December, 07 2017, 03:30pm EDT
Livestock Antibiotic Sales Finally Start Declining After Years on Rise
Decrease Follows Progress in the Chicken Industry, But Little Improvement Seen for Beef and Pork.
WASHINGTON
For the first time in many years, sales of antibiotics important to human medicine for use in the livestock industry have dropped -- down 14 percent from 2015 to 2016, according to new data released today by the FDA.
This news follows a series of food industry commitments to reduce antibiotic use in chicken production in recent years. NRDC estimates that approximately 50 percent of the chicken industry has now made some level of commitment to curb unnecessary antibiotics used in their production.
Though an improvement, the results remain significantly above 2009 levels. To continue this downward trend, the pork and beef industries must follow the chicken industry's lead in reducing antibiotic overuse.
NRDC and partner groups petitioned FDA last year for failing to sufficient action to reduce antibiotics overuse in livestock. That petition is still pending.
A statement follows from Avinash Kar, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council:
"This course change provides a glimmer of hope that we can beat the growing epidemic of drug-resistant infections. The progress is no doubt influenced by the groundswell of change we've seen in the chicken industry in the past few years--but beef and pork are lagging behind. It will take all hands on deck to keep our miracle drugs working when sick people and animals need them."
Background:
The vast majority of medically important antibiotics in the United States are sold for use on animals raised for food production, not people. More than 96 percent of those drugs are routinely distributed en masse in feed or water--often to animals that are not sick to speed up growth and help animals survive crowded and unsanitary conditions on industrial farms.
This practice contributes to the growing epidemic of drug-resistant infections in humans. Leading medical experts warn that we must stop overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and animal agriculture, or else the life-saving drugs we rely on to treat common infections and enable medical procedures could increasingly stop working. The World Health Organization recently recommended the elimination of all uses of medically important antibiotics on animals that are not sick.
Conservatively, at least 2 million Americans are already infected with antibiotic-resistant infections every year, and at least 23,000 die as a direct result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Read more about today's news here: Animal Antibiotic Sales Finally Drop, But Much Work Remains.
NRDC works to safeguard the earth--its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. We combine the power of more than three million members and online activists with the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to ensure the rights of all people to the air, the water, and the wild.
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'Not Even Trying to Hide Their Brazen Corruption': Trump Sons Set to Profit From Tungsten Mining Deal
"This is the most corrupt administration in American history," said one House Democrat. "It is not close."
Jun 30, 2026
A bombshell New York Times report detailing how President Donald Trump's eldest sons stand to profit from a tungsten mining deal negotiated by their billionaire father sparked outraged calls for accountability on Monday, with Democratic lawmakers characterizing the taxpayer-funded project as yet another example of the administration's unchecked and unprecedented corruption.
"You will not believe it until you see it laid out," US Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) wrote in response to the Times story published over the weekend. According to the newspaper, Trump and his team—including billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—"won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips, and other critical goods."
Ahead of the deal's completion last September, according to the Times, the Trump administration "approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan."
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., along with Lutnick's sons Brandon and Kyle, are poised to benefit from the project. "Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons... joined with other partners to take a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project," the Times reported.
"We’ve seen 300,000 Georgians lose health coverage in the last six months because they couldn’t find room in the budget for health insurance. But they’ve got room in the budget for a tungsten mine overseas, controlled in part by Prince Don and Prince Eric," Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) said in an MS NOW appearance late Monday.
Ossoff: You’ve got the American government, controlled by Donald Trump, backing a Trump family tungsten mine in Kazakhstan with more than a billion dollars in federal commitments at the very same time that they are cutting health care, defunding hospitals and nursing homes, and… pic.twitter.com/LCZbJgLyUX
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026
Lutnick's sons, meanwhile, "helped one of the lead investors... on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity," potentially resulting in a multimillion-dollar boon for Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm overseen by Brandon and Kyle Lutnick.
"They're not even trying to hide their brazen corruption anymore," wrote US Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). "President Trump and Secretary Lutnick used your tax dollars to further enrich their families from a major mining deal with Kazakhstan."
Beyer stressed that "this isn't an isolated incident." The Times found that at least "14 companies working on critical mining deals with the US government that have ties to Cantor Fitzgerald or the Trump family," including Kaz Resources, Perpetua Resources, and USA Rare Earth.
Trump's family has profited massively from his return to the White House, thanks in a large part to a crypto scheme spearheaded by the president's eldest sons. A "Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker" maintained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee estimates that crypto projects have netted the president and his family over $2.4 billion in profits so far.
"This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close," Levin said Monday, accusing Trump's Republican allies—including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—of enabling the president as he loots federal coffers to further enrich himself and his family.
"We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked," Levin added. "Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket."
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Smotrich Condemned for Plan to 'Illegally Seize' Gaza After Calling for Israel to ‘Complete the Conquest’ and Build Settlements
Palestinian resistance groups called it a "dangerous criminal escalation" and a "fully-fledged war crime."
Jun 30, 2026
Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "complete the conquest" of Gaza on Monday and send Israeli settlers to colonize the territory.
"We are prepared to establish three settlements in the northern perimeter immediately, the moment we receive the green light from the prime minister and the minister of defense," Smotrich said in a video filmed from the city of Sderot, which sits less than a mile from the wall separating the Gaza Strip from Israel.
Smotrich claimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) currently "[hold] nearly 70% of the Gaza Strip."
“We must complete the conquest of the remaining 30%,” he said, adding that they need to “defeat Hamas and above all we need to establish a belt of Jewish settlements within the territory of the Strip as a protective border for Sderot and all the communities of the Gaza envelope.”
Smotrich, who has overseen the rapid, violent acceleration of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank—considered illegal under international law—has been quite blatant about his desire to expand settlements into Gaza as well, reversing Israel’s withdrawal of settlers from the territory in 2005.
At a settlements conference last year, he said that “Gaza will be totally destroyed" and that its residents would be "concentrated" in a narrow southern strip while the rest of the territory "will be empty." He celebrated that Gazans would become “totally despairing” and seek “relocation” elsewhere, allowing Jewish Israelis to move in.
As the movement of settlers into the West Bank has ramped up, along with the destruction of Palestinian homes, Smotrich has said that the use of settlements to carve up the West Bank was "killing the idea of the Palestinian state."
Netanyahu has never said explicitly that he wants to resettle Gaza, but he did say last month, during a speech at an illegal West Bank settlement, that he'd ordered the military to seize 70% of Gaza in violation of the boundaries drawn up under last year's ceasefire agreement, which put Israel in temporary control of about 53% of the territory.
The peace plan laid out by US President Donald Trump, backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution, which underpins the ceasefire signed in October, states explicitly that "Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza."
The Resistance Committees in Palestine, a collection of armed groups in Gaza working closely with Hamas, described Smotrich's call to build settlements in the strip a "dangerous criminal escalation" and a "fully-fledged war crime" in a statement on Tuesday.
They described it as "a scheme to settle the conflict and impose a fait accompli in the context of the genocidal war" and a "dangerous development aimed at sabotaging the efforts of mediators and guarantors to solidify the ceasefire agreement and liquidate the Palestinian cause and presence in Gaza."
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington DC, emphasized that Smotrich was hardly a fringe figure.
"This isn’t a random person," she said. "He’s a high-ranking Israeli official declaring the intent to illegally seize Gaza."
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Privacy Advocates Raise Alarm Over Online Age Verification Provisions as House Passes KIDS Act
"Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources," warned two press freedom advocates.
Jun 30, 2026
Opponents of a bill that is purported to protect children online said Monday night, after the legislation passed in the US House, that laws are "urgently" needed to stop Big Tech companies from preying on kids' vulnerabilities.
"The KIDS Act is not that piece of legislation," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who was one of 117 lawmakers who voted against the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, which passed with 267 votes, while 47 members of Congress did not vote.
The bipartisan bill requires online platforms to use new safety features and parental controls, restricts the use of minors' personal data to target ads, and establishes new restrictions for AI chatbots and online games.
But ahead of the bill's passage, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was among the opponents raising alarm about other provisions "buried inside the KIDS Act" that would "push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications."
The legislation, drawing from portions of 14 different online safety bills, "is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms."
As Mullin explained:
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old).
The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16.
To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver's licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users' ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans.
At The Intercept, Caitlin Vogus of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Aliya Bhatia of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project warned ahead of the bill's passage that while the legislation is ostensibly meant to protect children, the age verification requirement could impact all users' ability to access social media platforms without revealing their identities—chilling anonymous speech and threatening would-be whistleblowers.
"Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them," wrote Vogus and Bhatia. "Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources."
While the KIDS Act says it won't require online platforms to collect government IDs for age verification, they said, "at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail."
Former Republican congressman Justin Amash, a libertarian, accused the lawmakers who voted "yes" on the legislation of betraying "the Constitution and the American people."
Other opponents of the legislation, including Jayapal, argued that the bill would allow tech companies to continue targeting children with algorithms that send harmful content to the youngest users.
The legislation omits a "duty of care" provision that was included in the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which was passed by the US Senate in 2024—a requirement that tech firms "exercise reasonable care” to prevent harms to children.
Jayapal noted that the bill, which faces an uphill battle in the Senate, leaves "suicide, depression, addiction, substance use disorders, and eating disorders from the list of harms" that tech companies like Meta must address in their algorithms.
The "duty of care" provision has been criticized as too vague by several digital rights groups, while some child safety groups said its omission in the KIDS Act would "let Big Tech off the hook."
"We have seen time and again that these corporations cannot be trusted to put children's safety over their own profit margins," said Jayapal. "We cannot keep exposing our kids to platforms that are either completely indifferent to their safety or a direct threat to it."
The KIDS Act, Jayapal said, also includes provisions "that do not do enough to actually address the harms of" artificial intelligence.
"I voted no," said Jayapal, "because we have a real opportunity to pass bipartisan legislation that holds these companies to not just be transparent about the harms and mitigate them, but to actually prevent them."
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