Companies raised $4 billion in the first quarter, an increase of $1 billion over the prior year, according to Rock Health. But nearly 60% of the capital deployed came from 12 large deals.

When the president announced the agreement in a post on his Truth Social platform, he also noted he had “received a 10 point proposal from Iran” that he considered “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Reporting on the story, CNN posted a news brief headlined “Iran claims victory, says it forced US to accept 10-point plan” that included a statement from the Iranian Security Council critical of the U.S. reading, in part, “The enemy, in its unfair, unlawful, and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.” CNN anchor Erin Burnett also read aloud from the statement on her show: “Our hands remain upon the trigger and should the slightest error be committed by the enemy it shall be met with full force.”

Trump turned again to Truth Social to air his anger. “The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows,” Trump wrote. “CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’ Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.”

Then, also for the second time since attacks on Iran began, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr followed up on the president’s attack with his own empty threats. “More outrageous conduct from CNN,” Carr wrote on X. “Fake news is bad enough for the country, but pushing out a hoax headline in such a sensitive national security moment as this requires accountability.” Carr, who holds no regulatory power over CNN, a cable news outlet, then concluded it”s “time for change at CNN.” Top Trump ally Larry Kudlow similarly lashed out at the Wall Street Journal for reporting on the same statement. 

Trump’s attack on CNN was not the only threat he has lobbed at the media this week.

Standing at the White House podium in front of a room full of reporters the day before, Trump issued a chilling ultimatum: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’” The crime in question? A journalist — or perhaps several of them — reported that when an American F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran last Friday, both crew members were not immediately accounted for. The pilot had been rescued. The weapons systems officer had not. Trump said he would pressure the news media to assist in the investigation, saying that the source who shared the information with the journalist is “a sick person.” 

The premise of the president’s outrage — that this story originated with a treasonous leak from within the government that jeopardized a sensitive rescue mission — falls apart almost immediately. The F-15E Strike Eagle is a two-seat aircraft that flies with a pilot and a weapons systems officer. When reports emerged that one crew member had been rescued, it did not require access to classified information to infer that the second was still missing. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the aircraft, or simply the ability to use Google and follow basic facts, could have arrived at that conclusion.

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In today’s information environment, that kind of inference happens constantly and in public. Images circulate online. Flight patterns are tracked. Communities dedicated to open-source intelligence piece together fragments of information in real time. By the time traditional news outlets publish a story, much of the underlying reality is already visible to anyone paying attention. Journalists who cover aviation, defense and foreign policy were drawing that exact conclusion at the same time as Reddit users. 

The story seems to have first appeared on the Israeli media outlet N12 and in an Axios piece by reporter Barak Ravid, who cited an Israeli official and a second source with knowledge of the incident. But the underlying fact — that there were two people on the plane — required no source inside the Pentagon to divine. If a reporter confirmed what was already evident with a source inside the Pentagon, that is not the same thing as exposing classified operational plans. Verification is not leaking. Trump collapses that distinction because it serves his broader objective. In his framing, any confirmation becomes a betrayal, and any reporting sabotage. This is the logic of a regime that believes the government’s right to control information supersedes the public’s right to receive it.

Trump insists that the reporting put the rescue mission at risk, arguing that it alerted Iran and incentivized efforts to capture the missing officer. But the crash itself was not a secret. Iranian forces knew they had shot down an American fighter jet. People on the ground would have known something had happened. The idea that a news report transformed the situation into something uniquely dangerous stretches credulity.

Even more glaring is the hypocrisy embedded in the president’s own conduct. While condemning journalists for allegedly revealing sensitive information, he volunteered details about the rescue operation that military officials themselves hesitated to disclose, including that 155 aircraft — bombers, fighter jets and refueling tankers — were involved in the mission. When asked whether such specifics should remain confidential, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he’d “love to keep that a secret,” but his commander-in-chief brushed past that caution, readily offering the information anyway. “I’ll keep it a secret, but it was hundreds.”

Trump’s threats against journalists come amid a long-running battle between the Pentagon and the press corps assigned to cover its activities. After the Department of Defense instituted a new policy that required outlets to commit to only reporting information officially sanctioned by the government, dozens of Pentagon reporters — including those representing Fox News — opted to forfeit their press credentials. A judge recently sided with a legal challenge spearheaded by The New York Times and ordered the Pentagon to reinstate the passes of certain reporters. The Defense Department responded by saying it would instead relocate media offices to an “annex” outside the Pentagon.

The president has spent years laying the groundwork for this kind of confrontation with the press. As early as 2017, he reportedly urged then-FBI Director James Comey to consider jailing journalists who publish classified information. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump escalated his rhetoric, at one point fantasizing aloud about reporters being shot. Shortly after winning the election, Trump ordered Senate Republicans to kill a popular bipartisan bill to protect press freedoms that would have prevented federal law enforcement from seizing journalists’ records or forcing the disclosure of confidential sources. Shortly after taking office, former Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed a Department of Justice policy that had protected journalists from being subpoenaed for their confidential sources. (In response to revelations that during Trump’s first term, the department had secretly obtained or attempted to obtain records from at least nine journalists in connection with leak investigations, the Biden Justice Department prohibited the practice of secretly subpoenaing journalists’ phone and email records.)

With no federal shield law in this country, the Trump administration has already taken action against Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, whose Virginia home was searched by the FBI in January after she was accused of sharing “national security information” with a journalist. At the time, Bondi said the department was acting “at the request” of the Pentagon.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s warning to journalists should be understood for what it is: not an impulsive outburst from a man upset about a story, but the activation of a system deliberately built to punish and suppress independent journalism. His threat to jail journalists is not just an attack on the media. It is an attack on the principle that the public has a right to know what its government is doing as it escalates a war the American people do not want.

The post Trump wants to jail reporters over leaks from own administration appeared first on Salon.com.

Idyllic images of blonde children and perfect homes aren’t the only selling points. The tradwife lifestyle is pitched as a way to earn men’s love and devotion. By submitting to men, tradwife proponents argue, a woman will activate his chivalric urge to protect and provide. Submission is portrayed as a fair trade to women. In exchange for giving up their autonomy, they will receive safety and joy beyond what feminists, with their petty demands for equality and anger at the patriarchy, can never imagine.

But once again, the tradwife pitch has been revealed as a lie. A new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly shows that young men who favor the trad lifestyle don’t honor and cherish tradwives — they hold them in contempt. After surveying nearly 600 men aged 18 to 29, researchers expected to find that those who supported the tradwife movement to have paternalistic attitudes toward women, viewing them as fragile but beloved creatures who needed protecting. Instead, they discovered pro-tradwife men expressed a hostile form of sexism, calling women who submitted to men lazy and parasitic.

This may seem like a paradox at first blush. These men loathe housewives while simultaneously believing that women should be housewives. But sociologist Jessica Calarco, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” is not surprised.

“If you hate your wife, it’s a lot easier to justify exploiting her unpaid labor for your own personal gain,” she told me. “With our modern sensibilities, we might think of love as the point of marriage.” But traditional marriage was about male power, she explained, which included “exploiting wives’ domestic labor, forcing them to bear children and using them as emotional or physical punching bags.” Underneath all the happy trappings of tradwife content is a longing to return to a time when women had no rights inside a marriage. Actual love for a “traditional” wife, Calarco concluded, gets in the way of a man “accepting the perks of patriarchy.”

Tradwife content whitewashes history, but an honest look shows that contempt for housewives was a widespread theme in the past. “Take my wife, please” jokes were standard fare in the mid-20th century, and popular sitcoms like “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy” included references to hitting women. These portrayals were part of an even longer history of depicting wives as nags and harridans, a narrative device that can be found in the Old Testament. Nineteenth-century cartoons decrying the women’s suffrage reflected the view that a wife is to remain at home not because she wants it, but because men do — and that’s all that matters.

Nowadays most women aren’t forced to marry for survival, yet elaborate propaganda systems have emerged to bait them into believing that traditional marriage, along with its outdated gender roles, is romantic. The Psychology of Women Quarterly study shows just how much the notion of chivalry is actually a myth. As Calarco said, “Misogynistic men will often ‘lovebomb’ their partners, lavishing them with praise and affection in the early days” in an attempt to convince women to give up their autonomy and outside income. Once they are trapped, though, the men will “drop the facade.”

Real-life examples aren’t hard to find. Lauren Southern was a right-wing media figure during Donald Trump’s first presidency who built an audience by showcasing her white nationalist and anti-feminist views. She eventually decided to live her values by getting married, handing over all her money to her husband and vowing to be submissive. But as Southern later wrote in a memoir, her husband isolated her in a rural area and treated her with an ever-growing contempt. She tried to please him by “cooking, cleaning, putting on dresses and high heels to welcome him home,” but he came to hate her even more. He emotionally abused her, she claimed, locking her out of the home as punishment. She eventually fled. 

Chivalry is unworkable because it’s simply too dissonant for men. On one hand, as the researchers found, traditional men want the services they believe only women should provide, such as emotional support and housework. But they also believe women are beneath them and, in fact, exist to serve them. So expressing gratitude, much less holding women in respect, is experienced as emasculating. The natural result for a man in this position is what Southern experienced: growing annoyance and resentment at his wife for having the temerity to express any needs at all, instead of functioning simply as a household appliance.

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British journalist Louis Theroux, in his recent Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere,” exposes how Southern’s experience is hardly unique. The far-right podcasters he interviewed espouse a belief in women’s submission in the home, but as he quickly found, the women in these arrangements aren’t getting love or care in return. The men brag about how they party and sleep with whomever they want, while their girlfriends are obliged to stay home and be monogamous. Nor do the women have any financial security. Theroux gets a manosphere influencer to admit he won’t marry his girlfriend to deprive her of any claim to his money — even though she gave up her job to take care of him and have his children. The women, the documentary makes clear, aren’t really getting anything from their relationships. One even realized this after filming was completed, and she dumped her podcasting boyfriend.

For a lot of women, though, leaving is a much bigger lift. As Calarco noted, the point of being a tradwife is that a woman is “isolated and financially dependent” on a man, which makes escape difficult. In other cases, there are psychological hurdles. It can be daunting for women to admit it was a mistake to buy into the tradwife lifestyle, especially after being warned by feminists of the risks. There’s also the personal pain of realizing that your husband’s “love” may not be as advertised, making it easier to live in denial.

That was what a lot of people took from a 2024 profile of Hannah Neeleman and her husband Daniel a profile of the couple that appeared in the Times of London. After it was published, the Neelemans angrily denied their marriage was unhappy or exploitative, but many readers weren’t convinced. There were too many details suggesting that Daniel Neeleman viewed his wife with exactly the contempt that researchers have found in so many male trad enthusiasts. There was the time, for example, when Hannah asked her incredibly wealthy husband for a Greek vacation for her birthday. He filmed a video of himself giving her an apron instead. There was the way Hannah confessed to the Times reporter that she liked giving birth away from her husband, because she got to enjoy pain medications when he was not around. Then there was his promise to build her a dance studio on their massive estate; he turned it into a schoolhouse for their growing brood of children.

Here is where I’m required to offer a throat-clearing assertion that everyone else’s marriage is a mystery, and that we can never know the depths of love or loathing from the outside. But I also sympathize with people who read this profile — or who saw Hannah Neeleman trying to crush her disappointment in the apron video — and thought that perhaps the situation was as it seemed. That it is not true that a woman can win a man’s eternal devotion with submission. That men who want women to submit have no intention of offering respect in return, but just want someone they can walk all over.

Now we have one more study showing that the tradwife hype is just as empty as feminists have always suspected. Traditional patriarchy isn’t some cheat code to make marriage happy. It is and always has been just an excuse for men to treat women poorly.

The post Why MAGA men actually loathe tradwives appeared first on Salon.com.

According to the CDC report, 17 new outbreaks were reported in 2026. Notably, 94 percent of confirmed cases are “outbreak-associated,” with a majority of cases stemming from outbreaks that started in 2025. An estimated 5 percent of cases have required hospital care already this year; in 2025, 11 percent required hospital care. No deaths have yet been attributed to measles in 2026, but the disease killed three people in 2025. Ninety-two percent of cases this year are in unvaccinated people.

As Salon has previously reported, experts emphasize measles isn’t just a fever and a rash as anti-vaccine influencers portray online. An estimated one in four infected patients will be hospitalized. In severe cases, there can be complications like pneumonia and encephalitis — a swelling in the brain that can trigger seizures, deafness and mental disability — even death. This can all be prevented by getting vaccinated.

The measles vaccine, which typically comes with mumps and rubella vaccines as well, is extremely effective. After two doses, nearly 99 percent of people will be shielded against infection. While the vaccine was first developed in 1963, it wasn’t until 1980 that all 50 states had laws requiring measles immunization for school enrollment. But thanks to a thoroughly discredited British doctor who claimed to document changes in behavior in children given the MMR vaccine, creating the so-called “Wakefield effect,” some of this progress has been undone.

Before the measles vaccine was widely available in the U.S., around 400 to 500 children would die from measles and its complications each year. Public health experts told Salon they’re concerned that under the Trump administration, measles infections are already becoming endemic and normalized, and that we will see outbreaks as frequently as we did in the 1990s.

“I think we are just going to move backward before we go forward,” Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and author of the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told Salon. “Sure, this has to do with the administration and lack of prioritization, but also because Americans find ourselves at the perfect storm of mistrust in institutions, general amnesia of vaccine preventable diseases, and on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Today the lack of prioritization from the current administration and a cultural moment post the COVID-19 pandemic, in which online anti-vaccine rhetoric has spread like wildfire, have contributed to a lack of trust in vaccines and public health — ironic given COVID vaccine development was a landmark medical achievement.

“Since the pandemic, we see that the number of children without measles protection has roughly doubled, and at the school level the conditions for sustained spread were crossed around 2022,” Dr. Ana Bento, an assistant professor in the department of public and ecosystem health at Cornell University, told Salon. “That means many schools are now in a situation where a single imported case is enough to trigger ongoing transmission.”

Bento is a co-author of a pre-print paper analyzing the recent drive in cases across the country, analyzing a database of 45 states encompassing over 50,000 schools in 3,000 counties. She explained she has hope the situation can turn around and that the outbreaks are very much “containable” — but only if the country acts quickly to control it.

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“From a scientific perspective, there is real hope: measles vaccines are highly effective, and the U.S. is starting from relatively high average coverage,” Bento said. “But the trends in our work make it clear that improvement will only happen if surveillance and vaccination efforts are designed to see and address the fine-scale school and district clusters where risk is currently concentrated.”

Public health experts and scientists aren’t confident that the situation will improve under the Trump administration. In February, the American Academy of Pediatrics called on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to promote measles vaccines and deploy more support to outbreak areas as cases surge.

“Vulnerable children across the nation need federal public health officials to be fully committed to stopping the spread of measles — and to use all the tools and platforms at their disposal,” Dr. Andrew Racine, AAP’s president, wrote in a letter to Kennedy.

From running an anti-vaccine nonprofit to profiting from litigation related to vaccine harms, Kennedy lacks a track record that supports vaccination. In a 2025 Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, Kennedy made several misleading statements about the measles vaccine. In 2019, a measles outbreak in Samoa, and Kennedy’s involvement in the crisis, underscores his views on the measles vaccine. During Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearings in 2025, he said the closely scrutinized trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” Documents obtained by The Associated Press and The Guardian undermined that testimony.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Salon he is not hopeful the outbreaks can be contained at this point.

“I think endemicity is a foregone conclusion and measles will circulate at the level it did in the 1990s,” Adalja said. “People are choosing this fate.”

Endemicity is when an infection is constantly present, like the common cold. Of course, measles and a cold are not remotely comparable, which is precisely the issue with serious diseases that were once eradicated becoming endemic. Jetelina agreed that it will get worse before it gets better.

“Measles will be become normalized once it becomes endemic,” she said. “Eventually, as a society, we won’t be paying close attention to the tally and it won’t make headlines.”

Measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, but the country is likely to lose its elimination status. The status is granted by the Pan American Health Organization, and the U.S. can only maintain it if it can prove that the virus has not circulated continuously in the nation for a year straight.

“I think it’s almost guaranteed that we lose the status,” Jetelina said. “It’s heartbreaking because it’s a road sign that we are going backwards.”

She is, however, “confident” that the country will bounce back, eventually. “But it’s going to take time,” she said.

The post “People are choosing this fate”: Measles will get worse before it gets better appeared first on Salon.com.

I study how institutions affect businesses and supply chains, and I expect food prices to rise next, with high prices lasting even after whatever point hostilities end.

Along with about 20% of the world’s crude oil trade and a similar share of the world’s liquefied natural gas shipments, shipping traffic through the strait also carries roughly a third of internationally traded fertilizer, which is key to bountiful crops around the world.

Modern agriculture depends on precise timing of delivering nutrients to plants. When fertilizer arrives late or becomes too expensive to buy in sufficient quantities, farmers are left to either reduce the amount they use, plant fewer crops or switch to crops that need less fertilizer. Each option reduces overall productivity, cutting supplies of basic foods, feed for livestock and key ingredients used in a wide range of food products.

Ultimately, with corn prices rising, summer barbecues may taste a bit different or cost more. Corn on the cob may not be cheap, nor will corn-fed beef. In addition, many store-bought condiments, soft drinks and other food products are made with high-fructose corn syrup and will also cost more.

3 main crops, 3 nutrients needed

Three staple crops – corn, wheat and rice – supply more than half of the world’s dietary calories.

To maximize production, those crops need three main nutrients: nitrogen, phosphate and potassium. Nitrogen helps plants grow. Phosphorus helps transport energy within plant cells and is critical for early root growth and the formation of seeds and fruit. Potassium helps plants conserve water and boosts protein content.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has reduced the supply and increased the cost of all three.

Natural gas, which determines 70% to 90% of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer, has seen a 20% drop in production due to the war and price increases up to 70%. To preserve its own supplies, Russia has suspended exports of ammonium nitrate, another nitrogen source for fertilizer.

In a similar effort, China, the world’s largest phosphate producer, has blocked phosphate exports, removing 25% of the global supply.

Potash, the potassium-rich component of fertilizers, has also been in short supply in recent years, in part because of economic sanctions on Belarus and Russia, which are major potash producers.

As a consequence, fertilizer prices have risen globally. In the U.S., some fertilizers rose more than 40% in just one month after the war’s start in late February 2026.

Affecting farmers first

Cereal plants absorb the vast majority of their nitrogen needs during their early growth. Applying fertilizer later in the growth cycle is less effective.

Reducing nitrogen application by 10% to 15%, or delaying application by two to four weeks, can reduce corn yields by 10% to 25%.

Producing less corn and wheat reduces not only food available for humans but also food for livestock. Increased fertilizer costs and reduced grain supplies increase the price of raising livestock, making meat and animal products more expensive.

When feed costs become unsustainable, farmers may be forced to kill or sell off the breeding cows and sows that represent the future of the food supply. In the U.S., a combination of persistent drought and high costs in 2022 forced producers to kill 13.3% of the national beef cow herd, the highest proportion ever. As a result, the U.S. beef cattle inventory shrank to its lowest level since 1962, a problem that restricts beef supplies for years.

Ultimately, the costs are passed to consumers. In 2012, when a historic Midwest drought slashed corn yields by 13%, it triggered a surge in feed prices, and U.S. poultry prices rose 20%.

More money can’t fix this problem

In mid-March 2026, the U.S. fertilizer supply was around 75% of normal levels. That’s right at the beginning of the time when Corn Belt farmers typically prepare their soil for planting, including the first applications of fertilizer. Subsequent fertilizer applications typically come from mid-April to early May and between late May and mid-June.

Farmers who fear not being able to optimize their corn yields may decide to plant less corn or switch crops and plant soybeans, which need less fertilizer. Either would reduce the corn supply.

Government loan guarantees and aid packages may help farmers cover higher costs, but they cannot address timing if enough fertilizer simply isn’t available when it is needed.

Hitting home

American consumers aren’t facing the gas and food shortages or power outages other countries are seeing from the war, but they will be hit in the pocketbook. U.S. prices for gas and jet fuel are already climbing. The effects on the food supply take longer to appear, but they are coming.

Even when crops are bountiful in the U.S., consumers are not immune to global economic forces. A smaller 2026 crop, with rising demand for livestock feed in some of the most populous countries, including China and India, will put pressure on global corn prices, affecting everyone regardless of their nationality.

In March 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture used data from before the Iran war to project a 3.1% average increase for all food prices.

The question for consumers is how much of the rise in corn prices will be passed to the consumer, and how fast.

USDA research shows that the speed and extent of changes in food prices vary widely by food category and the level of processing involved in making the food. Other factors also play a role, such as inventory levels, perishability and market competition. When farm prices change, wholesale prices usually adjust within the first month, but retail prices often take longer – sometimes two to four months.

Corn tortillas and other relatively lightly processed corn foods are more likely to show price responses within a few months after corn prices increase. Adjustments to cereals or poultry prices will take a little longer. Changes in the cost of livestock products such as beef will take longer, because there are more steps between the purchase of feed corn and the sale of the meat to consumers.

Other indirect costs, related to the cost of fuel and packaging, tend to hit later. Producers often absorb the price increases in the short term, but some increases are already in the works. For instance, transport companies are adding fuel surcharges on freight shipments.

Food price hikes hit low-income households harder than high-income households, because people with lower incomes spend larger shares of their money on food and housing. For these households, even relatively affordable proteins, such as chicken, may become harder to purchase regularly.

A global food emergency

The cost and availability of fertilizer will affect the whole world. More than 300 million people worldwide already do not have enough food. The U.N. World Food Program predicts an additional 45 million could join them by the end of 2026 if the conflict in the Middle East continues into the middle of the year.

Crop yields in India and Brazil in 2026 are expected to be lower than normal. East African farmers
struggled to afford fertilizer even before the crisis and will likely have to make do with even less.

These problems may seem removed for most Americans, but food prices are global in nature, and people in the U.S. will soon face these additional costs of the war.

Aya S. Chacar, Professor of International Business, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Hormuz closure threatens the global food supply appeared first on Salon.com.

That tally comes via Axios’ Andrew Solender after several days of social media brinksmanship from the commander-in-chief. Some congressional Democrats — such as frequent Trump target Rep. Ilhan Omar — were floating impeachment or removal under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment before Trump threatened to kill a “whole civilization.”

The president had set a deadline for Iran, demanding that the country lift its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday night. Over the Easter weekend, Trump threatened an attack on critical infrastructure in the country. He reiterated those threats in a post to Truth Social on Tuesday morning.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” he wrote. “Maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

The post drew immediate backlash from Democrats.

“The President’s enablers must wake up to the fact that he is becoming increasingly erratic and dangerous, and our country needs new leadership,” wrote Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., on X.

The post also concerned several Republicans and former Trump allies. Rep. Nathanial Moran, R-Texas, said the president’s statement did not reflect American values.

“I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’ That is not who we are, and it is not consistent with the principles that have long guided America,” he wrote.

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Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called for Trump’s removal from office.

“25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization,” she wrote on X. “This is evil and madness.”

Right-wing conspiracist and radio host Alex Jones said on X that Trump was talking like a “super villain” after called for Trump’s Cabinet to “25th Amendment his ass” earlier in the week.

The post Democrats, Marjorie Taylor Greene call for Trump’s removal from office following Iran threat appeared first on Salon.com.

Christian Greyenbuhl will replace Lee Westerfield, who has been interim CFO since 2023. The health IT company has worked to get up to date on its financial reporting requirements after it was delisted from the Nasdaq in 2024.

Regulators locked in a 2.48% rate hike for next year, much higher than the 0.09% that was proposed. Analysts said the Trump administration was likely spooked about coverage disruptions for seniors before the midterm elections.

Last summer, major payers committed to pare back onerous prior authorization policies, to the skepticism of providers. Now, AHIP and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association are providing an update on insurers’ progress.

The United Nations Population Fund and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNPFA-UNICEF) Global Program to End Child Marriage cites ending child marriage as one of their 2030 sustainable development goals. Globally, advances have been made in decreasing the rate of child marriage. An estimated 650 million girls and women worldwide, 19% of women age 20 to 24 years who are currently alive, were married before the age of 18, a decrease from 22% a decade ago. Yet it continues to be a problem that disproportionately affects girls worldwide. From the years of 2015 to 2024 child marriage affected 47.6 million girls compared to 5.8 million boys. South Asia, particularly India, as well as sub-Saharan Africa see the highest rates of child brides and to a lesser degree, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The United States has a notable history of child marriage. Between 2000 and 2018, nearly 300,000 children, mostly girls and some as young 10 years old, were married in the United States. Nevada, Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma had the highest rates of child marriage. There are no federal laws restricting child marriage in the United States, but rather legislation is dictated at the state level. As of 2025, only 16 states and two territories have banned child marriage for anyone under the age of 18 years without exception. Meanwhile, state-to-state minimum age can range from 15 to 18 years of age but with loopholes and exceptions based on parental consent with or without judicial permission, emancipation, and/or exceptions can be made in the case of pregnancy. Two states—Hawaii and Kansas—have set the age floor at 15 years, and four states and two territories have no minimum age requirement at all. Conversely, in many states that allow child marriage, a divorce cannot be obtained until the individual is of legal age.

Further complicating the landscape of child marriage is the concept of statutory rape. Depending on factors such as age difference, sex with a child is a misdemeanor or felony; the exception is in the instance of child marriage. Research in 2022 estimated that of all child marriages in the United States from 2000 to 2022, statutory rape laws were violated in as many as 14 states.

Several reasons have been given as to why there are no bans on child marriage in certain states. Outside of pregnancy as a reason for marriage, many cite religious mandates or cultural norms as reasons why child marriage has not been banned, even in the United States. And yet, there are no major religious traditions that require child marriage.

Child marriage has a significant negative impact on the health of girls. Those who marry prior to age 18 are at an increased risk of sexual and intimate partner violence.  Several factors may contribute to this increased risk such as an inherent lack of autonomy and power imbalance. Wide spousal age and education gaps may further contribute to the inequality within the relationship.

 The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) define intimate partner violence (IPV) as “a pattern of assaultive behavior and coercive behavior that may include physical injury, psychologic abuse, sexual assault, progressive isolation, stalking, deprivation, intimidation, and reproductive coercion.” ACOG cites the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Institute of Medicine’s recommendation that IPV screening and counseling be a fundamental part of all women’s health visits.

 The American Academy of Family Physicians cite several screening instruments that can be used to identify IPV, among them are HARK, which can assess for emotional and physical IPV within the past year; HITS, which assesses the frequency of abuse, or the extended version E-HITS, which also includes sexual violence; PVS, which assesses physical abuse and safety; and WAST, which assesses physical and emotional IPV.  Additionally, legislation against child marriage as well as advocacy can positively impact rates of IPV. Multinational research has shown that protective child marriage laws and advocacy were not only associated with reduced rates of girls experiencing physical and sexual abuse but also improved attitudes against violence against women.

Research related to child brides in the United States or other high-income countries is limited, but we know that child marriage can impact girls through the detrimental effects of increased rates of maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, increased rates of mental health conditions, and increased rates of IPV associated with adolescent pregnancy. Child marriage inherently increases the risk of adolescent pregnancy typically through limited autonomy and limited access to contraception. Globally, adolescent pregnancy is associated with higher rates of eclampsia, peripartum endometritis, systemic infections, preterm birth, and infants with low birth weight and severe neonatal conditions.

Pregnant adolescents also are at increased risk for depression, postpartum depression, suicidal ideation, low self-esteem, substance use, anxiety, and IPV. Some estimates put the rate of postpartum depression as high as 40% of all adolescent mothers. Additionally, postpartum depression in adolescents has been found to persist longer after delivery than adult mothers and increases the likelihood of shorter duration to subsequent pregnancy.

 The National Health Resource Center on Domestic Violence recommends clinicians screen for IPV every trimester as well as postpartum, which is consistent with the recommendations of other national organizations that screening be included in every facet of women’s healthcare.  Routine screening and heightened vigilance by the clinician are necessary to enable improved outcomes in this vulnerable population.

Global research focused on the mental health outcomes of child brides is also limited. However, what is available has identified increased rates of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Suicidal ideation and suicide attempts were found to be twice as likely in child brides.  Child marriage also has been shown to increase rates of substance use and abuse. However, confounding factors, such as the impact of poverty on the mental health of child brides, may impact current research. Regardless of circumstances, all adolescents should be screened for mental health conditions during preventive visits.

Globally, child marriage remains an ongoing problem, an end of which is not expected to be achieved by the UNFPA-UNICEF sustainable development goals in 2030. Currently, the United States has yet to contribute to the end of this practice through legislation at the state or federal level. Until this happens girls who are involved in child marriage will continue to face increased rates of IPV and psychological and physical health consequences. In addition to providing adequate and timely screening, clinicians also can serve as advocates for these patients.

References

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