Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is warning his party not to join a Democratic-led effort to undo President Trump’s 25-percent tariff on Canadian imports.
Thune defended the emergency order as necessary to address the nation’s fentanyl crisis, particularly as the anti-tariff resolution is expected to pick up support from a few GOP senators.
The resolution, which is sponsored by Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine (Va.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Mark Warner (Va.) would call for undoing Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods.
It does not have the force of law, but it would be embarrassing to Trump if a significant number of Senate Republicans vote for the measure.
Trump on Tuesday took a swipe at Kaine over the effort and urged Republican senators to defeat the resolution.
“Sen. Tim Kaine, who ran against me with Crooked Hillary in 2016, is trying to halt our critical Tariffs on deadly Fentanyl coming in from Canada. We are making progress to end this terrible Fentanyl Crisis, but Republicans in the Senate MUST vote to keep the National Emergency in place, so we can finish the job, and end the scourge,” the president posted on Truth Social.
The Senate is expected to vote on the legislation later this week.
Low-dose CT screening in a high-risk population detected lung cancer in 2.0% of participants, with nearly 80% of cases diagnosed at stage I or II. The screening protocol demonstrated 97.0% sensitivity at 12 months, with a 4.8% false-positive rate.
METHODOLOGY:
Annual low-dose CT screening has been recommended in the United States since 2013, but uptake remains low at only 4.5% of eligible individuals in 2022.
Regional targeted lung health check pilot programs are ongoing in the United Kingdom and are expected to be rolled into a national program. This study was conducted to assess the implementation of these types of programs.
Researchers conducted a prospective, longitudinal cohort study involving 12,773 participants aged 55-77 years, with current or former smoking habit within the past 20 years, identified from 329 primary care practices in London.
Participants meeting US Preventive Services Taskforce criteria or having a Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian 2012 model 6-year risk ≥ 1.3% underwent noncontrast, thin collimation low-dose CT screening.
Analysis included episode sensitivity of the screening protocol, with outcomes measured on a per-participant level using descriptive frequencies.
TAKEAWAY:
Among 12,773 participants, 261 (2.0%) were diagnosed with lung cancer, including 163 (1.3%) with screen-detected cancer and 98 (0.8%) with delayed screen-detected cancer after nodule follow-up CT.
The screening protocol demonstrated 97.0% sensitivity (95% CI, 95.0-99.1); 95.2% specificity (95% CI, 94.8-95.6), and a positive predictive value of 30.3% (95% CI, 27.3-33.4).
Surgical resection was the primary treatment modality in 201 (77.0%) of cases, with 207 (79.3%) of lung cancers being diagnosed at stage I or II.
Benign surgical resection rate was 11.6% (28 of 241 resections), with one death (0.4%) occurring within 90 days of surgery.
IN PRACTICE:
“Large-scale lung cancer screening is effective and can be delivered efficiently to an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population…. The findings of our study will help lung cancer services understand the implications of this programme on resource use and help to develop quality assurance standards for lung cancer screening, both in the UK and elsewhere,” wrote the authors of the study.
SOURCE:
The study was led by Amyn Bhamani, PhD, and Andrew Creamer, PhD, Lungs for Living Research Centre, University College London in London, the United Kingdom. It was published online on March 25 in The Lancet Oncology.
LIMITATIONS:
According to the authors, the study was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused procedures to be paused and led to delays in follow-up imaging. Some participants were unable to return for scans due to travel restrictions or pandemic-related concerns, resulting in higher attrition rates of 4.4% and 6.3% at 3-month and 6-month interval scans, respectively. Additionally, participation was limited to high-risk individuals based primarily on smoking history, excluding never smokers from the study population.
DISCLOSURES:
The study was funded by GRAIL. Sam M. Janes, PhD, received fees for advisory board membership from Bard1 Life Sciences, grant income from GRAIL, and lecture fees from Cheisi and AstraZeneca. His wife works for AstraZeneca. Additional disclosures are noted in the original article.
The possession, sale, and production of psilocybin for recreational use are illegal in Canada. Why then, do brick-and-mortar psychedelic stores and online sellers appear to be proliferating across urban areas, especially in Ontario and British Columbia (BC)?
Newly published study findings showed that as of May 2024, 57 psilocybin stores were operating in more than a third (35.7%) of major Canadian urban centers. The majority (96.5%) were located in two provinces: Ontario and BC, whose residents collectively make up 52.5% of the nation’s population.
“We had been reading in the news about stores popping up across Canada and anecdotal reports about magic mushroom dispensaries,” lead study author and researcher Jenna Matsukubo told Medscape Medical News.
“Our goal was to provide scientific evidence that these stores do exist, identify where they are located, and evaluate the types of health claims and health warnings they were making on their websites,” she explained.
Matsukubo’s team used a cross-sectional design with a two-step approach — systematic web searches and media reports — to identify the physical and online psilocybin dispensaries in 42 major urban Canadian population centers and surrounding areas. The data were collected at 2 unique timepoints: November 2023 and May 2024.
The researchers categorized retailers as chains, independent stores, or websites and analyzed products for sale and health claims and warnings. Health claims were categorized as related to mental health, substance use, nonmedical/wellness, or physical health. Dispensary access was determined using annual population Statistics Canada estimates of individuals aged 15 years or older on July 1, 2021, for each jurisdiction.
Initial findings showed that 68 psilocybin stores were operating in Canada between November 2023 and May 2024, 11 of which (mostly independent or small chain stores) had closed between the two data collection dates.
Products available for purchase ranged from dried mushrooms (sold by 100% of stores), microdosing capsules (97.8%), psilocybin-infused chocolate (91.3%), and gummies (93.4%) to infused teas, cocoa, and other products. Almost two thirds of the stores (65.2%) offered at least one infused product that mimicked popular brand-name snacks (eg, Mushtella, a Nutella-like spread, or chocolates similar to Skor or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups).
False Claims, Inconsistent Warnings
Matsukubo said that about 86% of stores had websites containing health claims despite limited or no supporting evidence. For example, 81.8% communicated that users might experience declines in social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder after microdosing, while 77.3% highlighted significant alleviation in depressive symptoms lasting months after treatment and even after a single psilocybin dose. Roughly one third of stores claimed that microdosing resulted in reduced alcohol and nicotine cravings.
Nonmedical claims ranged from increased creativity and open-mindedness (82%) to increasing focus and productivity (77.3%). Claimed physical health benefits included pain (36.4%) and headache (31.8%) relief, as well as improvements in eating disorders, insomnia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (68.2%).
More than half of the websites advised customers to start with a low dose and carried warnings about use in certain populations, potential hallucination or altered perception, and bad trips. Only 9% cited published evidence.
“For most of these substances, there’s no or limited adverse events data because there’s been no studies,” Co-author Daniel Myran, MD, Canada Research Chair in Social Accountability at the University of Ottawa and scientist at the Bruyère Health Research Institute, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, and The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, told Medscape Medical News.
Daniel Myran, MD
“We were surprised by the broad omission of potentially better-established risks, such as cautioning use by people with a history of bipolar disorder or mania, or psychosis or schizophrenia,” he said.
Vigilance Needed
The opening and closing of psilocybin dispensaries appeared to be a dynamic process.
“This is the only real limitation that came to mind, that many of the stores that they looked at have probably already closed, even in the last year, and others have opened up,” Kyle Greenway, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University and attending psychiatrist at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, told Medscape Medical News. Greenway was not involved in the study. “Things are moving really quickly.”
Kyle Greenway, MD
There are only three ways to obtain psilocybin legally in Canada: Through a clinical trial, via clinician requests to Health Canada’s Special Access Program, or by exemptions by the Minister of Health (the latter might take as long as 300 days). But the data showed that these restrictions have not prevented consumer access.
“It’s extremely unlikely that any sort of public ad or harm reduction campaign is going to be successful in creating enough awareness around these drugs for them to be liberally sold as is online and in dispensaries,” said Greenway.
“In the absence of regulation and enforcement, there are health claims being made that would need to meet the standards of other products and therapeutics. This suggests that some sort of federal or provincial action should be taken,” Myran added.
The study was independently supported. Matsukubo, Myran, and Greenway reported having no relevant financial relationships.
Lefty mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to spend $1.1 billion on a new department overseeing mental health calls instead of the NYPD — a proposal panned as “another pie in the sky idea” by law enforcement pros Tuesday.
The democratic socialist state assemblyman from Queens unveiled a 17-page public safety plan that did not call to hire more police officers, as other mayoral candidates have proposed.
Instead, Mamdani wants to create a new Department of Community Safety focused on increasing mental health outreach teams in the subways and beefing up “gun violence interrupter” programs in neighborhoods to drive down crime.
Mamdani, who has backed the “defund the police” movement, insisted that cops are being relied on too often to “deal with the failures of the social safety net.”
“A reliance that is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,” he said at a press conference Tuesday. “This is part of the reason why so many crimes are left unresolved in our city.”
Law enforcement and public safety experts slammed the plan as unrealistic and claimed cops would eventually be forced to clean up the mess.
“They keep trying to reinvent the wheel but it will always fall back on police officers,” a law enforcement source said.
“Another pie in the sky idea that will fall short again – with police officers picking up the pieces like everything else.”
Candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.REUTERS
Mamdani, who has landed in second place in recent polling, claimed to reporters he would not cut from the NYPD’s budget to pay for the new agency. His plan calls for about $600 million to be transferred from existing programs that would fold into the new department, while another $455 million would be new funding.
His campaign said the funds could come from raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and on corporations – both of which would need to be approved by state lawmakers.
Mamdani’s plan would also expand a current program, the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division — dubbed B-HEARD — that sends mental health professionals and EMTs to respond to 911 calls involving mental health crises instead of cops.
The program, launched as a pilot under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, has faced scrutiny in recent years over its inability to hire staff and failure to respond to all calls.
Michael Alcazar, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called the plan “100% a waste of money” and said cops need to be on the scene to handle most cases involving an emotionally disturbed person.
“The candidate has never responded to an EDP job so he’s putting this out on paper,” said Alcazar, a retired NYPD detective. “It sounds great because everyone hates the police.”
The plan calls for other workers to handle what cops typically would.James Keivom
Chris Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay, called Mamdani’s plan “innovative” and worth a try, but questioned if dispatchers are best equipped to decide whether cops or mental health staff respond to a 911 call.
“The problem obviously is when the social work teams show up to the place where the cops really need to be,” he told The Post.
A Mamdani campaign spokesperson said emergency dispatchers, under new protocols, would decide if medical workers and peer counselors would respond to a call or if police would handle the situation, and B-HEARD teams can also call for cops once they are at the scene.
Still, Alcazar and Herrmann both said candidates should be focused on drawing in more police officers.
“The reality is the numbers are going down,” Herrmann said of the NYPD, which is experiencing a staffing crisis.
The NYPD currently has a 34,000-person workforce — a notable drop from the 36,300 officers the department had five years ago before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd that stoked anti-cop sentiment.
The department had an all-time high of around 40,000 cops in 2000 under then-mayor Rudy Giuliani.
The lefty candidate says outreach workers would flood the subways.REUTERS
Several other candidates in the June Democratic mayoral primary, including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and City Comptroller Brad Lander, have unveiled public safety plans that involve hiring more cops.
Mayor Eric Adams, who is also running for re-election and has consistently called for more cops, brushed off Mamdani’s proposal.
“When you talk about that, where are you going to get the money from … you want to continue hemorrhaging the high income families going to pay into our tax base?” he said during his weekly press briefing later Tuesday.
Under his plan, outreach workers would flood 100 different subway stations to offer help to people in need and add more “violence interrupters” – who usually live in the community and have a criminal past — would attempt to “de-escalate potentially violent situations and mediate conflicts.”
He also wants to grow B-HEARD so every Big Apple neighborhood has at least one team, including one mental health professional and two EMTs.
“I have released a comprehensive evidenced-based plan that will address violence and crime at its source, deploy trained mental health crisis responders across our subway system, relieve the excessive burden we’ve placed on police officers, and keep New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani said in a statement responding to Adams’ criticism.
“It’s time to turn the page on Eric Adams’ four years of failed governance and elect leadership that takes these issues seriously.”
Wild details of Joe Biden’s rapid cognitive and physical deterioration have emerged in a new book, as it is revealed that handlers were trying to cover up signs of Biden’s physical decline with make up.
Excerpts have emerged from a new book by entitled “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” by The Hill Senior Political Correspondent Amie Parnes and NBC News Digital Senior political analyst Jonathan Allen that reveals Democrats and Biden insiders were all too painfully aware of what was going on, but all went along with the facade until it was no longer possible to hide it.
In one excerpt, a former Biden aide shared how they had a resident make-up artist to cover up how dilapidated Biden’s physical appearance had become.
As conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller puts it “they were literally Michael Jacksoning him” then calling anyone who questioned Biden’s acumen a conspiracy theorist.
It’s one small step away from whacking sunglasses on the ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’ corpse.
On some occasions, Biden would get the make up done, and then cancel the briefings.
Another incident saw Biden not recognising or knowing who Rep. Eric Swalwell was and having to be coached into remembering him.
The Hill notes…
Swalwell had not been invited to the White House often, like most members of Congress, but when Biden and Swalwell came face to face, Biden didn’t immediately recognize the congressman, according to the book.
Swalwell needed to note personal details to remind Biden of who he is.
While they all remained quiet at the time, Miller notes that everyone is coming out of the woodwork now the book deals are being bandied around.
Biden also needed fluorescent tape to guide him where to go and not to wander off during public events.
The book further notes that Biden’s allies were planning for his death and someone else becoming the Democratic nominee as early as 2023.
Kamala Harris’ team reportedly drew up a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear her in if and when Biden died in office.
Despite the bright red flags, Biden’s handlers still all went along with the show.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone in that inner circle was presenting the president any contrary advice that this thing is not going to be easy or maybe this is not the best thing for the Democratic Party,” one Biden ally told Parnes and Allen.
Appearing on NewsNation’s Cuomo, Parnes said that “I think every Democrat has a story…where they saw President Biden not in the best terms.”
The book has also confirmed that Biden essentially fucked over Obama and the insiders in the Party who finally took the decision to remove him by immediately endorsing Kamala Harris.
According to the book, Harris’ team “begged” Biden to endorse her in his statement issued when he ‘stepped down’ as the Democratic nominee, before the Obama/Pelosi crowd could push for an open primary to select a new nominee.
