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RFK Jr. faced tough hearing on vaccines, CDC changes : Shots

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrives to testify before the Senate Finance Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on September 4, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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In a contentious Senate hearing marked by raised voices and heated exchanges, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced calls to resign from Democrats and unexpected criticism from Republicans.
Several Republican senators brought up the legacy of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which sent a safe COVID vaccine to the public in record time, helping save millions of lives. They pushed Kennedy to explain his current approach to the shots and mRNA technology.
Under his leadership, the health agency cancelled hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding on mRNA technology for future vaccines, and the Food and Drug Administration limited access to the COVID shots, saying only people at high risk of complications from COVID or those over 65.
“President Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and physician, whose vote was critical in Kennedy’s confirmation. He demanded Kennedy explain his changing stance on COVID vaccines, and said: “effectively, we’re denying people vaccine” — an assertion echoed by many physicians’ groups including the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.
Cassidy had exacted assurances from Kennedy during his confirmation process in February that he would not restrict Americans’ access to vaccines, a promise the senator now accuses Kennedy of violating. Kennedy fired the entire 17-member Advisory Panel on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, replacing them with members Cassidy argued are largely unscientific vaccine skeptics with vested financial interests in suing vaccine makers.
Another Republican physician on the Senate Finance Committee, Dr. John Barrasso of Wyoming, joined Democrats in criticizing Kennedy for undermining vaccines.
“In your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned,” Barrasso told Kennedy at the hearing. “I’ve been hearing from many of my medical colleagues, and there are real concerns that safe, proven vaccines like measles, like hepatitis B and others, could be in jeopardy and that would put Americans at risk and reverse decades of progress.”
He accused Kennedy of politicizing vaccines further, and undermining public health.
CDC leadership change debated
Kennedy hotly defended his decisions and statements on vaccines and on changes at the CDC, arguing the agencies have historically relied on bad data.
“These changes were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency,” he said. He claimed he had the backing of “scientists and doctors are supporting me all across the country.”
Senators also repeatedly asked Kennedy about his decision to push out newly confirmed CDC chief Susan Monarez. Though she was his own pick to lead the agency, he said Monarez was lying when she claimed she was fired from that job after only a month for insisting on rigorous scientific review.
In response to questions from Warren, Kennedy said: “I told her she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said, ‘No.'”
Trump administration allies like Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin rushed to his defense, calling the senators’ pointed questions “abuse,” and lauding Kennedy for his attempts to overhaul health agencies.
Vaccine access arguments
Kennedy’s seven-and-a-half month tenure as Health Secretary is roiling the fields of science and health. His early sweeping changes included mass layoffs across the federal health and science agencies, from the FDA to the CDC to the National Institutes of Health.
Democratic senators took issue with these and other changes, as they and Kennedy accused each other of lying and manipulating data to serve political ends.
The committee’s ranking Democratic member Sen. Ron Wyden criticized Kennedy’s approach to vaccines: “I think Secretary Kennedy is dead set on making it harder for children to get vaccines and that kids are going to die because of it,” he said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, challenged Kennedy to “honor your promise that you made when you were looking to get confirmed” not to take away vaccines from people who want them. She said his recent moves to change the classification of the COVID vaccine do just that.
In response, Kennedy said “everybody can get access to them” for free, including those on Medicare and Medicaid, though the many contradictory statements have left many patients, doctors and insurers confused.
Kennedy said it was unclear the COVID vaccine had saved millions of lives — a data point generally accepted by scientists and doctors. But he also seemed to backtrack on assertions that he is “anti-vaccine,” arguing that there remain some unknown risks, even with long-approved vaccines.
“Saying I’m anti-vaccine is like saying I’m anti-medicine,” Kennedy said, arguing he just wants more research to look into possible risks. “It doesn’t mean that I’m, you know, anti-vax. It just means I’m pro-science.”
His argument didn’t appear to sway the Democratic senators in attendance, with several calling for Kennedy to resign throughout the hearing.
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Kansas City Chiefs vs. Los Angeles Chargers Live Score and Stats – September 5, 2025 Gametracker

Justin Herbert threw for 318 yards and three touchdowns in outdueling Patrick Mahomes, and the Los Angeles Chargers beat Kansas City 27-21 on Friday night in Sao Paulo, snapping a seven-game skid to the Kansas City Chiefs.
“It’s monumental,” Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh said. “September 5th will go down in some Charger lore, in my opinion. It was a big win.”
The NFL’s second game played in South America was streamed on YouTube, with Brazilian soccer superstar Neymar in attendance. Newly engaged pop superstar Taylor Swift wasn’t there to watch fiancé Travis Kelce and see Colombian singer Karol G perform at halftime.
Herbert became just the third quarterback in Chargers history with 300 yards and three TDs in a season opener. His 19-yard run on third-and-14 dashed any comeback hopes the Chiefs had with 2:21 to play. He finished 25 of 34 and was sacked three times.
“We knew it was going to be a dogfight, so we showed up today with our best effort,” Herbert said. “It was fun to see.”
Mahomes was 24 of 39 for 258 yards, one touchdown and two sacks.
Herbert’s 23-yard TD pass to Quentin Johnston extended the lead to 26-18 with 5:02 remaining in the fourth. They hooked up for a 5-yard TD on the Chargers’ opening drive of the game.
Chased by Khalil Mack, Mahomes threw incomplete to Marquise Brown on first-and-goal at the LA 9. Two more incomplete passes brought on Harrison Butker, whose 27-yard field goal cut the deficit to 27-21 with 2:34 remaining.
The Chiefs closed to 20-18 on Mahomes’ 37-yard TD pass to Kelce early in the fourth. The 2-point conversion failed as Mahomes’ pass was incomplete to Noah Gray.
The Chiefs were coming off their first TD drive in the third when they gave one right back to their AFC rivals. Herbert’s short left pass to Keenan Allen for 11 yards extended the Chargers’ lead to 19-12. Herbert and Allen had over 300 receptions together before Allen left for Chicago last season. He returned to Los Angeles last month.
The Chargers beat the Chiefs for the first time since Sept. 26, 2021, in Kansas City.
The Chiefs were already down two receivers to start the game, with Rashee Rice suspended to start the season and rookie Jalen Royals out with a knee injury.
They lost another one three snaps into the game.
Xavier Worthy and teammate Kelce collided on a third-down pass. Worthy had to be helped off the field and was later ruled out with a right shoulder injury.
Chargers linebacker Denzel Perryman didn’t return after leaving with an ankle injury in the third.
The Chiefs host Philadelphia on Sept. 14 in a Super Bowl rematch.
The Chargers visit Las Vegas on Sept. 15 in the second of three straight against division rivals.
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US Navy SEALs killed North Korean civilians during botched mission: Report | Kim Jong Un News

US Navy SEALs killed several North Korean fishermen after encountering them by accident during a botched mission, US news outlet reports.
Published On 6 Sep 2025
United States Navy SEALs shot and killed several North Korean civilians during a botched mission in 2019 to plant a listening device in the nuclear-armed country, reportedly approved by US President Donald Trump, a leading US news outlet reports.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the classified mission was carried out by the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6 during high-stakes diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang in early 2019.
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The elite special forces unit – the same one that killed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 – was tasked with covertly going ashore in North Korea and planting a listening device to spy on the country’s leadership.
But working in the dead of night with blackout communications, a series of errors led to civilians – several North Koreans reportedly diving for shellfish – inadvertently coming across the US special forces as they splashed ashore.
The SEALs opened fire, killing all those on board a small fishing vessel, the Times report said, without specifying the number of casualties.
Officials familiar with the mission told the Times that the US soldiers “pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities”. One source described how SEAL members “punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink”.
The Times said it gained knowledge of the botched mission through interviews with dozens of people, “including civilian government officials, members of the first Trump administration and current and former military personnel with knowledge of the mission”.
All spoke on condition of anonymity due to the mission’s classified status, the news outlet said. It added that several people said their decision to provide details was out of concern that the US military’s special operations failures are “often hidden by government secrecy”.
Sources said President Trump, during his first term in office, gave the mission its final go-ahead.
Trump denied any knowledge of the operations when questioned by reporters about the report on Friday.
“I could look, but I know nothing about [it],” Trump said.
“I’m hearing it now for the first time,” he said.
US officials said it was “unclear” whether Pyongyang ever pieced together what had happened in 2019.
North Korea did not make any public statements about the deaths of civilians at the time and has yet to comment on the story published by the Times.
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Anthropic pays authors $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement lawsuit

NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.
“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.
A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.
“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.
As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.
Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.
Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.
On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”
The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.
On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.
“It is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,” Heldrup said.
The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, earlier this week put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments.
Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.
The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Metaand Midjourney. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.
“This indicates that maybe for other cases, it’s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,” said Long, the legal analyst.
The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup’s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”
Comparing the AI model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer,” Alsup wrote that Anthropic “trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”
But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.
With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.
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