BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Cruciferous vegetables have long had a reputation for being the overachievers of the produce aisle. But new research from Australia’s Edith Cowan University (ECU) is giving them even more bragging rights, especially when it comes to blood sugar control. In a small but closely monitored study, researchers found that eating just four servings of cruciferous veggies a day helped reduce blood sugar spikes and fluctuations in older adults. And the effect was not only immediate but impressive. The science behind the crunch “We found that, when participants consumed the cruciferous vegetables, they had less variable blood sugar levels compared to when they consumed the root and squash vegetables,” explained Emma Connolly, lead researcher at ECU. “We also noted that these participants had a smaller spike in sugar levels after the meals.” The participants were all around 68 years old on average, and were equipped with continuous glucose monitors and rotated between diets rich in cruciferous vegetables (like broccoli, cauliflower, and kale) and those with starchy veggies (like potatoes and pumpkins) over two-week periods. The goal is to smooth out blood sugar highs and lows, a cornerstone of good health, especially for people with or at risk for type 2 diabetes. “Stable blood sugar, with minimal peaks and less fluctuations, is associated with better overall health and wellbeing,” Connolly added. Four cups a day keep the spikes away Thankfully, it doesn’t take a truckload of vegetables to make a difference. Just four servings per day, which amounts to around 1.5 cups or 300 grams, were enough to see benefits. Cruciferous vegetables are also low in calories, high in fiber, and packed with nutrients, making them an easy addition to most meals. Researchers aren’t entirely sure what causes the blood sugar-flattening effect, but natural compounds like sulforaphane are likely key players. More research is needed, but the early findings are promising. More than just blood sugar benefits This isn’t the only gold star cruciferous veggies have earned lately. In recent years, studies have shown: Eating just 20 to 40 grams of cruciferous vegetables per day may reduce colon cancer risk by 20 percent. A two-week cruciferous veggie plan significantly lowered systolic blood pressure in middle-aged and older adults. “Even more concerning is that cruciferous vegetables are among the least consumed vegetables,” said nutritionist Lauren Blekkenhorst. That’s a big missed opportunity, considering their benefits. But what about the, uh, side effects? Yes, cruciferous veggies do have a bit of a reputation, mainly for causing gas. Blame it on raffinose and other complex sugars that don’t fully digest until they reach your gut microbes, who celebrate their arrival with a fermentation feast. Fortunately, cooking and blending can make these veggies easier to digest. According to McGill researchers, heat helps break down indigestible carbohydrates, while blending (say, in a soup or smoothie) softens fiber and cell walls. Don’t underestimate the power of plants While the latest ECU findings are observational and based on a small group, they add to the growing body of evidence that cruciferous vegetables are nutritional powerhouses. “Continued investigation will be crucial to determine how these vegetables can be effectively incorporated into dietary recommendations for improved blood sugar regulation and overall health management,” Connolly said. But you don’t have to wait for the next scientific paper to get started. Adding a few florets of broccoli or handfuls of kale to your plate might just be the simplest, tastiest way to show your body some love. Source study: Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism—Cruciferous vegetables improve glycaemic control compared to root/squash vegetables in a randomized, controlled, crossover trial: The VEgetableS for vaScular hEaLth (VESSEL) studyThe post The surprising veggie trick to keep blood sugar steady (and your heart happy) first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most bus stops serve a simple function: keep commuters dry and out of the sun. But in cities across the globe, a quiet revolution is taking shape overhead. Green bus shelters, compact rooftops planted with succulents, wildflowers, and native grasses, are turning everyday infrastructure into tiny urban oases. Once a quirky feature in the Netherlands, these living roofs have been popping up across Europe, Asia, and North America. Boston recently installed 30 of them, and two towns in Maryland (Bladensburg and Edmonston) will soon follow. Proposals are underway in Arlington, Virginia, and New York. These little gardens offer more than a charming view: they help cool cities, support local wildlife, and nudge communities toward greener thinking. A small fix with big potential Green roofs have long been a fixture on city buildings, but bus shelters bring nature down to eye level. While a single roof garden might seem insignificant, their collective power adds up. Boston estimates that if every one of its 8,000 bus stops had a green roof, the total green space would equal 17 acres; that’s about the size of 13 football fields. These installations serve a practical purpose, too. “It’s the accumulation of those small, small things you will be doing that will have an impact in the long run,” says Jean-Luc Martel, professor at École de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal. In fact, living roofs have been shown to reduce surrounding air temperatures by up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, a significant benefit in cities battling the urban heat island effect. What goes into a green bus shelter? Building a green bus stop requires careful planning. The structure must be strong enough to handle the weight of soil, water, and plants. From there, the setup typically includes: A root barrier to stop downward plant growth A drainage system that stores rainwater and releases it gradually Special lightweight soil that retains water but won’t overburden the roof A selection of vegetation, ideally native plants that support biodiversity Sedums, hardy little succulents, are a favorite choice. “You can basically toss them into really extreme environments and somehow they’ve found a way to survive and thrive,” says Larry Davis of Green Mechanics, an ecological design firm in Maryland. A boost for pollinators and biodiversity For Utrecht, in the Netherlands, green bus shelters are part of a wider mission to save bees. Strategically placed throughout the city, these living roofs form “bee lines” that help sustain pollinators with consistent food sources. Their efforts may be paying off: the national bee census, which enlists citizens to count bees in their gardens, has shown signs of stabilization. In Boston, the new green shelters have drawn more than just curious glances. “We’ve seen butterflies, bees, birds, even squirrels,” says Zoe Davis, the city’s senior climate resilience project manager. Shifting how we see our cities While some U.S. installations are still in the demonstration phase like those in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and East Lansing, Michigan, their impact goes beyond data. Since they’re at street level, green bus shelters are more visible than green roofs atop tall buildings. They encourage commuters to imagine new possibilities for public space. In the end, these bus stops may be small, but their message is big: nature belongs everywhere, even on your daily commute.The post Why green bus stops are blooming around the world first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

'I am out of office for the foreseeable future'

'I never said I don't believe that'

'Not one penny'

Democrats shut down the government because Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is afraid he will lose his Senate seat to radical leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a party primary, Vice President JD Vance said at a Wednesday press briefing. “Why did this happen? Why did the Democrats shut down the government despite, as [White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt] said, voting on the exact same piece of legislation six months ago?” Vance asked rhetorically. “One answer I already gave is that they want to give health care benefits to illegal aliens,” he said. “That is true. They gave us legislative text that would have undone us cutting off health care benefits for illegal aliens. That’s one of the things that they asked for.” “But the reality here, and let’s be honest about the politics, is that Chuck Schumer is terrified he’s going to get a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Vance continued. “The reason why the American people’s government is shut down is because Chuck Schumer is listening to the far-left radicals in his own party because he’s terrified of a primary challenge.” Schumer would be up for reelection in 2028. Vance invited Schumer to join moderate Democrats and 52 Senate Republicans who voted to keep the government open. He said that Republicans are “willing to have that conversation” on how to fix American health care, but that “we’ve got to reopen the government first.” “Democrats say that they care a lot about lowering health care costs, and yet, when the president took historic action to work with the drug companies to lower prescription-drug prices, the Democrats did nothing to help us,” Vance said. “In fact, we would have loved to have the Democrats helping us, but they didn’t.” “What they have done instead is to shut down the government because we won’t give billions of dollars to health care funding for illegal aliens,” the vice president said. Vance blamed Schumer for the suffering of Americans who have lost their jobs and paychecks because of the shutdown. “Our troops are not getting paid starting today because of the Chuck Schumer wing of the Democratic Party,” he said. “We have people who require food assistance, low-income Americans who require food assistance, who will not get it unless we reopen the government. Thanks to Chuck Schumer and his wing of the Democratic Party, we have flood insurance as we start hurricane season in the southeastern part of our country, that flood insurance is going to disappear because of Chuck Schumer and the far Left of the Democratic Party.” The post Why Schumer Shut Down the Government, According to JD Vance appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I Have to Admit, Joy Reid's Version of Fascism Sounds Enticing

The nation is rightly traumatized by the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk. The media is filled, also rightly, with give and take trying to understand what can and should be done so that we don’t see more of the same. But unfortunately, much of the expression that I hear is informed by the same misguided sense of right and wrong that brought to fruition the horrible act. That is -- who do we blame? Homicide is unfortunately not so exceptional in our country. Among industrialized nations, the U.S. homicide rate, hovering around 6 per 100,000, is among the highest. Somehow it seems to bother us more when someone is gunned down for their political expression than when they are gunned down in gang violence in an inner city or in a robbery or in a horrible, meaningless mass murder perpetrated by some lost and deranged individual. A hot button here is the element of free speech. Free speech is the oxygen of a free society. The threat of its being impeded by terrorism or by government is horrifying. Our freedom has degenerated into chaos because we have forgotten why it is vital and precious. Why does our Constitution’s preamble speak of “the blessings of liberty”? To answer, we must have a discussion that so many do not want to have. Is ours a free nation under God or not? Is a free nation that is not under God possible? My view is this: Generally, our discussions today about freedom ignore what makes freedom meaningful and critical -- that is, that each human being has free choice. Free choice means it matters what we choose. It means there is good and evil, and man was created to take responsibility to choose and make a world that our Creator wants. Our nation was founded by Christians seeking freedom to live a faithful life. Our founding was a great meeting between the Christian population and the founders, many enthusiasts of the modern age of reason, who designed a government to protect its citizens and allow them to live according to their free choices. In other words, political man was there to protect religious man and enable him to take responsibility for his life and live free. But with the great success of this arrangement, hubris as always sets in. Many came to believe that our great success was because of the political arrangement rather than the choices of free religious men and women. Gradually, religion was pushed out the door, and we became increasingly a political society. Liberty was transformed from a blessing shared by all to an alleged right of every individual to determine for himself what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false. The heights of politicization of what was once a free nation under God were the Roe v. Wade decision, declaring women free to destroy their unborn children, and the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, in which the state was given authority to define marriage. In a free nation under God, life is sacred, as is the holy institution of marriage between a man and a woman. The result is the chaos in which we find ourselves. Politics has become our God, and individuals feel personally entitled to determine what is good and evil. And with tragic inevitability, some emerge who feel empowered to determine who will live and who will die. Celebrating an America that is not a free nation under God, a flag that does not represent standards of good and evil as transmitted to us by our Creator, is what the ancients called idol worship. We must restore and build a country where each sees his neighbor in the image of God, where each feels personal responsibility to take charge of his own life and allows others to take similar responsibility, knowing that the ultimate Judge is above. Star Parker is founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Her recent book, “What Is the CURE for America?” is available now. 

After celebrating his win in the Democratic Party primary for the mayor of New York City back in June, ABC’s The View welcomed far-left, anti-Semitic, communist candidate Zohran Mamdani to Wednesday’s edition of the show with open arms. The cast fawned for Mamdani and they cooed about his “meteoric rise.” They repeatedly teed him up to knock down his detractors and treated his controversies with kid gloves at they allowed him to bloviate his way around them. When introducing him, moderator Whoopi Goldberg boasted that Mamdani “has been a political lightning rod after pulling off a stunning victory” in the primary, and about how his “social progressive message is resonating beyond the borders of New York.” Having come out as a big fan of his following his victory in June, co-host Sunny Hostin was given the honor of slow pitching the first question: At 33 you are a rising star in the Democratic Party. You are the front-runner to become the next mayor of New York City this November. My question is, did you see this coming, and what do you credit this meteoric rise to?     Mamdani turned up the charm as he answered, quipping that “it really is a Joy to be here,” while giving a nod to co-host Joy Behar. “Just named dropped you,” quipped co-host Sara Haines as the rest laughed. Haines got to ask the next question, requesting him to speak about Mayor Eric Adams, who recently dropped out of the race. “Assemblyman, over the weekend, one of your opponents, embattled mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race. And while Adams didn't name check you he did appear to make veiled swipes,” she prefaced before playing a soundbite. “What is your response to that and why do you think he's decided to drop out now?”     The next series of questions came from Behar, who set up a line of President Trump strawmen for Mamdani to knock down (Click “expand”): BEHAR: Let's quickly tick through all the things that Trump said about you, and let’s get that out of the way. Number one, he's attacking you as a communist. Are you? MAMDANI: No, I'm a democratic socialist. That means I believe in dignity for all people. BEHAR: It means more than that. You're not a communist I agree with that. MAMDANI: No, I'm not a communist. (…) BEHAR: Okay. So you're like sort of like a Scandinavian type of politician, I would say. MAMDANI: A little more brown, but, yes. BEHAR: Okay. Okay. He's rooting for your opponent Andrew Cuomo. Why do you think that is? MAMDANI: You know, he is looking to clear the field for Andrew Cuomo because he knows that Andrew Cuomo would clear the field for trump's agenda. (…) BEHAR: Number three, he says that he'll withhold -- this really is something – Trump says that he will withhold federal funding for New York City if you win. Can he do that, number one, and my question is, is that going to stop people from voting for you? MAMDANI: You know, this is just one of the many threats that Donald Trump makes. Every day he wakes up he makes another threat. (…) BEHAR: Here’s my last one. He wants to use cities like New York as military training grounds. Can you stop him?     To Behar’s question about Trump threatening to withhold funds, Goldberg accused Trump of “tampering” with the votes. “I’m just saying,” Goldberg argued to those who point out that she made a serious accusation without evidence. The first mildly critical question came from co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin who wanted to know why Mamdani’s fellow Democrats in the state weren’t lining up to endorse him: “Even members of your own party like leader Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, both New Yorkers, have been reluctant to endorse you; Kamala Harris gave what I would call is a tepid endorsement. Why do you think members of your own party have been hesitant to embrace you?”     Following a commercial break, Haines came in with a question pressing Mamdani on his “inflammatory statements” against Israel “like calling Israel an apartheid state and questions its right to exist as a Jewish state.” She also noted how he was “evasive with a reporter about condemning Hamas,” but didn't mention his use of "globalize the intifada." “Given New York has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, why should voters who see this as a moral red line trust your clarity and judgment?” she wondered. He claimed those were just “misconceptions” about him.     Goldberg finally got a chance to ask some questions of her own. In this instance she demanded to know how he planned to go after companies like Amazon and Google for supposedly not paying their taxes in the city: On day one, why aren't you going to big corporations like Amazon and Google and making sure that they pay what could really help the city raise up and get us where we need to be? Because I need to hear somebody say, because it's the thing nobody says! They say, ‘oh, we're going to make people pay’ but they're not clear!     Following yet another commercial break, Mamdani got his toughest question in the whole interview from Farah Griffin, who grilled him on his past anti-police comments: Back in 2020 you called for defunding the police, something you've since walked back. You also called the NYPD racist, anti-queer and a threat to public safety in 2020, but now agree they deserve an apology. You initially refused to denounce highly charged rhetoric related to Israel, then later said you would discourage its use. How can New Yorkers trust you and not be concerned that consultants are getting in your ear to get you elected, but you are still hold all of those positions?     After he danced around awhile and tried to make excuses for his defund the police position, Farah Griffin pressed further by wondering: “Can I ask have you formally apologized to the NYPD?” To which Mamdani did not say ‘yes,’ but rather, “These are conversations that I'm having individually with officers.”

If anyone who questioned the official narrative during the pandemic recalls feeling as if the truth was being rewritten and as if the thoughts they shared via social media on any pressing matters were being throttled by a force greater than just the social media platform — then they’d be right. In a relentless pursuit of the truth, Matt Kibbe and Matt Taibbi have uncovered blatant collusion between former president Biden’s government and Big Tech during the COVID-19 pandemic to censor the accounts of Americans, including Charlie Kirk, Libs of TikTok, and Dan Bongino, among others. “The revelation that the FBI and other security agencies were putting direct pressure on social media sites to censor speech was a bombshell. This wasn’t just cowardly CEOs acting on their own,” Kibbe says on “Muckraker,” episode 5 of “The Coverup.” “This was the government clamping down to enforce a narrative in flagrant violation of the First Amendment.” “And it’s something that’s been going on for years,” he explains, before revealing email proof of the FBI setting up a meeting with Twitter in 2020. In one email from the FBI, the agency acknowledges the importance of free speech, before asking the social media platform to share any information “indicating malign foreign actors pivoting to any messaging discussing these current events on your platforms.” “So, they’re basically saying, ‘Yeah, we know speech about the George Floyd stuff is constitutionally protected, but if you think any of it might be, like, Russian influenced or whatever, can you just let us know?’” Taibbi explains. Taibbi points out that the Global Engagement Center, which was founded via an executive order in Obama’s last year as president, was a counterterrorism organization that initially went after “Arab language tweets” and ISIS recruits. “After Trump got elected, they started getting interested in all kinds of other topics, and then very soon, they were interested in domestic speech. They’ll deny that. But that’s what they were doing,” Taibbi says.Taibbi, who published the “Twitter Files,” found that in addition to voices like Charlie Kirk, even Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya — who is now the NIH Director — was among those blacklisted and shadow banned. Taibbi discovered through working alongside a Twitter executive who was ordered by Elon Musk to cooperate with him that Bhattacharya was on a “trends blacklist,” which was visible to some of those who worked for Twitter but not the users themselves. “It’s sort of like when you’re in Twitter and you want to see a quick summarized readout of what’s going on with an individual customer. Well, they had a thing where you could see the name, and then there would be a bunch of color-coded things on the page,” Taibbi explains. On Bhattacharya’s page, he recalls that there was a “big box that says, ‘Trends Blacklist.’” On Kirk’s page, it read, “Do Not Amplify.” “That was how we discovered that there was indeed shadow banning. What a ‘trends blacklist’ meant was that this account could never trend on Twitter. And it was one of hundreds of things that they could do to your account to deamplify it,” he says. “The health bureaucracies were involved in content moderation in a pretty intimate way,” he adds. Tune in to episode 5 of “The CoverUp,” as Kibbe and Taibbi unravel the pandemic industrial complex, exposing how federal health agencies and Big Tech prolonged lockdowns, fueled fear, and hid the government’s role in the creation of the virus.To watch episode 5 of “The Coverup” or binge the whole series, go to FauciCoverup.com.