Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy warned of "lazy" potheads during a segment on smoking marijuana.
During a Sunday Fox & Friends discussion about a Canadian study that linked marijuana use to schizophrenia, Duffy and Fox News medical contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier decried the "dangers of smoking."
The segment echoed sentiments of the 1936 "Reefer Madness" film.
"Please don't legalize," Duffy said. "Please don't allow, you know, your party to get behind legalization because it's a gateway drug to other drugs."
"I have also, like you have, been very cautious about legalization of marijuana because there are known risks with it," Saphier agreed. "So it is very concerning when it comes to people using this a lot more and you're seeing rising levels of THC over the years in marijuana that people are using."
"Well, let me tell you, not everything that is natural is good for you," she continued. "Other herbs that I like that are natural that can help with relaxation and some of those are like lavender, chamomile, low-dose kava kava."
"I have been a lot concerned about its normalization, and you and I know, I mean, let's just be honest, we're moms," Duffy agreed. "We knew those potheads in high school. They're lazy. Why would we want to normalize this when we see the effects on that."
"Plus we know that it can it can really just disrupt your your motivation for life and get you hooked on something instead of motivated to have a better life."
Saphier acknowledged "conflicting research as to whether this leads to hardcore drug use in the future."
"I mean it's a no-no," the doctor argued. "And I certainly don't recommend this unless it is very specific medical conditions that are proven to benefit from it."
"I miss the just say no days," Duffy opined. "I really do."
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue to run roughshod over the federal government with seeming impunity, there are at least three areas of restraint that could stand in their way, according to analysis by The Washington Post.
"So far the resistance has been minimal," writes chief correspondent Dan Balz. "Democrats have offered little opposition beyond rhetoric. Republicans in Congress have acted as if they are an extension of the executive branch rather than a separate branch of government."
What, then, can keep the two billionaires in line if the system of checks and balances fails to stop their "search-and-destroy mission designed as much to intimidate federal workers and exact retribution against perceived enemies as it is to make government more efficient"?
Balz argues that the courts, the markets, and public opinion could act as restraints "even if Congress abdicates its constitutional authority and responsibility to act as a check on the power of the executive."
Balz notes that on Saturday, a federal judge blocked Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing sensitive Treasury Department material, including personal and financial data. And on Friday, a judge barred the administration from laying off an additional 2,700 USAID workers. Musk is said to be ready to defy the Treasury Department order, according to at least one legal analyst, and both judicial orders are only temporary. "How the judicial system, including the Supreme Court, will rule overall on Trump’s effort to expand executive power will be a long-running battle," Balz writes.
The financial markets could also be a major influencer as Trump continues to consider tariffs on allied countries like Canada and Mexico. Last week, the markets went haywire before Trump announced he was delaying the threatened tariffs on those two countries for 30 days. "Trump is a keen watcher of the stock indexes and will feel the effects if his tariff, tax and spending policies lead to higher interest rates, higher prices or slower growth," Balz writes.
And finally, Balz argues that public opinion could help keep Trump in check. Although he won the popular vote, Trump could lose public support if grocery prices and inflation continue to hurt the average American's pocketbook. So far, the president's approval rating remains relatively high at 52 percent, Trump could be persuaded to change his tune if that number starts to fall.
That is according to a report from Politico's Kyle Cheney who noted that over nine judges across the country have entered the fray as the president and his appointees conduct their "shock and awe" campaign to upend democratic norms.
According to the report, Trump's agenda suffered several body blows on Friday when Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, temporarily shut down efforts by the president and Elon Musk to place 2,200 USAID employees on leave. That was followed by Judge Paul Engelmayer halting Musk and his young DOGE staffers from rifling through sensitive Treasury records.
As Cheney noted, in some of the rulings there is an undercurrent of "visceral fury" aimed at the Trump administration.
Longtime U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, took umbrage at a plan to undermine birthright citizenship and pointedly wrote in his ruling, "It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore.”
"Coughenour’s stunning assessment of a sitting president was also a stark contrast to the GOP-led Congress’ gentle compliance with Trump’s efforts to dramatically expand the powers of his office," Politico's Cheney wrote before adding, "For now, the initial decisions to slow down the onslaught are having widespread effects, forcing federal agencies to disclose more details about their opaque plans for the workforce, establishing guidelines for the handling of sensitive government data that Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has been gobbling up and raising sharp questions about Trump’s effort to impound swaths of government spending authorized by Congress."
There are trillions of charged particles – protons and electrons, the basic building blocks of matter – whizzing around above your head at any given time. These high-energy particles, which can travel at close to the speed of light, typically remain thousands of kilometers away from Earth, trapped there by the shape of Earth’s magnetic field.
Occasionally, though, an event happens that can jostle them out of place, sending electrons raining down into Earth’s atmosphere. These high-energy particles in space make up what are known as the Van Allen radiation belts, and their discovery was one of the first of the space age. A new study from my research team has found that electromagnetic waves generated by lightning can trigger these electron showers.
A brief history lesson
At the start of the space race in the 1950s, professor James Van Allen and his research team at the University of Iowa were tasked with building an experiment to fly on the United States’ very first satellite, Explorer 1. They designed sensors to study cosmic radiation, which is caused by high-energy particles originating from the Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, or beyond.
James Van Allen, middle, poses with a model of the Explorer 1 satellite.NASA
After Explorer 1 launched, though, they noticed that their instrument was detecting significantly higher levels of radiation than expected. Rather than measuring a distant source of radiation beyond our solar system, they appeared to be measuring a local and extremely intense source.
This measurement led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped regions of high-energy electrons and ions encircling the planet.
Scientists believe that the inner radiation belt, peaking about 621 miles (1000 kilometers) from Earth, is composed of electrons and high-energy protons and is relatively stable over time.
The outer radiation belt, about three times farther away, is made up of high-energy electrons. This belt can be highly dynamic. Its location, density and energy content may vary significantly by the hour in response to solar activity.
Charged particles, with their trajectories shown as blue and yellow lines here, exist in the radiation belts around Earth, depicted here as the yellow, green and blue regions.
The discovery of these high-radiation regions is not only an interesting story about the early days of the space race; it also serves as a reminder that many scientific discoveries have come about by happy accident.
It is a lesson for experimental scientists, myself included, to keep an open mind when analyzing and evaluating data. If the data doesn’t match our theories or expectations, those theories may need to be revisited.
Our curious observations
While I teach the history of the space race in a space policy course at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I rarely connect it to my own experience as a scientist researching Earth’s radiation belts. Or, at least, I didn’t until recently.
In a study led by Max Feinland, an undergraduate student in my research group, we stumbled upon some of our own unexpected observations of Earth’s radiation belts. Our findings have made us rethink our understanding of Earth’s inner radiation belt and the processes affecting it.
Originally, we set out to look for very rapid – sub-second – bursts of high-energy electrons entering the atmosphere from the outer radiation belt, where they are typically observed.
Many scientists believe that a type of electromagnetic wave known as “chorus” can knock these electrons out of position and send them toward the atmosphere. They’re called chorus waves due to their distinct chirping sound when listened to on a radio receiver.
Feinland developed an algorithm to search for these events in decades of measurements from the SAMPEX satellite. When he showed me a plot with the location of all the events he’d detected, we noticed a number of them were not where we expected. Some events mapped to the inner radiation belt rather than the outer belt.
This finding was curious for two reasons. For one, chorus waves aren’t prevalent in this region, so something else had to be shaking these electrons loose.
The other surprise was finding electrons this energetic in the inner radiation belt at all. Measurements from NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission prompted renewed interest in the inner radiation belt. Observations from the Van Allen Probes suggested that high-energy electrons are often not present in this inner radiation belt, at least not during the first few years of that mission, from 2012 to 2014.
Our observations now showed that, in fact, there are times that the inner belt contains high-energy electrons. How often this is true and under what conditions remain open questions to explore. These high-energy particles can damage spacecraft and harm humans in space, so researchers need to know when and where in space they are present to better design spacecraft.
Determining the culprit
One of the ways to disturb electrons in the inner radiation belt and kick them into Earth’s atmosphere actually begins in the atmosphere itself.
These waves can then travel through the atmosphere out into space, where they interact with electrons in the inner radiation belt – much as chorus waves interact with electrons in the outer radiation belt.
To test whether lightning was behind our inner radiation belt detections, we looked back at the electron bursts and compared them with thunderstorm data. Some lightning activity seemed correlated with our electron events, but much of it was not.
Specifically, only lightning that occurred right after so-called geomagnetic storms resulted in the bursts of electrons we detected.
Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in the near-Earth space environment often caused by large eruptions on the Sun’s surface. This solar activity, if directed toward Earth, can produce what researchers term space weather. Space weather can result in stunning auroras, but it can also disrupt satellite and power grid operations.
We discovered that a combination of weather on Earth and weather in space produces the unique electron signatures we observed in our study. The solar activity disturbs Earth’s radiation belts and populates the inner belt with very high-energy electrons, then the lightning interacts with these electrons and creates the rapid bursts that we observed.
These results provide a nice reminder of the interconnected nature of Earth and space. They were also a welcome reminder to me of the often nonlinear process of scientific discovery.
Elon Musk appears poised to defy a judicial order, according to observers.
Musk, the richest man in the world and an appointee of Donald Trump, was dealt a blow over the weekend when a judge reportedly blocked Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing personal financial data from the Treasury Department, which resulted in a MAGA meltdown.
Musk wasn't too happy about the ruling, saying, "Corrupt judges protecting corruption."
Trump legal ally Mike Davis said, "These DC uniparty judges are shockingly insulated from Real Americans in Real America."
"They are arrogant and delusional enough to believe they are saving America from Trump," the lawyer added. "Even though Trump campaigned on doing precisely what he’s doing. And won a decisive electoral mandate."
GOP Senator Mike Lee said, "This has the feel of a coup—not a military coup, but a judicial one." Musk reposted that comment Saturday evening, writing simply, "Yes."
In a separate post, Musk shared a statement from someone suggesting various reasons for defying court orders. That comment stated, "I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us…”
Legal analyst Anna Bower weighed in after that, saying, "After a judge blocked DOGE access to Treasury data, Elon Musk just reposted a user who implied that the order should be defied."
Donald Trump on Saturday promoted a comment from an ally who was criticizing New York Attorney General Letitia James, and shortly after another ally was seeking to release "damaging receipts" on James.
Trump over the weekend took to his own social media site, Truth Social, where he shared a post by infamous associate Roger Stone.
"A careful examination of New York Attorney General Letitia James financial disclosures shows she inflated the value of her assets in order to get mortgages on various commercial properties- EXACTLY what she falsely accused President Trump of doing" Stone claimed without providing details.
After Trump shared that post from Stone, another Trump ally stepped in. This time it was Laura Loomer, a popular right-wing influencer and conspiracy theorist who was seen by Trump's side during the 2024 campaign.
Loomer claimed she had proof of some sort of illicit behavior by James, and sought someone to help her release that purported evidence.
"I have very damaging receipts on Letitia James. Much more than what I posted last year, which was shared by @potus. Very powerful people would be able to do massive damage with these receipts in their hands," Loomer wrote on X, formerly called Twitter, on Saturday. "Those powerful people have my number. They should call me."
Elon Musk hopes to eventually replace the entire human workforce within the federal government, instead implementing machines and AI, a federal insider said, according to a new report.
Musk, a Donald Trump appointee and the richest man in the world, has been at the heart of several mass firings within the government. He has also reportedly used AI to accomplish some of his cost-cutting goals within the government.
A new weekend report suggests Musk's "end goal" ties these issues together.
"In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals," the report states. "The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president."
The Washington Post cited "one official closely watching the billionaire’s DOGE" as saying Musk's motive is actually to replace “the human workforce with machines.”
"That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation," the Post states, before quoting a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity.
"The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines... Everything that can be machine-automated will be," the official said. "And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
American actor Richard Gere called President Donald Trump a "bully" and a "thug" on Saturday during an awards ceremony in Spain, and said the United States was in a "very dark place".
The 75-year-old, who received an International Goya Award at Spain's top film honours, warned that authoritarianism is on the rise "everywhere".
"We're in a very dark place in America, where we have a bully, a thug, who's the president of the United States. But it's not just in the US, it's everywhere," he said. "Authoritarianism takes us all over."
The "Pretty Woman" and "American Gigolo" actor was also highly critical of Trump during a press conference in Granada on Friday.
During Saturday's gala, Spanish actor Antonio Banderas presented Gere with the honorary award for "his extraordinary contribution to the art of filmmaking" and his social commitment to various causes, including the plight of refugees and the homeless.
During his speech, Gere warned of the "dark marriage" of power and money "like we've never seen before".
"The fact that these irresponsible and perhaps dangerously corrosive billionaires are running everything in America right now is a danger for everyone on this planet," he said.
Gere is also a longtime champion of Tibet who has met frequently with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader Beijing accuses of fomenting separatism in the Himalayan region.
Last year, Gere and his Spanish wife, the publicist Alejandra Silva, 41, moved to Madrid with their two sons.
During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the U.S. economy was terrible under then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris. But according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, unemployment stayed under 4.0 percent from February 2022 through April 2024. And U.S. unemployment was 4.1 percent in December 2024, Biden's last full month in office.
Nonetheless, voter frustration over inflation worked to Trump's advantage, and he narrowly defeated Harris by roughly 1.5 percent (according to the Cook Political Report) on Election Day.
Wall Street Journal reporters Rachel Wolfe and Joe Pinsker examine consumer confidence in an article published on February 7, laying out some reasons why it appears to be declining during Trump's second presidency.
"The Trump bump in consumer confidence is already over," Wolfe and Pinsker report. "Tariff threats, stock market swings and rapidly reversing executive orders are causing Americans across the political spectrum to feel considerably more pessimistic about the economy than they did before President Trump took office. Consumer sentiment fell about 5 percent in the University of Michigan's preliminary February survey of consumers to its lowest reading since July 2024."
The WSJ reporters continue, "Expectations of inflation in the year ahead jumped from 3.3 percent in January to 4.3 percent, the second month in a row of large increases and highest reading since November 2023…. Morning Consult's recent index of consumer confidence, too, fell between January 25 and February 3, driven primarily by concern over the country's economic future."
Wolfe and Pinsker cite 58-year-old Paul Bisson as an example of someone who voted for Trump in 2024 but now has reservations about his economic policies, including tariffs.
Bisson told WSJ, "I don't like the turbulence. I don't like the chaos in the market…. That will make the economy worse, and that's not what we signed up for. We've already cut back. There's no more cutting back to do."
Nicholas Schuch, a 38-year-old Durham, North Carolina resident who voted for Harris, also views the economy as chaotic during Trump's second presidency. And he is thinking of moving to a country he believes has a better monetary policy.
Schuch told WSJ, "I was thinking Switzerland, potentially…. I just expect things will be chaotic, and that that is what life is now."
Joe Scarborough is "accommodating" Donald Trump and Elon Musk, a former GOP insider said Saturday.
Political strategist Steve Schmidt weighed in on his show, The Warning, saying the MSNBC "Morning Joe" host didn't do enough to stand up to two Republican lawmakers singing Musk's praises in a recent TV interview.
Schmidt went as far as to say Scarborough was accommodating the Trump administration.
A judge on Saturday reportedly blocked Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) from accessing personal financial data from the Treasury Department, resulting in a MAGA meltdown.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer over the weekend issued a preliminary injunction to halt access, ordering the world's richest man and his team to destroy copies of records they already received.
As BBC reports, "The move comes after 19 state attorneys general sued the Trump administration after Doge, a cost-cutting initiative led by Musk, was given access to the records."
The news wasn't taken well by allies of Trump, including Charlie Kirk, to whom Trump's campaign farmed out much of its ground game in the 2024 election.
"New York Judge Paul Engelmayer just forbade all political appointees — including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — from accessing Dept. of Treasury data, all based on Blueanon conspiracy theories!!" Kirk shouted in one post. "Those theories couldn't be challenged because the order was EX PARTE — meaning Trump's lawyers weren't warned, and couldn't weigh in. Only Democrat Attorneys General were allowed to argue."
He continued, "The judge cites no law or logic to support this unprecedented order, because it defies both."
"The judge’s ruling is, in essence, that Scott Bessent simply occupies a ceremonial position without real power, like the King of England," Kirk said. "This is a grenade thrown into the functioning of the Treasury Department. It forbids the elected government from accessing information about budget and finances. Instead, only the permanent, deep-state government can know what's being spent."
Republican Senator Mike Lee said in response, "This sounds like a good time to file a petition for an extraordinary writ of mandamus."
Popular right-wing influencer AXL also weighed in, saying, "Secretary of the Treasury functions as the CFO of the U.S. government."
"If the CFO is denied access to spending information, how can he do his job?" he asked. "The people elected Donald Trump, who appointed Scott Bessent to run the Treasury — not bureaucrats."
Another self-identified conservative influencer, John Jackson, said, "This right here is a major test for the Trump Administration. Will they allow a crooked judge to tell them they can't access their OWN DATA???? The response from DOJ should be the legal equivalent of FU."
President Donald Trump's decision to freeze federal hiring is impacting life-saving firefighting efforts, according to a new report.
CNN over the weekend reported that Trump's hiring freeze "comes at a critical time, when fire departments across the country would typically onboard thousands of seasonal federal firefighters in preparation for wildfires in the spring and summer."
The report quotes Ben McLane, a federal hand crew captain and board member with Grassroots Wildland Firefighter, as saying, “It’s going to be really bad, really quick."
McLane is further quoted as telling CNN, "We’re going to have a lack of personnel when fire season gets going... The precedent that we’ve seen over the last few decades at this point is making us pretty certain that it’s going to be a big fire season again.”
According to CNN, "The federal hiring freeze, initiated through one of the executive orders the president signed on his first day in office, dictates that no new federal civilian positions can be created and no vacant positions can be filled."
"Federal firefighters are an essential part of the nation’s firefighting capability. The Department of the Interior employed 5,780 federal wildland fire personnel in 2024, while the US Forest Service employed over 11,300," according to the outlet. "The majority of firefighters employed by the federal government are seasonal, hired as either permanent or temporary employees."
CNN goes on to report, "The freeze also comes as fire departments across the country have already faced staff shortages. In Los Angeles, where devastating wildfires killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes in January, the fire department is less staffed than almost any other major city, with less than one firefighter for every 1,000 residents."
South Africa on Saturday condemned a "campaign of misinformation" after US President Donald Trump issued an order freezing aid to the country over a law he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers
"We are concerned by what seems to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation," the government said.
Land ownership is a contentious issue in South Africa, with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid. It is a legacy of a policy of expropriating land from the black population that endured during apartheid and the colonial period before it.
"It is disappointing to observe that such narratives seem to have found favour among decision-makers in the United States of America," Pretoria said.
Trump claimed on Friday the law would "enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation".
The allegation came in an executive order, which also noted foreign policy clashes between the United States and South Africa over the war in Gaza, particularly Pretoria's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
South Africa's foreign ministry said it "has taken note" of Trump's executive order but added: "It is of great concern that the foundational premise of this order lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa's profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid."
"It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship."
The South African president's office has denied any intention of “seizing lands".
Trump's executive order pledges to assist the “ethnic minority Afrikaners" -- descendants of the first European settlers, including offering refugee status to what it said were "racially disfavoured landowners".
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said Saturday that "persecuted South African farmers and other innocent victims being targeted solely based on their race who choose to resettle in America will be welcome."
"The United States will also defend the rights and interests of those remaining descendants of settlers threatened with expropriation without compensation and other intolerable abuses," she said on X.
- 'Afrikaners or Amerikaners?' -
President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a national address on Thursday his country would not be "intimidated" by the United States.
"We are witnessing the rise of nationalism, protectionism, the pursuit of narrow interests and the decline of common cause," Ramaphosa said.
Trump made a blanket claim that the South African land law would allow the government to seize Afrikaners' property "without compensation".
The law, which came into force in January, clarifies the legal framework for expropriations. Most legal experts stress it does not add new content.
It allows the government, as a matter of public interest, to decide on expropriations without compensation -- but only in certain exceptional circumstances where it would be "just and equitable".
For several days, South Africans of all racial origins have taken to social media to mock the US stance.
"Should we now call them Amerikaners?" quipped one person on Saturday.
"Should we expect wine estates or safari reserves to be evacuated?" joked another. Most estates and private reserves in the country belong to white families.
On Saturday, Afriforum, a small organisation dedicated to "protecting and promoting the Afrikaner identity", expressed its "great appreciation" to Trump, while stressing that white South Africans' place was in their home country.
White South Africans make up around seven percent of the population, according to date from 2022. Afrikaners make up a proportion of that group.
Trump's ally Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa under apartheid, has accused Ramaphosa's government of having "openly racist ownership laws".
