Hasta La Gadget!

Put aside, for a moment, your questions on how much CGI the live-action remake of “The Lion King” will require while we present this casting rumor: Director Jon Favreau reportedly wants Beyoncé to voice Nala.

According to Variety, sources claim she’s the No. 1 pick to voice the lioness destined to marry Simba, who in turn is destined to rule their patch of savannah. Born into the ruling class and eventually marrying the king, Nala is as good a Disney princess as any. But is that good enough for Beyoncé ― already a queen?

It’s not like it’d be her first Hollywood gig. The singer has previously starred in 2002’s “Austin Powers in Goldmember” and 2006’s “Dreamgirls,” among a few others.

Favreau, per the outlet, is willing to work completely around Beyoncé’s schedule, considering the singer is currently pregnant with twins and has canceled her upcoming performances at Coachella. (Lady Gaga is taking her place at the music and arts festival in April.)

The “Lion King” remake is reportedly well underway, with Donald Glover on board to voice Simba and James Earl Jones, who voiced Mufasa in the 1994 animated original, will reprise his role. 

A release date has not been set. 

Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Mahershala Ali, Amy Poehler and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31 on Facebook Live. 

You can support the ACLU right away. Text POWER to 20222 to give $10 to the ACLU. The ACLU will call you to explain other actions you can take to help. Visit www.hmgf.org/t for terms. #StandForRights2017

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The Oklahoma Bar Association has launched an investigation into an ethics complaint filed against Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt.

The complaint accuses Pruitt of breaching Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct by allegedly misrepresenting the facts when he told a Senate committee at his confirmation hearing that he did not use a personal email address to conduct business while attorney general of Oklahoma, reported KSWO-TV.

Attorney Amy Atwood from the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement that she was “very pleased” about the investigation.  “Lying to Congress is a serious ethical breach, and it doesn’t help that Pruitt’s use of private emails reflect potential collusion with the very oil and gas industry he’s now supposed to be regulating,” she said.

Pruitt has not commented on the investigation nor on the complaint. 

He was narrowly confirmed as EPA head last month despite Democrats’ calls to delay the vote until the release of new documents detailing his relationship with oil and gas companies while he was attorney general.

A group of law professors last month filed a “professional misconduct” complaint against President Donald Trump’s chief counsel Kellyanne Conway with the Washington, D.C., Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Board of Professional Responsibility, which addresses complaints about members of the local bar. They argued that Conway’s several lies (including linking immigrants to a fictitious “Bowling Green massacre”) was bringing “shame upon the legal profession.” 

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West Virginia’s Senate is reviewing a bill that would allow public school students to receive religious exemptions from vaccinations.

Debate over parents opting out of their children’s vaccinations have centered around the issue of “herd immunity” ― the fact that a large majority of a population must be immunized in order for that community to be protected against infectious disease. Despite what researchers have called a potential “public health crisis,” the majority of states currently offer religious exemptions. If the bill passes, West Virginia would become the 47th. 

And yet, as a number of writers have pointed out, the pervasiveness of religion-based exemptions doesn’t reflect reality. No major religion has explicit, doctrinal objections to vaccinations.

John Grabenstein, Senior Medical Director for Adult Vaccines for Merck Vaccines, published a paper on religious beliefs surrounding immunization in the peer-reviewed medical journal Vaccine in 2013.

Anti-vaccinators could argue that Grabenstein’s role with a company that manufactures and distributes vaccines poses a conflict of interest, but the paper notes that the researcher is himself a practicing Roman Catholic and has spent decades investigating the religious aspects of immunization.

Grabenstein found that only two religious groups ― Christian Scientists and the Dutch Reformed Church ― have demonstrated a precedent of widely rejecting vaccinations, but even these are not explicitly laid out in their doctrine. 

Certain leaders and groups in other faiths have expressed objections to immunization, but these typically aren’t based in scripture or doctrine. But that doesn’t seem to matter for health officials reviewing the requests for exemptions. In most places, it’s fairly easy for parents to cite religious reasons for opting their children out of the vaccine mandate. Many states require parents to fill out a basic form, while some only ask for a signed statement or even just the child’s name, birthdate and Social Security number.

And such exemptions are on the rise across the country. National nonmedical vaccine exemption rates rose 19 percent between 2009 and 2013, according to the American Journal of Public Health. Nonmedical vaccine exemptions nearly doubled in Texas over the last five years. And in New Jersey, the number of school children whose parents sought exemptions on religious grounds rose from 1,641 in the 2005-06 academic year to 8,977 in the 2013-14 year. 

Mark S. Movsesian, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York who specializes in religious liberty issues, said the reasoning behind many of these exemptions is mis-represented.

“The people who are claiming these exemptions ― it’s not religious exemption, but ‘personal belief,’” he told Deseret News in 2015. “My impression is that’s what most of the objection is about.”

A 2013 survey of pediatricians found much the same to be true. The report, published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatricians, found the majority of doctors said parents refusing or delaying vaccinations for their children do so because they believe the vaccine is unnecessary, taxing on their child’s immune system or for fear the shot will cause their child pain. 

Individuals may hold personal, spiritual objections to vaccinations ― but what grounds these sentiments doesn’t appear to be religious tenets. Here’s a brief rundown on where groups from several religious traditions stand on vaccinations:

Christianity

As Grabenstein found, the religious group most commonly associated with anti-vaccination sentiment is the Church of Christ, Scientist. Christian Scientists routinely turn down vaccinations, which has been linked to a number of measles outbreaks among members of the faith. But the church does not list any formal objections to vaccinations on its website. And Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the movement, was reportedly in favor of vaccines. “Rather than quarrel over vaccination, I recommend, if the law demand, that an individual submit to this process, that he obey the law, and then appeal to the gospel to save him from bad physical results,” she’s been quoted as saying. 

A large contingent of the Dutch Reformed Church, a Protestant denomination, have historically turned down vaccinations. They hold that vaccines can interfere with a person’s relationship to God.

The Catholic Church has in the past expressed moral objections to vaccines manufactured using voluntarily aborted fetuses. The church urges Catholics to find alternatives in such cases, but it argues that faithful shouldn’t turn down immunizations and “sacrifice the common good of public health,” according to National Catholic Reporter.

There’s a common misconception that the Amish, who are wary of some modern technology, don’t vaccinate. They do. Some unvaccinated pockets of the traditionalist Christian community have been at the center of measles outbreaks in the past, but as a whole the religious community has nothing against getting immunized. 

A handful of conservative Christian groups, including the anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion rights Family Research Council, have argued that certain vaccines targeting sexually transmitted diseases will encourage promiscuity among young people. Some Christian groups, including the Catholic Church, reject the use of birth control for similar reasons.

Judaism

Most major branches of Judaism hold that people have a moral responsibility to maintain their health ― including getting vaccinated. According to Orthodox Jewish group Chabad, the preeminent Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson wrote on the importance of vaccinations in 1956: “It is with regard to matters such as these that the axiom ‘Do not set yourself apart from the community’ applies. You should act according to that which is done by [the parents of] the majority of children who are in your children’s classes.”

However, a measles outbreak hit Southern California in January and specifically appeared to be spreading in the Orthodox Jewish community in Los Angeles. None of the 18 L.A. County residents who got the virus could provide proof of vaccination, according to Los Angeles Times. This may be indicative of a trend among ultra-Orthodox communities of turning away from vaccinations, which has been correlated to a number of measles outbreaks in recent years. Members of these communities occasionally cite fears that vaccines carry potential health risks, but such concerns are not rooted in religious belief.

Islam

Some vaccines contain pork gelatin, the consumption of which both Islam and Judaism have rules prohibiting. But leaders in both faiths have come forward saying that receiving a vaccine with pork-derived material does not constitute oral consumption.

In California, which recently eliminated nonmedical exemptions to immunizations, a handful of Nation of Islam leaders objected to the changes, citing widely-rejected fears that certain vaccines could increase the risk of autism among black men. In their objection, the leaders said the mandate carried echoes of the government’s Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an infamous study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in which federal researchers withheld treatment from African American men who had the disease. They did not cite specific religious objections to the law, however.

Other faiths and traditions

Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist texts and doctrine contain no teachings in opposition to immunization. In 2010, Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama helped initiate a polio eradication drive in India.

One group, the New Jersey-based Congregation of Universal Wisdom, explicitly forbids vaccinations and even surgery and medicine of any kind. Chiropractor Walter P. Schilling founded the church ― which worships “a Supreme Master of all levels in creation,” according to its website ― in 1975. Schilling lets interested parties apply for membership using a simple form found on the group’s website.

Objections to vaccinations are sometimes rooted more in culture than religion. Among the Hmong people, a minority ethnic group from southeast Asia who began immigrating to the U.S. during the Vietnam war, the notion of vaccines is largely foreign. The concept of preventative medicine, in general, isn’t a part of traditional Hmong healing. The Hmong also tend to be wary of putting objects and substances in their bodies, which they believe can interfere with reincarnation.

Objections to vaccinations can also be found among some left-leaning holistic health proponents and pockets of spiritual and New Age communities. Some of those objecting to mandatory vaccination laws point to the debunked conspiracy theory that some vaccines cause autism. Disbarred former doctor Andrew Wakefield helped spur the anti-vaccine movement with his 1998 British Medical Journal study linking the MMR vaccine to autism. The BMJ later retracted the study, calling it “fatally flawed both scientifically and ethically.” And Wakefield was discovered to have made up much of the data in order to reap financial benefits from a lawsuit against the vaccine’s manufacturers.

But the study made a splash and continues to capture the imaginations of people ranging from President Donald Trump to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to actress and holistic health icon Alicia Silverstone.

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President Donald Trump’s executive order on climate change threatens state and local governments’ ability to prepare for and cope with extreme weather events, climate and planning experts warn. 

The executive order, issued Tuesday, goes beyond undoing Obama-era commitments to clean energy. It revokes an Obama-era executive order aimed at planning for natural disasters linked to climate change, including sea-level rise, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires and extreme heat.

That now-revoked 2013 executive order, entitled “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change,” charged federal agencies with helping states and localities improve resilience to natural disasters and established a task force of state, local and tribal leaders dedicated to determining needs.

Trump’s action could sever those governments from important federal data and tools to help them prepare for extreme weather, experts said. 

“It’s almost as if we think if we don’t have the information, it won’t happen,” said Rachel Cleetus, a lead economist and climate policy manager with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But that’s not true. We can bury our heads in the sand, but the facts are still the facts. All we’re doing is preventing people from being able to take protective measures ahead of time.”

The task force established by the 2013 executive order has played an important role guiding cities and states in climate-smart planning. 

In 2014, the task force released recommendations for how federal agencies can aid the rest of the country, and helped develop the Climate Resilience Toolkit, a continually updated online database with climate data and projections, case studies on responses to past disasters, and directories of experts and funding opportunities. The toolkit was assembled with climate information gathered by federal agencies.

The toolkit has helped places like low-lying Tybee Island, Georgia, prepare for the impacts of sea-level rise, which can contribute to more frequent and widespread flooding. Last year, the island’s city council approved plans to improve the only road to the island, retrofit stormwater drainage systems and stabilize shorelines to block high water. 

It’s almost as if we think if we don’t have the information, it won’t happen.
Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager with the Union of Concerned Scientists

Cleetus said it’s unclear what revoking the Obama order will mean in practice. Nor is it certain how far the Trump administration will go to halt climate-preparedness efforts at federal agencies, or to curb access to resources like the Climate Resilience Toolkit. But Trump’s order doesn’t bode well.

“It really goes after some of the core missions of these agencies,” Cleetus said, pointing to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s help with coastal flooding and wildfires as an example. “It’s terrifying to see a government that actually wants to go backwards when there’s so much work to do,” she added.

Revoking the Obama executive order may be part of a twofold assault on some federal agencies. Those that help with climate change response and resilience efforts, such as FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, all are threatened with steep cuts under Trump’s budget proposal.

“It’s not some theoretical threat in the future,” Cleetus said. “We’re already experiencing these impacts, so it’s a real dereliction of responsibility to say they essentially don’t care, that they’re not going to help.”

The possible effects of climate change have already been widespread: Years of severe drought in California and other Western states followed by a record-wet winter, a series of “1-in-1,000-year” floods last summer, and a decade of record-low Arctic sea ice. 

Trump’s order “sets everyone up for a lot more of these disasters,” warned Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Some big cities may be spared. Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a former EPA official, said he expects efforts like New York City’s nearly $20 billion plan to fortify the city will move forward. 

“This will continue without the federal government, but would benefit from federal infrastructure funding and additional federal funding on the science and engineering of climate change and climate science,” Cohen said. “Even though removing these federal policies is not helpful, real estate developers, insurance companies, power companies and many other organizations are assessing the financial risks of climate change and factoring it into their decision making.”

Many of the very people who voted for Trump are being directly hurt by his policies.
Michael Mann, Pennsylvania State University climatologist

Trump’s action could be especially bad news for smaller communities lacking the resources to collect their own data, said climatologist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

“The regions with those who are least well off, who have the least adaptive capacity and the least resilience … rural regions and the South,” are most likely to suffer, Mann said. “Many of the very people who voted for Trump are being directly hurt by his policies.”

Want to know more about how Trump’s executive order will affect efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change? Check out these charts.

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Senate intelligence committee leaders have received reports that Russia hired at least 1,000 trolls to spread fake news stories to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential election.

“What really concerns me [are reports] there were upwards of 1,000 paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets that can generate news down to specific areas,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He appeared Wednesday with GOP intel chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) at a press conference before committee hearings began.

Warner said the paid trolls apparently focused on swing states in an attempt to influence votes there — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where people were “reading during the waning days of the election that “‘Clinton is sick,’ or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”

Warner said it’s crucial that investigators determine if voting results were actually affected. Each of the three states narrowly fell to Trump. 

“An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hijack the most critical democratic process, the election of a president, and in that process, decided to favor one candidate over another,” Warner said. 

Burr said that he and Warner were committed to getting to the bottom of Russian interference in the election. He accused Russia of blatant attempts to also impact elections in Germany and France. “We feel part of our responsibility is to educate the rest of the world,” he said.

By the end of the first day of hearings Thursday, no one had yet testified about the 1,000 trolls, but the investigation is just beginning.

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, now a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, testified that Russian attempts to influence the election started before the party nominees were chosen. Trump’s GOP presidential rival Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appeared to be a particular target, he said.

“Through the end of 2015 and the start of 2016, the Russian-influenced system began to push themes and messages seeking to influence the result of the presidential election,” Watts said.

“Russian overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adverse views towards the Kremlin,” he added. “They were in full swing during both the Republican and Democratic primary season, and may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed.”

Watts said more details about the targeting of Rubio would be included in his written report to the committee.

He also testified that Trump helped spread fake news by embracing the stories that served the Russian agenda against his opponents. 

Watts told the committee to “follow the dead bodies” to learn more, referring to several Russians connected to Kremlin fake news who have died in the past few months.

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