How Jack Smith connected the dots between GOP lawmakers, Trump aides in 2020 election probe by Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney

 

Former special counsel Jack Smith’s office sought to map a vast web of contacts between President Donald Trump’s most vocal Republican allies in Congress and key players in his bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to newly released records of the Smith-led investigation.

Emails from January 2023 circulated among Smith’s deputies show how top GOP lawmakers communicated directly with individuals later identified by Smith as Trump’s co-conspirators in his election interference plot, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

 

Those contacts became the Smith office’s justification for pursuing subpoenas of phone logs for more than a dozen Republican officials. That includes former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who were previously known to be of interest to Smith’s investigators — as well as then-Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, who is now Trump’s head of the EPA and is among other lawmakers not previously known to be under Smith’s microscope.

A spokesperson for Zeldin did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment.

These Republicans and others are featured in the materials released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who has been leading a probe into Smith’s work. The Iowa Republican made the documents public to help support the party’s widely held position that Smith was politically motivated in his pursuit of criminal charges against Trump during the Biden administration — for efforts to overturn the election and his mishandling of classified documents.

“They were not aiming low. They were trying to take out everyone on the other side,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose data Smith’s office sought to obtain via subpoena, said Tuesday.

Cruz delivered the remarks while presiding over a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing comparing Smith’s investigations into Trump to the Watergate scandal that took down former President Richard Nixon and led to new rules cracking down on government corruption.

 

But the newly public documents also offer a more expansive picture of who Smith’s team believed might have had information that could bolster their probe into the campaign to undermine the 2020 election results that culminated in a deadly riot.

The special counsel’s office found that Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) had communicated with Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now director of the CIA. A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zeldin corresponded with Meadows and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who was a close Trump ally in the effort. Cruz had calls with Meadows, Eastman and Ratcliffe and was one of several senators who received a call from Giuliani on Jan. 6.

 

Those contacts explain Smith’s interest in obtaining subpoenas for the phone logs for a dozen current and former Republican members of Congress, which his team said would be used to “establish logical evidentiary inferences regarding Trump and his surrogates’ actions and intent.”

The list of potential subpoena targets also includes Arizona Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar. Spokespeople for Biggs, Gosar and Perry did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the documents, Smith’s team methodically reviewed information provided in a report produced by the Democratic-led House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, suggesting a nexus between the two parallel inquiries.

New documents released by Grassley Tuesday also revealed the scale and scope of Smith’s scrutiny of Kash Patel, a longtime Trump ally who now serves as FBI director. Patel was previously established to have been a target of the special counsel’s investigation, but it was not known that Smith sought to obtain Patel’s phone and text message logs spanning two years.

A FBI spokesperson pointed to a comment FBI spokesman Ben Williamson previously gave to Reuters, in which he said, “The FBI under prior leadership was weaponized in ways the American people are only now beginning to fully grasp.”

 

The materials also provide new details about the backchanneling between former Vice President Mike Pence and Smith’s team regarding Pence’s grand jury testimony, and the efforts investigators took to screen out privileged information before they accessed devices they seized from targets of their probe.

At the Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Democrats continued to defend Smith’s work and urged Republicans to schedule a public hearing with the former special counsel.

“Apparently when the Trump DOJ does it, it’s nothing new; when Jack Smith does it, it’s a modern Watergate,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. “With Patel, it’s obvious why Jack Smith was looking at him.”

 

Grassley has said Smith will receive an invitation to address the full Judiciary panel in the coming months, following testimony the attorney gave to the House Judiciary Committee late last year.

A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment.

 

The Future of E-books in School Libraries by Shannon Maughan

 

School libraries face shrinking budgets and a shifting vendor landscape for digital materials

 

The trajectory of e-book usage in K–12 schools is well-known. Demand was ramping up in the mid- to late 2010s, then took off when Covid lockdowns necessitated a pivot to remote and hybrid learning. After the pandemic, gains continued but at a much lower rate, as educational technologies and publishers’ e-book business models continued to evolve.

Now that federal relief funding through the American Rescue Plan Act has ended and grants from the government’s embattled Institute of Museum and Library Services are far from certain, school library budgets are tighter than ever. And with the recent announcement that Follett Content has partnered with Sora, OverDrive’s student reading app, to deliver digital content to schools, the e-book distribution landscape has become more consolidated. With schools facing limited funds, higher prices, and fewer vendors to choose from, how are they procuring digital book access for their students?

“The goal is to have the most access for our kids,” says Amanda Kordeliski, director of libraries and instructional technology for Norman Public Schools in Oklahoma, and president of AASL. Achieving that aim looks different in different states and school districts. Among the basics, school library vendors are vetted at the state level for their privacy compliance, and school librarians want e-books that align with academic standards and easily integrate with their existing digital library and learning management systems and available electronic devices to assure ease of use for educators and students.

 

In Texas, school boards must now approve library materials proposed for purchase. According to Becky Calzada, district library coordinator for Leander Independent School District (LISD) in central Texas, “A challenge this year has been the implementation of Texas Senate Bill 13, requiring that all new books get approved, so that’s another layer.”

Major distributors of e-books to K–12 school libraries include Sora and Mackin, as well as educational publishers ABDO and Capstone, and larger library database providers EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest, which also host e-books within their products. Other players include such publishers as Lerner, ReferencePoint Press, and Rosen, and digital reading platforms like Epic, which are primarily consumer focused but also offer educational market products. Many school districts use more than one e-book vendor, and pricing structures and business models among those companies vary. But the librarians we spoke with agree that the post-Covid e-book marketplace has generally become more restrictive and more expensive.

 

Decisions, decisions

Kordeliski’s district has maintained an OverDrive account for each school level—elementary, middle, and high school—for more than a decade. “It was really easy to grow the collection initially, because we were able to purchase one copy per one user,” she says. “But most everything has moved to a lending model, where you only get access to an e-book title for a year, or for 26 checkouts. That makes it difficult for smaller districts or rural schools to be able to maintain a robust collection, because they have to repurchase everything almost every year. And that’s inaccessible for a good chunk of the schools in the country, because they just don’t have the e-book budget to be able to do that right now.”

Calzada notes that LISD has been using OverDrive as its primary e-book vendor—it also purchases from Mackin and Capstone—for close to 17 years. When it was first considering OverDrive as a portal, that conversation was rooted in devices, she says. “Was it device agnostic? We also had to think about accessibility in terms of internet access. One of the positives for OverDrive is that when a student downloads an e-book on their device, they can take it home and they don’t need additional internet access for it.”

 

But Calzada realizes that Sora may not be the best fit for everyone, which is worrying for some schools and librarians that had previously relied on Follett Content for e-books. “I have heard a lot of chatter among not just librarians within our institution but beyond, asking, Well, what do I do now?” she says. “There are budget impacts when you shift. When you think about OverDrive, in our case, as an institution, we have roughly 42,000 students across 45 schools feeding into this, and district-level support, too. Whereas if you’re a small, maybe rural library with 500 kids total, the cost impacts are huge.”

In Connecticut’s Colchester Public Schools district, instructional technology coordinator Barbara Johnson recalls her purchase practices from the early days of e-books. “If I were buying, say, the winner of our state’s Nutmeg Award, I would buy a hardcover of that book, three or four paperback copies, and one e-book. That way I could, on a very tight budget, have that book available in many different formats to reach all of my readers.”

But as things shifted after the pandemic, new licensing models became a challenge. “The price of an e-book was sometimes unattainable—just a two-year license for an e-book could be upwards of $75–$100—whereas I could buy a hard copy of a novel for $25 or $30,” Johnson says. “It no longer made sense.”

For the roughly 2,000 students in her district, most recently she has ordered e-books from ABDO, Capstone, Follett, and Mackin. In addition, many teachers in her schools use free teacher classroom accounts offered by reading platform Epic. “We’re buying a little bit here and a little bit there to make a more comprehensive platform, instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket.”

Kristen Luettchau, school library media specialist at Morristown High School in New Jersey, had used Follett as one of her sources for e-books, but when she learned of the Follett-Sora partnership, she began investigating other vendors. “Sora is an option, but the cost is a concern for us,” she says. “Realistically, I don’t think I’m going to be able to use it as our primary vendor, because our district is no longer paying for one of our databases, so that’s going to be an extra $8,000. Between that and the cost of the databases going up usually about 5% each year, it doesn’t leave a lot available for e-books.”

 

In the meantime, Luettchau has been proactive this school year in finding a mix of strategies to get the most for her e-book budget. “I’m working with the young adult librarian at our local public library to coordinate her e-book purchases and to encourage the students to utilize those free resources as well,” she says. “We worked for several weeks in the fall on getting students to sign up for a library card and understand how to download the Libby app and access the e-books and audiobooks directly from the public library.”

When the public librarian had extra funds in the fall, Luettchau says, “we talked about which titles we might want purchased as audiobooks or e-books to supplement print copies of the book students are getting in school from the English department.” This collaboration, she adds, “has alleviated a lot of the pressure on me to be purchasing the most current e-books.”

For nonfiction, Luettchau has mostly been purchasing titles through ABDO and ReferencePoint. “If you purchase a set amount of the e-book licenses, and I’ve been getting the multi-user e-book licenses, they’ll give you the print copies for free,” she says. “And it’s not a subscription, so we have these e-books forever.”

Another tack for managing e-book costs involves joining forces with other libraries to build strength in numbers and negotiate better pricing. Once such venture is the Connecticut Library Consortium, which “attempts to create a complete marketplace of discount contracts for all of the things that libraries need to buy,” according to Ellen Paul, the organization’s executive director. “We have had a great relationship with Follett, and we’re deeply appreciative that they have been providing our school libraries with a discount on e-books.” She says it remains to be seen whether CLC members will retain that discount now that Follett has partnered with OverDrive. “That’s where our concern comes in. We don’t currently have a discount with OverDrive, and we’ve never been able to have a conversation with them about that.”

Paul acknowledges that library e-book lending has been in the news of late due to libraries’ frustration over costs and contract terms. But she believes that relief is on the horizon, in the form of legislation designed to level the playing field. “Connecticut passed a first-in-the-nation e-book reform law last June, which governs contracts that public, school, and academic libraries enter into with e-book publishers and aggregators,” she says. “We didn’t necessarily want to go down the legislative route, but we were forced to because it’s been 20-plus years of e-book lending, and terms, conditions, and pricing get worse every year. Without good-faith negotiation, I think that legislation is not only appropriate but necessary.”

Librarians are holding out hope for a solution that bridges the gap between e-book access and pricing. The answer lies in figuring out “how we can balance the rights of readers and the rights of authors and publishers too,” Calzada says.

Kordeliski adds, “It’s so important for libraries to have e-book and audiobook access for all of our learners. To have that be uniform and equitable across the country would be my personal dream.”

In a perfect world, Johnson envisions that every school, and every learner, has access to a well-staffed, well-funded library, and that publishers understand that school libraries are in a unique position to reach an unlimited number of readers. “We’re checking out to students and their families, and we are their central location,” she says. “I have transportation delivering these students to my door and taking them home every single day. School libraries have a captive audience and create such a bang for the buck.”

Trump administration to pay energy firm $1 billion to stop East Coast wind farms by Sydney Carruth

 The Interior Department said it is reimbursing the French energy company to ditch leases for its offshore wind projects and instead invest in U.S. fossil fuel efforts.

 

The Trump administration announced Monday that it will pay a French energy company $1 billion to forfeit its plans to build two offshore wind farms off the East Coast, syphoning the investment into fossil fuel projects.

The deal will reimburse the company, TotalEnergies, nearly $928 million for its leases to build the wind farms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies will then invest the money in a liquefied natural gas facility in Texas, oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and shale gas production, according to a news release from the Interior Department.   

The agreement falls in line with President Donald Trump’s energy agenda, which prioritizes the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity over clean, renewable energy projects. It’s also a personal move for the president, who has been an enemy of offshore wind projects since he lost his bid to stop one that was visible from one of his Scotland golf courses in 2015. 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the settlement during an energy conference in Houston, saying the administration is “allowing” TotalEnergies to “redirect those dollars that have been paid into the Treasury to affordable, reliable and secure oil and natural gas production in the U.S.” 

The leases were granted under the Biden administration.

The Interior Department and the Justice Department did not return MS NOW’s request for comment on the deal or how the payment to TotalEnergies will be financed.

“Considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest, we have decided to renounce offshore wind development in the United States, in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees,” Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, said in a news release Monday.  

 

Pouyanné added, “These investments will contribute to supplying Europe with much-needed LNG from the U.S. and provide gas for U.S. data center development.” 

The Trump administration has clawed back funding and slashed federal grant programs and tax incentives for Biden-era clean energy projects. Without the Biden administration’s offshore wind incentives, companies such as TotalEnergies are facing higher input costs for wind farm construction projects. 

Late last year, the Interior Department issued stop-work orders for five fully permitted offshore wind projects that were already underway, citing national security concerns. But the orders failed to hold up against a cascade of legal challenges, and a federal judge issued injunctions that allowed the projects to continue. 

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has sent crude oil and liquified natural gas prices soaring amid Iran’s near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil export route in the Persian Gulf. Attacks on critical energy infrastructure across the Gulf region have threatened to deepen a looming global energy crisis.

Experts have called the war a wake-up call for the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and pointed to renewable energy as a cost-effective means of ensuring energy security, especially during times of geopolitical conflict.

 

Trump is dismantling democracy at 'unprecedented' speed, global report finds by Headshot of Frank Langfitt

 

Three major reports out this month say President Trump has done serious damage to American democracy at remarkable speed since his return to the White House.

An annual report from V-Dem, an institute at Sweden's University of Gothenburg, concluded democracy had deteriorated so much in the U.S. that it lowered the country's democracy ranking from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.

The U.S. landed between Slovakia and Greece.

 Meanwhile, Bright Line Watch, which surveys more than 500 U.S. scholars, concluded that the U.S. system now falls nearly midway between liberal democracy and dictatorship. The newest survey comes out next week. Bright Line Watch's co-directors spoke to NPR exclusively ahead of publication.

Yet another report out Thursday from Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based democracy think-tank, said that among free countries, the U.S. joined Bulgaria and Italy in registering the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties last year.

 The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid," said Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute's founding director, who spent seven years in the U.S. "It's the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world."

V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. More than 4,000 scholars contributed data to the report, which is the largest of its kind.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales dismissed V-Dem's analysis as "a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization."

She called Trump a champion for freedom and democracy and the most transparent and accessible president ever.

"His return to the White House saved the legacy media from going out of business," Wales said.

 Trump has rejected criticism that he tries to rule as an autocrat.

"A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office last August. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator."

Lindberg said V-Dem downgraded America's rating based on the Trump administration concentrating executive power, overstepping laws, circumventing the Republican-led Congress as well as attacks on the news media and freedom of speech. Lindberg, a political scientist, is struck by the speed with which Trump has acted.

 Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey 10 years to accomplish, and Orban in Hungary four years," said Lindberg, referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

All three of those leaders came to power through democratic elections, but scholars say they have since undermined checks and balances on executive power to try to ensure they remain in office.

Trump is a big fan of Orbán's and has praised him as a "strongman" and a "tough person." Orbán faces election next month — the first real challenge to his rule in a decade and a half.

 

cholars are alarmed by Trump's blitz on the U.S. system of governance, but John Carey, a co-director of Bright Line Watch, says the United States' democracy rating might have slid even further in recent months if not for the courts pushing back.

Carey says autocrats try to co-opt or pressure government institutions that serve as referees but notes that didn't work last month as the Supreme Court ruled against the president on tariffs.

"One of the things that the tariff decision suggested [is] he has not fully captured that set of referees," said Carey, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, "and that's the most important set."

Brendan Nyhan, a fellow Dartmouth professor and Bright Line co-director, adds that just because Trump has undermined democracy, doesn't mean the effects are permanent.

"There's just no question that what we're seeing is the authoritarian playbook," said Nyhan, "but there's no guarantee that Trump will be able to operate this way after the midterms, let alone a successor after 2028."

 Yana Gorokhovskaia, director for strategy and design for Freedom House, says some of Trump's policies abroad also are undermining the country's democratic standing overseas.

For instance, the State Department often used to call out election fraud in other countries, but under Trump, it has said it will only comment on foreign elections when the U.S. has a clear and compelling interest.

"What we're losing is democratic solidarity globally," Gorokhovskaia said. "We're no longer emphasizing ... a distinction between democracies and autocracies in the world."

 That doesn't mean the U.S. doesn't take sides in foreign elections. Just last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly endorsed Orbán, Hungary's autocratic leader, for a fifth term.

Our skin is teeming with microbes. We should learn to love them by Jasmin Fox-Skelly

 

Billions of bacteria, fungi and viruses live on the surface of our bodies. We are only just beginning to understand the vital role they play in our health and wellbeing.

Your skin is crawling. Zoom in on any square centimetre of the skin on your body and you'll find between 10,000 to one million bacteria living there. Your body is covered in a bustling microbial ecosystem. Pretty disgusting, right?

Or is it? There is growing evidence that our skin microbiota actually plays a crucial role in keeping us healthy and brings a surprising range of other benefits. So don't reach for that antibacterial soap just yet.

You might already have heard of the gut microbiome – the ecosystem of microbes that inhabit your intestines. It is well established that the diversity of this collection of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other single-celled organisms plays an important role in a range of  diseases, from diabetes to asthma and even depression. (Learn how exercise can give your gut microbes a boost.)

But it turns out the microbial hitchhikers on our skin can be just as good for us, offering the first line of defence against any pathogens that might be unlucky enough to settle on the surface of our bodies. They also help to break down some of the chemicals that we encounter in daily life and play an important role in the development of our immune systems.

The skin microbiome is second only to our guts when it comes bacterial diversity. This is quite surprising if you think about it. Compared to the safe, warm and moist habitats of our mouths or guts, the skin is a pretty inhospitable place.

"Skin is a very hostile environment compared to other areas of the body," says Holly Wilkinson, a lecturer in wound healing at the University of Hull, in the UK. "It's dry, barren, and very exposed to the elements. Bacteria that live there have evolved over millions of years to cope with these pressures."

And this co-evolution has brought us many benefits.

 Not all parts of the skin are colonised equally either. Bacteria can actually be surprisingly picky about where they want to live. Take a swab and run it along your forehead, nose, or back, and you'll find that these areas are brimming with Cutibacterium, a genus of bacteria that has evolved to feed off the oily sebum made by our skin cells to help moisturise and protect the outer layer of our body.

 

Take a sample from your warm and moist armpit, however, and you'll probably find plenty of Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium. Look between your toes and you'll find an abundance of Propionibactrium species – some of which are also used in cheesemaking along with a wide range of fungi. Dry regions of the skin, such as the arms and legs, are particularly inhospitable to bacteria, and so species that make their home here don't tend to stay for too long. They also tend to play host to a larger proportion of viruses than other external areas of the body. (Of course, our skin plays host to other creatures too, such as tiny mites – see the video below to find out more about them, if you can stomach it.)

More like this:

• The curious ways your skin shapes your health
• How gut bacteria are controlling your brain
• Why pollution is affecting us in some surprising ways

Over millennia, these microbes have formed a kind of symbiotic relationship with us humans. The bacteria, fungi and mites living on our skin benefit from a constant supply of rich nutrients. But we rely on our skin microbiome too, as beneficial species help us repel more harmful, pathogenic bacteria by competing against them.

"Just by virtue of the fact that there are all these bacteria already there, it's quite hard for a pathogen to get a foothold," says Wilkinson. "Any bacteria coming in has got to be able to overwhelm the system, but to do so they've got to compete with bacteria that [are] highly evolved to be in this environment.

 

Skin bacteria can also wage war on potential invaders by producing chemicals that inhibit their growth, or even kill them outright. For example Staphylococcus epidermidis and Staphylococcus hominis – two commensal species that rely upon us and other animals to host them – produce antimicrobial molecules that inhibit Staphylococcus aureus, a harmful species of bacteria associated with MRSA infections and a common source of skin infections.

Some scientists also believe that, like our gut microbiome, the skin microbiome plays a role in helping to "train" our immune system during childhood, teaching it which targets to attack, and which to ignore. There is thought to be a link between the diversity of certain bacteria on the skin and a lower risk of allergies, for example.

 

The skin microbiome has other important functions too. For example, it's thought that certain bacteria can help us retain a youthful visage by helping us retain moisture, keeping our skin supple, smooth and plump. 

To stop toxins and harmful pathogens from coming in and water from rushing out, our skin contains several layers, with the top being the most impenetrable. The top layer is called the stratum corneum and is formed from dead cells called corneocytes, interspersed with fatty molecules known as lipids.

 

"It's very tough and waterproof, hence why we don't dissolve when we go out in the rain," says Catherine O'Neill, professor of translational dermatology at the University of Manchester.

Beneath the stratum corneum you have layer upon layer of live skin cells called keratinocytes. There are tiny gaps between these skin cells through which water could leak. To stop this from happening keratinocytes produce lipids, which help repel moisture.

"It's kind of like a brick-and-mortar kind of structure," says Wilkinson. "You've got the cells, and then in between the cells you've got all of these lipids that act as part of the barrier as well. They act like a glue keeping everything together."

So, where do bacteria come into this? Well, it turns out that some of the more helpful bacteria that live on our skin not only produce lipids themselves, but send out signals telling our skin cells to produce more lipids too. For example, studies show that Cutibacterium stimulates the skin to produce more of the lipid-rich sebum, which reduces water loss and increases hydration. Staphylococcus epidermidis also increases levels of skin ceramides – lipids that act like a glue holding our skin cells together to keep our skin barrier intact and healthy.

 So far so good. But what happens when the delicate balance of the skin microbiome is disrupted? Skin "dysbiosis" has been linked to conditions from atopic dermatitis (a type of eczema), to rosacea, acne and psoriasis. Even the presence of dandruff on the scalp is associated with a particular type of fungi. Malassezia furfur and Malassezia globosa fungi produce a chemical called oleic acid, which disturbs the stratum corneum cells on the scalp, provoking an itchy inflammatory response

 

However, in each of these cases it is difficult to establish whether the disease state is caused by the skin microbiome, or whether the skin microbiome itself has changed as a consequence of the disease.

There's even some evidence to suggest that the skin microbiome could protect us from the some of the harmful effects of UV radiation

One phenomenon that we can, at least partially, blame on bad bacteria is skin ageing. As you get older, the types of bacteria that live on your skin change. You tend to find less of the "good" species that protect against infections and help keep skin moist and hydrated. Instead you get higher levels of the harmful pathogenic bacteria. This has implications for skin healing.

"Older people tend to have drier skin that's associated with lower amounts of the types of bacteria that help with lipid production," says Wilkinson. "That leads to increased risk of skin infections, as, it reduces skin integrity. In older people, you're more likely to get a spontaneous wound appearing because you lose that integrity of the skin."

Unfortunately, "bad" skin bacteria may also interfere with wound healing. Research by Elizabeth Grice, a professor of dermatology and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that wounded mice lacking a skin microbiome take much longer to heal.

 

Meanwhile work at the Hull York Medical School by Wilkinson's colleagues has shown that a person's skin bacteria can predict whether they will heal from a chronic wound or not. Chronic, non-healing wounds are a life-threatening skin condition affecting one in four diabetics and one in 20 people over the age of 65.

"Hopefully at some point in the very near future we might be able to use that kind of strategy to figure out which patients are going to be most at risk of developing a non-healing wound, and provide that early intervention before it gets to the stage where they need to have a leg amputation, or develop a really nasty infection," says Wilkinson.

Indeed, certain strains of Staphylococcus aureus are associated with delayed healing. However, the exact mechanisms by which this pathogenic bacteria interferes with healing are uncertain.

"Staphylococcus aureus produce enzymes that can help them invade and digest the tissue around them," says Wilkinson. "But they can also interfere with your immune function, causing your own system to turn against you.

"The main driver of poor healing in chronic wounds is the fact that the wounds are stuck in that inflammatory phase, and they can't get out of it. So having the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria there just keeps it in this perpetual loop of inflammation."

 

Other studies have found that some skin microbes may actually be beneficial for wound healing.

There's even some evidence to suggest that the skin microbiome could protect us from the some of the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. When UV radiation hits the skin it can damage DNA. However, skin cells have an inbuilt protection mechanism.

"Essentially they stop reproducing and then the skin goes through a series of checks to repair that damaged DNA," says O'Neill. "If it can't repair it, the cells will basically kill themselves." 

However, in a recent unpublished study, O'Neill found that if you remove the microbiome, then skin cells carry on dividing even when they have damaged DNA.

 

"Obviously, this is a really important protective mechanism against tumours," says O'Neill. "And clearly the microbiome seems to be a big part of that." 

Research in mice has also indicated that the microbiome may also help to modulate the way our immune system responds to UV exposure, helping to prime it to fight off potential infection. UV light is known to suppress our immune response while it can also damage the skin, offering pathogenic bacteria the opportunity to invade our bodies. It appears the skin microbes help to induce an inflammatory response to UV light exposure, priming our bodies to fight off infection.

There's even some evidence to suggest that the skin microbiome could influence the gut. For example a recent study shows that skin injuries can lead to significant changes in the intestinal microbiome, increasing a person's susceptibility to gut inflammation. Studies also show that Malassezia restricta, a fungal member of the skin microbiota, is associated with Crohn's disease and can exacerbate colitis.

"Everyone knows there is gut-skin axis, whereby eating a poor diet can give you bad skin, but the idea that when something is wrong with our skin microbiome, that it could maybe give us diarrhoea. That's completely crazy," says Bernhard Paetzold, cofounder and chief scientific officer of S-Biomedic, a company which aims to treat conditions like acne by restoring the skin microbiome. "However, very recently, we have started to understand that this crosstalk is bidirectional and in fact there is a skin-gut axis."

There's even a theory that your skin microbiome could affect your brain, although the jury is still out on this. For example, a recent study took 20 healthy volunteers and asked them to perform a range of cognitive tests while measuring their brain activity. It found that removing bacteria from the skin on the forehead increased the attention level of participants

 

As we learn more about the skin microbiome and its role in health and our wellbeing, there is growing excitement among scientists about the role it may play in other aspects of our lives.

Treatments

So, could we improve our health by swapping our bad skin bacteria for the good guys – a kind of microbial skin transplant, if you will. Possibly, although to do this you'd have to wipe out the existing microbial community on your body, which could cause other problems, including the risk of driving antibiotic resistance. 

Our skin microbes are also heavily influenced by our environment, so we would also need to consider how the world around us contributes to the diversity of different bacteria, fungi and viruses on our bodies. Even the cosmetics we use can alter the make up of our skin microbiota in ways that are only just starting to be understood.

Some companies believe it may be possible to stimulate the growth of "healthy" microbes by treating the skin with "prebiotics" and "probiotics" to feed the good bacteria, or apply bacterial proteins or lipids to your face directly. There is little published evidence for how effective this is, but there are some signs it can tweak the balance of different skin bacteria.

 

Wilkinson is even researching whether special viruses that infect bacteria – known as bacteriophages – and the molecules they produce, could be used to wipe out Staphylococcus aureus in a targeted way without harming the rest of the microbiome.

"The idea is that by depleting the pathogenic bacteria, and allowing the natural microbiota to be restored, you can accelerate wound repair," she says. "So that is all very exciting for us, and hopefully that will eventually lead to a step change in the way that we approach treating these infections."

How Trump's Treasury is shifting sanctions to punish his critics and reward friends by Chiara Eisner , Robert Benincasa

 

After Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez condemned the U.S. attacks on Iran as a violation of international law, President Donald Trump did what he's done before with people who criticize his actions. He asked the secretary of the Department of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, to take care of it.

"In fact, I told Scott to cut off all dealings with Spain," Trump said in the Oval Office on March 3. "I could tomorrow stop, or today even better, stop everything having to do with Spain, all business having to do with Spain."

On March 12, Spain's foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, indicated that using the Treasury Department to attack Spain would make "no sense" and would affect the whole European Union.

 

But there is a way for the agency to target Spanish individuals and businesses, and Trump's Treasury Department has used it on other foreign leaders who have spoken out against the administration.

Since Trump began his second term, his administration has imposed — or rescinded — Treasury Department sanctions on foreigners in ways that have diverged from historical precedent or the sanction programs' intent, former State Department officials say.

The Treasury Department has historically used sanctions to restrict foreigners who pose serious threats to the U.S. and their own countries. The U.S. currently sanctions foreign entities under 37 official programs. Some of those programs allow the U.S. to block foreigners who have acted maliciously on behalf of a specific country, like North Korea or Russia. Other programs allow the federal government to restrict people from any foreign country, as long as they have committed or pose a serious risk of committing dangerous acts, like terrorism, drug trafficking or human rights abuse. Blocked people, companies, boats and planes are added to a list, called the "Specially Designated Nationals" list.

 

The sanctions are meant to protect Americans and bring about a positive change in behavior.

"When deployed effectively, these tools can disrupt weapons of mass destruction procurement rings, suffocate narcotics and criminal cartels, degrade the capabilities of terrorist groups, and alter the decision making of threatening regimes," Treasury Department documents reviewed by NPR state.

But under Trump, the agency has sanctioned people after they criticized the President or his political allies. The agency has also lifted sanctions it previously imposed on people accused of crimes and corruption, despite a lack of clear evidence of change in their behavior, former U.S. ambassadors said.

 "It's supposed to operate independent of personal interests, and it's supposed to reinforce our strategic interests, not advance personal vendettas," said former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman. "And so what you're seeing in this particular instance is different than what has happened before."

 

In 2025, Trump's Treasury Department repeatedly sanctioned prominent foreign officials after they ruled or spoke out against different types of military aggression from the U.S., Israel and Brazil.

In February, shortly after Trump took office, and after the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for their roles in the war in Gaza, the Treasury Department started sanctioning some of the court's judges and prosecutors. By December, 11 staffers had been sanctioned. Except for two ICC staffers that Trump sanctioned during his first term in 2020, no other U.S. president has sanctioned ICC employees, Treasury Department data shows.

In July, the Treasury Department sanctioned U.N. human rights official Francesca Albanese. Albanese had been investigating human rights abuses in Palestinian territories and had started characterizing the Israeli aggression against Palestinians as a genocide. 

 

Later that month, as Brazil's Supreme Federal Court considered whether former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump supporter, had attempted a coup with top military officials after he lost an election, the Treasury Department sanctioned the lead justice on the case.

"Alexandre de Moraes has taken it upon himself to be judge and jury in an unlawful witch hunt against U.S. and Brazilian citizens and companies," said Secretary Bessent in a press release published by the Treasury Department that announced the sanctions on the justice. "De Moraes is responsible for an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary detentions that violate human rights, and politicized prosecutions — including against former President Jair Bolsonaro."

 After the court decided Bolsonaro was guilty in September, the Treasury Department sanctioned De Moraes' wife. 

 

The Treasury Department sanctioned the two Brazilians using Global Magnitsky Sanctions, a program that allows the U.S. to sanction foreigners who commit serious human rights abuse. It was named after Russian Sergei Magnitsky, who died in his government's custody after accusing Russian officials of corruption.

Democratic U.S. senators criticized the use of Magnitsky sanctions again De Moraes, citing a lack of evidence and saying the actions undermined America's global standing.

"These actions fly in the face of the spirit and purpose of the Global Magnitsky Act, and send a signal that America's commitment to fighting corruption hinges on political winds," wrote Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in a joint statement.

Then, on Oct. 24, the Treasury Department sanctioned Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia. That was one month after Petro said in the 2025 U.N. General Assembly that the U.S. had violated international law by executing people on boats in the Caribbean sea, and days after Petro reiterated on X, in Spanish, that a U.S. attack on a Colombian fisherman was "murder."

 

The consequences for sanctioned foreigners can be severe. Their assets within U.S. jurisdiction are frozen and they are restricted from entering the U.S. and from using U.S. financial services. No U.S. companies are allowed to deal with them.

Some of those sanctioned by the U.S. have pushed back against their new restrictions.

"These sanctions are a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates pursuant to the mandate conferred by its States Parties from across regions," the ICC stated in a press release, following the most recent sanctions to its members in December. "When judicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk."

 After the Treasury Department stated that the agency sanctioned Petro for engaging in "international proliferation of illicit drugs or their means of production," Petro said on X that the Treasury Department's statement was a lie. Under his leadership, Colombia had seized more cocaine than any other government, he said, in Spanish. Petro described the imposition of the sanction as an "arbitrary act typical of an oppressive regime."

 

"The whole scenario is quite mad, in my view," said Richard Nephew, a former anti-corruption coordinator at the State Department. "So, it is hard to imagine a comparative situation and it is pretty obvious — to me — that this is political retribution rather than a serious use of sanctions tools for behavior modification purposes."

Albanese, the U.N. human rights official, responded to her sanctions with a lawsuit filed by her family on Feb. 26, 2026. It argued that Trump, Bessent and others in the administration had prevented her from accessing her property in the United States and violated her First, Fourth and Fifth amendment rights as well as the sanctions rules themselves.

 

In December, the U.S. lifted sanctions on the Brazilian justice and his wife. The ICC members, Petro and Albanese remain on the list. Asked for comment, Treasury Department spokeswoman Gigi O'Connell declined.

Previously sanctioned, now meeting at the White House

Historically, sanctions have been imposed following extensive research, former Treasury Department officials said.

"The facts that are being used for the basis of designation, those had to be irreproachable," said former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who led the Treasury Department under the Obama administration, from 2013 to 2017.

But the sanctions are not meant to last forever. The agency allows people to demonstrate they have improved their behavior by filing a petition. If that petition is successful, the sanctions can be lifted.

"A lot of times the argument will be like, look, the circumstances have changed, but to address any ongoing concerns that the U.S. government might have, I'm going to commit to providing audited financials for the next five years, or donating an amount to charity or divesting from an asset," said Erich Ferrari, a lawyer who has helped people remove themselves from the sanctions list for more than a decade. "All these different things you can say to kind of address the underlying concerns that led to the sanctions in the first place."

 

But in some instances last year, Trump's Treasury Department removed sanctions against people who U.S. ambassadors and senators did not believe had addressed the agency's initial concerns.

On Jan. 7, 2025, under the Biden administration, the U.S. sanctioned Antal Rogán, the head of the Hungarian cabinet, for his involvement in the country's system of political corruption. Three months later, in April, Rogán's sanctions were removed.

Pressman, the former ambassador to Hungary, speculated that Rogán's sanctions were removed because of the "perceived personal loyalty" of Trump and Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, who Trump endorsed for reelection in February.

 

'With friends, everything is easier," Orbán wrote on X, while posting a video of Trump's endorsement, which happened at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace, of which Orbán is a member.

"The challenges in Hungary remain," said Pressman. "And the delisting in this case of Antal Rogán had nothing to do with changed behavior."

Something similar happened months later when the Treasury Department removed sanctions on Horacio Cartes, the former President of Paraguay, in October 2025.

In 2023, the Treasury Department had accused Cartes of collecting bribes through representatives during private events held by the Iran-backed terrorist group, Hezbollah. Cartes was also involved in "rampant corruption," the agency stated, including allegedly using $1 million of his personal funds to buy the votes of legislators to push for a constitutional reform that would have allowed him to run for a second term.

 Cartes had not demonstrated a clear change in that sort of behavior when he was delisted, said Marc Ostfield, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay from 2022 to 2025.

"The U.S. says that links to Hezbollah are a grave concern of this current administration," said Ostfield. "So it's really hard to understand why the U.S. would lift sanctions on Cartes."

 One person removed from the Treasury Department's sanctions list has already used his renewed access to the U.S. for a meeting with a member of the Trump administration.

When, in October 2025, the U.S. removed sanctions on Milorad Dodik, the former President of the Republika Srpska who was previously sanctioned for "undermin[ing] the stability of the Western Balkans region through corruption and threats to long-standing peace agreements," some U.S. politicians said.

"Dodik has undermined the Dayton Peace Agreement, cozied up to Putin, and profited from corruption — hardly grounds for relief," said Sen. Shaheen, the New Hampshire Democrat. "The American people deserve answers."

But on Feb. 6, 2026, Dodik posted three photos on X of him and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt inside the White House. 

 

NPR asked the White House to explain why Dodik's sanctions were removed and why Leavitt met with Dodik in February. A representative for the White House declined to respond by email.

Pressman said the recent examples conflict with the purpose of the sanctions programs.

"This authority is being utilized in ways to augment the power of an individual rather than advance our country's interests," said Pressman, adding it is "rewarding loyalists and punishing those who are perceived to be opponents."

---

Medicare Advantage 'dark money' group tries to win higher payments for insurers by Fred Schulte , Maia Rosenfeld , David Hilzenrath

 

Judging by more than 16,300 comments recently posted on a federal government website, you'd think there was a groundswell of older Americans demanding that federal officials hike payments to their Medicare Advantage health insurance plans.

Yet about 83% of the comments are identical to a letter that appeared on the website of a secretive advocacy group called Medicare Advantage Majority, a data analysis by KFF Health News has found.

The "dark money" group does not reveal its funders or much else — other than to say it is "dedicated to protecting and strengthening Medicare Advantage" and is "powered by hundreds of thousands of local advocates nationwide."

 "Our campaign provides information and offers tools for concerned Americans to use to reach decision makers," spokesperson Darren Grubb said in an email. The group has spent more than $3.1 million on hundreds of Facebook ads since September 2024, according to Facebook's Ad Library, a database of the social media company's online ads.

 

There's no doubt health insurers are unhappy with a January proposal from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS to keep Medicare Advantage reimbursement rates essentially flat in 2027 — far less than they expected from the Trump administration.

Medicare Advantage plans differ from traditional Medicare because private insurance companies administer them. The insurance plans enroll about 35 million members, more than half the people eligible for Medicare. The plans offer things like vision and drug coverage, but Medicare Advantage insurers restrict the hospitals and doctors that patients can use and require prior approval for various procedures.

CMS, is set to announce a final decision by early next month on the rate proposal. The agency solicited public comments on the proposal from Jan. 26 through Feb. 25 to give interested parties and the public a chance to air their views.

Medicare Advantage Majority, which says the rate proposal amounts to a "cut" in services and warns of dire consequences for seniors should it go through, accounted for at least 13,519 of the 16,324 comments published as of March 11.

 

The proposed rate plan "puts my access to care at risk," the group's template letter to policy makers reads in part. "If the investment made by Washington in the Medicare Advantage program is nearly flat year-over-year, I could lose benefits I rely on every day, including affordable prescriptions, capped out of pocket costs, and access to trusted doctors and specialists."

"Medicare Advantage is not optional for me. The cost protections alone have saved me thousands of dollars and made my health care manageable. Without this program, I would face higher costs, fewer providers, and fewer benefits at a time when I can least afford it," the letter states.

Critics warn that these sorts of campaigns may create a misleading impression of grassroots support, especially when it's not clear who is financing them.

 

It puts a different spin on a massive groundswell of comments to know all are being driven by one specific organization," said Michael Beckel, director of money in politics reform for Issue One, a group that seeks to limit the influence of money on government policy and legislation.

"There's no way for the public to know what wealthy donors or special interests are funding dark money groups like this," he said. "That means there's no scrutiny of who's really calling the shots."

Some health care policy experts, who have long argued that the government overpays Medicare Advantage plans by tens of billions of dollars every year, believe industry groups or their surrogates routinely overstate possible negative impacts of rate decisions they don't like.

"The plans always say that the sky is falling," said Matthew Fiedler, a health care policy expert with the Brookings Institution. "The industry has a lot of money at stake here. They try to exert pressure on policymakers any way they can."

At the same time, even critics concede that some of the millions of people enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans could face service cuts if insurance companies are not satisfied with government payments.

 

"It is legitimate for people to be worried," said Julie Carter, counsel for federal policy at the Medicare Rights Center, a group that advocates for older adults and people with disabilities.

Her group argues that Medicare Advantage plans have never attained expected cost savings and instead have been overpaid for years at least partly due to "actions to maximize profits." She said the health plans "are supposed to be saving money, not taking extra."

People struggling to pay health care bills may have little use for the policy debate in Washington.

"If it wasn't for being able to have this program, I really wouldn't be able to afford any kind of medical services, to be honest," said EsterAlicia Rose, 75, who works at the front desk of a hotel in Pagosa Springs, Colo. She said she signed the Medicare Advantage Majority form letter to reach policymakers.

Kathy Lovely-Marshall, 66, a retired nurse who lives in Brookville, Ohio, did too. She said she receives "a lot of perks" from her plan, such as dental care, eyeglasses, and prescriptions.

"All those things are a big plus as far as I am concerned," she said. "I'm very happy with the plan I have."

But Corenia Branham, 90, a widow and cancer survivor who lives in Alum Creek, W.Va., said she wants nothing to do with Medicare Advantage plans run by private health insurance companies. She said she didn't turn in any of the four form letters under her name, which were posted online by CMS on Feb. 23 and signed, "Miss Corenia Branham Branham." It's not clear why her name is signed twice.

 Branham said she's not on Medicare Advantage and doubts she could count on it for needed care.

"I wouldn't recommend it to nobody," she said. "I sure don't want anything to do with it."

 

Grubb, the Medicare Advantage Majority spokesperson, disputed that account. He said Branham responded to an ad on Facebook. On Feb. 6, she "completed the form with her information and chose to send her comment to CMS as well as to her representatives in Congress and the White House," he said.

Other Medicare Advantage advocacy groups have stepped up ad campaigns as the rate decision looms.

The Better Medicare Alliance, whose "allies" include a range of health insurers, health care providers, and consumers, is urging seniors to "Tell Washington to Stand Up for Medicare Advantage."

"We've mobilized beneficiaries to write letters and make phone calls, and we've run digital ads on streaming platforms," spokesperson Susan Reilly said.

Reilly said that this year roughly 3 million seniors "were forced to find new coverage" because plans either shuttered operations or left some areas.

She also said Medicare Advantage plans have "scaled back" benefits such as offering transportation to medical appointments, nutrition support, and dental and vision coverage, while over the past two years beneficiaries have faced an average $900 increase in out-of-pocket maximums.

"We do view this as especially serious," Reilly said. "This isn't a single bad year; it's the cumulative effect of years of underfunding and policy disruption from the previous administration that has left the program increasingly vulnerable."

As of March 11, CMS said it had received 46,884 comments but had posted only 16,324 online.

CMS spokesperson Catherine Howden said the agency would make more comments public "as soon as practicable."

"The agency focuses on reviewing the substance of timely submissions and does not speculate on volume, sentiment, or potential impact of comments while the comment period is open/under review," she said in a statement.