Mark Wert

This is a really scary attack on the press.

“There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official about the Trump administration’s decision to stop funding the group with no notice or communication. “And that is not forgivable.” From our “The End of Aid” series, a Pulitzer finalist: propublica.org/article/kenya-…

In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has granted industrial facilities in 38 states and Puerto Rico a two-year reprieve from federal rules under the Clean Air Act. The president is considering exempting even more. propublica.org/article/clean-…

“At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns.” propublica.org/article/more-p…

The conference aims to give judges a "healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing” and help judges understand that “so much of what passes as ‘science’ ... never has to face tests for rigor, reliability and quality.” propublica.org/article/climat…

54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level. nu.edu/blog/49-adult-…

Majority of Ohio nurses experienced violence at work in the last year dispatch.com/story/news/hea… via @DispatchAlerts

Foreign contributions to political campaigns are banned. Trump found a loophole—crypto—allowing him to rake in hundreds of millions from foreign regimes buying influence. My @Morning_Joe Chart.

The share of Americans who say their financial situation is getting worse (55%) is higher now than at any point in the past 25 years. 👉🏻 axios.com/2026/04/28/tru…

The Trump administration gave a secret, no-bid contract to the firm building the WH ballroom -- after inflating its value 3X. This time, the government pays, not private donors. nytimes.com/2026/04/25/us/…

A Reuters investigation found a broader-than-previously known Trump administration effort to expand federal control over elections, using investigations, raids and demands for access to voting systems across at least eight states reut.rs/4eKWxSX @specialreports

Commentary: Without being asked and without public hearings, five Republican Ohio Supreme Court justices engaged in flagrant judicial activism and decided Ohio judges can participate in partisan politics, including for prosecutors, sheriffs and lawmakers. ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/04/22/rep…

Destroying the @InternetArchive's @WayBackMachine would be the equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria - one of the worst losses of knowledge in history. Media giants are now threatening to do this. We can't let this happen. Pass it on.

@TroyWillimas How many loads?

My position all Sunday.

Ohio has become the first U.S. state to allow judges to make partisan political endorsements, as the Ohio Supreme Court unexpectedly ruled the state's decades-long ban is unconstitutional cleveland.com/news/2026/04/o…

NEW: In 2020, as President Trump tried to overturn his loss to Joe Biden, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely. A @ProPublica investigation found that, ahead of the midterms, Trump has systematically demolished those guardrails. 🧵

Before Citizens United, billionaires spent around $16 million on presidential elections. In 2024, they spent $2.6 BILLION. And what did they get for that money? They got a MASSIVE tax cut for themselves.

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks. The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people. ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher. My Take The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing. I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all. Hedgie🤗 nature.com/articles/d4158…

Exclusive: The acting director of the CDC has delayed publication of a report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of ER visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists. wapo.st/4tFqKqY

Nieman Lab analyzed the tweets of major news organizations that link back to their websites and compared them to a handful of “breaking news” accounts that almost never include links. It found that tweets with links almost definitely are being suppressed niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-lin…