TAKE TWO AND CALL: President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced yesterday that they believe there is a link between autism and pregnant mothers taking the painkiller acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, despite all previous science on the subject being inconclusive.

  “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it, Trump said.” He urged pregnant women to “tough it out” when in pain, except in rare instances, such as a dangerously high fever.

  Kennedy also announced research into a long debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines. Trump critiqued the infant vaccine schedule … without any medical knowledge … saying that, “It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number.”

  The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, also endorsed a B-vitamin-based drug, leucovorin, to treat autism, although that has barely been studied as a remedy.

  Kennedy in April promised that he would find the cause of autism by September. Health officials are planning to warn women against using the medication early in a pregnancy unless they have a fever, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

  “Acetaminophen is the safest pain reliever option for pregnant women as needed throughout their entire pregnancy,” the makers of Tylenol objected in  a statement released Sunday. “Without it, women face dangerous choices: suffer through conditions like fever that are potentially harmful to both mom and baby or use riskier alternatives.”

  Autism is believed to have multiple causes, genetics among them. About 1 in every 31 children was diagnosed with autism by age 8 in 2022, up from 1 in 36 in 2020.

  The numbers are rising in part because the definition of autism was broadened by psychiatric professionals in 2013.  There’s also been more screening of children, especially infants, resulting in more diagnoses.

ON AIR: ABC announced that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will return to air on tonight after a suspension last week that was described as indefinite. Kimmel was taken off the air after saying the followers of the Trump MAGA movement were saying and doing everything they could to prove that the killer of right wing activist Charlie Kirk was not one of their own. That’s exactly what they were doing before anything was known about the killer. 

  The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, said in a statement that, “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country.”

  After the Kimmel suspension, four hundred entertainers including Tom Hanks, Jennifer Aniston, Robert DeNiro, and Natalie Portman had signed a letter organized by the American Civil Liberties Union decrying “a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation.” 

  The conservative-owned Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns many ABC affiliates, said they will continue to pre-empt Kimmel.

THE REGIME:

— The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether it should overrule its 90-year-old precedent that protects employees of independent agencies from being fired by the President while in the meantime greenlighting President Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter. 

  In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that,  “Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars.” She said, “Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.” 

 Trump has been ignoring protections afforded certain regulators with such agencies as the FTC and the Federal Reserve protection from political firing.

— Congressional Republicans plan to re-name their unpopular “Big Beautiful Bill” the “Working Families Tax Cut.”

  Reduced taxes on tips, and overtime, as well as an increase to the standard deduction and child tax credit are retroactive to the start of this year, meaning a lot of people will receive a check after filing their taxes. You can bet it will be signed by Donald Trump.

— White House aide and former Trump defense lawyer Lindsey Halligan was sworn in as the interim US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia following her predecessor’s refusal to seek indictments against former FBI Director  James Comey, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. 

  Halligan has no experience as a prosecutor and she will take office under pressure to indict the president’s perceived enemies. 

— A federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled that work on a Rhode Island wind farm stopped by the Trump administration may proceed. The $6.2 billion Revolution Wind project was 80 percent complete when the Interior Department ordered construction to stop. The farm would be able to provide power for 35,000 homes.

  The Interior department attributed its stop work order to unspecified national security concerns. 

.THE SPIN RACK: The Secret Service says it dismantled a massive network of electronic devices in the New York City area they believe would have been capable of cyberattacks that could knock out large sections of cellular communications. The devices were found in vacant apartments and other properties within 35 miles of the UN General Assembly meeting underway this week in Manhattan. — A federal trial in Seattle beginning this week will determine whether Amazon tricked tens of millions of people into signing up for its Prime membership program, and then made it hard for them to cancel when they wanted out. 

BELOW THE FOLD:  It’s Fat Bear Week on the Brooks River in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska as voters pick the fattest bear heading into winter hibernation. The returning champion is bear # 128 Grazer, who won in both 2023 and 2024. Eleven bears are in the competition. Vying for the title is # 32 Chunk, who has been seen downing 42 big salmon in 10 hours.

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