The National Transportation Safety Board’s chair said an Obama-era rule the Trump administration nixed would not have prevented the derailment of a train in Ohio, as some partisan commentators inaccurately claim. The rule requiring a new electronic braking system for certain trains carrying hazardous cargo did not apply to that train.
The people affected by the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, do not qualify for direct financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But FEMA and other federal agencies have been assisting since the accident there in early February. Social media posts have misleadingly claimed that the federal government has denied aid.
The derailment of a freight train carrying toxic chemicals in eastern Ohio has sparked a slew of unfounded claims by conservative commentators. There’s no indication that this incident will rise to the level of a “domestic Chernobyl”; it has been covered steadily by the media; federal and state agencies are monitoring air and water quality and its impact on people and animals.
Republican super PACs are using an outdated Congressional Budget Office estimate to falsely claim in TV ads that Democrats voted to raise taxes by $20 billion on “lower- and middle-income families.”
It’s well known that JD Vance — Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate in the Ohio Republican primary for U.S. Senate — was no fan of the former president just a few years back. Vance’s past quotes practically write his opponents’ attack ads for them. But the truth isn’t enough in political campaigns.
In the crowded Republican primary field for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, candidate Mike Gibbons charges in a TV ad that his cohorts have taken his words on taxes “out of context” — but his ad leaves out context and stretches the facts on their positions, too.
In a campaign ad, Josh Mandel, a Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, shared an image of himself as a Marine with a group of Black troops. Social media posts falsely claim that Mandel photoshopped his head onto the body of a Black Marine. The Mandel campaign denied the claim and provided the media with a copy of the original image.
Q: Do people with serious mental health disorders pose a greater risk of becoming mass shooters?
A: People with mental illnesses are somewhat more likely to be violent than those without a diagnosis. But a majority are never violent, and very little is known specifically about mass murder.
The spin focused mainly on the economy and health care.
Q: When is the human heart fully developed, and when are heartbeats audible during pregnancy?
A: A developing heart has all of its primary structures after about nine weeks of pregnancy. Some forms of ultrasound can detect cardiac activity in an embryo in the sixth week, but a heartbeat wouldn’t be audible until about 10 weeks on a Doppler fetal monitor.