Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Trump told a crowd there were “no women” present, “which is nice.” A Massachusetts doctor who punched a police officer on January 6 has lost her right to renew her medical license. ICE illegally scooped up the Medicaid data of millions of people, then handed it to Palantir. And a new cyclospora outbreak sickening 72 people is under investigation, with no source identified.
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Trump Glad There Were No Women at UFC Event
The president attended a cage fight and still managed to say the most violent thing in the building.
Donald Trump was in Macungie, Pennsylvania, giving a speech when he started bragging about the White House’s UFC Freedom 250 event. He praised the fighters as “the strongest, toughest men on Earth.”
Then he added eight words: “No women in the crowd, which is nice.”
There were women in the crowd. Multiple viewers pointed this out afterward, along with the more basic question of what kind of president says that at all.
Trump went on to describe UFC fighters as “geniuses” with an intelligence behind the sport that “a lot of people wouldn’t understand.” He was very focused on muscles, and on one muscle in particular.
The remark came shortly after a UFC heavyweight fighter made false and disparaging remarks about Michelle Obama into a live microphone. Trump appeared to smirk.
This is the party that wants you to believe it’s protecting women’s sports.
Doctor Who Punched Cop on Jan. 6 Can’t Renew License
It turns out that “do no harm” also covers Metropolitan Police officers.
Jacquelyn Starer of Ashland, Massachusetts, has lost her right to renew her medical license after the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine announced disciplinary action on Thursday.
The board found that Starer was among the crowd that stormed and breached the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, and that she struck a Metropolitan Police Officer with her closed fist.
Starer pleaded guilty in 2024 to two felony counts of civil disorder and assaulting officers, plus a stack of misdemeanors. She was sentenced in September 2024 to nine months in prison followed by nine months of home confinement.
She first got her Massachusetts license in 1983. At the time of her arrest in December 2022, she worked at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, which later said she was “no longer active” there.
In court, she told a federal judge she wasn’t proud of what she did, calling it a “regrettable encounter.” She accepted full responsibility. Then Trump returned to office and pardoned everyone who took part in the attack, including the violent offenders. The medical board still revoked her license anyway.
A medical board just did what the President of the United States refused to do — hold a January 6th rioter accountable. That’s where we are. The institutions that still work are working in spite of the White House, not because of it. If independent accountability journalism matters to you, please consider becoming a paying subscriber today.
ICE Stole Medicaid Data and Gave It to Palantir
Every report out of this administration now arrives with two settings: bad news, and worse news.
The bad news came last July, when the Trump administration decided ICE should have access to Medicaid data for the sole purpose of locating migrants to arrest. The administration itself said the data would help ICE find “the location of aliens.” There was no legal basis for the demand, which is why more than 20 Democratic attorneys general sued.
The worse news came out in a court motion filed Thursday. After Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people, ICE then shared that data with Palantir, the analytics firm behind an app called ELITE that shows ICE agents the addresses of noncitizens.
The data ICE wanted exposed “home addresses and ethnicities.” Not subtle.
Palantir says the dataset has been “purged.” It also says its employees only touch a customer’s data to integrate and analyze it, not to store it. There is no independent verification of any of this.
It gets worse, which by now you expected. The Justice Department admitted in a court filing that CMS again inadvertently reshared with ICE the same dataset of millions of names it improperly shared in January. The error happened while sharing data from states that aren’t part of the lawsuit.
Because not every state sued, ICE keeps collecting data it should already be barred from touching, and Palantir keeps getting handed information the government was never allowed to distribute in the first place.
New Cyclospora Outbreak Has Sickened 72 People
Before we get into this next story, I’m going to need you to sit down. Preferably near a bathroom.
A new cyclospora outbreak, unconnected to the previously recalled lettuce, is now under investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Cyclospora is the parasite capable of giving you what officials describe as “explosive” diarrhea.
The latest outbreak, with 72 cases, was added to the FDA’s list of ongoing investigations on Wednesday. The cause has not been identified.
The FDA now has six active cyclospora investigations. Only one — the iceberg lettuce outbreak, with more than 11,000 confirmed or suspected cases — has an identified source.
Part of the problem is that cyclospora is hard to track. Whole genome sequencing isn’t available for it, so investigators fall back on targeted genotyping, which a CDC official said is “not as fast and precise.”
Symptoms can take up to two weeks to appear. Standard stool testing doesn’t detect the parasite. Cases are frequently underreported. A federal agency is now chasing six separate outbreaks of a parasite it can’t sequence, from food it can’t yet name.
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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Government Withdraws Subpoenas of 3 New York Times Reporters. A federal judge forced the government to back down after it tried to compel three New York Times reporters to reveal their sources for articles about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet. Judge Arun Subramanian, visibly irritated, said subpoenas on journalists are supposed to be “the last step, not the first step,” and warned that he would consider sanctions against the government’s lawyers. The Justice Department, which had also sought phone records for one reporter’s mother and two journalists’ spouses, apologized and called the errors inadvertent. It’s the latest in a pattern: the administration recently withdrew similar subpoenas aimed at Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters.
25 States Sue FEMA and DHS Over Withheld Disaster Funding. A coalition of 25 states and the District of Columbia sued FEMA and the DHS, accusing the Trump administration of withholding hundreds of millions in disaster-preparedness and homeland security grants to force states to adopt its election and immigration policies. The new conditions would require states to verify voter citizenship through a federal database, move toward hand-marked paper ballots, and cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. The states estimate FEMA could withhold at least 20% of Homeland Security Grant Program awards, roughly $148 million from the plaintiffs. The money in question normally pays for first responders, bomb squads, cybersecurity, and security at houses of worship.
Judge Extends Emergency Order Pausing the Paramount–Warner Bros. Merger. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín extended a temporary restraining order on the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger by another two weeks, meaning the deal can’t close until at least Aug. 17. She said she found good cause to extend the TRO, citing two pending preliminary injunction motions and disputes over the hearing schedule. The plaintiffs — a dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America — are trying to block the merger, and the WGA will be allowed to participate in an Aug. 3 hearing. Paramount has asked for a three-day evidentiary hearing. For once, a media consolidation deal is being made to slow down and show its work.
New Jersey Bans Algorithmic Rent Pricing Under the FAIR Act. Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed the Forbidding the Algorithmic Inflation of Rent Act into law Monday, making New Jersey the fourth state to regulate the software lawmakers say lets landlords coordinate rents. The law targets tools that pool nonpublic data like rents, occupancy, and lease terms from multiple landlords to recommend pricing, effectively letting competitors set rents together. It takes effect July 1, 2027, and requires the attorney general to build a portal where renters can report violations. The crackdown began in courtrooms: last October, Greystar and 25 other property firms agreed to settle a class-action for more than $141 million collectively.
