> Prisoners for Palestine says move comes after subsidiary of Israeli arms manufacturer failed to win UK gov't contract.
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Trump’s EPA could limit its own ability to use new science to strengthen air pollution rules
(grist.org)
Ethylene oxide was once considered an unremarkable pollutant. The colorless gas seeped from relatively few industrial facilities and commanded little public attention.
All that changed in 2016, when the Environmental Protection Agency completed a study that found the chemical is 30 times more carcinogenic than previously thought.
The agency then spent years updating regulations that protect millions of people who are most exposed to the compound. In 2024, the EPA approved stricter rules that require commercial sterilizers for medical equipment and large chemical plants to slash emissions of ethylene oxide, which causes lymphoma and breast cancer.
It was doing what the EPA has done countless times: revising rules based on new scientific knowledge.
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Now, its ability to do that for many air pollutants is under threat.
In government records that have flown under the radar, President Donald Trump’s EPA said it is reconsidering whether the agency had the legal authority to update those rules.
Chemical companies and their trade organizations have argued that the EPA cannot reevaluate hazardous air pollution rules to account for newly discovered harms if it has revised them once already.
It doesn’t matter if decades have passed or new information has emerged.
If the EPA agrees, environmentalists fear that the decision could have wide implications, significantly curbing the EPA’s ability to limit nearly 200 pollutants from thousands of industrial plants. The next time new science reveals that a chemical is much more toxic, or that the amount of pollution released from a factory had been underestimated and would cause legally unacceptable health risks, the agency would not be able to react.
“It’s a poor reflection on this administration’s claim that they are actually interested in clean air,” said Ana Baptista, a professor of environmental policy and sustainability management at The New School. “By saying we’re no longer going to consider science, it’s abdicating your mission.”
The EPA didn’t address ProPublica’s questions about the ethylene oxide reevaluation or its broader implications. Instead, the agency pointed to a March 2025 press release about how it was reconsidering multiple air pollution rules issued by President Joe Biden’s administration, including the ones for chemical plants and commercial sterilizers. “EPA is committed to using the gold standard of science during these reviews,” a spokesperson said in an email. “Since day one, EPA has been clear that providing clean air, water, and land for all Americans is a top priority.”
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The EPA’s reconsideration focuses on the Clean Air Act, the country’s most powerful air quality law, which regulates hazardous air pollutants for different types of industrial operations. There’s a specific rule for oil refineries, for instance, and another for steel mills. Within eight years after each rule is published, the EPA is required to conduct an assessment, called a residual risk review, to decide if an update is necessary.
These assessments use detailed data on the quantity of emissions coming from each facility, the toxicity of each chemical and other information on how the chemicals are released and dispersed in the air. The combined data reveals how the emissions put local residents at risk of cancer, respiratory diseases, reproductive harm, and other health problems.
If the EPA determines the overall risks exceed what’s allowed under the law, the agency must tighten the rules.
The Clean Air Act doesn’t say whether the EPA is required to conduct additional residual risk reviews after the first one. Nor does it specifically prohibit the agency from doing so.
As far back as 2006, the EPA under President George W. Bush asserted that the agency had the right to revisit and revise the rules based on risk.
The issue became newly relevant in 2021, when the EPA’s Office of Inspector General cited the new conclusions about the toxicity of ethylene oxide. The office estimated that nearly half a million Americans were exposed to unacceptable cancer risks from industrial emissions by chemical plants, commercial sterilizers and other facilities pumping out ethylene oxide.
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In its report, the inspector general’s office advised the agency to “exercise its discretionary authority to conduct new residual risk reviews” as needed when “new data or information indicates an air pollutant is more toxic than previously determined.” (The inspector general was a Trump appointee.)
The EPA had already conducted the first, mandatory risk reviews for large chemical plants and commercial sterilizers in the early 2000s. In response to the inspector general report, the agency launched additional reviews using the updated science on ethylene oxide. Ultimately, the EPA determined the health risks were unacceptable and revised the rules to lower them. The agency asserted that the Clean Air Act “does not limit our discretion or authority to conduct another risk review should we consider that such review is warranted.”
According to the EPA’s estimates, the new regulations for chemical plants under the 2024 revised rule would cut the number of nearby residents who are exposed to unacceptable cancer risks from 90,000 to 3,000.
But the chemical industry opposed the stricter rules. Industry representatives disagreed with the EPA’s new assessment of ethylene oxide, contending that it overestimated the risk the chemical posed, and argued the agency didn’t have the authority to conduct those risk reviews. In a 2023 letter, the American Chemistry Council said, “The agency has erred in conducting a new risk review,” as “the plain text” of the Clean Air Act “indicates that EPA actually lacks this authority.”
Similarly, the Louisiana Chemical Association submitted public comments on the chemical plant rule stating the “EPA has no statutory authority to conduct a second risk review” and that doing so was “arbitrary and capricious.”
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David Cresson, president and CEO of the association, told ProPublica that the trade group supports “protecting the public’s health through regulatory frameworks that are lawful, while remaining based in sound science.”
Brendan Bradley, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, said the organization had no further comment on the issue.
After Trump was inaugurated, one of his appointees to the EPA let the industry know the agency was conducting a “reconsideration” of the two rules focused on ethylene oxide emissions. Last spring, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator Abigale Tardif, a former oil and gas lobbyist, hinted at how the EPA might challenge those rules.
In letters addressed to trade groups representing commercial sterilizers and chemical plants, Tardif said the agency was reconsidering multiple issues related to the rules, including the “EPA’s authority and decision to undertake a second residual risk review” under the Clean Air Act, as well as “the analysis and determinations made in that review, and the resulting risk standards.”
Tardif didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The agency also filed a regulatory notice about its plans to revise the 2024 chemical plant rule. Citing the part of the Clean Air Act that deals with the updated rule assessments, the notice said the EPA had “identified items for reconsideration around its CAA section 112(f)(2) residual risk review authority.”
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While the stricter ethylene oxide rules are technically still in effect, the Trump administration has exempted dozens of large chemical plants and sterilizer facilities from following them as the agency works through a formal process that is widely expected to result in watered-down standards.
If the Trump EPA does decide it lacks the legal authority to conduct multiple risk reviews, the agency might still have the authority to strengthen hazardous air pollution rules by using a separate part of the Clean Air Act, said Abel Russ, a senior attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group. That section of the act allows the EPA to update a rule if agency scientists conclude that better pollution-control technology is affordable and available. But limiting the agency’s ability to conduct residual risk reviews would be a serious blow to the act, Russ said, “kneecapping” the agency’s authority over these toxic pollutants.
Environmental groups will almost certainly sue if the EPA concludes it does not have the legal authority to revise hazardous air pollution rules more than once based on risk. Russ called industry’s comments absurd and said they don’t account for the reality that our knowledge of industrial pollution is changing all the time.
As ProPublica reported in October, the agency recently received clear evidence that many industrial facilities are leaking far more pollution than the companies that own them previously reported. In 2023, researchers who conducted their own air monitoring in the industrial corridor of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley found much higher concentrations of ethylene oxide than expected. For more than half the areas they sampled, the local cancer risk from ethylene oxide would be unacceptable if residents were exposed to these concentrations over a lifetime.
If the EPA decides it lacks the legal authority to conduct multiple risk reviews, it would find itself in the position of not being able to take action even if the agency confirmed similar results.
“The whole premise of risk assessment is that it’s based on the best available science,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Environmental Integrity Project. As our knowledge grows, researchers tend to find that chemicals are linked to additional health effects, she added, so blocking these updates “pretty much ensures” the EPA is underestimating the risks.
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Pentagon Partners With Musk's AI Chatbot Despite Child Porn Scandal and Owner's Embrace of White Nationalism | Common Dreams
(www.commondreams.org)
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and the owner of the social media app X, has faced a mountain of outrage in recent weeks as his platform's artificial intelligence chatbot "Grok" has been used to generate sexualized deepfake images of nonconsenting women and children, and Musk himself has embraced open white nationalism.
But none of this seems to be of particular concern to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Despite the swirl of scandal, he announced on Monday that Musk's chatbot would be given intimate access to reams of military data as part of what the department described as its new "AI acceleration strategy."
During a speech at the headquarters of SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, Hegseth stood alongside the billionaire and announced that later this month, the department plans to “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation,” including “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”
As the Associated Press noted, it's a departure from the more cautious approach the Biden administration took toward integrating AI with the military, which included bans on certain uses "such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons."
While it's unclear if those bans remain in place under President Donald Trump, Hegseth said during the speech he will seek to eschew the use of any AI models "that won't allow you to fight wars" and will seek to act "without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications," before adding that the Pentagon's AI will not be "woke” or “equitable.”
He added that the department “will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. He added that ”we will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.
— (@)
Hegseth's embrace of Musk hardly comes as a surprise, given his role in the Trump administration's dismantling of the administrative state as head of its so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) last year, and his record $290 million in support for the president's 2024 election campaign.
But it is quite noteworthy given the type of notoriety Grok has received of late after it introduced what it called “spicy mode” for the chatbot late last year, which “allows users to digitally remove clothing from images and has been deployed to produce what amounts to child pornography—along with other disturbing behavior, such as sexualizing the deputy prime minister of Sweden,” according to a report last month from MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).
It's perhaps the most international attention the bot has gotten, with the United Kingdom's media regulator launching a formal investigation on Monday to determine whether Grok violated the nation's Online Safety Act by failing to protect users from illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.
The investigation could result in fines, which, if not followed, could lead to the chatbot being banned, as it was over the weekend in Malaysia and Indonesia. Authorities in the European Union, France, Brazil, and elsewhere are also reviewing the app for its spread of nonconsensual sexual images, according to the New York Times.
One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.
[image or embed]
— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 12:37 PMIt's only the latest scandal involving the Grok, which Musk pitched as an "anti-woke" and "truth-seeking" alternative to applications like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
At several points last year, the chatbot drew attention for its sudden tendency to launch into racist and antisemitic tirades—praising Adolf Hitler, accusing Jewish people of controlling Hollywood and the government, and promoting Holocaust denial.
Before that, users were baffled when the bot began directing unrelated queries about everything from cats to baseball back to discussions about Musk's factually dubious pet theory of "white genocide" in South Africa, which the chatbot later revealed it was "instructed" to talk about.
Hegseth’s announcement on Monday also comes as Musk has completed his descent into undisguised support for a white nationalist ideology over the past week.
The billionaire's steady lurch to the far-right has been a years-long process—capped off last year, with his enthusiastic support for the neofascist Alternative for Germany Party and apparent Nazi salute at Trump's second inauguration.
But his racist outlook was left impossible to deny last week when he expressed support for a pair of posts on X stating that white people must "reclaim our nations" or "be conquered, enslaved,removedd, and genocided" and that "if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered," necessitating "white solidarity."
— (@)
While details about the expansiveness of Grok’s use by the military remain scarce, Musk's AI platform, xAI, announced in July that it had inked a deal with the Pentagon worth nearly $200 million (notably just a week after the bot infamously referred to itself as “MechaHitler”).
In September, reportedly following direct pressure from the White House to roll it out "ASAP," the General Services Administration announced a "OneGov" agreement, making Grok available to every federal agency for just $0.42 apiece.
That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Hegseth warning that Musk, who'd also used Grok extensively under DOGE to purge disloyal government employees, was "gaining improper advantages from unique access to DOD data and information." She added that Grok's propensity toward "inaccurate outputs and misinformation" could "harm DOD's strategic decisionmaking."
Following this week's announcement, JB Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said on Tuesday that, "allowing an AI system with Grok’s track record of repeatedly generating nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children to access classified military or sensitive government data raises profound national security, civil rights, and public safety concerns."
"Deploying Grok across other areas of the federal government is worrying enough, but choosing to use it at the Pentagon is a national security disgrace," he added. "If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk.”
