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Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands Across White House Complex

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Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands Across White House Complex

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is now accessible across the White House campus. It is the latest installation of the Wi-Fi network across the government since Mr. Musk joined the Trump administration as an unpaid adviser.

It was not immediately clear when the White House complex was fitted with Starlink after President Trump took office for a second term.

Starlink terminals, rectangular panels that receive internet signals beamed from SpaceX satellites in low-Earth orbit, can be placed on physical structures. But instead of being physically placed at the White House, the Starlink system is now said to be routed through a White House data center, with existing fiber cables, miles from the complex.

White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the effort was “to improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex.”

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But the circumstances are different from any previous situation to resolve internet services. Mr. Musk, who is now an unpaid adviser working as a “special government employee” at the White House, controls Starlink and other companies that have regulatory matters before or contracts with the federal government. Questions about his business interests conflicting with his status as a presidential adviser and major Trump donor have persisted for weeks.

In February, Chris Stanley, who currently works as a security engineer at two of Mr. Musk’s companies, SpaceX and the social media platform X, went to the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex to explore installing Starlink there. Mr. Stanley has also been working with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as a special government employee, and on Monday, President Trump named him to the board of Fannie Mae.

As Mr. Stanley opened a door leading to the roof of the building, which is directly opposite an entrance to the White House, he tripped an alarm that alerted the Secret Service to his presence. It created a dramatic scene as a uniformed officer rushed to respond, according to four people with knowledge of the incident.

A fifth person with knowledge of the event said Mr. Stanley was told earlier by the Secret Service that he could check out the roof, but the agency had not coordinated a time for Mr. Stanley’s arrival.

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that the White House “was aware of DOGE’s intentions to improve internet access on the campus” and that it “did not consider this matter a security incident or security breach.”

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Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, also said it was not considered a breach or a security incident.

White House officials said that Starlink had “donated” the service and that the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office.

Some former officials were unclear about how such a donation could work.

Clare Martorana, a former chief information officer at the White House during the Biden administration, said that typically people cannot simply give technology to the government. She said the White House’s chief information officer would need to sign off on a new system to ensure it was properly secured, as would the chief information officer at the General Services Administration.

Mr. Stanley worked to set up the new Starlink system in concert with the White House information technology office, which he is an adviser to while also being assigned to work at the Justice Department, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

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The White House is the latest government property on which Starlink now operates.

In recent weeks, Starlink was also set up at the General Services Administration, which has served as a hub for Mr. Musk’s government-shrinking efforts, according to documents and people familiar with the service.

While several federal agencies contract with Starlink, the satellite service is typically used to provide internet access in emergency situations and to remote locations — not at federal buildings in Washington, which already have ample internet options.

Starlink is generally seen as a reliable network. In October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency contracted with Starlink to distribute terminals for the service across North Carolina after Hurricane Helene hit the state. The service has also been crucial to Ukraine’s defenses against Russia, with SpaceX estimating to the Defense Department that it cost $400 million to support the effort over a 12-month period around 2022.

It is less clear, however, that the Starlink internet service will significantly expand wireless internet capacity in buildings where fiber cables already provide access.

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It was also unclear if Starlink communications were encrypted. At a minimum, the system allows for a network separate from existing White House servers that people on the grounds are able to use, keeping that data separate.

“It’s super rare” to install Starlink or another internet provider as a replacement for existing government infrastructure that has been vetted and secured, said Jake Williams, a vice president for research and development at Hunter Strategy, a cybersecurity consultancy. “I can’t think of a time that I have heard of that.”

“It introduces another attack point,” Mr. Williams said. “But why introduce that risk?”

One official with knowledge of the discussions about installing Starlink at the White House, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Secret Service was concerned that the Starlink system might be piped in through existing secure hard wiring at the White House that is used by the Secret Service, as well as other federal agencies. The fact that the internet service is now working through a different data hub appears to have addressed that concern.

At the General Services Administration, where the use of Starlink was reported earlier by NBC News, the service has been added to a list of apps approved for download on the agency’s mobile devices. That list also includes apps of two other Musk-led companies, X and Tesla, according to documents seen by The New York Times.

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“Only apps that meet G.S.A.’s security and privacy standards are allowed,” an agency spokesman said in a statement. The agency declined to comment on its use of Starlink.

Mr. Musk has expressed frustration at what he views as outdated technology in government and blazed ahead with an effort to modernize it.

Soon after Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. Musk complained that a digital system known as WAVES, which allows the Secret Service to approve guests to enter the White House grounds, was clunky. Some White House officials shared that assessment. Mr. Musk tasked Mr. Stanley with fixing it, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Guglielmi, the Secret Service spokesman, said the agency “collaborates closely with” Mr. Musk’s team and has continuing discussions. At this time, he added, “no formal changes have been made to the White House visitor access system.”

Jonathan Swan and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.

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Video: SpaceX Rocket Launches Carrying 3 Weather-Monitoring Spacecraft

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Video: SpaceX Rocket Launches Carrying 3 Weather-Monitoring Spacecraft

new video loaded: SpaceX Rocket Launches Carrying 3 Weather-Monitoring Spacecraft

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SpaceX Rocket Launches Carrying 3 Weather-Monitoring Spacecraft

Two of the spacecraft are for NASA and one is for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Three, two, one — engines full power and liftoff. Go, Falcon. Go IMAP. Go SWFO-L1 and go Carruthers.” “And we are flying three new missions on a million-mile journey to track space weather.”

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RFK Jr. wants an answer to rising autism rates. Scientists say he’s ignoring some obvious ones

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RFK Jr. wants an answer to rising autism rates. Scientists say he’s ignoring some obvious ones

This week, the Trump administration announced that it was taking “bold action” to address the “epidemic” of autism spectrum disorder — starting with a new safety label on Tylenol and other acetaminophen products that suggests a link to autism. The scientific evidence for doing so is weak, researchers said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said federal officials “will be uncompromising and relentless in our search for answers” and that they soon would be “closely examining” the role of vaccines, whose alleged link to autism has been widely discredited.

Kennedy has long argued that rising diagnoses among U.S. children must mean more exposure to some outside influence: a drug, a chemical, a toxin, a vaccine.

“One of the things that I think that we need to move away from today is this ideology that … the autism prevalence increase, the relentless increases, are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria,” Kennedy said in April.

Kennedy is correct that autism spectrum disorder rates have risen steadily in the U.S. since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control began tracking them, from 1 in 150 8-year-olds in 2000, to 1 in 31 in 2022, the most recent year for which numbers are available.

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But physicians, researchers and psychologists say it is impossible to interpret this increase without acknowledging two essential facts: The diagnostic definition of autism has greatly expanded to include a much broader range of human behaviors, and we look for it more often than we used to.

“People haven’t changed that much,” said Alan Gerber, a pediatric neuropsychologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., “but how we talk about them, how we describe them, how we categorize them has actually changed a lot over the years.”

Defining ‘autism’

The term “autism” first appeared in the scientific literature around World War II, when two psychiatrists in different countries independently chose that word to describe two different groups of children.

In 1938, Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger used it to describe child patients at his Vienna clinic who were verbal, often fluently so, with unusual social behaviors and at-times obsessive focus on very specific subjects.

Five years later, U.S. psychiatrist Leo Kanner published a paper about a group of children at his clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who were socially withdrawn, rigid in their thinking and extremely sensitive to stimuli like bright lights or loud noises. Most also had limited verbal language ability.

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Both Asperger and Kanner chose the same word to describe these overlapping behaviors: autism. (They borrowed the term from an earlier psychiatrist’s description of extreme social withdrawal in schizophrenic patients.)

This doesn’t mean children never acted this way before. It was just the first time doctors started using that word to describe a particular set of child behaviors.

For the next few decades, many children who exhibited what we understand today to be autistic traits were labeled as having conditions that have ceased to exist as formal diagnoses, like “mental retardation,” “childhood psychosis” or “schizophrenia, childhood type.”

Autism debuted as its own diagnosis in the 1980 third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Assn.’s diagnostic bible. It described an autistic child as one who, by the age of 2½, showed impaired communication, unusual responses to their environment and a lack of interest in other people.

As the decades went on, the DSM definition of autism broadened.

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The fourth edition, published in 1994, named additional behaviors: impaired relationships, struggles with nonverbal communication and speech patterns different from those of non-autistic, or neurotypical, peers.

It also included a typo that would turn out to be a crucial driver of diagnoses, wrote cultural anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker in his book “Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism.”

The DSM’s printed definition of autism included any child who displayed impairments in social interaction, communication “or” behavior. It was supposed to say social interaction, communication “and” behavior.

The error went uncorrected for six years, and the impact appeared profound. In 1995 an estimated 1 in every 500 children was diagnosed with autism. By 2000, when the CDC formally began tracking diagnoses (and the text was corrected), it was 1 in every 150.

Reaching underserved communities

In 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended for the first time that all children be screened for autism between the ages of 18 and 24 months as part of their regular checkups. Prior to that, autism was diagnosed somewhat haphazardly. Not all pediatricians were familiar with the earliest indicators or used the same criteria to determine whether a child should be further evaluated.

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Then in 2013, the fifth edition of the DSM took what had previously been four separate conditions — autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder and pervasive developmental disorder — and collapsed them all into a single diagnosis: autism spectrum disorder.

The diagnostic criteria for ASD included a broad range of social, communication and sensory interpretation differences that, crucially, could be identified at any time in a child’s life. The term was no longer limited only to children whose development lagged noticeably behind that of their peers.

Since that definition was adopted, U.S. schools have become more proactive about referring a greater range of children for neurodevelopmental evaluations. The new DSM language also helped educators and clinicians better understand what was keeping some kids in disadvantaged communities from thriving.

“In the past, [autism was] referred to as a ‘white child’s disability,’ because you found so few Black and brown children being identified,” said Shanter Alexander, an assistant professor of school psychology at Howard University. Children of color who struggled with things like behavioral disruptions, attention deficits or language delays, she said, were often diagnosed with intellectual disabilities or behavioral disorders.

In a sign that things have shifted, the most recent CDC survey for the first time found a higher prevalence of autism in kids of color than in white children: 3.66%, 3.82% and 3.30% for Black, Asian and Latino children, respectively, compared with 2.77% of white children.

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“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, no, what does this mean? This is terrible.’ But it’s actually really positive. It means that we have been better at diagnosing Latino children [and] other groups too,” said Kristina Lopez, an associate professor at Arizona State University who studies autism in underserved communities.

The severity issue

An autism diagnosis today can apply to people who are able to graduate from college, hold professional positions and speak eloquently about their autism, as well as people who require 24-hour care and are not able to speak at all.

It includes people who were diagnosed when they were toddlers developing at a noticeably different pace from their peers, and people who embraced a diagnosis of autism in adulthood as the best description of how they relate to the world. Diagnoses for U.S. adults ages 26 to 34 alone increased by 450% between 2011 and 2022, according to one large study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Kennedy was not correct when he said in April that “most cases now are severe.”

A 2016 review of CDC data found that approximately 26.7% of 8-year-olds with autism had what some advocates refer to as “profound autism,” the end of the spectrum that often includes seriously disabling behaviors such as seizures, self-injurious behavior and intellectual disability.

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The rate of children with profound autism has remained virtually unchanged since the CDC started tracking it, said Maureen Durkin, a professor of population health science and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Indeed, the highest rate of new diagnoses has been among children with mild limitations, she said.

For many researchers and advocates, the Trump administration’s focus on autism has provoked mixed emotions. Many have lobbied for years for more attention for this condition and the people whose lives it affects.

Now it has arrived, thanks to an administration that has played up false information while cutting support for science.

“They have attempted to panic the public with the notion of an autism epidemic as a threat to the nation, when no such epidemic actually exists — rather, more people are being diagnosed with autism today because we have broader diagnostic criteria and do a better job detecting it,” said Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. “It is high time that this administration stops spreading misinformation about autism, and starts enacting policies that would actually benefit our community.”

This article was reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship’s Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism.

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Forest Service reverses decades-long ban, allows wildfire firefighters to use N95 masks

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Forest Service reverses decades-long ban, allows wildfire firefighters to use N95 masks

The U.S. Forest Service has announced it is reversing a ban on federal firefighters wearing masks, and will give crews protective N95s as they battle increasingly intense fires across the nation.

For decades, the agency argued their use made firefighters vulnerable to heat exhaustion.

Other wildfire-prone nations, such as Canada, Greece and Australia, provide their firefighters with masks to prevent lung damage and smoke-related diseases, including cancer and organ failure — and have not seen increases in heat stroke among the crews.

The policy will have little bearing on local and regional urban firefighters, such as those in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County.

“We are actually encouraged to wear them,” said Jonathan Torres, engineer and spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

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“There are chemicals that are unknown to us that are part of our work,” as buildings and infrastructure burn, he said. Masks provide some protection against harmful smoke particles and chemicals released when plastics, upholstery and synthetic building materials burn.

Earlier this week, the forest agency announced it has stockpiled roughly 80,000 N95 masks and will include them as part of the equipment they provide for large fires.

The decision came following a series of New York Times reports that detailed the Forest Service’s decades-long refusal to require, or even offer, masks to its crews, despite recommendations from state and federal health agencies, and a growing body of evidence that wildfire smoke is harming firefighter health.

“To provide masks, and even require masks, is an implicit admission of the health hazards of smoke,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, an organization that promotes the health and safety of wildland firefighters.

Ingalsbee and others say the Forest Service’s reluctance to encourage mask wearing was probably motivated by concern it would be admitting that smoke poses dangers and risks to its crews.

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Research shows that firefighters have a 9% higher risk of getting a cancer diagnosis than the general public, and 14% higher risk of dying from cancer. Crews may be exposed to smoke and other toxins believed to cause cancer, such as benzene, phenols and heavy metals, while fighting fires.

Federal lawmakers are now working on safety legislation to protect federal and contract wildland firefighters, and have sent a series of letters to the Forest Service criticizing what they call its decades-long neglect.

Reports suggest that “that federal agencies are neglecting their duty to protect the health of wildland firefighters,” wrote Reps. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) in a letter to Forest Service chief Tom Schultz. “Neglecting the health of current firefighters will make future recruitment harder and leave our communities vulnerable.”

On Tuesday, they grilled Schultz at a House oversight meeting.

Huffman urged Schultz to warn workers about the dangers of smoke exposure: “Chief, do you feel like the Forest Service is doing everything that it can to make the safety risk of smoke inhalation known to firefighters?”

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Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection also announced Tuesday that the state will be funding research designed to examine how smoke and other occupational exposures may increase cancer risk in firefighters.

The research, which includes a collaboration among scientists and experts at UCLA, UC Davis and Cal Fire, is backed by nearly $9.7 million in state funding and will include 3,500 firefighters from departments across the state over a two-year period.

The study comes at a time when the Trump administration has made drastic cuts to cancer research.

“It’s California at our best: our world-class public universities teaming up with the women and men who put their lives on the line to protect others — all in an effort to improve health outcomes for all,” Newsom said in a statement.

The study will include a focus on the exposures and biological changes that occurred in firefighters who responded to the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles.

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Ingalsbee said that masks are not always appropriate when fighting fires — there are activities, such as traipsing up and down steep terrain when a N95 mask can get gummed up with debris and sweat and make it difficult for a firefighter to breathe.

However, he said the vast majority of the time, when firefighters are at their base camps, where it’s often smoky, or driving along dusty, sandy roads, masks could go a long way to protect their lungs, reducing exposure.

“There are times when masks are unsuitable and firefighters overheat and they are uncomfortable,” he said. “But there’s a lot of times when they’d be very useful in limiting their exposure. And maybe could save some lives.”

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