The Ancient Mediterranean Diet Wasn’t What You Think

It wasn't as defined as it is today

By Konstantine Panegyres, University of Western Australia

This terracotta depiction of a baker sitting in front of an oven dates from the early 5th century BCE. Credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

For Roman emperor Julian (332–363 CE), bread occupied a central place at the table. He described it as the food that “among us is thought to be the most nourishing.”

That emphasis reflected everyday eating across much of the ancient Mediterranean. Bread and other foods made from cereals formed the foundation of many diets, supplemented by pulses, oil, wine, and whatever seasonal produce was available.

The result looked quite different from the modern idea of the “Mediterranean diet,” with its familiar emphasis on vegetables, olive oil, and grilled fish.

Bread may have been indispensable in Julian’s Roman world, but not everyone considered it desirable. Ethiopians who relied on meat and milk regarded bread as poor food with little nutritional value.

They wondered how Mediterranean peoples could survive on a “diet of dung.”

Federal Judge Blocks Trump and RFK Effort to Get More Teens Pregnant

Judge tells Trump and Bobby Jr. to leave teenage girls alone

Julia Conley for Common Dreams

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, first authorized through bipartisan legislation in 2009, has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce the number of American teenagers who have experienced unwanted pregnancies in the past decade and a half, dropping by more than 65% over 16 years, according to one congressional report.

Despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a federal judge’s ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration’s limits on the program’s federal grants paused.

Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which officials joined King County in Washington state, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in challenging HHS’s changes to the program’s grant policy. The plaintiffs were represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.

The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and capricious.”

US government is pushing to gain unprecedented access to your medical records – as data protections are weakening

Bobby Jr. wants your health records

Jennifer D. Oliva, Indiana University

You might assume that what you tell a doctor stays between you, your physician and perhaps your insurer. But the reality is more complicated.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal privacy law that governs health information and is commonly known as HIPAA, is narrower than its reputation suggests. It regulates hospitals, physicians, insurers and their business associates, but not the health data you generate everywhere else: not the period-tracking application on your phone, the internet search you ran about a diagnosis, the DNA you mailed to a genealogy company or the wearable that counts your heartbeats.

Even the records HIPAA does cover can be shared, sold or handed to the government in ways that might surprise you.

This gap in protection matters more than ever because the U.S. government is pushing hard to gather health data domestically and abroad. This is happening even as a growing body of research shows that the safeguard which these efforts to collect data lean on – anonymizing data by removing identifying information to make it difficult to trace back to an individual – is far weaker than officials claim.

As a professor of law at Indiana University, I study health information privacy and medical data regulation, which includes tracing how sensitive health information moves among clinics, government agencies and law enforcement. As a co-investigator on a federally funded study about opioid prescribing, I rely on health data in my own research. I appreciate its value for science, and I also see the danger of collecting it without meaningful safeguards.

He knows all

Meanwhile at the White House...

All perfectly normal

"I don't need no stinking security clearance..."

...just to change diapers..."

"...or write the boss little notes."

Wednesday protest in Hope Valley

Burning Questions Confront Wildland Firefighters in Maine and Across New England

Can't count on the feds

By Sydney Cromwell

New England’s dense populations amid vast forests
mean that even a small, localized wildfire can threaten
homes or lives. Credit: Maine Forest Service

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Wildfires in New England rarely make national news. The spotlight is more often on the catastrophic fires of Western states, but the Northeast’s fire season has been quietly heating up.

In 2025, severe drought quadrupled Maine’s late summer fire activity. In 2024, another drought quintupled Connecticut’s fall wildfires, and one firefighter died while controlling a blaze. It was also Massachusetts’ most active fall fire season in 40 years. 

It can and does happen here. 2024 wildfire

Across the border, Nova Scotia saw its largest wildfires in recorded history in 2023, and more than 10 million acres burned in Quebec, creating a smoky haze that spread thousands of miles southward. Canadian wildfires created haze on the East Coast again this July.

“We think that the Northeast is an important place to have on the map when we’re talking about fire, and we often get ignored,” said Erin Lane, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Northeast Climate Hub.

As forest managers and firefighters stretch their resources to respond to wildfires in a changing climate, they’re also dealing with new uncertainties from the Trump administration’s plans to radically alter the Forest Service and the new Wildland Fire Service. 

Study ties COVID vaccine conspiracy theories to distrust of government, mainstream media

If you've been wondering "What's wrong with these people?"

Meghan Holohan

As soon as the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began early in the pandemic, conspiracy theories about them started swirling. Some people claimed that the vaccines contained microchips, while others were suspicious about the intentions of the government or pharmaceutical companies. 

Researchers surveyed people in Japan about their beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories to understand who adheres to such ideas. The findings were published last week in Scientific Reports.

“When people think about conspiracy beliefs, attention often focuses on highly extreme claims,” lead author Hitoshi Yamamoto, PhD, of Rissho University in Tokyo, said in a university press release. “However, our findings suggest that more common forms of conspiracy-related thinking are associated with the persistent distrust of social institutions and the mainstream media.” 

Catholic immigrant rights group wins major court battle against Trump ban on people from 75 countries

No discrimination based on national origin

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

Federal Judge Jeannette Vargas has struck down the Trump administration's suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, ruling the State Department policy violates federal immigration law and exceeds Secretary Marco Rubio's authority. Judge Vargas ruled federal law expressly prohibits nationality discrimination in issuing immigrant visas.

A federal judge in New York has ruled that Donald Trump and the US State Department overstepped their authority when they suspended the processing of visa applications for people from 75 nations earlier this year, a move that critics at the time called a “travesty,” cruel, and counter to the rule of law.

US District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee, ruled Friday that the pause in visa applications—which Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed was necessary to prevent immigrant visitors from freeloading on US taxpayer dollars—was “contrary to law and in excess of statutory authority.”

Beyond shock and outrage

Surviving a madman

Robert Reich 

Posted by Trump about himself. What kind of
person does this?

Friends,

Trump claimed this past week that his job approval ratings are “fabulous” — they’re “above 60%.”

He also asserted that the United States is enjoying “the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

And that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Trump’s braggadocio doesn’t just mask his failures. His statements wildly contradict the calamities he’s created for America and the world.

To be sure, since he first entered American politics, we’ve been shocked and outraged by his lack of morality, scruple, or shame. It’s been difficult to conceive of such a person because we’ve always been taught to distinguish right from wrong and to do the right thing. 

Yet Trump has no conception of right and wrong. He isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.

But his latest fabrications are so contrary to the realities of his monumental failures — his losing war with Iran, the near-collapsing U.S. economy, and his underwater approval ratings — that they’re not merely non-ethical or amoral. How can they be explained?

One possibility is his conman brain still firmly believes the public will go along with whatever he says and thinks he can manufacture success even when he’s going down the toilet.

But this can’t explain the extreme dissonance; he reads the same polls everyone else reads, and he knows the public isn’t buying.

Another possibility is that the sycophants surrounding him are telling him he’s wildly successful and don’t want to inform him of the depths of his failures for fear of his reaction.

Yet he constantly watches television, and even the networks he favors — such as Fox News — have lately been broadcasting his cataclysmic failures.

So what’s really going on? How can his assessments be so utterly unhinged from the enormity of his defeats?

The only possible explanation is that he’s finally lost his grasp on reality. He’s dangerously delusional. Trump is losing his mind.

It’s hard for most of us to take in the full import of this. Even those of us who detest him find it difficult to accept the seriousness of his dementia because we think of him as loathsome rather than oblivious.

We’ve spent so many years seething that no one has held him accountable for all the awful things he’s done that we’re disoriented by the possibility he’s now unaware. We don’t want to let him off the moral hook by reason of insanity. Yet what moral compass do we use to judge a president who is wildly and dangerously delusional?

This has become the wrong question. The problem is no longer Trump’s lack of ethics or his amorality. The current challenge is how to survive under a madman.

If he is no longer responsible for what he says or does, we should move beyond shock and outrage to outright fear. He could blow the world up. We must call on our elected representatives to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment as soon as possible, by reason of insanity.

What do you think?

He was especially horrified because he hates dogs

Suck it up

Trump’s 50% Tariffs Take Hold After US-Canada Trade Talks Collapse

We’re back to war with Canada, our oldest and closest ally, jacking up tariff taxes on US consumers

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

While courting North Korea and Russia, Trump
destroys ties with our historic allies and
says this make US stronger and safer.

“It’s war.”

That’s how one Canadian journalist described developments between the governments of the US and Canada after trade talks between the two were suspended on Friday night without a deal in place to avoid the imposition of 50% tariffs threatened by Donald Trump on a wide swath of Canadian goods.

Both nations accused the other of scuttling the deal, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney citing “last-minute changes” by the Trump administration and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer pointing to “new demands and walk backs” by the Canadians.

Asked earlier on Friday if a deal was within reach, Trump responded, “I think so, yeah, we’ll see.” But by late Friday night, it was clear the talks had collapsed entirely as Carney summoned Canada’s representatives back to Ottawa.

In his statement on Friday night, Carney said, “We have recognized from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”

Here are Trump's demands on Canada: 

"French language rules in Quebec?" WTF!

Unexpected findings add new insight on cannabis and heart health

Might have some heart benefits

By University of California, San Francisco

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

Habitual cannabis users experienced about 9% fewer premature heartbeats on days they inhaled cannabis compared with days they abstained, a counterintuitive finding that adds to the complex and evolving understanding of how cannabis affects the heart, according to new UC San Francisco-led research.

The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, is among the first to examine the acute cardiovascular effects of inhaled cannabis in people living their normal daily lives. While the findings challenge assumptions drawn largely from observational studies, the researchers caution that they should not influence medical or behavioral decisions around cannabis use.

With millions of Americans using cannabis, studies like this are increasingly important for understanding its health effects, the researchers said.

"We were surprised by the results because they contradicted our original hypothesis," said Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, an endowed professor of atrial fibrillation research in the UCSF Division of Cardiology. "That's why randomized trials are so important. When the data challenge our expectations, our job as scientists is to understand them, not ignore them."

The trial enrolled 108 adults who regularly smoked or vaped cannabis but had no history of clinically diagnosed cardiac arrhythmias. Over 14 days, participants were randomly assigned each day to either inhale cannabis or abstain while wearing a continuously recording electrocardiographic monitor, activity tracker, sleep monitor and continuous glucose monitor.

Participants served as their own controls, allowing investigators to compare physiological changes during cannabis use and abstinence days.

What To Do with Us Boomers?

Why We're a Problem

Robert Reich

I keep hearing that we Boomers are to blame for just about everything wrong with America — unaffordable housing (because we bought up most of the housing stock and now refuse to leave), the depletion of Social Security (because we’re collecting it now), the national debt (because so much of it is being spent on Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits for us), inequality (because apparently we have so much money), climate change (because we’ve been polluting longer than anyone else alive), and even Trump (because he’s one of us).

I don’t have standing to contest these claims because, well, I’ve also made them. They’re a theme of my latest book, Coming Up Short (out in paperback in a few weeks).

All of this seemed confirmed by a recent headline in The Economist: WHY PEOPLE OVER THE AGE OF 55 ARE THE NEW PROBLEM GENERATION.

But not for the reasons I supposed. According to The Economist, the real problem with us Boomers is we’re partying too hard. We were too wild, crazy, and irresponsible back in the day, and we’re still too wild, crazy, and irresponsible.

The Economist opines that compared to younger generations, we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — oh my goodness! — having sex.