New York declares state of emergency to help food banks in shutdown
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, has declared a state of emergency to raise $65m to help food banks as federal funding for the national food stamps program is set to expire on Saturday due to the government shutdown.
The move comes after Oregon and Virginia also declared emergencies to make funds available to cover the anticipated short fall in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (Snaps), which provides food aid to nearly 42m people.
New York receives nearly $650m a month in federal funding for Snap benefits, according to Department of Agriculture figures.
Oregon governor Tina Kotek on Wednesday pledged $5 million to food banks and declared a 60-day food security emergency. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has said the state will draw on surplus funds to pay for up to a month of Snap benefits.
The declarations come amid an ongoing stand-off between the Trump administration and the Republicans, on one side, and the Democrats, over a federal government funding package. Neither Congress nor the White House has acted to fund November Snap benefits, which cost around $8bn a month.
Key events
The Trump administration is issuing a new rule that could exclude employees of non-profits that help undocumented people from qualifying for a government program that cancels student debt.
Under new criteria for qualifying for the public service loan forgiveness program, the education department will bar non-profit groups that it deems to be “aiding and abetting violations of federal immigration laws.” The department said employees that advocate for immigrants or represent them in court would still be eligible.
The new requirement is due to start from July next year.
Democracy Forward, a left-wing group, said it planned to challenge the change in court.
According to the Congressional Research Service, nearly 43m Americans have debts from federal student loans.
A handful of states rolled out plans to use their own funds to provide benefits as the SNAP federal food aid program runs dry, AP reported.
The Trump administration says the federal government won’t fund the program for low-income households in November because of the prolonged federal shutdown.
That could leave about 1 in 8 Americans scrambling to pay for food. Both Democratic and Republican governors are launching programs in states including Delaware, Louisiana, New Mexico and Vermont.
The federal government says they won’t be reimbursed. It’s also not clear how quickly the benefits can reach recipients. Louisiana’s effort excludes “able bodied” adults who aren’t caring for children.
The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has pledged that the US will “catch up” with China on nuclear energy, saying it was “all hands on deck” to meet the commitment.
In an interview with Fox Business, he said: “President Trump is bringing back nuclear power like we’ve never seen before. It’s clean, it’s reliable. The US has an advantage, and again, for years, for some unknown reason, nuclear power was not used in the US, and we’re bringing it back. So it is all hands on deck for nuclear power.
“The Chinese are building nuclear plants. They’re starting them up every month, and we are behind, but under President Trump’s leadership, we’re going to catch up.”
The mystery of how quotes wrongly attributed to the former New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, ended up in the Times – historically renowned as Britain’s “newspaper of record” – has been cleared up. The reporter concerned quoted, not a de Blasio impersonator, as originally reported, but another man called Bill DeBlasio, who decided to have fun at the paper’s expense by answering questions about the Democrats’ currently mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, in an email exchange without disclosing that he was not, in fact, the ex-mayor.
Semafor revealed that the Mamdani critic was not an impostor as such but a 59-year-old win importer from Long Island who had been emailed by the reporter, Bevan Hurley, seeking his views on the candidate, in the mistaken assumption that he was the former office holder.
Rather than correct the journalist, DeBlasio decided to play along, composing a response using ChatGPT to criticise Mamdani’s tax plans. “It was all in good fun. I never thought it would make it to print,” DeBlasio told Semafor. He assumed the reporter would “have all his people check it out.”
It was far from the first time DeBlasio had been mistaken for his more famous namesake. The two met at a 2016 New York Mets play off, with the then mayor – who spells his surname name with a lower case d and has a space between its two parts – asking the wine importer: “How bad is it having the same last name as me?”
The wine importer responded: “Dude, you’re killing me.”
The Times has removed the report from its website and apologized.
Dharna Noor
At the Cop30 UN climate talks in Brazil next month, leaders must be willing to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, said Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
“This is a story that has villains in it,” he told reporters on a webinar early Thursday.
The fossil fuel industry created a “whole armada of fake front groups” to protect its interests and spread doubt about the climate crisis – despite early knowledge that their products warm the planet, he said.
“To refuse to talk about that ignores both a very important and probably the most interesting part of the story,” said Whitehouse.
Without this influence, the world may have acted on the climate much earlier, Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director of the science and climate advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists told reporters.
“Fossil fuel companies have been lying and obstructing progress on climate action. That’s why we’re here,” she said.
Who is Casey Means?
Means qualified as a doctor at Stanford University medical school but dropped out of her surgical residency program at Oregon health and science university in 2018.
She later said that she had left because of her belief that the health care system was broken and exploitative.
Means subsequently turned to alternative medicine to tackle what she called metabolic dysfunction caused, she believed, by poor nutrition and the spread of ultra-processed foods. AP reported that she has made hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting health and wellness products. The outlet found that she had failed to disclose that she could personally profit from their sale while promoting them.
The surgeon general’s position is highly sensitive, placing the nominee in the role of “the nation’s doctor,” who leads health officials and the general population on public health issues.
Means, who has no previous experience in government, would oversee 6,000 public health corps members and could issue advisories on public health threats. Her authority in such a strategic position could be undermined by the fact that her licence to practice medicine is currently inactive.
Trump nominated Means for the position after withdrawing his first nominee, Janette Nesheiwat, following criticism of her from his fellow Republicans.
The imminent birth of Means’s child introduces an element of harmony into an otherwise fractious nomination that has been fiercely criticized by public health campaigners.
“Everyone’s happy for Dr Means and her family,” said Emily Hilliard, deputy press secretary for the health and human services Department. “This is one of the few times in life it’s easy to ask to move a Senate hearing.”
But before the postponement had been announced, Defend Public Health, a campaign group, urged the Senate to reject her nomination. It issued a press release timed to coincide with the originally scheduled hearing dismissing her as a “‘health influencer’ without discernible qualifications to be Surgeon General” and accused her of “peddling unproven products and tests sold by companies led by herself and her brother, Calley Means.”
In a withering critique, Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and Defend Public Health member, suggested that Means’s ties to Robert F Kennedy Jr and support for his unproven health theories was the only reason she had been nominated.
“She dropped out of her surgical residency, is not board certified in any specialty, holds an expired medical license, and has no public health background whatsoever outside of promoting scientifically unsupported disease remedies in her newsletter,” Rasmussen said.
“Her only apparent qualification for the job of Surgeon General is her willingness to promote RFK Jr.’s disinformation and quackery.”
Dharna Noor
In climate news, ahead of major United Nations climate talks set to start in Brazil next week, former Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy said US cities and states are keeping the climate fight alive despite an all-out assault on environmental policy from the Trump administration.
“We will not allow our country to become numb or debilitated by those who are standing in the way of progress,” she said on a press call Thursday morning.
McCarthy co-chairs America Is All In, a coalition of climate-concerned states and cities in the US. The group will send a delegation of over 100 subnational leaders from the US to the UN climate talks known as Cop30 next month, as well as to the UN Local Leaders Forum set to take place in the days before. That will include including governors and senior officials from six states, over 35 US mayors, and over 50 city officials and international climate experts, she said.
This week, America is All In and Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland released a study showing that with aggressive action from cities and states, significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are still achievable by 2035.
“There are especially large opportunities for states and cities to go further and faster in the power and transport sectors, as well as in reducing methane,” said Nate Hultman, former distinguished senior advisor for climate ambition at the State Department and founding director of the Center for Global Sustainability.
Trump is clamping down on state and local climate action, trying to block policies in court and working to eliminate incentives for clean energy. But Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said climate leaders should resist those attacks, and sue the administration over potentially illegal obstruction.
“I think if you allow yourself to be intimidated by this administration, they will seize all the ground that you’ve seen them and then come back for more,” Whitehouse told reporters.
Senate postpones Casey Means confirmation hearing after she goes into labor
The Senate has postponed its confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, after she went into labor with her first child, CNN reported, citing a Senate committee spokesperson.
Means was due to be the first nominee ever to appear by video link before the health, education, labor and pension committee due to her pregnancy.
The hearing is understood to have been scheduled two days after her due date for giving birth.
Means, the author of a bestselling book, Good Energy, has become a public symbol of the ”Make America healthy again” movement championed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, by promoting holistic health based on natural foods, exercise and avoiding pharmaceutical prescription drugs for chronic ailments.
The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour has analyzed the South Korea meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. He writes:
When Donald Trump launched his trade war against China in April, threatening tariffs as high as 145%, the Chinese government said it would never bow to blackmail and vowed to “fight to the end”.
The question now is whether the consensus reached between Trump and Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on Thursday means that the fight really has come to an end, and if so on whose terms.
