine of old, while playing on fear to distract from the clear safety gaps in licensing this particular product." "The NYT reporters writing the hit piece plainly do not care about truth and accuracy," Siri wrote in part in a lengthy X post pointing to numerous government reports he say defend his position. In his statement, McConnell makes it clear he will fight to protect access to the polio vaccine. “I have never flinched from confronting specious disinformation that threatens the advance of lifesaving medical progress, and I will not today.” Despite his active campaign against vaccines, in an interview with NBC News before he was announced as Trump’s pick at HHS, Kennedy said he would not seek to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” But he went on to say they he planned to rigorously review the way the lifesaving drugs are brought to market. “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” he said. “So I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.” In his statement, McConnell never mentions Kennedy by name but says that anyone seeking confirmation before the Senate must be specific about their intentions related to the polio vaccine. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts,” McConnell wrote. Kennedy is expected on Capitol Hill next week for meetings with senators. McConnell will relinquish his post as the top Republican in the Senate in January, but remains an influential leader in the chamber. Overcoming his opposition may prove difficult for a nominee.House rejects Democratic efforts to force release of Matt Gaetz ethics report
Spend a reasonable amount of time around the average city hall and you’ll see the frustration of residents trying to figure out how to settle their parking tickets and conduct other seemingly picayune details of civic life. In Palm Beach, Fla. — the longtime winter beach playground for the rich, the home of Mar-a-Lago — officials are turning to for such tasks, an effort that offers lessons for other municipalities as they . The technology comes from . The up-and-coming supplier of constituent relationship management software for local governments has since its founding in 2019. That includes a just more than a year ago. In September, Palm Beach, via the company’s technology, launched a search tool based on artificial intelligence for the city’s website, Jess Savidge, Palm Beach’s administrative manager, told via an email interview. People who use the site can use full sentences to get answers to specific questions and receive quick responses based on the website content. The new system improves upon the older keyword-based search feature, according to the company. That original search feature remains. The new tool debuted in Palm Beach around Labor Day after “comprehensive testing and website content review during the summer months produced a consistent testing percentage above 90 percent,” according to Savidge — an illustration of how much work comes before deployment. “Clear and current website content is essential,” she said. “During our testing, we discovered that sometimes you can discover conflicting, unclear or outdated and incomplete content. We continue to review our content through the lens of ‘teaching Poli’ so Poli can deliver fast and factual information.” Some of the most common inquiries made via the tool: how to pay for a parking ticket, how to get a resident parking decal, when construction is allowed, when the bridges are open — the city borders an intracoastal waterway — and how to make a public records request. A recent tropical storm, , also offered a chance to improve the search technology. While Milton did not directly hit Palm Beach, “it provided an opportunity for us to discover that we need to refresh the content to ensure that AI knows there is new content to use as a resource,” Savidge said. “Moving forward, we will manually ‘scrape’ the emergency service content so that Poli has the most recent content to provide for our community.” The continued success of the tool will rely on several factors, she said, including a feedback mechanism that can lead to more precise answers, and more analytics.OpenAI's legal battle with Elon Musk reveals internal turmoil over avoiding AI 'dictatorship'
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ATLANTA — As she checked into a recent flight to Mexico for vacation, Teja Smith chuckled at the idea of joining another Women’s March on Washington. As a Black woman, she just couldn’t see herself helping to replicate the largest act of resistance against then-President Donald Trump’s first term in January 2017. Even in an election this year where Trump questioned his opponent’s race, held rallies featuring racist insults and falsely claimed Black migrants in Ohio were eating residents’ pets, he didn’t just win a second term. He became the first Republican in two decades to clinch the popular vote, although by a small margin. “It’s like the people have spoken and this is what America looks like,” said Smith, the Los Angeles-based founder of the advocacy social media agency, Get Social. “And there’s not too much more fighting that you’re going to be able to do without losing your own sanity.” After Trump was declared the winner over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, many politically engaged Black women said they were so dismayed by the outcome that they were reassessing — but not completely abandoning — their enthusiasm for electoral politics and movement organizing. Black women often carry much of the work of getting out the vote in their communities. They had vigorously supported the historic candidacy of Harris, who would have been the first woman of Black and South Asian descent to win the presidency. Harris’ loss spurred a wave of Black women across social media resolving to prioritize themselves, before giving so much to a country that over and over has shown its indifference to their concerns. AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, found that 6 in 10 Black women said the future of democracy in the United States was the single most important factor for their vote this year, a higher share than for other demographic groups. But now, with Trump set to return to office in two months, some Black women are renewing calls to emphasize rest, focus on mental health and become more selective about what fight they lend their organizing power to. “America is going to have to save herself,” said LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of the national voting rights group Black Voters Matter. She compared Black women’s presence in social justice movements as “core strategists and core organizers” to the North Star, known as the most consistent and dependable star in the galaxy because of its seemingly fixed position in the sky. People can rely on Black women to lead change, Brown said, but the next four years will look different. “That’s not a herculean task that’s for us. We don’t want that title. ... I have no goals to be a martyr for a nation that cares nothing about me,” she said. AP VoteCast paints a clear picture of Black women’s concerns. Black female voters were most likely to say that democracy was the single most important factor for their vote, compared to other motivators such as high prices or abortion. More than 7 in 10 Black female voters said they were “very concerned” that electing Trump would lead the nation toward authoritarianism, while only about 2 in 10 said this about Harris. About 9 in 10 Black female voters supported Harris in 2024, according to AP VoteCast, similar to the share that backed Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Trump received support from more than half of white voters, who made up the vast majority of his coalition in both years. Like voters overall, Black women were most likely to say the economy and jobs were the most important issues facing the country, with about one-third saying that. But they were more likely than many other groups to say that abortion and racism were the top issues, and much less likely than other groups to say immigration was the top issue. Despite those concerns, which were well-voiced by Black women throughout the campaign, increased support from young men of color and white women helped expand Trump’s lead and secured his victory. Politically engaged Black women said they don’t plan to continue positioning themselves in the vertebrae of the “backbone” of America’s democracy. The growing movement prompting Black women to withdraw is a shift from history, where they are often present and at the forefront of political and social change. One of the earliest examples is the women’s suffrage movement that led to ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Black women, however, were prevented from voting for decades afterward because of Jim Crow-era literacy tests, poll taxes and laws that blocked the grandchildren of slaves from voting. Most Black women couldn’t vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Black women were among the organizers and counted among the marchers brutalized on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, during the historic march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery that preceded federal legislation. Decades later, Black women were prominent organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police and vigilantes. In his 2024 campaign, Trump called for leveraging federal money to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in government programs and discussions of race, gender or sexual orientation in schools. His rhetoric on immigration, including false claims that Black Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs, drove support for his plan to deport millions of people. Tenita Taylor, a Black resident of Atlanta who supported Trump this year, said she was initially excited about Harris’ candidacy. But after thinking about how high her grocery bills have been, she feels that voting for Trump in hopes of finally getting lower prices was a form of self-prioritization. “People say, ‘Well, that’s selfish, it was gonna be better for the greater good,”’ she said. “I’m a mother of five kids. ... The things that (Democrats) do either affect the rich or the poor.” Some of Trump’s plans affect people in Olivia Gordon’s immediate community, which is why she struggled to get behind the “Black women rest” wave. Gordon, a New York-based lawyer who supported the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s presidential nominee, Claudia de la Cruz, worries about who may be left behind if the 92% of Black women voters who backed Harris simply stopped advocating. “We’re talking millions of Black women here. If millions of Black women take a step back, it absolutely leaves holes, but for other Black women,” she said. “I think we sometimes are in the bubble of if it’s not in your immediate circle, maybe it doesn’t apply to you. And I truly implore people to understand that it does.” Nicole Lewis, an Alabama-based therapist who specializes in treating Black women’s stress, said she’s aware that Black women withdrawing from social impact movements could have a fallout. But she also hopes that it forces a reckoning for the nation to understand the consequences of not standing in solidarity with Black women. “It could impact things negatively because there isn’t that voice from the most empathetic group,” she said. “I also think it’s going to give other groups an opportunity to step up. ... My hope is that they do show up for themselves and everyone else.” Brown said a reckoning might be exactly what the country needs, but it’s a reckoning for everyone else. Black women, she said, did their job when they supported Harris in droves in hopes they could thwart the massive changes expected under Trump. “This ain’t our reckoning,” she said. “I don’t feel no guilt.”
