Latest news with #cognitivedecline
Fox News
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Seth Meyers mocks media frenzy over Biden 'cover-up,' says his age was 'worst-kept secret'
NBC "Late Night" host Seth Meyers mocked the idea of former President Joe Biden's declining health being a major political scandal, claiming it "was the worst cover-up in American history." Questions about Biden's health have resurfaced after the release of "Original Sin," a new book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios journalist Alex Thompson, which alleges that Biden's inner circle concealed the president's flailing health and cognitive decline for years, despite telling the public that he was mentally sharp and fit for office. Meyers ripped the media for paying attention to the Biden "cover-up" when, according to him, "The Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress are rapidly dismantling American civil society and turning the country into a reclusive oligarchy." "But I don't want to talk about any of that and neither does the media. We both want to talk about something way more important. Joe Biden is, and has been, for a while, very old," he said sarcastically. After playing a montage of figures calling the cover-up a media scandal, Meyers joked, "They're right. This is the biggest scandal in history, bigger than Watergate, bigger than Iran-Contra, bigger than the Teapot Dome Scandal." The late-night host argued that the president's advanced age wasn't a secret and the majority of Americans were against him running for re-election in the 2024 campaign, believing him to be too old to serve again. "Now, you might be thinking to yourself, 'Wait, didn't everybody already know that Joe Biden was old?'" Meyers asked. "'Didn't poll after poll show that the vast majority of Americans, including a clear majority of Democrats, thought he was too old to run for reelection, and wanted someone else? Didn't he biff it so bad in the debate that his own party undertook an unprecedented effort to successfully force him out of the race?'" "'Weren't Democrats ultimately punished for Biden's disastrous choice to run again when they got their asses kicked in the November election?'" he continued. "'Didn't Seth play that clip of Biden falling up the stairs, like, 1,000 times?'" "This was on TV, everyone saw it," he said of Biden stumbling while walking up the stairs of Air Force One in 2021. "If this was a cover-up, if this was the worst [bleep] cover-up in American history. It was the worst-kept secret since Mika and Joe," he joked, referring to the relationship of "Morning Joe" co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough who wed in 2018 after years of co-hosting the morning MSNBC show. "This was only like Watergate if the break-in had been live-streamed on Twitch," Meyers added. After poking fun at reports that Biden got lost in his closet in the White House, Meyers turned serious. "It was just a disastrous political choice. And the people who deserve criticism for that are Biden, the aides who convinced him and themselves that he should ignore reality and run again," he concluded. Meyer's Monday night show appears to be the first time he referenced the Biden cover-up revelations from Tapper's book, according to Grabien transcripts. Meyer and fellow liberal late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have all welcomed Biden for friendly interviews. Most recently, Biden was on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" in February 2024, just days after the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur's report. Hur was heavily attacked by the media at the time for calling Biden a "sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory" in his report. During his February 2024 interview of Biden, Meyers gently broached the subject of Biden's age before quickly moving on to other topics. After Hur's report was released a few days later, Meyers called the special counsel's comments a "gratuitous hypothetical" and stressed that Hur was a "Republican attorney" who "was originally appointed by Trump." "If that kind of language was appropriate in a legal finding, then prosecutors could have done the same thing to Trump," Meyers said before repeatedly drawing attention to President Donald Trump's mental acuity.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Night owls tend to have more health risks than early birds—including cognitive decline, new study finds
Night owls—people whose natural body clock, or chronotype, skews to late sleep and wake times—are already forced to wake up too early for office jobs and to deal with derision from early birds. And now comes a new affront: research concluding that they appear to decline faster, cognitively, than morning people. To look into this, dementia researcher Ana Wenzler at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands analyzed sleep-based questionnaires through a large national study, BIRD-NL Project. She was able to determine people's chronotypes and found that 52% were morning people, 44% intermediate, and only about 5% night owls—different from the general global population breakdown, where typically 30% are night owls, 40% early birds, and the rest in between. Next, Wenzler looked at the results of a cognitive function test over a 10-year period to see how the scores differed at the end of the decade. Her conclusion was that evening people saw faster cognitive decline. But every night owl may not have the same risk. 'We found that 25% of the effect was due to lower sleep quality and smoking,' Wenzler tells Fortune. 'So, having a healthy lifestyle could lower the negative effect of having a late chronotype a bit.' She says that, for this study, she only looked into the executive function of the brain, so more research is needed into how chronotype affects memory, language, and other cognitive aspects. But the increased risk here, interestingly, was found mostly in highly educated people. 'That probably has to do with their sleep rhythm,' Wenzler said in a news release. 'They are often people who have to go back to work early in the morning and are therefore more likely to sleep too short, giving their brains too little rest.' This tracks with a previous body of research showing that night owls, compared with early risers, face various health risks—a 30% higher risk of diabetes, nearly double the odds of depression and other psychological disorders, increased heart disease risk, and a 10% higher all-cause mortality risk. 'All of this evidence, to me at least, impresses the fact that when we do not sleep in harmony with our chronotype, the ensuing sleep disruption that unfolds has consequences,' Matt Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, previously told Fortune. He added, 'There is vast variability in chronotype, and it's important to sleep in harmony with yours.' (You can determine it with this free calculator.) But if work and other factors won't allow you to stay up till 2 a.m. and sleep in until 10 a.m., could you push yourself to become an early bird? 'Some studies showed that intensive intervention could help change your chronotype… but only by a few hours,' Wenzler says. 'But forcing yourself to get up early every day while you are an extreme evening person will not make you a morning person. In these cases, it might be best to adapt your life, as much as possible, to your chronotype.' Walker also noted that only slight shifts are really possible, and that the ongoing, disciplined interventions that are required to truly change chronotypes are 'just not tenable,' he said. 'Let night owls sleep as they were biologically designed. At least, that's how I feel on the basis of the science and medicine of the data.' So, is the cognitive health of night owls just simply doomed? 'If these individuals are doomed is hard to say, as we only had a follow-up of 10 years,' says Wenzler, explaining that the true long-term effects—particularly whether or not night owls are more likely to develop dementia—need further investigation. 'Faster cognitive decline in middle age does not necessarily mean a higher risk of dementia,' she said in the news release. 'With our research, we hope to find out more about this. This will ultimately help us to be able to give people informed advice on how to try to prevent dementia.' More on cognitive health: 5 ways to reduce your dementia risk as study estimates U.S. cases could double by 2060 A study on the Mediterranean diet offers the strongest proof yet that it's associated with healthy brain aging It's not just forgetfulness: 8 early warning signs of dementia This story was originally featured on
Irish Times
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Did the media fail to do its job covering Joe Biden's decline?
In late 1919 US president Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke that would physically and mentally incapacitate him for many months, but which was concealed from the American people by his inner circle. In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt's inability to walk was similarly hushed up, as were Dwight Eisenhower's two heart attacks in office in the 1950s, John F Kennedy's crippling back pain in the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan 's symptoms of dementia in the mid-1980s. For a time at least, all of these were kept from voters despite being known in elite circles, including parts of the media. In that sense, the controversy over the alleged cover-up of Joe Biden 's physical and cognitive decline during his presidency (an allegation that looks increasingly plausible following the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin) is just the latest instalment in a long presidential tradition. READ MORE It has, admittedly, proved the most consequential of the lot; none of the others caused a sitting president to drop out of his re-election race with just three months to go. But that dramatic reversal was ultimately due to a catastrophic debate performance that in a few short minutes crystallised all the whispers and suspicions about Biden's real condition. In that crude sense, the media did its job. The cameras in the Atlanta studio brutally revealed the truth. But the broader question of whether journalists could have done more and earlier to uncover that truth remains contentious. In some of the responses to Original Sin you can see a desire to move on. After all, there's a real and present threat to media freedom under way right now from the current administration's legal assaults on ABC and CBS. And there's alarming evidence that those networks' corporate owners, Disney and Paramount, are only too willing to bend the knee. But the questions won't go away. 'Biden's decline, and its cover-up by the people around him, is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,' Thompson told the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, DC a few weeks ago. 'But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We – myself included – missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it.' [ Maureen Dowd: The tragedy of Joe Biden is that he was poisoned by power Opens in new window ] That statement provoked a furious response from veteran broadcaster Chuck Todd, who, in a tone that will startle those familiar with his TV persona, posted on Substack that 'the virtue-signalling that some people have done, to try to say that the media missed this story – they didn't miss this story ... You know why that's all out there? Because the media fucking showed it!' Perhaps. Certainly, if you search for 'Biden' and 'cognitive' across US media in 2023 and the first half of 2024 you'll get plenty of results. Many, but not all, came from the right-wing media sphere, and were often just overwrought punditry with little in the way of supporting evidence. It seems probable that the ferocity of these partisans attacks on Biden's cognition contributed to the excessive caution with which the story was treated by the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN. The attacks haven't ended. Reacting to Thompson's words, current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the 'legacy media' were responsible for 'one of the greatest cover-ups and scandals that ever took place in American history'. Not for the first time, polarised hyperbole has poisoned US media's capacity to do its supposed job of reporting factual information in an objective manner. It's inconceivable that antipathy to Trump did not contribute to undue deference to his opponent. But as Jon Allsop pointed out in the New Yorker last week , 'the media' is not some sort of coherent, unified entity. Conspiracy theories are seductive because they offer an over-arching black and white narrative in which everything can be explained. Random errors, muddled thinking and unexamined motives are a little less attractive. The truth is that while reporters such as Thompson at Axios and opinion writers such as Ezra Klein at the New York Times became increasingly vocal about their concerns over Biden's condition, the subject was not addressed by their employers with the tenacity and resources it deserved. One element of this sorry saga that makes it different, I think, from Wilson, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy and even Reagan is the 'hiding in plain sight' part. Yes, Biden's inner circle were deliberately concealing his low energy levels, making sure he would only be seen in public within his few 'good' hours. And yes, it is clear they made sure any expressions of concern from within the Democratic Party were ruthlessly crushed. But this is not the 1920s. Even in a presidential system, where the leader of the country is not held to account by parliament, there will be video evidence and eyewitness accounts available, as there were here. In a way, the most damning indictment of the media's performance is that it failed to reflect the clear public judgment, recorded unambiguously over three years' worth of opinion polls, that Biden was too old and should not run again. That failure gives fuel to the accusation that modern journalists – not just in the US – have become a disconnected elite, excessively monocultural, politically conformist and too close to the institutions that they are supposed to hold to account. There is some truth to all that, but it doesn't fully account for how this saga played out. Donald Trump , inevitably, plays a role. Discussions about mental acuity and fitness for office might have taken a different course if Nikki Haley had been the Republican nominee. Regardless, when both your emperors are naked, the media's role is to report that fact, not decide that one of them is partially clothed.
Japan Times
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Release of 2023 Biden recording renews debate on his capabilities
A newly published recording of former U.S. president Joe Biden speaking hesitantly and struggling to remember key events and dates has fueled renewed debate over his mental capabilities while still in office. The four-minute audio clip, obtained by news outlet Axios and published Saturday, coincides with the upcoming release of a book that alleges White House staff covered up Biden's decline even as he was seeking reelection. The clip was taken from two October 2023 interviews with former special counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating whether Biden had criminally mishandled public records after leaving office as vice president to Barack Obama. Questions about Biden's physical and cognitive abilities — and the responses of staff and key Democrats to evident signs of decline — have flared with Tuesday's release of "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" by CNN journalist Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios. When the special counsel released his findings in a voluminous report, describing Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" it drew fury from Democrats and White House officials. But the audio hints at the extent of his confusion and underscores Biden's seemingly tenuous grip on dates. Describing the impact of the death from brain cancer of his son Beau, Biden struggles to remember exactly when it happened. "What month did Beau die?" he asks in a soft voice. "Oh God, May? Was it 2015 he died? I think it was 2015." He goes on to say, "And Trump gets elected in November of 2017," before being corrected and saying, "That's when Trump gets sworn in." His delivery is slow and halting, including lengthy pauses and occasional shifts in topic midsentence. Biden spokeswoman Kelly Scully told CNN that "the transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago. The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public." The former president comes across as having been shattered by his son's death. "Beau was like my right arm," he says. And "Beau knew how much I adored him." Republicans had called for the release of the recording, but the Biden administration refused, citing executive privilege. Hur ultimately found that while Biden had carelessly kept classified documents after leaving office, the evidence was insufficient to file charges — particularly as a jury would likely have been sympathetic to the "elderly man with a poor memory." Biden later lashed out at Hur for bringing up his son's death, saying, "I don't need anyone to remind me when he passed away." Signs of Biden's evident decline — particularly his halting delivery and verbal stumbles — were on full display during his June 2024 presidential debate with Donald Trump. The disastrous performance ultimately led to Biden stepping aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump following an abbreviated campaign. Trump, who himself has at times confused names and dates but appears vigorous for a man of 78, has repeatedly described Biden as cognitively impaired.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Release of 2023 Biden recording renews debate on his capabilities
A newly published recording of former US president Joe Biden speaking hesitantly and struggling to remember key events and dates has fueled renewed debate over his mental capabilities while still in office. The four-minute audio clip, obtained by news outlet Axios and published Saturday, coincides with the upcoming release of a book that alleges White House staff covered up Biden's decline even as he was seeking reelection. The clip was taken from two October 2023 interviews with former special counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating whether Biden had criminally mishandled public records after leaving office as vice president to Barack Obama. Questions about Biden's physical and cognitive abilities -- and the responses of staff and key Democrats to evident signs of decline -- have flared with Tuesday's release of "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" by CNN journalist Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios. When the special counsel released his findings in a voluminous report, describing Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" it drew fury from Democrats and White House officials. But the audio hints at the extent of his confusion and underscores Biden's seemingly tenuous grip on dates. Describing the impact of the death from brain cancer of his son Beau, Biden struggles to remember exactly when it happened. "What month did Beau die?" he asks in a soft voice. "Oh God, May? Was it 2015 he died? I think it was 2015." He goes on to say, "And Trump gets elected in November of 2017," before being corrected and saying, "That's when Trump gets sworn in." His delivery is slow and halting, including lengthy pauses and occasional shifts in topic mid-sentence. Biden spokeswoman Kelly Scully told CNN that "the transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago. The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public." The former president comes across as having been shattered by his son's death. "Beau was like my right arm," he says. And "Beau knew how much I adored him." Republicans had called for the release of the recording, but the Biden administration refused, citing executive privilege. Hur ultimately found that while Biden had carelessly kept classified documents after leaving office, the evidence was insufficient to file charges -- particularly as a jury would likely have been sympathetic to the "elderly man with a poor memory." Biden later lashed out at Hur for bringing up his son's death, saying, "I don't need anyone to remind me when he passed away." Signs of Biden's evident decline -- particularly his halting delivery and verbal stumbles -- were on full display during his June 2024 presidential debate with Donald Trump. The disastrous performance ultimately led to Biden stepping aside in favor of vice president Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump following an abbreviated campaign. Trump, who himself has at times confused names and dates but appears vigorous for a man of 78, has repeatedly described Biden as cognitively impaired. bbk/md/acb
