Rick Scott asks Trump admin to strip CodePink’s tax-exempt status over China funding ties

  Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is calling on the Trump administration to strip lefty activist group CodePink of its tax-exempt status over its alleged funding connections to the Chinese Communist Party and potentially other US adversaries like Cuba.

Scott wrote a letter to IRS Commissioner Frank Bisignano on Wednesday, saying that the 501(c)(3) educational group has “long been connected to shady characters, acted inappropriately, and
seemingly broken the rules and standards established for non-profit entities.”

“The American people have a right to expect that the substantial privileges associated with tax-exempt status are reserved for organizations that operate independently and in furtherance of legitimate charitable, educational, and public interest purposes,” Scott wrote in the missive.

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CodePink activists frequently get booted from congressional hearings for causing disruptions.AFP via Getty Images

For years, the rowdy cabal of pink-clad feminist agitators have disrupted congressional hearings and badgered lawmakers all over Capitol Hill in protest of American support of Israel, among other issues.

The Florida Republican argued that CodePink has been running afoul of its nonprofit eligibility by lobbying members of Congress publicly and privately by pushing propaganda about the CCP — including through its denials about the widely reported use of forced labor in Xinjiang Province.

“While this connection to the CCP is concerning and warrants its own investigation, CodePink’s day-to-day activities raise questions about its eligibility as a 501(c)(3) organization,” the senator wrote.

Under IRS rules, 501(c)(3)s are restricted from engaging in “too much lobbying activity” to maintain their tax-exempt status.

“CodePink’s own website details how it was founded for the express purpose of lobbying Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress to ‘break with the party leadership’ during the Iraq War,” Scott recalled.

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CodePink’s activists have often been arrested for causing disturbances.Anadolu via Getty Images

“The organization has never ceased lobbying Congress, boasting that it has ‘become famous for confronting the warmongers, in the halls and hearing rooms of Congress, the national conventions of both the Republicans and Democrats, political fundraisers, and in the streets,'” he added, citing the group’s website.

Scott also raised concerns about the group’s alleged ties to China. It was co-founded by the wife of tech mogul Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire and Chinese Communist Party sympathizer, who has sponsored CodePink protests in the past.

This includes a Times Square demonstration opposing the US war with Iran. Singham, an American expat living in China, has faced accusations of working with Beijing’s propaganda machine.

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Uncle Sam is currently investigating CodePink over a March trip to Communist Cuba.Getty Images

The House Ways and Means Committee has also been probing CCP links to the CodePink funder.

Recently, the pink disruptor group was hit with federal subpoenas related to a March trip to Cuba, amid concerns about possible sanctions evasion.

Specifically, the Treasury Department is probing CodePink. Several of its leaders — including Medea Benjamin — stayed at a five-star hotel in Havana in March, ostensibly to provide humanitarian aid, though it’s unclear the degree to which they coordinated with the Cuban government.

“We brought desperately needed medicines and medical supplies at a time when Cuba is suffering catastrophic shortages caused by the crippling U.S. blockade,” Benjamin said in an earlier statement. “We stayed in hotels explicitly permitted under U.S. regulations: Spanish-owned hotels approved for U.S. travelers.”

The Post contacted the IRS and CodePink for comment.

https://nypost.com/2026/06/17/us-news/sen-rick-scott-asks-trump-admin-to-strip-codepinks-tax-exempt-status-over-china-funding-ties/

'US must halt the terror-driven gold rush that’s looting Venezuela'

 A human-rights horror is unfolding right under America’s nose, with kids under age 10 laboring in mines, girls as young as 12 working in brothels and whole communities fleeing cartel violence.

Venezuela is at the evil heart of an illicit gold-mining rush that’s enriching US enemies like the Tren de Aragua cartel, the terror group Hezbollah and others.

It’s the new El Dorado, run by cartels, enslaving children and fueling terror.

Colombia and Peru are the world’s largest cocaine exporters, yet cartels in both countries are now making more money from illicit gold than from cocaine.

The toxic substances used to refine illegal gold — mercury, cyanide and arsenic — poison entire communities and fund cartel chaos at the US-Mexico border.

The notoriously brutal Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel makes millions of dollars supplying illicit mercury to South American gold and drug cartels.

With the price of gold reaching a record-breaking $5,400 per ounce in January, illegal gold mining is becoming more profitable. 

Estimates suggest that, at 2026 gold prices, criminals and terrorists in Venezuela may be making around $10 to $12 billion a year from illicit gold mining and trading.

Corrupt officials and lawless jungles have made Venezuela a hub of the illegal gold trade, with dirty gold from Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, as well as from its own illicit mines, flowing through to international markets.

Cartel gold is reportedly even making its way into coins sold by the US Mint.

Former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro propped up his regime by opening a wilderness area the size of Portugal to illegal gold mining, where he partnered with the cartels to control the trade in illegal gold, drugs and human trafficking.

That’s why President Donald Trump took Maduro down — yet his successor Delcy Rodriguez is equally guilty.

Maduro in 2020 used cartel gold to purchase goods from Iran; Rodriguez reportedly used it to bribe European officials that same year.

And today, throughout the Rodriguez government, Maduro’s cronies are still in power.

One Venezuelan colonel linked to illegal gold operations, who also ran Maduro’s torture centers, has even been promoted: He now runs the military counterintelligence special unit.

With his dirty profits, this same colonel has used US shell companies to buy businesses in Florida.

If Trump’s administration ignores the problems of cartel gold, it will undercut its primary goal in Caracas: pushing out the criminal organizations that send migrants, drugs and violence flooding toward the United States.

Venezuelan gold has also directly supported Iran’s illicit oil sales, undermining Trump’s efforts in the Middle East.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in Venezuelan gold a year heads to Turkey, enabling Russian and Iranian sanctions evasion and global money laundering.

As then-Sen. Marco Rubio said in 2019, “illegal gold mining’s effects” present a “direct threat to US national security and to the integrity of the US and international financial system.”

Despite those national security threats, the US Treasury Department created a sanctions exception for Venezuelan gold mining and gold purchases earlier this year.

But with more than 90% of Venezuela’s gold being mined illegally, it’s difficult to ensure that US companies are not funneling cash toward terrorists and criminals.

And Venezuela’s government is making it harder to eliminate dirty money: In April, the legislature passed a new law that make gold mining operations and contracts more opaque, helping criminals dodge scrutiny.

To protect American interests, the US should appoint an on-the-ground inspector general to conduct regular audits and monitor gold transactions for corruption, fraud and terror financing.

Without eyes on the money, Washington will hand more power to the very cartels that Trump spent $5 billion in Venezuela to defeat.

Removing Maduro was a chance to restore democracy — but entrenched terrorists must still be rooted out.

The mining sector should be part of Venezuela’s economic rebirth, but that will require a firm US approach that demands more transparency and imposes more oversight.  

The 16th-century search for El Dorado killed millions through violence, disease and exploitation.

Today’s gold rush is following the same path — funding terrorists, poisoning communities and lining the pockets of America’s enemies.

Washington has a chance to help break that cycle, but only if it uses its leverage in Caracas to insist on accountability and action against terror financing.

As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month, “If we are serious about ‘no money for terror,’ then there must also be ‘no room for excuses.’”

Josh Birenbaum is deputy director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Susan Soh is a research associate.

https://nypost.com/2026/06/17/opinion/us-must-halt-the-terror-driven-gold-rush-looting-venezuela/

'How Patients Speak May Signal Cognitive Impairment'

 

• Doctor-patient conversations in primary care revealed vocal cues associated with cognitive impairment.
• A model trained on acoustic features of these conversations identified impairment in patients with moderate sensitivity and specificity.
• Measures of pitch, timing, and speech variability were key predictors of cognitive impairment.

Short segments of conversations between primary care clinicians and patients contained signals that helped detect undiagnosed cognitive impairment, an acoustic analysis suggested.

A machine learning model trained on acoustic features from recordings of primary care visits achieved a sensitivity of 68.2%, specificity of 63.6%, and positive predictive value of 30.4% for identifying cognitive impairment, reported Joseph Colonel, PhD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and co-authors.

The model had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.733 and a maximum F1 score (F_max) of 0.502, Colonel and colleagues wrote in JAMA Neurology.

AUROC and F_max values were similar in a validation cohort. Measures of pitch, timing, and speech variability were key predictors of cognitive impairment.

The project was designed to learn how machine learning models could be used in primary care to screen for cognitive impairment, "as it is frequently undiagnosed or underdiagnosed," Colonel said in a JAMA Network podcast interview. "Are there patterns in a conversation between a patient and their physician that might indicate that there are some problems with cognition?"

Of five approaches tested in the study, the best-performing model was one trained on prosodic features -- acoustic elements like intonation, stress, and tempo.

"Those relate to how someone talks," Colonel said. "How does the pitch of their voice change? How does the volume of their voice change? How quickly are they speaking?"

The study showed that "the more quickly someone spoke, the more that was related to healthy cognition," he noted. "Things related to pause duration were more positively associated with cognitive impairment."

Earlier research assessed whether patients' vocal responses to questions on tests could predict dementia, or whether models could distinguish normal versus impaired cognition by voice alone. In a small study in Japan, a predictive model identified vocal features of dementia from speech patterns in phone conversations. Most previous studies were based on structured tasks, not unstructured conversations, Colonel pointed out.

Primary care clinicians are positioned to detect signs of decline in their patients but only 8% of expected mild cognitive impairment cases are diagnosed in primary care settings, observed Gabriela Meade, PhD, and Hugo Botha, MBChB, both of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

"This gap is driven by numerous factors, including restricted time, the number of co-occurring needs, and the perception that existing assessment tools are unhelpful," Meade and Botha wrote in an accompanying editorial. "One potential solution is to embed cognitive screening into existing clinical workflows; researchers have increasingly turned to speech as a potential passive screening method."

If machine learning models were further developed, "this approach could meaningfully change how and when cognitive decline is detected," they added.

From August 2020 through December 2021, Colonel and co-authors studied 787 older adult patients in New York with no history of dementia or mild cognitive impairment, and 179 similar patients in Chicago as a validation cohort.

The mean age in the study was 67.2 years and 55% of participants were women. Overall, 35% of participants were Black, 33% were white, 22% were Latinx, and 10% were of another race.

Patients were invited to attend an in-person interview immediately after their primary care appointment. The researchers used audio recordings collected during these clinical visits to train machine learning classifiers.

The study's primary outcome was cognitive impairment, defined as a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score at least 1 standard deviation below age- and education-adjusted norms. Based on MoCA scores, the overall rate of undiagnosed cognitive impairment was 21%.

The classifiers performed better when trained on recordings that captured both patient and physician speech rather than patient speech alone. The top-performing model used acoustic features derived from Whisper.

The analysis looked only at the acoustic properties of the primary care conversations, not the content, the researchers acknowledged. Future work should validate the findings in larger, more diverse populations and should incorporate electronic health record data, they said.

Disclosures

The study was supported by the NIH.

Colonel had no disclosures. Co-authors disclosed relationships with the NIH, Nipro, Clinithink, the American Medical Association, Banook, PPD, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Regeneron.

Meade had no disclosures. Botha reported relationships with CervoMed and the NIH.

Primary Source

JAMA Neurology

Source Reference: Colonel JT, et al "Acoustic analysis of primary care patient-clinician conversations to screen for cognitive impairment" JAMA Neurol 2026; DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2026.1868.

Secondary Source

JAMA Neurology

Source Reference: Meade G, Botha H "Clinical conversations as a window into cognitive impairment" JAMA Neurol 2026; DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2026.1863.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/dementia/121808

Hantavirus outbreak start: Scientists investigating new scenarios

 When news broke of a deadly outbreak of a rodent-borne hantavirus aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius last month, it took only hours for wild conspiracy theories to start to circulate about how it might have started. Was this a side effect of COVID-19 vaccines? Did the virus leak from a lab in Australia?

A more prosaic and plausible origin story also took hold quickly: The first patient, a 70-year-old Dutch man who died on board the ship on 11 April, could have come into contact with rodents carrying hantavirus while he and his wife were birdwatching at a landfill in Ushuaia, the city on Argentina’s southern tip where the cruise started on 1 April. (His wife died 2 weeks later on her way back to the Netherlands.)

But even that story “never made much sense,” says Gustavo Palacios, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. No hantaviruses have ever been reported around Ushuaia, and the region has never seen cases of the disease they cause, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. Palacios and a large group of other researchers are now investigating several other possible scenarios, including some that would revise scientists’ knowledge of where the virus circulates or its incubation period.

The investigation promises fresh insights into the little-studied Andes virus, the species that caused this outbreak and the only hantavirus documented to transmit from person to person. (Other strains infect people only through contact with rodents, such as breathing in dried rodent feces or being bitten.) “We don’t yet understand whether this virus is more transmissible in some regions than in others” because of genetic differences between strains, says Nicole Tischler, a virologist at the Science and Life Foundation and San Sebastián University. Finding out where different Andes strains circulate, under which circumstances they jump to humans, and how easily they spread is key to “strengthening surveillance, prevention, and response strategies for similar future events,” Argentina’s minister of health, Mario Lugones, wrote in a statement to Science.

The Dutch couple, both retired ornithologists, took a 4-month road trip through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay before boarding the ship. Researchers have pieced together their itinerary through geolocation data from bird photos they posted on a website called eBird and records of their border crossings. Strangely, they do not appear to have traveled through areas where Andes virus is known to circulate, or where human cases of disease have appeared, during the virus’ known incubation period. Estimates vary, but the Pan American Health Organization puts that period at 7 to 39 days.

Although researchers were skeptical of the link to Ushuaia from the start, it has only become more unlikely as they have gathered evidence. The Dutch passengers arrived in Ushuaia on 29 March, and the man is now understood to have developed a fever just 5 days later, on 3 April. (Earlier reports had pinpointed 6 April.) Such a short incubation period is “not impossible, but it seems very unlikely,” says Valeria Martinez, a virologist at Argentina’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases and a collaborator on the investigation. And trapping efforts by an Argentine team at the Ushuaia landfill turned up no long-tailed pygmy rice rats, the rodents that carry Andes virus, Martinez adds.

Genomic evidence points to a different region. When researchers compared the viral sequences recovered from passengers on the MV Hondius with Andes virus sequences from other patients, they found the closest matches dated to 2018. They were taken from two brothers who fell ill in Villa Meliquina in Neuquén province, more than 2000 kilometers north of Ushuaia and bordering Chile. After discovering the match, Argentine researchers sequenced samples from more recent cases in that area and found that these, too, were very similar to the virus isolated from cruise ship passengers. “So we know that these viruses are still circulating in that area,” Palacios says. Their itinerary shows the couple passed through Neuquén in their motor home before the cruise. But that was in the first days of February, which would mean an unprecedentedly long incubation period of 60 days.

Evidence from animals bolsters the connection between the outbreak and this region. Lissette Ulloa-Zepeda, a Ph.D. student at the University of Development who has been setting up genetic surveillance of Andes virus in rodents, published sequences online in May that are even more closely related to the outbreak strain. They come from long-tailed pygmy rice rats caught in 2013 in Toltén in Araucania, the region that borders Neuquén on the Chilean side, and through which the Dutch couple passed on their way to Argentina. “The genomic data points to that region in Chile and Argentina,” says Ulloa-Zepeda. But fewer than 100 full genomes of Andes virus have ever been published, leaving large gaps in researchers’ knowledge. “We need more sequences to say anything more precise,” Ulloa-Zepeda says. For now, the closest sequences from both rodents and humans come from areas the couple passed through outside of the known incubation period, Palacios notes.

There are other possibilities. One is that the Dutch man was not the first case in the infectious chain but was infected by another human while traveling. But the most likely scenario for now, Martinez says, is that a rodent snuck into the couple’s mobile home and infected the man at some later point during the trip. “This is pretty common in the area when winter comes,” she says. “The rodents invade the cars looking for food and shelter.” However, she adds, “We are still learning about this virus, so I can’t rule out any hypothesis.”

Researchers and public health authorities in Uruguay have located the couple’s motor home, which had been parked there since they joined the cruise. “We didn’t find feces or any obvious remnants of rodents in the van,” says Adriana Delfraro, a virologist at the University of the Republic. The researchers have taken swabs from the van to look for evidence of the virus or its rodent host. “It’s gonna be hard” given how much time has elapsed, Delfraro says. “But let’s see what we can find.”

If the 60-day incubation period is correct, that would call into question the 42-day quarantine the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended for healthy passengers who have left the MV Hondius, which most countries are following. But even in that case, 60 days is likely an outlier, says Thomas Ksiazek, a researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch who was not involved in the investigation: “The probability of it being that long is still not very high.” And patients only become infectious around the time they start to have symptoms, he notes, meaning monitoring former passengers for symptoms might be enough.

In fact, even 42 days is a long quarantine. Argentina, which first quarantined contacts of Andes virus cases during an outbreak in 2018, has become more flexible as it faced more outbreaks, shortening requirements from 40 days to 30 days for high-risk contacts and 21 for low-risk contacts, Martinez notes. WHO’s more cautious response to this one-off outbreak is “maybe a little exaggerated,” she says, “but that’s OK when it’s only one time.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-did-cruise-ship-hantavirus-outbreak-start-scientists-are-investigating-new

AP: Luigi Mangione Plans Psychiatric Defense in Trial of UnitedHealthcare CEO's Killing

Luigi Mangione plans to assert a psychiatric defense at his state murder trial, claiming he was suffering from extreme emotional disturbance when he gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a judge said Wednesday. That could mean less prison time if he's convicted.

A jury that accepts such a defense would be obligated to convict Mangione of manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, instead of murder, which could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. An emotional disturbance defense isn't available in Mangione's federal case, where he also faces a possible life sentence.

New York Judge Gregory Carro announced the defense's decision in court 2 weeks after holding a secret hearing on the matter. He said he will unseal a transcript and other records from that hearing once redactions are made.

Carro said Mangione's lawyers first raised the possibility of a psychiatric defense last year in a letter that was filed under seal and confirmed their decision at the June 3 hearing, which the judge said was held in secret at the defense's request.

"The reasons for the sealing was to give the defense an opportunity to determine whether they were going forth with that defense and the nature of that defense," Carro said.

Carro said he didn't expect the development to delay Mangione's trial, which is scheduled to begin with jury selection on Sept. 8. His next pretrial hearing is scheduled for Aug. 11.

Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann said he wants Mangione evaluated by a prosecution psychiatrist. To facilitate that, Carro said, Mangione could soon be moved to New York City's Rikers Island jail complex from a federal jail in Brooklyn, where he has been held since shortly after his December 2024 arrest.

Mangione, 28, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges in the Dec. 4, 2024, killing. His federal trial, which involves stalking charges, is set to begin on Oct. 13.

Mangione, sitting between his lawyers and wearing a blue suit, didn't appear to react as Carro spoke. At a February hearing, Mangione railed against the prospect of two trials, telling Carro: "It's the same trial twice. One plus one is two. Double jeopardy by any commonsense definition."

An extreme emotional disturbance defense wouldn't absolve Mangione of responsibility for Thompson's killing. It is not the same as a not guilty by reason of insanity defense, which would allow a defendant to go to a psychiatric facility instead of prison.

Mangione's lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, said unsealing the transcript of the secret hearing and materials related to his psychiatric defense will harm him in his federal case.

"The reason why we asked for the sealing is that this defense is not available federally and Mr. Mangione is being prosecuted federally and this is prejudicial to his defense to the exact same facts," Friedman Agnifilo said.

The judge had been set to rule on the matter Tuesday, but was forced to delay it a day because prosecutors failed to let Mangione's jail know that he was needed in court.

Thompson, 50, was killed as he walked to a Manhattan hotel for UnitedHealth Group's annual investor conference. Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting him from behind. Police say "delay," "deny," and "depose" were written on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase used to describe how insurers avoid paying claims.

Mangione, an Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Maryland family, was arrested 5 days later at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 230 miles west of Manhattan.

At a May 18 hearing, Carro ruled that a gun and notebook that prosecutors say link Mangione to the killing can be used as evidence against him. The gun, a 3D-printed pistol, matches the one used to kill Thompson, prosecutors said. The notebook describes wanting to "wack" a health insurance executive and rebelling against "the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel."

On Wednesday, Carro dismissed a charge related to a gun magazine that he had ruled inadmissible because it was found during an initial search of Mangione's backpack at the McDonald's.

To establish an emotional disturbance defense, Mangione's lawyers must show that the disturbance was so extreme it robbed him of self-control; that, in his mind, he had a reasonable explanation or excuse for the disturbance; and that he killed Thompson while "under the influence" of that disturbance.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/generalpsychiatry/121811