Oracle, BorderPlex, and Bloom Energy announced on Monday plans to power Project Jupiter using cleaner, water-efficient fuel cell technology from Bloom, with capacity scaling up to 2.45 gigawatts.
The partnership leverages Bloom's fuel cell expertise to deliver efficient, low-emission power tailored for high-demand operations, replacing planned gas turbines and diesel generators. "The project includes community commitments totaling $416.9 million and expects 4,000 construction jobs and 1,500 ongoing roles," the firms said in a press release.
Project Jupiter is a massive $165 billion AI-training data center campus under construction in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, to serve advanced AI needs.
United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday that foreign governments should not shape global artificial intelligence (AI) rules, criticizing efforts to involve international voices.
"The real threat to AI safety is letting any nation other than the United States set the global standard," Bessent wrote on X, adding the US is home to "the most talented AI researchers in the world." "Instead of harnessing American innovation, Senator [Bernie] Sanders is inviting foreign nationals to tell the United States how to regulate AI," he stressed.
Last Friday, Sanders said "uncontrolled AI poses a severe danger to all of humanity" and announced he will host a discussion on Wednesday with US and Chinese scientists on international cooperation.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Bessent:-Letting-others-set-AI-rules-is-real-threat/66158634
by Amin Haqshanas via CoinTelegraph.com,
Brazilian authorities have moved to shut down 27 prediction market platforms, including Kalshi and Polymarket.
The decision, announced Friday, follows a directive from the Ministry of Finance and enforcement by the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel), according to state-owned news outlet Agência Brasil. Authorities claimed that such services fall outside Brazil’s current legal framework and therefore operate illegally.
“We have been monitoring the evolution of this sector in Brazil, which suffered a period of anarchy because there were no rules, no oversight, from 2018 to 2022,” Finance Ministry executive secretary Dario Durigan reportedly said during a press conference at the Palácio do Planalto.
The crackdown follows Resolution 5.298 issued by Brazil’s National Monetary Council (CMN) on Friday, which takes effect in early May and sharply limits what prediction market platforms can offer. Under the new rules, contracts tied to sports, politics, entertainment, or social events are banned, as authorities consider them closer to gambling than financial investments.
Only contracts linked to economic indicators, such as inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, or commodity prices, will remain allowed and fall under financial market oversight.
Durigan claimed that prediction markets could deepen household debt and expose users to financial harm. “At a time when we are working to reduce debt levels among families, small businesses, and students, we must also prevent new forms of harmful indebtedness,” he said.
The blocked platforms include a mix of international and Brazil-focused services, with major names including Kalshi, Polymarket, PredictIt, Robinhood (via its forecasting feature) and Fanatics Markets.
Banned prediction markets in Brazil. Source: Agência Brasil
Other affected platforms include ProphetX, Hedgehog Markets, Novig, Polyswipe, PRED Exchange and Stride, alongside several Brazil-focused services such as Palpita, Cravei, Previsao, and MercadoPred.
A growing number of jurisdictions have moved to ban prediction markets, often folding them into gambling or financial regulations. Several European nations, including France, Belgium and the Netherlands, have blocked or penalized platforms operating without authorization.
In the United States, the situation is more fragmented, with an ongoing tug-of-war between federal regulators and individual states over prediction markets.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/kalshi-polymarket-among-27-prediction-platforms-banned-brazil
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
- Ian Fleming
Don’t you love the way the news media pretends it can’t figure out the motive of Cole Tomas Allen, who tried to shoot-up Saturday’s White House correspondents’ gala. He was a creation of the very White House correspondents who ducked under their tables at the sound of his shots.
Cole Tomas Allen had digested and internalized the “narrative” spewage of the Democratic Party’s propaganda department. MSNOW occupied his brain like a glistening parasite.
CBS tried to amplify the shooter’s own motive on Sunday night’s 60 Minutes show when Norah O’Donnell read out-loud from his manifesto, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” and asked President Trump “What is your reaction to that?” Mr. Trump did not fall for the ruse — which was just an opportunity to reinforce a well-worn scurrility.
“You’re a disgrace,” the president replied, and Ms. O’Donnell just continued with the interview as if his answer never registered.
There it is.
In fact, Cole Tomas Allen traveled all the way from Los Angeles to Washington for the rare chance to find Mr. Trump and most of his cabinet all together in one room where he might be able to kill as many of them as possible. He styled himself: “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen. “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done,” he concluded in his short manifesto, reportedly composed and sent out minutes before he left his room at the Washington Hilton to perform his rash deed.
That rage, you understand, was planted in his head by the likes of Norah O’Donnell of CBS news and the scores of reporters, editors, and news producers who had to abandon the festive menu starters of spring pea and burrata salad and crab terrine with a nice Veuve Clicquot when the shots rang out. The gala is a night when the Blob’s media errand boys and call girls like to treat themselves like royalty. (Meanwhile their hated enemies back in the truck stops of MAGAland get by on lowly chili-lime jerky and Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, washed down with Red Bull — good for five-hundred miles of hauling, at least.)
The former president can’t guess Cole Tomas Allen’s motives. He is a liar, a cad, and a fraud. As for political violence in general, you have not heard Mr. Obama complain about Antifa mayhem, BLM riots, tranny school murders, harassment of ICE officers, or any other violence approved by the Lefty-left. Mr. Obama is himself a bona fide seditionist. When he repeats the shibboleth “our democracy” he means simply the Lefty-left’s malevolent will to power — which is predicated on nothing more than feeding the Democratic Party’s never-ending rackets, doling out money to its captive clients for votes, solely to remain in power: Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. His mealy-mouthed sanctimony serves only his personal need to evade prosecution for his own crimes.
The only way Barack Obama can evade prosecution for RussiaGate and then for covertly running the “Joe Biden” White House from his HQ across town is if he is named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the RICO cases to come. That will be enough for historians to understand what happened here in the early 21st century. And what about the other traitors, the long list of Blob apparatchiks who schemed to overthrow the executive from 2016 to 2021, and then labored to throw thousands in prison, ran a fake pandemic op, queered two elections, hijacked the courts, shut down opposing opinion, and poisoned the minds of several assassins?
Justice is coming for them. They know it, and their “resistance” seeks to turn feral and savage in the months leading to the midterm elections. It will start in a few days with “Mayday Strong” rallies and street marches. Their slogan, “It’s workers over billionaires,” is just another lie. The part they leave out is that these actions are funded by billionaires: George Soros, Neville Roy Singham, Hansjörg Wyss, et al. Don’t expect the action to remain “mostly peaceful,” either. The idea, of course, is to get violent so as to goad President Trump into invoking emergency powers to put down an insurrection.
I doubt that President Trump will shrink from invoking the Insurrection Act, an amalgamation of laws passed by Congress starting in 1792–1795 with the Militia Acts, then the key 1807 law signed by President Thomas Jefferson, and major amendments during and after the Civil War, including the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. It is codified in Title 10 of the United States Code, Chapter 13, specifically §§ 251–255. It is a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act (1878), which generally prohibits using federal troops for domestic law enforcement.
The Insurrection Act (with its predecessor statutes) has been invoked approximately 30 times in U.S. history by 16 presidents — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland, Wilson, Harding, FD Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and Bush — in episodes including the Whiskey Rebellion, the Southern Secession, many violent labor strikes, several race riots, and looting in natural disasters.
President Trump might have to use the Insurrection Act to stop what has been an ongoing coup against his elected administration by an opposition party that has turned criminal and traitorous. He may have to convene extraordinary military tribunals to adjudicate crimes that include those committed by the federal judiciary itself. If he does all this, it must include an executive order mandating common sense election procedure for the midterm: citizenship and photo ID required, paper ballots only, no vote-counting machines, voting only on one day deemed Election Day, and mail-in ballots limited only to military, people required to be out of the country, and the disabled.
All this is looking increasingly unavoidable.
While debate over President Trump’s “Great Healthcare Plan” has focused heavily on the Most Favored Nation (MFN) drug pricing policy, another provision with additional and real potential to quickly lower costs has received far less attention: expanding access to over the counter (OTC) medicines.
Allowing more medications to be sold without a prescription would reduce costs, expand competition increase convenience, and ease pressure on the entire healthcare system. Done properly, expanding OTC access can deliver immediate, tangible benefits to patients by making medicines more affordable.
We’ve seen this story before. Over the past several decades, dozens of drugs have successfully moved from prescription-only status to local store shelves—transforming both access and affordability. Patients with chronic heartburn turned to Nexium and Prilosec without a doctor’s visit. Everyday pain relief became simpler with products like Aleve. Even cough suppression—through the approval of dextromethorphan (DXM)—shifted to OTC, enabling familiar brands like Mucinex, Robitussin, and NyQuil to become cheaper, more effective and available.
These switches did more than create convenience. They reduced unnecessary doctor visits, lowered out-of-pocket costs, and gave patients more control over routine care. What was once locked behind the pharmacy counter became accessible, affordable, and widely used. And as more companies produced these products, it spurred economic competition, which lowered prices to consumers, making these medicines more affordable.
Expanding OTC access further would build on this proven track record. Improving the process of moving medicines from prescriptions to OTC is a major priority for the Trump Administration – as evidenced by the inclusion of this policy in the President’s Great Healthcare Plan. It’s also an idea that should produce enthusiastic support on Capitol Hill among those who want to improve affordability. Each additional switch has the potential to generate meaningful savings and greater patient benefits.
Another reason for quick action is the U.S. lags other high-income countries in converting prescription medications to OTC. In an analysis of 19 drugs with the same active ingredients, the U.S. had only two prescriptions to OTC approvals compared to nine in the UK, eight in Australia, and five in Germany and New Zealand.[1]
The economic case is substantial as significant savings stem from lower drug prices and fewer physician visits for routine conditions. A February 2025 study in the journal Health Economics found that removing the requirement that patients receive a prescription to purchase brand-name drugs reduced the retail price by more than 35% within five years, on average. A 2024 Journal of the American Medical Association study estimated 57% savings if Medicare Part D claims for 19 drugs identified with OTC equivalents had been paid at cash rather than pharmacy transaction prices. [2]
Patients see the most immediate benefit. OTC availability typically lowers per-dose costs and eliminates the time and expense of scheduling doctor visits. Studies consistently show that OTC use reduces unnecessary office appointments for common conditions like allergies, heartburn, and minor pain—freeing providers to focus on more complex care.
Employers and public programs benefit as well. Fewer claims for doctor visits and prescription drugs translate into lower overall spending, particularly for chronic but manageable conditions that benefit from these medications. At the same time, easier access can improve adherence, encouraging patients to treat symptoms earlier and more consistently—often preventing more costly complications later.
These transitions generally follow a New Drug Application (NDA) process or a Switch Petition, where the pharmaceutical company submits evidence to the FDA that the drug is safe, effective, and can be used by the public without professional supervision. The FDA reviews clinical trials, expert recommendations, and data about potential misuse or safety concerns before approving the switch.
The OTC provision in the Great Healthcare Plan[3] provides a strong policy mandate to the FDA to modernize and streamline the process for transitioning appropriate prescription drugs to over-the-counter availability. It directs the FDA to create a faster process to increase the availability of ‘over-the-counter’ safe medicines to patients without the time, money, and hassle of needing to receive a prescription. This would both lower prices and make it easier for people to quickly get the medicine they need.
Not every drug belongs on the shelf. Safety must remain the threshold. But the evidence is clear: when regulators make careful, evidence-based decisions, prescription-to-OTC switches consistently deliver consumer, economic, and public health gains.
Lawmakers should build on these successes—and make expanding OTC access a central part of their efforts to lower healthcare costs. By directing the FDA to create a clear, accelerated pathway to move more medicines to over-the-counter use, Congress can deliver on the President’s vision in the Great Healthcare Plan by elevating a provision that is not only practical, not only proven, but for too long has been overlooked and underemphasized in Washington at the expense of Americans.
Gary Andres is Assistant Secretary for Legislation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
A growing movement claims social media is “addictive,” and lawmakers are treating it as settled science. But the evidence is far less clear, and the rush to litigate and regulate risks turning a debated concept into sweeping policy. When science is uncertain, the costs of getting it wrong can be enormous.
A movement is underway to classify heavy social media use as a form of addiction. Advocacy groups, plaintiffs’ attorneys, and a growing number of lawmakers are treating the proposition as settled science. In a landmark California trial in early 2026, a jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing platforms that allegedly caused mental health harm, awarding $6 million in damages.
In Congress, the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media platforms to prevent specified harms to minors, including “compulsive usage,” and to disable addictive product features by default, has advanced out of committee in both chambers. Additional bills would ban children under age 16 from using social media entirely, require age verification at the app store level, and expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to cover minors up to age 17. Australia has enacted an outright ban on social media for children under 16 years old.
The pace of legal and legislative action suggests a society that has made up its mind. But the underlying science has not. The research base on social media addiction remains fragmented, methodologically inconsistent, and far from the kind of consensus that would ordinarily justify the regulatory and legal apparatus now being built around it. As we have argued in our earlier analysis of how the American health care system rewards psychiatric overdiagnosis, when diagnosis is subjective and payment depends on diagnosis, the system will predictably expand the boundaries of illness. Social media addiction is poised to become the next case study in that dynamic, with consequences that extend well beyond health care spending into the domains of free speech, privacy, and innovation.
Addiction, Dependence, and Habit Are Not the Same Thing
Before asking whether social media is addictive, it is worth clarifying what addiction actually means, because politicians, journalists, and even some clinicians routinely misuse the term. As one of us has previously argued, the conflation of addiction with dependence and habit distorts both public understanding and public policy.
These three concepts describe very different things. Dependence is a physiological adaptation in which abruptly stopping a substance produces withdrawal symptoms. It is common and, by itself, unremarkable. Anyone who has ever quit coffee cold turkey and spent the next two days with a splitting headache has experienced caffeine dependence. Patients who take certain antidepressants, benzodiazepines (e.g., Valium), antiepileptic drugs, or beta blockers for extended periods develop physical dependence as well. If they stop abruptly, they will experience withdrawal. In some cases, withdrawal can be fatal. Yet no one would claim that patients taking beta blockers long term for high blood pressure or antiepileptic medications for a seizure disorder are addicted to those drugs.
A habit is something different still. Habits are behavioral patterns, often automatic, that people repeat because they find them pleasurable, comforting, or simply routine. Checking social media first thing in the morning, scrolling through a feed while waiting in line, or reaching for the phone out of boredom: These are habits. They may be unwise. They may waste time. They may even be difficult to break. But difficulty is not pathology. People also find it hard to stop snacking, binge-watching television, or hitting the snooze button. We do not diagnose these behaviors as diseases.
Addiction is distinct from both. The American Society of Addiction Medicine’s definition states: “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.” Addiction can involve substances or activities. For example, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classifies gambling disorder as an addiction.
The defining feature is compulsive behavior: repeated engagement despite clear harm to relationships, finances, or health. This pattern reflects changes in the brain’s reward and decisionmaking circuits that erode self-control. But people with addiction do not completely surrender agency; they are not zombie-like automatons at the mercy of a substance or activity. Even in the grip of addiction, many will avoid use in certain settings, delay it when consequences are immediate, or respond to incentives—evidence that agency, though impaired, is still intact.
When the term “addiction” is applied loosely to heavy social media use, it skips over the crucial middle category of habit and confers a clinical gravity that the evidence does not support. Someone who checks Instagram too often or finds it hard to put down TikTok almost certainly has an unhealthy habit. Calling it an addiction equates that behavior with the compulsive, life-destroying patterns seen in substance use disorders.
This distinction matters because “addiction” is not a neutral word—it has specific consequences enshrined in policy. Once applied, it unlocks diagnosis codes, insurance payments, treatment industries, lawsuits, and regulation. We don’t create Medicaid billing categories for habits. We don’t pass federal laws to shield children from habits. Label something “addiction,” and the entire policy engine comes to life. That label should follow the science, not lead it.
What Does the Research Actually Show?
Much of the existing research on social media and mental health suffers from serious methodological limitations. The majority of studies rely on self-reported measures administered at a single point in time. They can identify correlations between heavy social media use and negative mental health outcomes, but they cannot establish the direction of causation. It is equally plausible that individuals already experiencing depression, anxiety, or social isolation turn to social media as a coping mechanism rather than social media causing those conditions.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics analyzed 143 studies examining the effects of social media use on mental health among over one million adolescents worldwide. Overall associations were small and inconsistent across studies and often confounded by other factors such as personality and social support. The evidence base being cited to justify sweeping policy interventions is built on faulty scientific ground, as one of us recently argued in the Washington Post.
None of that means excessive social media use cannot be harmful for certain individuals. Some people undoubtedly experience significant distress and functional impairment related to their online habits. But the question of whether a behavior causes harm in some people is different from the question of whether it constitutes a discrete clinical disorder, and the latter question is far from resolved.
Why We Should Not Trust the Diagnostic Authorities to Get This Right
Proponents of recognizing social media addiction as a disorder often point to the DSM and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as the bodies that will eventually resolve the question. But formal inclusion in these manuals would not settle the science. It would settle the payment. And the track record of these manuals should inspire caution, not confidence.
Formal classification matters because of what it triggers financially. In the American health care system, a diagnosis unlocks reimbursement. A recognized social media addiction diagnosis would trigger insurance coverage under the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which requires health plans, including Medicaid managed care, to cover behavioral health services at parity with medical and surgical services. Under fee-for-service billing, providers increase revenue by increasing the volume of services delivered, and subjective diagnostic criteria provide the discretion to do so. The system fixes the price of a service but introduces no effective mechanism for governing whether the service was clinically necessary.
The DSM has progressively broadened the boundaries of psychiatric illness over successive revisions, often without corresponding improvements in diagnostic precision. Its fifth edition collapsed previously distinct autism categories into a single spectrum elastic enough to encompass both nonverbal children requiring constant care and socially awkward adolescents who prefer solitude. It loosened ADHD criteria, allowing symptom onset as late as age 12 rather than requiring it by age 7, and reduced the symptom threshold for adults. Generalized anxiety disorder requires only that worry be “excessive” and cause “clinically significant distress or impairment,” judgments that depend entirely on a clinician’s interpretation of where normal worry ends and disorder begins. Each revision has expanded the population eligible for diagnosis and, with it, the population eligible for treatment and reimbursement.
As we documented in our recent analysis of Medicaid-funded autism therapy, the broadening of autism spectrum criteria, combined with Medicaid’s open-ended reimbursement structure, produced an explosion in spending on applied behavior analysis therapy that far outpaced any plausible change in the actual prevalence of disabling autism. The broadening of ADHD criteria produced a parallel surge in stimulant prescriptions. In each case, the combination of subjective diagnosis and financial incentives that reward diagnosis pushed the boundaries of illness outward.
Social media addiction, if formalized, will follow the same trajectory. A social media addiction rehabilitation industry is already emerging: Specialized retreats, counseling programs, and screen-time management apps are marketing themselves to anxious parents and burned-out professionals. That industry will expand dramatically the moment a formal diagnosis is established—a new special interest group, funded in significant part by taxpayer dollars and private insurance premiums.
We have already seen this dynamic play out when unhealthy habits become medically pathologized. The inclusion of “gaming disorder” in the ICD-11 in 2019 is a cautionary example rather than a reassuring precedent. A large group of scholars published an open letter opposing the classification, warning that it rested on a low-quality evidence base, that the diagnostic criteria leaned too heavily on substance use and gambling frameworks without adequate validation for behavioral contexts, and that official classification would generate a “tsunami of false positive referrals to treatment.” The scholars were particularly concerned that premature classification would pathologize ordinary recreational activity and cause significant stigma. That gaming disorder made it into the ICD-11 despite these objections is not evidence that the process works. It is evidence that diagnostic classification is driven as much by political and institutional momentum as by scientific rigor. Anyone who believes that social media addiction will receive more careful treatment from these same institutions is not paying attention.
What Comes Next
This pattern is by now familiar. Subjective diagnostic criteria and financial incentives that reward diagnosis have repeatedly produced policy responses that were disproportionate, costly, and harmful. The social media addiction debate is following the same trajectory. If we do not insist on scientific rigor before enshrining a diagnosis in law and policy, we will once again find ourselves managing the consequences of a premature consensus.
The question is not whether social media can be used in unhealthy ways. Of course it can. The question is what happens when we reclassify those behaviors as a medical disorder before the science supports that classification. When diagnosis is subjective and incentives reward diagnosis, the boundaries of illness expand. More diagnoses generate more treatment, more spending, and more regulation—along with greater government intrusion into choices that were once considered matters of personal judgment.
That reclassification also invites litigation. Once courts accept the premise of “addiction,” lawsuits will pressure platforms to alter or restrict lawful content and design features, often through settlement agreements negotiated outside the legislative process. Lawmakers, responding to a perceived epidemic, will layer on additional restrictions—limiting access, mandating intrusive age verification, and expanding regulatory oversight of online speech. As our colleagues at Cato have argued, these interventions threaten free expression and innovation while doing little to address the underlying concerns about children’s welfare and risk undermining online speech and privacy for users of all ages. The costs will be measured not only in dollars but also in diminished speech, eroded privacy, and the further medicalization of ordinary human behavior.
When the science is unsettled and the incentives to expand diagnosis are strong, we must be cautious. At bottom, this is a question of restraint.
We should be especially careful before turning a widespread human behavior into a medical disorder, because once we do, the consequences will extend far beyond the people we are trying to help.
Jeffrey A. Singer, MD received his BA from Brooklyn College and his MD from New York Medical College. After completing his surgical residency and receiving Board Certification he began a private practice as a general surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona and became a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, serving in the Department of Health Policy Studies. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, AZ.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2026/04/24/case-against-social-media-addiction-50075
