“Better together.” That’s the optimistic theme that Annalena Baerbock, the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, chose for this year’s global gathering, the 80th. President Donald Trump instead confirmed in his speech what I keep hearing from the cognoscenti here at UNGA: The likelier trajectory points toward “worse apart.”

As is his wont, Trump heaped contempt on the U.N. as on other countries and people he disdains. “The two things I got from the United Nations,” he sneered, are “a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.” (Apparently, neither device worked to his satisfaction.) And while he, the peacemaker-in-chief, was allegedly out ending seven wars, “sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help.”

This is today the sound of America — the co-founder, host and eight-decade underwriter of the U.N. system — eating its children like Cronus. And the stony faces and occasionally audible gasps are those of the assembled world dreading the fate of what diplomats call the “international community minus one.” The U.S. may or may not exit the U.N. as it once orphaned the League of Nations. But it’s bad enough that America has morphed from the system’s main benefactor into its spoiler.

Part of the tragedy is that this hostile U.S. turn toward its own creation rests on a profound misunderstanding. Many American conservatives, and especially MAGA types, view the U.N. largely as Michael Waltz, Trump’s new ambassador to Turtle Bay, described it in his confirmation hearings: At best, as a feckless and bloated bureaucracy that burns through American tax dollars to churn out woke verbiage instead of keeping world peace. At worst, as an antisemitic and anti-American cesspool.

This UNGA provided fodder for these narratives. The controversy over Israel and Palestine is escalating, with some of America’s closest Western allies — including Britain, Canada, Australia and France — recognizing Palestinian statehood, as more than 140 of the U.N.’s 193 members already do. This pits them against Israel and the Trump administration, which even revoked the visas of Palestinian leaders who had planned to attend. Beyond the Middle East, the U.N. and its Security Council seem to stand idly by as wars and atrocities torment the world from Sudan to Ukraine.

What threatens to tip these crises into an existential threat for the U.N. is the political and financial assault from Washington, historically the U.N.’s biggest funder. The U.S. is responsible for providing 22% of the U.N.’s regular budget, which it has yet to pay. Instead, the Trump administration has already clawed back about $1 billion and vows to keep cutting, in what amounts to the international analog to its domestic Doge-ing earlier this year. Notably, America has in effect defunded the U.N.’s humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.

Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has announced that the U.S. will withdraw from U.N. institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, UNESCO (the agency that looks after education, science and culture) and the Human Rights Council. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told me that “there’s not one international organization that he says anything good about. Not one. Whatever chance he can, he pulls us out.”

The administration’s selective boycott of the U.N.’s many wheelhouses goes further. Ten years ago, the U.N. adopted 17 so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — from ending hunger and poverty to educating girls in poor countries and giving people cleaner energy. As of this year, the U.S. officially “rejects and denounces” these goals as lefty-woke-DEI bilge.

In contrast to his predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump also shows no interest in reforming the most dysfunctional part of the U.N. system, the Security Council. It still has the same five veto-wielding members as it did in 1945. And although France and Britain haven’t made use of their privilege since the end of the Cold War, the U.S., Russia and China nowadays wage war-by-veto, blocking all attempts to address conflicts and threats from the Middle East to Ukraine and the Korean peninsula. Just last week, the U.S. vetoed a resolution, embraced by the 14 other members, that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all hostages.

The council is widely considered unreformable because neither America nor Russia and China would ever contemplate giving up the veto privilege that gums up what could be an international peacekeeping organ. Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, told me that Trump in fact likes this status quo because it “matches his worldview of a handful of great powers conducting the real business while little countries get out of the way.” The hypocrisy consists in then blaming the U.N., rather than the great powers, for failing to maintain international order.

It suits the mighty to use the U.N. as their scapegoat, Anjali Dayal at Fordham University told me: “We call that laundering dirty politics. The U.N. is very good at laundering their dirty politics for them.” The U.N.’s apparent failure to pacify the Syrian civil war over the past decade is an example. The simple explanation was that Russia did not want the U.N. to act in Syria, Dayal says, but to much of the world it looked as though the U.N. was failing Syrians.

Americans are not the only ones who “get this the wrong way round,” Gowan told me. “The U.N. does not shape the world. The world shapes the U.N.” When the Cold War was ending and something resembling harmony briefly reigned, the great powers on the Security Council often agreed, as in condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Later during the 1990s, American diplomats such as Strobe Talbott rhapsodized that “the United States defines its greatness not as an ability to dominate others but as an ability to work with others in the interest of the international community.”

Such breathless idealism sounds otherworldly today. But the American leaders who midwifed the UN as World War II was still raging were somber realists, not utopians. In April of 1945, four months before he dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and with the old and failed League of Nations still on the books, Harry Truman exhorted delegates to the San Francisco Conference to create the U.N. to “provide sensible machinery” to settle disputes without “bombs and bayonets.”

This world-weary and worldly-wise pragmatism is reflected in the U.N.’s unofficial motto, a quote by an early secretary general that today graces the hallway through which delegates walk into the general assembly: “The U.N. was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”

This is what Trump, Waltz and MAGA don’t get. Truman would never have harangued the international community that America is First, or obstructed every effort to better the lot of humanity by asking what’s in it for the U.S., not in coming decades but during this news cycle. Truman understood what eludes Trump: that the alternative to cacophony is violence, and violence in the modern world can mean nuclear hell. That’s why every U.S. president saw America’s interests as overlapping with those of the world and the U.N. Until Trump.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg dropped a bombshell on Democrats last week, one lost in the chaotic news cycle following Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

He was responding to a passage in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ book, “107 Days,” in which she said Buttigieg was her first choice for a running mate and “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”

“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” Buttigieg said before a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Monroe County Democratic Party headquarters in Indiana, according to Politico.

Conservatives have been decrying identity politics for years, and liberals have been just as vigorously espousing them as key to winning races.

Buttigieg cited former President Barack Obama winning the state in 2008 and his own two terms as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as evidence of his approach.

“You just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them,” he said. “Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”

That’s radical thinking in Democratic circles, many of whom blamed Harris’ loss to Donald Trump on anything but her policies.

Obama said he was speaking to Black men in particular when he suggested some “aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Others pointed the misogyny finger at Latino men.

Pundits went all in on sexism and racism tipping the scale in Trump’s favor after last November’s election.

The problem is, identity politics don’t matter as much to voters as they do to campaigns.

A Pew Research Center poll released last year asked Americans how important it is that a woman be elected president in their lifetime, and found that only 18% of U.S. adults said this is extremely or very important to them. Some 64% said it is not too important or not at all so, or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter.

Democrats missed the memo.

“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk,” Harris wrote of rejecting Buttigieg.

The real risk was believing voters would check the box for Harris because of who she was, not what she was promoting, which was essentially four more years of the very Biden policies the electorate was rejecting.

All this is more than just a thorough look in the rear-view. Both Harris and Buttigieg are scoping out presidential bids in 2028. Buttigieg has proven an effective communicator, a big plus for the party.

Communication has never been Harris’ strong suit.

This is more than just a cautionary tale for Democrats who want to win races. It should be a wake-up call for candidates to listen to what Americans want, what they’re worried about, and what they hope their futures will look like.

We want solutions to America’s problems, and a clear path forward for a prosperous, safe country for all citizens. And we’ll vote for whoever makes the best case for delivering on those promises, no matter who they are.

— The Boston Herald

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When St. Paul Regional Water Services set about designing a replacement for its century-old McCarrons water treatment plant in Maplewood, it didn’t so much look to its current 450,000 customers as beyond them.

What kind of capacity will its decarbonization and disinfectant basins need as its 14 client cities grow in population and new cities sign on? How might the utility combat threats to the east metro’s water supply that might not be known for years or even decades to come?

For designers, one key answer to the latter question was “ozonation” — the process of bubbling ozone gas through water as an added disinfectant in a long line of water purifiers, clarifiers, softeners and enhancers, ranging from lime and fluoride to chlorine and ammonia. For the first time since launching as a public utility in 1882, St. Paul Regional Water is purifying its water with ozone, a tool it’s added to a growing toolbox of approaches toward drawing water from the Mississippi River and its watershed and purifying it until every drop is safe to drink.

“We don’t need ozone to operate this plant,” said civil engineer Eric Noe, who is taking over as project manager for the new McCarrons water treatment plant as remnants of the old operation are demolished or repurposed. “It’s kind of like icing on the cake. But for the next contaminant bogeyman that we don’t yet know about, ozone is already part of our treatment.”

$250M investment in water quality

After three years of planning and four years of construction, St. Paul Regional Water officials threw open the doors on Thursday to what’s being billed as the treatment plant of the future — a $250 million investment in water quality infrastructure for St. Paul and more than a dozen neighboring cities and townships. To pay for the treatment plant, St. Paul Regional Water has gradually increased rates by 25% or more since 2021.

Constructed next to the century-old McCarrons plant on Rice Street, the new water treatment plant represents the largest capital undertaking in the 143-history of St. Paul Regional Water as a public utility.

The project was led by the design-build team of Jacobs, which is based in Dallas working alongside PCL Construction and Magney Construction. Brown and Caldwell, as well as Stantec, served as the utility’s advisors.

“We’re on schedule. We’re a little bit under budget. We’re making great water,” said project manager Will Menkhaus, who is being promoted to assistant general manager for St. Paul Regional Water Services. “And at the end of the day, there were no change orders. … The key thing that jumps out has been a virtue that our society has largely forgotten or even at times labeled a vice, and that’s compromise.”

The old McCarrons water treatment plant has been the sole producer of water for the utility’s clients since 1920, producing an average of 40 million gallons per day — enough to cover a football field in 93 feet of water. The number of gallons drops to about 30 million in winter and can rise as high as 60 million in summer. The new plant will maintain many of the same established practices with additional capacity to serve future client cities and treat as many as 84 million gallons of water daily, even if one of its major basins is out of commission.

Among the new amenities: new lime-softening solids contact clarifiers, new recarbonation basins and a new ozonation treatment process for enhanced taste, odor control and disinfection.

Quality testing lab to come

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, center, is joined by St. Paul Regional Water Services general manager Racquel Vaske, to his left, and Board of Water Commissioners President Mara Humphrey, to his right, and other project leaders in a toast celebrating the newly-upgraded St. Paul Regional Water Services McCarron’s Water Treatment Plant in Maplewood on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The project opened with partial demolition of structures in 2022. Up next will be the construction of new water quality testing lab space in a building previously dedicated to flocculation, or getting particles to clump together for easier removal. Final site restoration and landscaping are expected to wrap in coming months.

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, who shared remarks at the ribbon-cutting on Thursday, reminded the audience that 70% or more of their drinking water comes from the Mississippi River and virtually all of it comes from its watershed. The human body, he said he tells students, is upwards of 60% water, meaning that much of each young person’s body was, in fact, composed of the river itself.

“Our bodies are more than half Mississippi River,” Carter said, noting St. Paul Regional Water took “this water treatment plant that has provided water to our community for 100 years, and replace(d) here it with a brand new water treatment plant that will provide clean drinking water to our community for the next 100 years.”

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President Donald Trump spent several days promising Americans that “an answer to autism” was imminent. Instead, his big reveal on Monday offered families distorted science, false hope, and unproven and at times dangerous medical advice.

Flanked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top federal health officials, Trump linked autism to the use of acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — during pregnancy. This, despite decades of research showing that the medication is safe. He offered no evidence to the contrary.

He also repeated long-debunked claims that vaccines and the timing of the shots could be contributing to the increase in autism cases, also without presenting any evidence. And Trump and Kennedy announced that a form of folic acid called leucovorin might help treat symptoms of autism.

In promoting these unproven causes and treatments, Trump, Kennedy and other top health officials do a disservice not just to families and people with autism, but to pregnant women and children. The information provided at a rambling and often incoherent press briefing — during which Trump admonished pregnant women not to take Tylenol — could cause real harm. And it does nothing but create confusion and distract from genuine efforts to improve the lives of autistic people and their families.

The consensus among actual experts based on decades of research is that genetics — not just one gene, but hundreds — play a major role in autism. Scientists have also spent years trying to understand which environmental factors might magnify the inherited risk of autism.

And while early studies did suggest that acetaminophen might slightly raise the risk of autism, that research also failed to account for the reasons that pregnant women take the drug, explained David Mandell, associate director of the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Fevers during pregnancy, for example, are known to increase the risk that a child will have a neurodevelopmental delay, and are also the reason someone would take Tylenol. More recent, robust studies out of Japan and Sweden that controlled for those variables found no link between Tylenol and autism.

Trump and his team dismissed those critiques. “Sure, you’ll be able to find a study to the contrary, that’s how science works,” said Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Trump, meanwhile, seemed to blame women and those who choose to take the drug.

“Don’t take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said, conceding that women who can’t “tough it out” might still choose to.

Acetaminophen is considered the only safe pain reliever a woman can take during pregnancy. But to those women Trump said, that’s something “you have to work out with yourself.”

That admonishment could easily dissuade American women from treating a symptom that could endanger their child. “Everybody knows a fever is really bad for the developing brain. That’s good science,” says Robert L. Hendren, a psychiatrist who works in the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Program at the University of California, San Francisco. For Trump to “tell mothers that they’re wimps if they take Tylenol — and if their kid gets autism and they’re the cause of it — that’s just a shame.”

Just as easy answers to explain complex conditions are scarce, so, too, are miracle cures. Yet Trump and his health leaders blithely overpromised on the potential of leucovorin, which they claimed could help with speech and behavioral problems in children with autism.

But that claim isn’t supported by the kind of “gold standard” science this administration has vowed to pursue. So far, the drug, which was approved in 2002 to address side effects of chemotherapy, has undergone limited testing for the treatment of autism. The largest study enrolled just 80 children, and the other, smaller trials had design flaws that cast doubt on any hints of efficacy.

Yet the FDA is already adding information to the leucovorin label to allow its use to treat cerebral folate deficiency, a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with autism.

“Suggesting that there’s something out there for families who are pretty desperate to do anything that they can to help their children is a waste of time, a waste of money, and honestly a waste of hope,” says Connie Kasari, a founding member of UCLA’s Center for Autism Research and Treatment. “Jumping to this kind of conclusion is really dangerous.”

That doesn’t mean leucovorin isn’t worth investigating. But families of children with autism deserve the kind of large, placebo-controlled studies that can definitively prove (or disprove) the drug’s efficacy and define who it might help. Parents have already suffered through too many fake treatments that have been, at best, expensive but benign, and at worst, horrifyingly harmful. That terrible history should be a reason for the administration to exercise caution when discussing any potential therapy — not contribute to the hype.

But Trump also went beyond the already troubling repositioning of autism priorities to riff on the childhood vaccine schedule, which he implied could be linked to the disorder. “Don’t let them pump your baby up with the largest pile of stuff you’ve ever seen in your life,” he said, suggesting the shots should be spread out over several years.

The president also opined that children shouldn’t receive the Hepatitis B shot until they are 12 (it is currently given at birth), and that the measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox shots should be administered separately. Pediatricians note that shots for those individual infections do not exist in the US, where children get a combination vaccine.

That the nation’s president used his platform to promote theories that have been thoroughly debunked across hundreds of studies endangers all children. Confidence in vaccines is already declining, a situation that has real consequences for public health — as was made clear by this year’s measles outbreak.

All of this seemed designed to stoke fears rather than calm them — and suggests the administration is more interested in easy “wins” than real solutions. As they sift through the raft of misleading and false information from their president, parents would do well to remember that the person with the best medical advice is their doctor.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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