What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” inside the U.S. government, needling Canada amid an intensifying trade war. Trump’s order directed the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to remove and replace Lake Ontario on all federal maps and documents within 30 days, though he told reporters the name change was “effective immediately.”

Who said what
Trump’s Lake America rebrand “most likely requires only federal entities to recognize the change,” The New York Times said. “It does not have to be recognized by other countries.” New York, the only state that borders the lake, “won’t be calling it that,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). Neither will Canada. The name, “from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,’” is “more than 400 years old,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said on social media. “America is changing,” but Canadians “know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”

What next?
The Lake Ontario snub is “likely to harden public sentiment against the Trump administration in Canada,” The Wall Street Journal said. But Trump suggested he wasn’t satisfied with Lake America and the Gulf of America. “Now, all we need is an ocean,” Trump told reporters. “Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.”

What happened
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly testified in his Senate confirmation hearing last year that a 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” But new documents obtained through freedom of information requests “refute that testimony,” The Associated Press said yesterday. Kennedy was a “prominent anti-vaccine activist" at the time, and "critics said the visit fueled anti-vaccine sentiment" before a measles outbreak that killed 83 Samoans. In one letter, The Guardian said, Kennedy “explicitly told the Samoan prime minister he wanted to study” the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine there and “used the words ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’ eight times.”

Who said what
“RFK’s platform is built on lies” that “leave a trail of dead children,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. “There are consequences for lying to Congress.” Watchdog group American Oversight yesterday asked the Justice Department to investigate Kennedy’s testimony for false statements. The Health and Human Services Department told the AP that “any claim or insinuation” Kennedy “lied under oath or to Congress” based on these letters is “not only false but outright defamatory.” 

What next?
“Lying to Congress is a crime, whether or not the witness is under oath,” Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz told The Guardian. But this Justice Department is “unlikely” to prosecute Kennedy.

Produce shelves are becoming sparser and feature fewer options. Economic, cultural and environmental factors have reduced the variety of vegetables available to consumers, and that can have negative health consequences and make crops more susceptible to climate change.

Vegetable diversity is “declining due to market homogenization, land-use change and other threats,” said a study published in the journal PNAS,  and the “current conservation is insufficient.” There have been “substantial declines in the range of traditional vegetable varieties grown over the past century, while almost one-quarter of assessed wild relatives of major vegetable crops are threatened with extinction,” said a release by the World Vegetable Center. 

Agricultural practices like “monoculture, the practice of growing a single crop variety across vast areas,” are a “risky business, both economically and ecologically,” said IFL Science. If a “disease takes root in one plant, it rapidly spreads through the entire identical field like wildfire.”

People worldwide “consume nearly 40% fewer vegetables than recommended by the World Health Organization,” the World Vegetable Center said. Low vegetable consumption is “among the five leading dietary risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease.” The good news is that there are 1,480 known species of edible vegetables, most of which are underused.

“Vegetable biodiversity is one of the world’s greatest assets for improving diets and adapting agriculture to a changing climate,” said Colin Khoury, the global conservation lead at the crop diversity preservation nonprofit Crop Trust. “But we are losing it at exactly the time we need it most.”