Happy Wednesday! It’s Fat Bear Week, the annual contest celebrating the feeding season at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, in which voters choose the biggest brown bear in a bracket contest as the fuzzy omnivores prepare for the winter hibernation. More than a million people vote every year in the mammalian March Madness, and the 2025 bracket opened yesterday, with voting continuing until September 30. Viewers can also watch a livestream of the bears fishing for salmon. Let the fattest bear win!
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- President Donald Trump delivered a combative address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, castigating the world body as failing to live up to its potential and telling European allies that “your countries are going to hell” due to what he said was the “failed experiment of open borders.” The president questioned the U.N.’s purpose, saying it produces only “empty words” that “don’t solve war,” while claiming he has “ended seven unendable wars,” which “sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them.” Trump also criticized climate policies as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated” and warned that recognizing Palestinian statehood would reward Hamas. Technical malfunctions affected both his teleprompter during the address and an escalator when he arrived. “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator on the way up that stopped right in the middle,” he quipped.
- Trump on Tuesday also seemingly changed his public position on Ukraine. Shortly after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump took to Truth Social to say that Ukraine, with European assistance, “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” reclaiming all land lost to Russia during the invasion, “and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Trump encouraged Europe and NATO to provide more support to Ukraine and said the U.S. will “continue to supply weapons to NATO.” He called Russia a “paper tiger,” in “BIG Economic trouble,” and said that “this is the time for Ukraine to act.” During his meeting with Zelensky, he told reporters that NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter their airspace and praised the Ukrainians for “putting up one hell of a fight.” During his own U.N. address, Zelensky condemned China and Russia and criticized the U.N. Security Council—of which Russia is a member. During another session, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney joined Zelensky in calling for the return of the thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has abducted.
- The Secret Service announced on Tuesday that it had dismantled more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 servers discovered in August within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations. The devices, seized from “SIM farms” in abandoned buildings across five sites, were found alongside cocaine, illegal firearms, computers, and cellphones. Multiple news outlets report that the network would have been capable of disabling cell towers, disrupting emergency communications, shutting down cellular networks, and carrying out surveillance. Analysis of some SIM cards revealed ties to at least one foreign nation and to criminals already known to U.S. law enforcement, including cartels, but investigators stressed there is no evidence the operation targeted this week’s U.N. meetings. The scale of the seized equipment suggests it may have been part of a state-run surveillance operation.
- Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC on Tuesday night after the network had “indefinitely” suspended him last week following remarks he made about the murder of Charlie Kirk. During his first show back, he told the studio audience of Jimmy Kimmel Live! that “it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man” while defending free speech against “anti-American” government threats. During his monologue, Kimmel goaded the president, saying he “did his best to cancel me,” but it “backfired bigly.” Having initially cheered Kimmel’s cancellation, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Kimmel “is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution.” He followed that “we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative.” Although the show is back, affiliate station owners Sinclair and Nexstar are continuing to preempt the show on their approximately 70 ABC stations.
- Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Tuesday that mysterious drone incursions over Copenhagen Airport were “the most serious attack on Danish critical infrastructure to date,” after two to three large aircraft shut down the facility Monday night. Danish police said the skilled operator flew the drones for hours, apparently showcasing their capabilities, and a similar incident also closed Oslo Airport in Norway. The disruptions come amid heightened concerns over Russian violations of European airspace following recent drone and fighter jet incursions into Poland, Romania, and Estonia. It’s unclear who was responsible.
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda fighter who became the leader of the country in January 2025 after opposition factions deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The pair discussed “ongoing counterterrorism efforts, efforts to locate missing Americans, and the importance of Israel-Syria relations in achieving greater regional security,” according to a State Department spokesperson. Elections are scheduled for October 5 in Syria to elect two-thirds of all members in what will be the country’s first parliament since al-Assad’s ousting, with al-Sharaa planning to appoint the remaining third.
- On Tuesday, Trump canceled his Thursday meeting with Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to discuss details for a prospective spending deal to avert a government shutdown on October 1. “After reviewing the details of the unserious and ridiculous demands being made by the Minority Radical Left Democrats in return for their Votes to keep our thriving Country open, I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. On Friday, the Senate voted down both a Democratic-endorsed temporary funding bill and a separate short-term funding bill supported by most Republicans, which had passed in the House. To read more about the shutdown fight, read last Friday’s TMD.
- International Criminal Court (ICC) documents made public on Monday night show that former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has been charged with three counts of crimes against humanity for his alleged involvement in the killings of 76 people during a crackdown on violent drug crime. Prosecutors had argued that Duterte had paid hit men to murder suspected “high-value targets” and “lower-level criminals.” Duterte was charged in early July and has been imprisoned in The Hague since March.
- A 12-member federal jury on Tuesday convicted Ryan Routh, 59, of attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, in addition to illegal firearm violations and assaulting a federal officer. In September 2024, Routh camped in one of Trump’s Florida golf courses with a firearm. Following the verdict, Routh—who had defended himself in court—attempted to stab himself in the neck with a pen, though he later appeared with no signs of serious injury. He is set to be sentenced on December 18 and faces up to life imprisonment.
- Trump issued an executive order on Monday designating Antifa, a loose coalition that encompasses sects on the far-left, as a “domestic terrorist organization,” because it “uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide,” according to the order. While the State Department has the authority to designate some groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, there is no such designation for domestic groups. Trump’s order further directs the federal government to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all illegal operations conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”
A Scientific Headache
No one can accuse Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of a lack of ambition. In April, he claimed that by September he would have found and announced the cause of autism. And on Monday afternoon, he claimed to have made good on that promise.
Through new Food and Drug Administration guidance, a Politico article authored by three of the federal government’s top health officials, and an hour-long Roosevelt Room press conference starring President Donald Trump, the Trump administration announced what it claimed was the most concrete finding yet on the cause of the alleged autism epidemic: Tylenol.
Maybe.
As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. You can read our full item in the members-only version of TMD.
The Trump administration made two substantial policy recommendations on Monday: The first was to limit the use of Tylenol (the brand name for the generic drug acetaminophen), the only over-the-counter pain reliever considered safe for pregnant women, during pregnancy. The second was to approve the use of folinic acid to treat speech disorders related to autism. Though there are some reasons to caution the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy, there is currently no reliable publicly available evidence that shows a causal link between its consumption in pregnancy and the development of autism.
In their public statements, Trump and Kennedy also frequently went beyond the qualifier-laden pronouncements of other top health officials. “Taking Tylenol is not good. All right, I’ll say it. It’s not good,” Trump said during Monday night’s briefing, flanked by Kennedy, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Martin Makary, and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
The three health agency heads were more measured in their Monday opinion piece in Politico, writing that “observational evidence has suggested that when moms take acetaminophen during pregnancy, especially close to delivery, it is correlated with subsequent diagnosis of conditions like autism and ADHD,” but also stating that “evidence from family control studies have failed to find a correlation.” They concluded that acetaminophen should be used “judiciously” in pregnancy, with “caution extended to infants and toddlers.”
Trump seemed to think that those recommendations didn’t go far enough. “Don’t take Tylenol if you’re pregnant and don’t give Tylenol to your child when he’s born or she’s born,” he said near the end of the press conference. “Don’t give it, just don’t give it.”
But acetaminophen is the only pain reliever considered safe for pregnant women to use. Other over-the-counter medications like aspirin, ibuprofen, and naproxen—all nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs—can harm the developing fetus, especially if taken later in a pregnancy.
Some medical authorities pushed back on the administration’s claims. “The conditions people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks,” noted Dr. Steven J. Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), in a Monday press release citing the risks of conditions like maternal fevers to unborn children. He also noted that no study had yet successfully documented a causal link between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and autism.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican and doctor from Louisiana who chairs the Senate’s health committee, was also skeptical. “HHS should release the new data that it has to support this claim. The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case,” he wrote on X. “The concern is that women will be left with no options to manage pain in pregnancy.”
Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, understandably went into corporate crisis management mode. “We understand the recent media coverage you’re reading may cause concern or lead to questions,” the company says on its website. “If you are treating your little one with acetaminophen, please know that there is no credible science that shows taking acetaminophen causes autism,” it continued, citing statements from ACOG, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the American College of Pediatrics, and the Autism Science Foundation.
Though Kenvue’s stock fell 16 percent on September 5 after a Wall Street Journal report previewed Kennedy’s upcoming pronouncements, it started to rebound after slumping on Tuesday, as it became clear that the White House was not announcing any new scientific evidence demonstrating Tylenol’s dangers, nor bans or FDA label changes. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Kenvue’s CEO privately met with RFK Jr., hoping to persuade him not to cite Tylenol in any pronouncements.
The White House was not pulling its claims about Tylenol out of thin air. Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, the dean of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted Tuesday that a recent review of 46 studies he conducted found an “association” between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism, especially when used for more than four weeks. “I believe that caution about acetaminophen use during pregnancy—especially heavy or prolonged use—is warranted,” he said in a statement. “Patients who need fever or pain reduction during pregnancy should take the lowest effective dose of acetaminophen, for the shortest possible duration, after consultation with their physician.”
“That’s been the advice for decades,” Renee Gardner—a principal researcher specializing in epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet, a Swedish-based medical research university—told TMD. “It’s not like women are going about and sort of recreationally taking large doses of acetaminophen during pregnancy all of a sudden.”
Gardner was a co-senior author of an April 2024 study that examined potential links between acetaminophen intake during pregnancy and the development of early childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, using Swedish public health data of nearly 2.5 million children born in the country between 1995 and 2019. And, while they found an association between acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders, there was no link when they applied a sibling control, in which they compared siblings in cases where the mother used acetaminophen during one pregnancy but not the other.
“Multiple biases may explain” the correlation between acetaminophen use and autism some studies have noted, including the underlying reasons a pregnant woman would take the drug, such as an infection or fever, and genetics, which Gardner said “is one of the most important factors in terms of determining whether a person has autistic traits or not.” Still, the 2024 study found “there was not one single ‘smoking gun’” responsible for the association without the sibling control groups. “Despite what the administration would really like, there are no easy sort of explanations for this,” Gardner said. “We’re, after all, trying to describe really complex human traits here.”
The Trump administration also said the FDA was approving a new treatment for some autism symptoms: leucovorin, also known as folinic acid, used to treat some side effects of cancer treatment. “Our research has revealed that folate deficiency in a child’s brain can lead to autism,” Kennedy said on Monday. Folate is also known as Vitamin B9, and there is some evidence that treating children with autism spectrum disorder with folate can improve speech disorders. “We have a duty to let doctors and the public know,” Makary said. “Hundreds of thousands of kids, in my opinion, will benefit.”
But as with Tylenol, the administration’s Politico piece was much more guarded than statements made at Monday’s press conference. “Leucovorin is not a cure for autism but has demonstrated an improvement in speech-related deficits for autism,” the administration officials wrote.
“Treatments post-birth are always to be viewed with skepticism” because of autism’s strong genetic component, Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told TMD. “The data that President Trump and RFK Jr. were arguing for were thin at best.” Offit noted the long history of supposed treatments for autism that have failed to pan out: the hormone secretin, nicotine patches, Lupron (the drug used to chemically castrate sex offenders), antifungal medication, raw camel milk, and even dolphin therapy. “I just feel sorry for these parents who are so often misled here,” he said. Though the public faces of autism, like Elon Musk, have a moderate, socially functional level, being severely autistic is debilitating, for both the people themselves and the families who support them.
Administration officials presented the prevalence of autism as an emergency requiring a rapid response. During the press conference on Monday, both Kennedy and Bhattacharya referred to autism in the U.S. as an epidemic of increasing proportions. “You’re only seeing this in people who are under 50 years of age,” said Kennedy, rebutting claims that rising rates of autism were due to changing diagnostic criteria. “I’ve never seen this happening [profound autism] in people my age.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean autism is becoming more prominent, only that autism diagnoses are. Several decades ago, “The autism diagnosis was generally not given to people who showed the kind of profound impairments that profoundly autistic people have,” Helen Tager-Flusberg, professor emerita in psychological and brain sciences at Boston University and founder of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, told TMD. “So in his day, yes, there wouldn’t have been people with that diagnosis, because it sort of didn’t exist for people who meet the criteria for profound autism.”
Trump also pointed to Cubans and the Amish to back his claims. “They don’t have Tylenol, and I hear they have essentially no autism,” he said of the Caribbean island nation. “[Autism] doesn’t exist with the Amish community, and they don’t take all of this junk,” he added, referring to the higher likelihood of Amish people to eschew vaccines and use alternative medicine. But Tager-Flusberg maintains these are likely examples of certain groups not looking to diagnose the condition the way the broader U.S. community has in recent years: “I suspect it’s the same case of, well, if we’re not out there looking for it, we say that it doesn’t exist.”
The White House is confident in its proclamations, though, and Monday’s press conference made clear administration officials don’t plan to slow down on making more potentially controversial pronouncements. “We are now replacing the institutional culture of politicized science and corruption with evidence-based medicine,” Kennedy said.
Today’s Must-Read
American power, like much else, exists on a spectrum. At one extreme of our foreign policy, there is pure force, the power of muscles and guns; somewhere toward the middle are various forms of diplomacy, from moral suasion to tit-for-tat deal-making. At the other extreme there is the power of friendships across cultures, the power of example, the power of teaching. This end of the spectrum—soft power in perhaps its purest form—is where the Peace Corps has lived since its founding. The present administration, on the other hand, lives at the other extreme. In virtually every arena the Trump approach has been, plainly speaking, hard-ass: sending soldiers to do the work of urban police, masking ICE agents, renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War—the list is long and almost everything on it is much more “hard” than “soft.” In the foreign policy arena, compared to big stick threats like invading Greenland or weaponizing tariffs, the power of the Peace Corps is ultra-soft. It is therefore a mystery why this 64-year-old agency has so far survived relatively unscathed.
Toeing the Company Line
Toughing It Out
Why is the White House focused on autism?
French Unrest Is About More Than Austerity
Voters were told that immigration would save the welfare state. That didn’t happen.
The Problem With Arguing ‘They Did It to Us First’
When you fight fire with fire, everyone gets burned.
The Fall of Affirmative Action | Interview: Justin Driver
‘How do we want to be wrong?’
Worth Your Time
- Accounts of Elon Musk’s childhood don’t paint a happy picture of the relationship between himself and his father, and the two have been estranged for years. Errol Musk has disputed his billionaire son’s characterizations of him, but on Tuesday, the New York Times published a detailed investigation by Kirsten Grind and John Eligon claiming Errol Musk has faced accusations of child sexual abuse (though none from Elon). “The allegations against Errol Musk involve five of his children and stepchildren, whom he was accused of abusing in South Africa and California, according to police and court records, personal correspondence, social workers and interviews with family members,” they write. “The earliest accusation was in 1993 when Errol Musk’s stepdaughter, then 4 years old, told relatives he had touched her at the family house. A decade later, the stepdaughter said she caught him sniffing her dirty underwear. Some family members have also accused Errol Musk of abusing two of his daughters and a stepson. And as recently as 2023, family members and a social worker attempted to intervene after his then 5-year-old son said his father had groped his buttocks.” They continue: “Three separate police investigations were opened, according to police and court records, as well as family members. Two of the inquiries ended, while it’s unclear what happened in the third. Errol Musk, 79, has not been convicted of any crime.” Elon Musk has not publicly commented about the report.
Presented Without Comment
The Hill: Harris on Trump: ‘We’re Dealing With a Communist Dictator’
Also Presented Without Comment
Politico: FBI Says It Found Classified Documents in John Bolton’s DC Office
FBI agents executing a search warrant at former national security adviser John Bolton’s downtown Washington office last month turned up documents marked as classified, according to a court filing released Tuesday. A description of the documents gathered in the Aug. 22 search suggested they included materials that referenced weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. mission to the United Nations and records related to the U.S. government’s strategic communications.
Also Also Presented Without Comment
Associated Press: Trump Administration Rehires Hundreds of Federal Employees Laid Off by DOGE
Let Us Know
Have any thoughts or questions about today’s newsletter? Drop us a note in the comments!
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.
With your membership, you only have the ability to comment on The Morning Dispatch articles. Consider upgrading to join the conversation everywhere.