See also this.
The near total silence on this event from the mainstream press and media, including in the UK, is deafening.
The Byzantine Love of the Theotokos
7 hours ago
Friday, October 17, 2025
GAFCON Severs Ties with Canterbury and Liberal Churches in Major Anglican Schism
Official Statement here.
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Trump: Now I am getting drug prices down 500, 600, 800%, in some cases even more than that, hard to believe.
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 16, 2025
The dumbest president in American history, by far.
pic.twitter.com/WtToFmz0Iv
Military Restricts Press Reporting
Wednesday was a major moment for the coverage of the United States military. Scores of journalists with access to the Pentagon handed in their press passes rather than sign on to new rules laid out by Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense.
The news organizations that have refused to agree to the rules include large organizations such as The New York Times, NBC News and Fox News, as well as many smaller publications that focus entirely on the military. At least one news organization, the conservative cable network One America News, has agreed to the new terms.
The new rules codify sharp limitations on access and raise the prospect of punishment — including revocation of credentials — for simply requesting information on matters of public interest. Lawyers representing national news organizations have been negotiating for weeks with Pentagon officials over the strictures.
Read the rest here.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
The Young Republican Chat Scandal
NEW YORK — Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
Read the rest here.
Giving credit where it is due
Trump got Israel to stop the horror show in Gaza and forced Hamas to release their hostages. We will see what follows.
Friday, October 10, 2025
How Trump’s message to ‘Pam’ got exactly the results he wanted
All it took was a personal message to “Pam.”
A Sept. 20 tirade from President Donald Trump on Truth Social set off an extraordinary rush that has turned a once-hypothetical fear into reality: a president personally directing criminal charges against people he sees as his enemies.
Trump’s public instructions to Attorney General Pam Bondi (which he may have intended as a private DM) were not subtle. The president named three public figures he has long detested and urged the Justice Department to prosecute them immediately.
Now, less than three weeks later, two of them are under indictment: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both have denied wrongdoing. And the many other targets Trump wants to see in jail are bracing for who will be next.
The third person Trump named in his message to Bondi — Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — decried the new reality Thursday, shortly after James was indicted on two counts stemming from allegations of mortgage fraud.
Read the rest here.
Thursday, October 09, 2025
Trump DOJ Indicts NY Attorney General
New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, as President Donald Trump’s Justice Department continues to pursue charges against his political opponents.
James has been under investigation since May over a 2023 mortgage she took out to help her niece buy a home in Norfolk, Virginia.
The grand jury returned two felony charges: bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. James’ first court appearance is scheduled for October 24 in Norfolk.
According to the indictment, James claimed on mortgage paperwork that a home she purchased in Norfolk would be her second residence. That claim allowed her to get favorable loan terms not available for investment properties, prosecutors say.
But, prosecutors allege, James did not use the house and instead rented the property to a family of three. They allege she falsely stated in loan applications that the residence would be a secondary home when they allege James knew she would use it as an investment property.
The charges come as Trump continues to call for his enemies to be prosecuted in court. Former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty Wednesday to allegedly making a false statement in a congressional proceeding. The Justice Department has also opened investigation into former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, and others.
Read the rest here.
Sunday, October 05, 2025
Sunday, September 28, 2025
A Libertarian Argument for an Interventionist Foreign Policy
From here.
Side note: Due to my mother's death there will be little blogging until the 9th of Oct. However, I found this to be a really good read and thought I'd share it. My sisters and I will be quite busy during the mourning period settling mom's affairs. Lastly, I am deeply grateful for the many expressions of sympathy and prayers posted here and communicated privately. They have been a source of comfort in a very dark and painful moment. Thank you.
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Memory Eternal!
In a blessed falling asleep, grant, O Lord, eternal rest unto Thy departed servant Geraldine and make her memory to be eternal!
Memory eternal! Memory eternal! Memory eternal!
Friday, September 05, 2025
Making Polio Great Again
Ok. It's time to call a shovel a shovel. Anti-Vax pseudo-scientific nuttery has now gone mainstream in the Republican Party. RFK Jr. is turning the Department of Health and Human Services into an agency dedicated to all out warfare on modern medicine. Florida's Surgeon General wants to end ALL vaccine mandates for kids. Yes, even Polio! If this quack had been in charge a couple of generations ago, we would still have Smallpox in the world. If you don't know what that is, firstly you are very fortunate, and secondly it's because we eradicated it by mass vaccinations. In the 19th century one in four children did not live to adulthood. Vaccines are one of the most important reasons we have reduced infant mortality rates in the developed world to less than 1%. The most dangerous people are always well meaning fools with power. And these kooks are going to get people killed.
Thursday, September 04, 2025
Ray Dalio Warns of Debt, Wealth Inequality and America's Drift Towards Authoritarianism
One of the world’s most prominent hedge fund billionaires has warned that rising inequality is turning the US into an autocratic state and condemned business leaders for failing to speak out against Donald Trump’s policies.
Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, said “gaps in wealth” and a collapse in trust were driving “more extreme” policies in the US.
Speaking to the Financial Times, the veteran financier said many western countries were affected by growing inequality, leading voters to turn increasingly to autocratic leaders.
“I think that what is happening now politically and socially is analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930-40 period,” he said.
“Classically, increased wealth and value gaps lead to increased populism of the right and populism of the left and irreconcilable differences between them that can’t be resolved through the democratic process.
“So democracies weaken and more autocratic leadership increases as a large percentage of the population wants government leaders to get control of the system to make things work well for them.”
Concerns about a significant rise in borrowing by the US government were well founded, said Dalio, who has long predicted a reckoning for economies that allow debts to rise.
In his books, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke: the Big Cycle, he has described how large annual spending deficits and unsustainable debt growth had brought the US economy to the brink of a debt crisis – a situation that had worsened over many years.
“The great excesses that are now projected as a result of the new budget will likely cause a debt-induced heart attack in the relatively near future,” he said. “I’d say three years, give or take a year or two.”
Read the rest here.
Unfortunately, the original interview is behind a paywall. But it is getting a lot of attention in the broader press.
Monday, September 01, 2025
Gold Posts New Record
Gold currently trading at ~$3,566 /oz amidst expectations of the Fed cutting interest rates (whether by choice or under presidential coercion), and the risks of a weaker dollar and higher inflation.
Update: Gold closed at $3,599 /oz.
China's navy is the world's largest and expanding at breakneck speed
...Suoyuwan park in Dalian, which juts out of north-eastern China into the Yellow Sea, has stunning views of one of China's largest shipyards, and is a place to gather and be merry.
But to White House analysts thousands of miles away in Washington, this cradle of Chinese shipbuilding is part of a growing threat.
In the last two decades, China has ramped up investment in shipbuilding. And that has paid off: more than 60% of the world's orders this year have gone to Chinese shipyards. Put simply, China is building more ships than any other country because it can do it faster than anyone else.
"The scale is extraordinary… in many ways eye-watering," says Nick Childs, a maritime expert with the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. "The Chinese shipbuilding capacity is something like 200 times overall that of the United States."
That commanding lead also applies to its navy. The Chinese Communist Party now has the world's largest, operating 234 warships compared to the US Navy's 219.
China's explosive rise has been fuelled by the sea. The world's second-largest economy is home to seven of the world's 10 busiest ports, which are critical to global supply routes. And its coastal cities are thriving because of trade.
As Beijing's ambitions have grown, so has its arsenal of ships - and its confidence to stake a louder claim in the South China Sea and beyond.
President Xi Jinping's China certainly wants to rule the waves. Whether it will is the question.
Read the rest here.
Largely overlooked in this otherwise good story is the fact that China's navy is concentrated in the Western Pacific. The US Navy is spread all over the world.
Sunday, August 31, 2025
By the Numbers: The slow death of the manual transmission
Just like the trend toward SUVs in the United States throughout the 2000s, there’s another major shift happening that seems unstoppable. Automatic transmissions have become the standard in many markets, threatening the survival of manual transmission cars.
In 2001, almost every passenger car registered in the five major European markets—Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain—had a manual transmission. Data shows that, at that time, cars with manual transmissions accounted for 91 percent of registrations in those five markets. This type of transmission was more popular than the automatic, even among premium and luxury brands.
At that time, the technology was not nearly as advanced as it is today, so high development costs had a direct impact on the final price, and the automatic transmission was more of a luxury feature than anything.
However, as has been the case with airbags and other automotive technologies, gradual adoption has helped reduce cost and price. With traffic growing in large cities and drivers more preoccupied than ever, the automatic transmission is quickly becoming the answer to the new reality.
Last year, cars with manual transmissions accounted for only 29 percent of registrations in the five major European markets. The breakdown between mainstream and premium brands also shows major changes.
In 2001, premium cars with automatic transmissions accounted for 31 percent of sales. By 2024, they reached 97 percent. As for mainstream brands, the change is just as dramatic: The market share of automatic transmission increased from 5 percent in 2001 to 63 percent last year.
Read the rest here.
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Mexican (Catholic) bishop faces backlash for con-celebrating Eucharist with Anglican female cleric
A retired Mexican bishop has provoked widespread controversy after he celebrated the Eucharist with an Anglican female minister at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
On the 26 August, Bishop Emeritus Raúl Vera López of Saltillo presided at Mass in the basilica with Rev Emilie Teresa Smith, a Canadian Anglican minister, standing beside him as a concelebrant. During the liturgy, Ms Smith, wearing a stole (a liturgical vestment), joined in parts of the Eucharistic Prayer, whispered words of consecration, raised her hand in blessing and elevated the chalice containing the Precious Blood of Christ.
The Mass was recorded and published on the bishop’s own Facebook page, where it quickly gained attention. In a post accompanying the video, the bishop invited viewers to “reflect together” on the Gospel of the day, quoting the words of Christ in St Matthew’s Gospel condemning hypocrisy and spiritual blindness.
He described Ms Smith as one “who walks among us picking up the word of many people around finding solutions to the climate crisis we live in".
The event caused shock among Catholics both in Mexico and internationally, with many describing the event as sacrilegious. Critics of the bishop's actions said that the presence of a female Anglican minister at the altar during the Eucharist is a clear violation of Catholic teaching on both the ordained priesthood and intercommunion with non-Catholics.
The bishop emeritus attempted to defend his actions with a second Facebook post: he recounted how, after Mass on the following day, he had been questioned by journalists about whether canonical sanctions might follow. Bishop Vera explained that Ms Smith was a fellow co-chair of the international solidarity network SICSAL, who was passing through Coahuila on route to the COP 30 environmental summit and had accepted his invitation to take part in the Mass at the basilica.
He dismissed accusations of sacrilege, heresy and indiscipline as “common sense” misunderstandings, noting that Ms Smith had long been active in human rights and pastoral work, with experience as a parish minister and theologian.
“Not only does she work with the poor, she has a parish, has a theological background, she is a writer, she is ready to participate in a meeting of the United Nations and with God’s people around the defence of our Mother Earth,” he wrote. He also praised her homily as “excellent”.
“We are no longer in witch hunts and bonfire times,” the bishop also said in his Facebook post. “The word of our sister Emilie gives us light, life and guidance as Laudato Si’ asks for all the people of this planet.”
Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe
Friday, August 29, 2025
Federal appeals court largely rejects Trump’s emergency tariffs
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that most of President Donald Trump’s global tariffs are illegal, striking a massive blow to the core of his aggressive trade policy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in a 7-4 ruling, held that the law Trump invoked when he granted his most expansive tariffs does not actually grant him the power to impose those levies.
“The core Congressional power to impose taxes such as tariffs is vested exclusively in the legislative branch by the Constitution,” the court said. “Tariffs are a core Congressional power.”
The appellate court paused its ruling from taking effect until Oct. 14, in order to give the Trump administration time to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision.
Trump later Friday attacked the appeals court as “Highly Partisan” and asserted that the Supreme Court will rule in his favor.
“If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”
“The President’s tariffs remain in effect, and we look forward to ultimate victory on this matter,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a separate statement.
Friday’s ruling is the second straight loss for Trump in the make-or-break case, known as V.O.S. Selections v. Trump.
The case was consolidated from two separate lawsuits, one filed by a dozen states and the other by five small U.S. businesses.
It is the furthest along of more than half a dozen federal lawsuits challenging Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose sweeping tariffs.
Read the rest here.
Trump Has Dropped an ‘Atomic Bomb’ on the Department of Justice
...Donald Trump has blown through all of this. From the first days of his second term, that much was clear. He granted clemency even to the most violent rioters on Jan. 6, including people found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
At the same time, he launched a purge against dozens of prosecutors who investigated and prosecuted the Jan. 6 rioters.
The Justice Department dropped its charges against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, because the case was getting in the way of Adams’s enforcement of Trump’s immigration priorities. The judge in the case said it “smacks of a bargain,” one so transparently in violation of Justice Department standards and practices that it prompted the resignations of multiple prosecutors.
(There have been so many scandals since the Adams incident that it feels like ancient history — as if it happened during the First Continental Congress, and not mere months ago.)
Trump’s bias has extended not just to people who’ve shown individual loyalty to Trump, but also to favored and disfavored constituencies. Earlier this summer, his Justice Department sought an astonishingly light sentence for a Louisville police officer convicted of a civil rights violation after he fired wildly into an apartment on the night Breonna Taylor was killed.
At the same time, it has relentlessly pursued migrants, deporting hundreds to a brutal El Salvadoran prison without due process. Sadly, that incident was but the tip of an iceberg of brutality aimed at people who are suspected of being illegal immigrants.
And it all keeps escalating. I have no way of knowing whether John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, is guilty of a crime, but I do know that when Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., tweets triumphantly amid reports of a search of Bolton’s home that “NO ONE is above the law” and when the vice president of the United States confirms that Bolton is under investigation, they are breaking through the standards designed to remind us that every American is innocent until proven guilty.
Nor do I know whether Senator Adam Schiff of California, or Attorney General Letitia James of New York, or Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, is guilty of mortgage fraud, but the public accusation — in the absence of any adjudication — is yet another grave breach of the standards that preserve the presumption of innocence.
And when the president fired Cook on the basis of an unproven allegation, he not only violated the standards that preserve our system of justice, he may have violated the law as well. The president has to show “cause” before he fires a Federal Reserve governor, and an accusation of impropriety is not the same as the legal proof of improper conduct.
The very effort to use a Trump administration official, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to engage in targeted examinations of the financial records of prominent Democrats is yet another application of Trump’s relentless thirst for vengeance. It is certainly fine — even laudable — to police real accusations of suspected mortgage fraud. It is a gross abuse of justice to single out Democrats for special attention in this way.
On Wednesday, in fact, Trump made another reckless criminal accusation, declaring on Truth Social that George Soros and his son should be charged under “RICO,” the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. RICO is a statute typically deployed to combat organized crime.
But this is what authoritarian regimes do. They don’t simply declare that they’re prosecuting political opponents, they go ahead and do it — through trumped-up charges or selective prosecution.
Read the rest here.
Germany is rearming, with potentially huge implications
...Across Germany, both politicians and members of the public have been going through a similar transformation. The country’s army, officially named the Bundeswehr — which translates as “federal defense” — was established by the United States during the Cold War. It was designed to support NATO rather than ever lead a conflict, for fear that a German military could be misused as it was during World War II. This supporting role suited Germany’s leaders: Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the country’s politicians carefully shaped an image of a peaceful nation that prefers influencing global politics through trade and diplomacy. After the end of the Cold War the Bundeswehr began scaling down, with military spending falling from a high of 4.9 percent of GDP in 1963 to just 1.1 percent in 2005.
But in the months following the Russian invasion, then-chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world by announcing a radical change in German foreign policy, including a €100 billion ($116 billion) plan to beef up its army. Then in early 2025, five days after the February election of new chancellor Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), Donald Trump invited Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky into the Oval Office for a browbeating broadcast around the world that signaled his lack of interest in standing up to Russia. A shocked Merz, who had campaigned on a platform of low taxes and low spending, immediately agreed with Scholz to work together to reform the country’s strict borrowing laws — which were embedded in the constitution — and build up its defense capabilities as quickly as possible with a €1 trillion loan, which amounts to about 25 percent of the country’s GDP. According to Lorenzo Scarazzato, a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), this type of defense spending was previously unheard of during peacetime. “Countries that spend this much are usually those at war, or autocratic states that don’t have democratic oversight,” he said.
The following month, Germany’s lawmakers voted to back the plan, setting the country’s military on track to be the best-funded in Europe and the fourth-biggest in the world. In Merz’s view, Europe didn’t just need to arm itself against Russian aggression, but also “achieve independence from the USA.” Later in the year, NATO members would agree to raise their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, at Trump’s behest.
Read the rest here.
This is a longish read, but very good.
White House declares $4.9B in foreign aid unilaterally canceled
President Donald Trump threw a grenade Friday into September government funding negotiations on Capitol Hill, declaring the unilateral power to cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid by using a so-called pocket rescission.
Escalating the administration’s assault on Congress’ funding prerogatives, the White House budget office announced Friday morning that Trump has canceled $4.9 billion through the gambit that Congress’ top watchdog and many lawmakers argue is an illegal end-run around their “power of the purse.”
The move to unilaterally nix money previously approved by Congress raises tensions on Capitol Hill as lawmakers face an Oct. 1 deadline to avoid a government shutdown, pitting Republicans at the White House against GOP lawmakers and increasing pressure on Democrats to force a funding lapse unless Trump stands down.
Democrats and Republicans alike have warned that a pocket rescissions request would hamper cross-party talks to avert a shutdown at the end of September, while fulfilling White House budget director Russ Vought’s wish that the process of funding the government be “less bipartisan” to accommodate a raft of conservative priorities.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hinted Friday that Democrats could refuse to offer the votes to get a government funding bill through the chamber before funding lapses late next month if congressional Republicans don’t push back against Trump’s latest funding move.
“Republicans don’t have to be a rubber stamp for this carnage,” Schumer said, adding that “if Republicans are insistent on going it alone, Democrats won’t be party to their destruction.”
Yet three congressional Republicans, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they expect Vought to send additional requests to revoke funding between now and the end of the current fiscal year, which would only inflame tensions.
“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” the Senate’s top Republican appropriator, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, said in a quick and clear rebuke of the Trump administration’s gambit.
But the Trump administration is embracing the strategy boldly and without apology, while also signaling it intends to stare down any legal challenges that may come its way as a result: “Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds — it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”
Read the rest here.
Trump revokes Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has revoked U.S. Secret Service protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris, a senior adviser to Harris told NBC News on Friday.
“The Vice President is grateful to the United States Secret Service for their professionalism, dedication, and unwavering commitment to safety," the adviser said.
A senior White House official confirmed Friday that Trump had revoked Harris’ Secret Service detail, adding that vice presidents typically only get six months of protection when they leave office.
Congress passed legislation in 2008 that authorized the Secret Service to protect former vice presidents, their spouses and their children under 16 years old for up to six months after the end of a vice president’s term.
A Secret Service official told NBC that while that's true, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive memorandum in January extending Harris’ protection to 18 months.
Aides to the former president didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the rest here.
Want to work for National Weather Service? Be ready to explain how you agree with Trump
As the National Weather Service scrambles to hire up to 450 people to restore deep cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, potential applicants are being asked to explain how they would advance President Donald Trump’s agenda if hired.
A posting from the weather service’s parent agency seeking meteorologists asks applicants to identify one or two of Trump’s executive orders “that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”
It’s among screening questions added to government job applications as part of a “ merit hiring plan” that Trump announced at the outset of his second term, and it’s not unique to the weather service positions. But some experts said they are alarmed at the prospect that a candidate’s ideology could matter for jobs in science.
Read the rest here.
With the rich ALREADY fleeing New York, who’d be left for Zohran Mamdani to tax?
Anyone who thinks Zohran Mamdani’s plans to tax the rich are remotely workable, beware: The city’s share of “the rich” is already shrinking.
So if Mamdani gets his way, there soon might be no one at all left to squeeze.
From 2010 to 2022, the Citizens Budget Committee reports, New York state’s share of taxpayers with more than $1 million in federal adjusted gross income shrunk by almost a third — from 12.7% to 8.7%.
The city’s share also fell, from 6.5% to 4.2%.
New York’s loss was other states’ gain, particularly Florida, Texas and even California.
Thanks to inflation, the gross number of million-plus earners in New York grew, but it less than doubled; it tripled in California and Texas and quadrupled in Florida.
New York’s losses come with a steep cost, the CBC warns: “Had New York State and City had the same share of millionaires in 2022 as they did in 2010, the State would have received $10.7 billion more” in personal-income-tax revenue, and “the City $2.5 billion more. More millionaires mean more PIT revenue.”
Read the rest here.
DOJ drops charges against another client of AG Pam Bondi's brother Brad
For the second time in less than a month, the Justice Department on Wednesday abruptly dropped charges against a client represented by Brad Bondi, the brother of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Federal prosecutors in Missouri this week agreed to voluntarily dismiss an indictment against Sid Chakraverty, a property developer who faced felony wire fraud charges. Prosecutors under the Biden administration accused Chakraverty in 2024 of lying about hiring women- and minority-owned subcontractors on a housing development in order to allegedly secure favorable tax incentives.
As recently as three weeks ago, career prosecutors held that Chakraverty should face criminal penalties for his alleged scheme.
But on Wednesday, the newly installed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus, a Trump appointee, filed court papers informing the judge overseeing the case that the "defendants have agreed to make restitution of the taxes" and that it is therefore "prudent for the government to end this criminal prosecution."
Read the rest here.
Pope Francis blessed King and Queen’s anniversary despite their divorces
Pope Francis gave the King and Queen a blessing for their 20th wedding anniversary, it has emerged.
The King and Queen, who had a private audience with the late pontiff in April, were offered his blessing behind closed doors.
Their marriage would not be recognised in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Both have been divorced, with Andrew Parker Bowles, the Queen’s ex-husband, still living.
But Pope Francis gave a blessing during a 20-minute meeting during their state visit to Rome, it has been claimed.
The late Pope and the King are also said to have prayed together, thought to be the first time the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the Bishop of Rome have done so.
Read the rest here.
Medical Quackery and RFK's Purge at the CDC
An escalating conflict over an influential vaccine committee was one of the final straws that led to the firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and the exodus of other highly regarded top officials.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly undermined the agency’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing the committee’s members and appointing new members, including vaccine skeptics.
Early Wednesday, Monarez suggested to Dr. Richard Besser that she was going to be forced to sign off on new vaccine recommendations.
“She said there were two things she would never do in the job,” said Besser, a former acting CDC director and the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “One, in terms of firing her leadership who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber-stamp ACIP recommendations that flew in the face of science.”
Hours later, Monarez was out, according to a Health and Human Services post on X. Almost immediately, several top officials resigned in protest.
One of those officials, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — which oversees vaccines — wrote in his resignation letter that a particular document related to the vaccine committee “ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.”
The document was guidance for a newly formed work group that will present Covid vaccine data and research at the upcoming ACIP meeting — scheduled for September 18 — and contained anti-vaccine talking points. The work group will be led by newly appointed ACIP member Retsef Levi, an MIT professor who has been vocally against the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Read the rest here.
Europe must assert hard power or become a ‘hunted animal,’ France’s top general warns
PARIS — Europe's disunited governments are in denial about the extent to which violence is shaping global politics and must step up to assert their combined force as a hard power, the chief of defense staff of the French military has warned in a sweeping interview.
"A weakened Europe may find itself tomorrow as a hunted animal, after two centuries of the West setting the tone,” General Thierry Burkhard said in unusually outspoken remarks to POLITICO and French newspaper Libération. "It's not only about armed forces, but about the fact that hard power dynamics now prevail."
Burkhard warned that Europe's fragmented countries would have to bind together more tightly as a strategic force to counteract the "spheres of influence" being built by China, Russia and the U.S.
"On the one hand, European countries have never been so strong. On the other, there is a form of denial from governments and populations in the face of the level of violence in the world today," he added.
The French general's reality check echoes a growing number of warnings about Europe's weakness.
Former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi also stressed last week the EU had to stop pretending it could exercise global influence just as an economic force and consumer market. He insisted the bloc had received a "very brutal wake-up call" from Donald Trump that it needed to think in far more strategic terms about security and defense spending.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday accused the European Union of sliding into irrelevance on the world stage. "We must be willing to pay the price of our freedom and our independence,” she said.
Read the rest here.
France may be heading into a full blown political crisis
PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron’s allies don’t seem to have any good answers as to what happens after the almost certain fall of the government of Prime Minister François Bayrou in the Sept. 8 parliamentary vote of confidence.
The names of Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu and Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin are emerging in the chatter as potential successors to the poisoned chalice of the premiership, but what would a new recruit really solve? A new PM will be ensnared in exactly the same quagmire.
French politics will still be too internally riven to pass vital deficit-slashing reforms, despite Bayrou’s Cassandra-like warnings that France could be headed toward a Greek-style debt crisis if it sits on its hands and doesn’t implement an unpopular €43.8 billion budget squeeze.
So how about another snap election? If Macron calls one, the political landscape could still be mired in exactly the same impasse — but the blame after a vote would more obviously fall on him rather than on his prime minister. And all that time, the financial markets will be running out of patience regarding France’s ability to put its books in order.
All in all, a state of shock grips elected officials, aides and advisers from the various parties that support France’s minority government.
Read the rest here.
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