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Senate passes bipartisan bill to overhaul college sports
President Donald Trump wants the House to clear the measure quickly.
From Mexico to Houston: Nurse turns side hustle into growing business
Houston registered nurse Joao Casiano, born in Monterrey, Mexico, launched a mobile IV hydration business as a side venture while continuing his nursing work, quickly gaining repeat customers.
A Financial Stock Can Be a Great Business and a Bad Investment. Here's How to Tell Them Apart.
Investors will quickly figure out that a potential stock needs to clear two primary hurdles.
A Financial Stock Can Be a Great Business and a Bad Investment. Here's How to Tell Them Apart.
Investors will quickly figure out that a potential stock needs to clear two primary hurdles.
Looking for a way to sharpen your mind? Bird-watchers may have found it.
They get up early. They know what to look for. They quickly memorize details. For birdwatchers, an engrossing hobby could very well be a path to keeping the brain healthy.
Maryland football destroyed by UCLA, 54-3, in 9th straight Big Ten loss
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Maryland was outclassed from the start. In a game that was scoreless after one quarter but quickly devolved into another lopsided loss, nothing went the Terps’ way. Maryland couldn’t establish a running game despite a questionable insistence on doing so; quarterback Malik Washington never got going in the one-dimensional offense and threw four interceptions; and the Terps’ ...
Raiders’ defensive makeover has an unexpected star leading the charge
Nakobe Dean is wasting no time proving his value in Las Vegas, as the Raiders’ $36 million linebacker has quickly emerged as the “glue” of their revamped defense.
Can Omarion Hampton Move Past His Fumbling Woes?
Omarion Hampton has already lost two fumbles through the Chargers’ first two games. With turnovers hurting the team early this season, Hampton needs to fix his ball-security issues quickly and prove he can be trusted with a heavy workload.
US scientists launch workaround after Trump administration dismantles National Climate Assessment
Major scientific groups moved quickly to keep the work alive after the Trump administration dismantled key parts of the federal process behind the next National Climate Assessment.
Fruita mom turns home bakery into growing farmstand business
What started as a way to help support her family has quickly grown into a thriving business for one Fruita mother.
Trump and Johnson meeting with AI executives set for Tuesday
President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will meet with executives of top AI companies at the White House on Tuesday, the Washington Examiner confirmed. The expected meeting underscores the pressure Republicans are under to regulate the industry ahead of the November midterm elections. Johnson has rejected calls to act quickly on regulating AI models, […]
AMD Takes the Lid off of Next-Gen EPYC 9006 Venice As Zen 6 Comes to Servers
The launch of AMD’s next-gen EPYC 9006 processors is quickly approaching. Today we are looking at AMD’s complete 6th gen EPYC lineup, and what to expect from the company between now and late 2027
Pioneer of China NewCo model sued in US over trade secret misuse, double-dealing
A legal feud unfolding in New York is putting a spotlight on the work of a business development veteran who is credited for pioneering one of biopharma’s hottest dealmaking mechanism: the China “NewCo” model. In a lawsuit originally filed in New York state court and recently moved to federal court, China’s Lepu Medical Technology has alleged that biopharma business development consultant Su Zhang, who was hired to help shop its GLP-1 weight-loss candidates to Western partners, engaged in corporate double-dealing and trade secret leaks. According to the complaint, while acting as Lepu’s primary dealmaking liaison for a group of obesity and metabolic disease drug candidates, Zhang was secretly double-dipping as the acting chief business officer for a direct competitor, BrightGene Pharmaceutical. “She never adequately disclosed the role, never sought Lepu’s consent, and never proposed any safeguard,” Lepu alleged in its complaint, which was filed in July after Zhang’s consulting firm, CoDevCo, sought certain transaction-based success fees from its angry customer through an arbitration process in Singapore. Lepu, the parent company of Lepu Biopharma, has asked Zhang to pay back its $500,000 retainer and disgorge all benefits she received during the alleged breaches of fiduciary duty, plus other damages and relief. The company has also requested the court grant injunctions to protect Lepu’s trade secrets. The ill-fated partnership officially kicked off in December 2024, when Lepu tapped CoDevCo as its “exclusive business development mechanism” to identify collaborators for the company’s drug candidates. According to Lepu’s complaint, Zhang personally negotiated and signed the agreement as managing director for CoDevCo, which used her home address. Before the Lepu deal, Zhang made a name following a short stint as the global head of business development for Hengrui Pharmaceuticals. It was during her tenure that Hengrui signed a landmark deal granting exclusive rights for a portfolio of GLP-1 assets to Hercules, which was at that time newly established by a group of private equity and venture capital firms. In addition to the regular upfront and milestone payments, Hengrui also gained an equity stake in Hercules, which later became Kailera Therapeutics. The Hengrui-Hercules deal opened a new paradigm, where a Chinese biopharma company spins off certain early-stage assets to investors for further development through the creation of a new company abroad. The “NewCo” model quickly came into vogue as it allows Western investors to access high-potential assets originating from China at an early stage while giving the Chinese licensors an opportunity to reap long-term benefits through equity stakes in the new firms. The NewCo model proved its value when Kailera staged a record-breaking $625 million IPO on Nasdaq this April, merely two years into the Hengrui deal. Related Kailera CEO 'knew we were in a good spot' before obesity biotech's record-breaking $625M IPO On her LinkedIn page, Zhang described her work at Hengrui as “[b]uilding team and capability from the ground up,” forming NewCo and major pharma partnerships worth billions of dollars. Lepu clearly wanted that kind of track record to help boost its own cardiometabolic portfolio, which includes a range of assets for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and muscle preservation during weight loss treatment. “Lepu’s pipeline is very valuable, but only if Lepu could secure the right international partner to expand into the overseas market during the available commercial window,” the company argued in its complaint. The Chinese biotech said it had little knowledge of U.S. laws, customs or business practices in the business development field, and therefore “needed to rely entirely” on the expertise of Zhang and her team as the firm’s first engagement of a U.S.-based BD consultant. “Zhang’s dominating influence on the business development strategy is further evidenced by the fact that she personally controlled the business-development communications on behalf of Lepu with potential partners,” Lepu said in its complaint. After entering the deal, Zhang introduced Lepu to her four associates. According to Lepu’s version of events, all of them were allegedly employed at different time points to perform similar jobs at other Chinese companies that Lepu described as its competitors, while having access to Lepu’s confidential information. As such, Lepu described Zhang’s team as “a roster of individuals whose primary professional loyalty, by virtue of their concurrent full-time employment, ran to Lepu’s competitors.” As well as the specific examples set out in the case, a look at Lepu’s deals over the period suggests Zhang may have been involved in at least one transaction. During their partnership, Lepu, through its subsidiary Shanghai Minwei Biotechnology, also out-licensed its GLP-1/GIP/FGF21 agonist MWN105 to a NewCo called Sidera Bio in the fall of 2025. The deal included an upfront and near-term payment of $35 million, up to $1.01 billion in milestones, and a 9.99% stake in the Danish startup. It seems likely that Zhang facilitated the Minwei deal given that Lepu is on record as having used CoDevCo as its “exclusive business development mechanism.” The big shock for Lepu came in the form of a news article on June 25, 2025. The article, reporting on phase 2 data for BrightGene’s GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist BGM0504, identified Zhang as acting chief business officer of the Lepu rival. Blindsided by her association with BrightGene, Lepu confronted Zhang in July 2025. “Lepu was given assurances that there was nothing to be concerned about and told that Zhang would explain the matter to Lepu,” Lepu alleged in its complaint. “Zhang never did.” Lepu claimed that Zhang had the motive and opportunity to steer potential prospective partners toward BrightGene or other competitors. Later, in February 2026, one of Zhang’s associates joined BrightGene as the vice president for global business development, according to the complaint. Around the same time, Lepu sent written demand letters asking Zhang to account for her BrightGene role, identify what confidential data were shared with the rival firm, and provide any conflict-of-interest or firewall policies during the engagement. According to Lepu, neither CoDevCo nor Zhang answered the questions in their responses. Related Novo vs. KBP: How a $1.3B deal turned into a fraud accusation and an international legal fight In a motion to dismiss filed with the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York on Sept. 4, Zhang’s legal team argued that Lepu’s agreement was signed with CoDevCo, and that an employee of the contractor does not owe fiduciary duties to the client. In its complaint, Lepu said: “That CoDevCo was the contracting entity does not insulate Zhang from personal liability for duties she personally undertook and personally breached.” Taking the argument one step further, the defending party argued that the consulting agreement “does not create a fiduciary relationship even between CoDevCo and Lepu; instead, it identifies CoDevCo as an independent contractor retained to market Lepu’s business to potential western partners.” Although CoDevCo was Lepu’s exclusive business-development contractor, there were no terms stipulating that the consulting firm should serve only Lepu, Zhang’s lawyer noted. As to Lepu’s claims that Zhang misappropriated trade secrets, the defendant argued that Lepu authorized the use of the information so Zhang’s team could perform their service per the agreement. In a rebuttal filed on Sept. 11, Lepu’s lawyer set out why they believe the Chinese biotech satisfied New York law’s misappropriation definition by alleging that the defendant used a trade secret “in breach of a duty or through improper means.” As an alternative to dismissing the suit, the defendant suggested the action should be stayed pending outcomes from the arbitration of a separate case in Singapore. While NewCo pioneer Zhang is defending her business arrangements, momentum behind the NewCo trend has continued unabated into 2026. Through August, Chinese biotech assets have spurred 15 NewCo deals this year, according to local trade publication PharmaDJ.
Trump Is Destroying Public Health. Democrats Need to Fight Back.
If they win in the midterms, the party must move quickly and aggressively to undo the harm Trump and his cronies have caused. It is truly difficult to keep up with the pace of OMB Director Russell Vou...
Trump Is Destroying Public Health. Democrats Need to Fight Back.
If they win in the midterms, the party must move quickly and aggressively to undo the harm Trump and his cronies have caused.
Falcons Shock Packers In Primetime!
The Atlanta Falcons stunned the Green Bay Packers on Thursday night, rolling to a 35-14 victory at Lambeau Field and handing Green Bay its second straight loss. The Packers came out quickly, with Jordan Love connecting with Christian Watson for an early touchdown. Atlanta answered through Bijan Robinson, who broke loose for a huge 55-yard…
How Ryan Richter sparked Philadelphia Union's stunning turnaround
By Charles Boehm“Richter’s at the wheel, at the wheel. Richter’s at the wheel!”Sports Illustrated Stadium emptied quickly after the Philadelphia Union’s 3-1 win over Red Bull New York on Aug...
More AI regulation ordered by Oregon governor
Kotek said Oregon must move more quickly to regulate advanced artificial intelligence amid growing warnings about its risks.
Scientific American Starts Sober but Quickly Relapses
A proposal by University of Washington planetary scientist David Catling addresses what origin-of-life researchers call the phosphate problem.
Broward Health North Unveils Dedicated Emergency Room CT Scanner and X-Ray Machine
Broward Health North unveiled a major investment in emergency care with a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating new CT scan and X-ray equipment located directly inside the emergency room. The new imaging technology is just steps from ER triage, allowing patients to receive critical scans quickly without leaving the ER to go to the hospital’s imaging center. […]
When what you see doesn’t make sense, your brain does something remarkable
The brain may have a built-in way to quickly settle disagreements between regions processing the same scene. Researchers found that matching signals between two visual areas lasted longer, while conflicting signals rapidly faded away. This “consensus building” mechanism could help explain how the brain turns many specialized inputs into one unified view of the world.
Kennesaw State researcher developing safer, more efficient computing systems for intelligent vehicles
Modern vehicles are becoming computers on wheels, powered by increasingly complex software and artificial intelligence. As those systems take on more responsibility, they must process information quickly and reliably enough to keep critical functions running safely. Kennesaw State University computer science researcher Kun Suo is working to improve how those systems operate through a $356,782 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant focused on developing more efficient and secure computing infrastructure for intelligent vehicles.
Puka Nacua Injury Update: Rams WR’s Week 3 Status Revealed
Puka Nacua missed Week 2 due to injury, and it might be a while before we see him on the field. Originally selected in the fifth round of the 2023 NFL Draft, the BYU product quickly became one of the biggest draft steals in recent memory. Developing an immediate connection with quarterback Matthew Stafford, the …
New emergency department screening helps UK HealthCare identify sepsis sooner
A new emergency department screening protocol at UK HealthCare is helping care teams identify sepsis earlier and begin treatment more quickly, improving care for a life-threatening condition where every minute matters.
Political yard signs still play a role in a digital campaign era
Political yard signs remain part of local and statewide elections even as campaigns increasingly use social media to spread their messages quickly and cheaply.
New Jersey Community Colleges Offer Hands-On Data Science, AI Training
As employers seek workers who can effectively use data science and artificial intelligence, the County College of Morris and Camden County College are working to train students quickly and strategically.
Political shifts may shape how quickly Germany adopts electric cars and solar power
A new study conducted by the Climate Action Research Lab (CARL) at the University of Freiburg finds that electric cars and photovoltaic systems are less widespread on average in municipalities with strong ...
Penguins’ lineup battle temperature check
A lot can change quickly for the picture of building the NHL roster. Take a look at the last 48 hours, where Blake Lizotte was announced as being out on a week-to-week basis, and Ben Kindel got injured during the preseason game with a day-to-day designation. Add in more injuries to Ville Koivunen and Justin […]
Googlebook Reactions: Who Are These $899+ Laptops For?
Google unveiled its first wave of Googlebook laptops this week. The pricing surprised a few people, with the laptops starting at $899 and quickly jumping over $1,000 for some models. We have full Googlebook details here if you missed it, but essentially, they are designed to be perfect pairings with your Android phone. If you’re...
The Walmart GeForce Week Sale Has Black Friday Worthy Gaming PC Deals, But They're Selling Out Quickly
The best prices I've seen all year on prebuilt gaming PCs with RTX 5060 to 5090.
Trump-backed Senate candidate says 'Groceries cost too much,' calls for Iran war to 'end quickly'
Trump-backed Michigan Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers declared in a video that "Groceries cost too much" and the Iran war "needs to end, and end quickly."
Bryson’s story: Penn State Health delivers coordinated care for Lancaster family
After newborn Bryson Geiss was transferred to Penn State Health Golisano Children’s Hospital for specialized NICU care, he recovered quickly and went home with his family just two days later.
What CDC's new teen health survey shows, and what it skips
Teen suicide risk hit a 10-year low in 2025. Guns, sexual violence, and self-harm. Where are the 2025 data on transgender teens? Missing data changes public health policy. Teen suicide risk hit a 10-year low in 2025. CDC asked more than 10,000 high school students over 100 questions in spring 2025. Yesterday, it published a report covering a fraction of them. The report focsed on five areas: diet, physical activity, sleep, digital behaviors, and mental health, reflecting the priorities of the Make America Healthy Again movement. There was good news. Fewer teens seriously considered suicide in 2025 than in any survey year since 2015: 14%, down from 20% in 2023. Sadness fell. Underlying Conditions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Sports participation, which dipped to 49% in 2021, is back to its 2015 level of 58%. Daily PE fell from 27% to 20% in two years, while fewer students eat breakfast daily than a decade ago. Guns, sexual violence, and self-harm. The questionnaire is public, and it goes well beyond those five areas. Students answered questions about sexual violence, self-harm, and whether they got help when they felt sad or anxious. They said how quickly they could get a loaded gun. They reported whether food ran out at home and whether they felt close to people at school. There were questions about sexual identity, including whether they were transgender. The report did not publish any of the answers students gave to those questions. CDC posts the raw survey data online, so anyone can see what the report left out. The report doesn’t cover the health of sexual minority students. Among students who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning, or another non-straight identity, persistent sadness fell from 66% to 57% between 2023 and 2025. Serious thoughts of suicide fell from 41% to 30%. Those drops were bigger than the ones among straight students, although the gap remains wide: 28% of straight students reported persistent sadness, about half the rate of LGBQ+ students. About 1 in 7 girls reported sexual violence in the past year. One in 6 students hurt themselves on purpose. Among students who needed help for sadness or anxiety, half rarely or never got it. And among students who had seriously considered suicide, 43% said they could get a loaded gun without an adult’s permission. One protective factor rose sharply. In 2023, 55% of students said they felt close to people at their school; in 2025, 63% did. CDC’s earlier research ties that kind of connection to better mental health. Where are the 2025 data on transgender teens? In 2023, CDC's national survey asked high school students, for the first time, whether they were transgender. Their answers are the only nationally representative data on transgender teens, and their mental health is by far the worst of any demographic. That year, 71% of transgender students reported persistent sadness, 54% seriously considered suicide, and 26% attempted it, compared with 38%, 18%, and 8% of cisgender students. But we don’t have 2025 data. The timing matters because students took the survey in spring 2025, as federal policy toward transgender youth shifted. On January 28th, an executive order directed agencies to end federal support for gender-affirming care for people under 19, and several hospitals paused that care within days. In February, the CDC said it would no longer process transgender identity data. Later in 2025, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and HHS ended the 988 Lifeline’s dedicated line for LGBTQ+ youth. Researchers disagree about how much state policy shapes trans teens’ mental health. A 2024 Trevor Project study estimated that anti-trans laws increased suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth. Critics dispute its methods and its estimates. The 2025 survey could have added national evidence to that fight. CDC collected the data but hasn’t publicly released it. Missing data changes public health policy. Surveillance works as a feedback loop. It can show officials whether their policies help or hurt. The CDC didn’t provide data on the students most exposed to transgender policy shifts. The report kept measures that frame health as personal choice, like fruit, breakfast, and sports. It left out measures that track policy, like gun access, mental healthcare, food at home, and school climate, all of which respond to what legislators and agencies decide. HHS did not respond to questions that I sent on September 21st.
iOS 27 adds convenient new iPhone feature you’ll use all the time
One of my favorite iOS 27 features is a convenient addition for quickly pasting items from the iPhone clipboard. Here’s how it works.
Jiang Feng: The Unravelling of German & European Politics
A state election in eastern Germany has become a revealing test of the changing political landscapes of Germany and Europe, writes Jiang Feng, Professor and Chairman of the Council of the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies (SAGGAS) at Shanghai International Studies University. His analysis follows the decisive victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) (which has been classified as right-wing extremist by German authorities)in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, in which it finished far ahead of its mainstream rivals. Jiang previously served as Minister-Counsellor at the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. The following article was published on 8 September 2026 on huanqiu.com, the online platform of the Global Times. On 6 September, the results of the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, were announced. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), classified as far-right by German authorities, made history by becoming the largest party in the state parliament, winning 43.8 per cent of the vote — twice its share in the previous election. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had governed the state continuously for 24 years, won just 17.2 per cent, its worst result ever in Saxony-Anhalt. On the night the results were announced, the atmosphere at the CDU gathering was unusually calm. There was neither shock nor argument, as if the defeat had long been expected. Several veteran party members who had spent years working in the state government said: “Defeat is not a bad thing. It is time to make changes.” This state election has not only upended Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape, but also laid bare the deep tensions between Germany’s traditional party structure and model of governance, on the one hand, and an increasingly polarised society on the other. Its repercussions are already being felt at the federal level, making Saxony-Anhalt a useful case study of the broader trend towards political polarisation and realignment in Europe. Governing Difficulties after Electoral Victory The most immediate consequence of the election is a historic setback for the mainstream party order that took shape in post-war Germany. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has leapt from a peripheral party to the largest political force in the state. Its electoral base has expanded beyond the traditional category of “marginal protest voters” to take on the characteristics of a cross-class coalition. The party has not only consolidated its support in rural areas, but also attracted many middle-class voters and even members of the social elite with stable jobs, their own homes, and substantial incomes. It has thus evolved from a “protest party” into one with the potential to govern. Despite its commanding lead in the vote, however, the AfD faces an institutional obstacle to governing the state: the mainstream parties’ long-standing “firewall” against it. Neither of the two potential routes to forming a government appears likely to break the current political deadlock. The first would be a coalition of establishment parties, led by the CDU and bringing together the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party (Die Linke) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in a cross-camp government. In terms of parliamentary arithmetic, such a coalition could prevent the AfD from forming a government and preserve the outward stability of the traditional political order. Yet these parties are fundamentally divided over key issues including immigration, the energy transition, economic management, and cultural and education policy. Coalition negotiations would therefore be extremely difficult, and even if a government could be formed, it would most likely prove short-lived. More importantly, an alliance of establishment parties aimed at keeping the largest party out of government would play directly into the AfD’s narrative that “political elites are suppressing public opinion”. It could deepen perceptions of political unfairness, further strengthening the AfD’s political capital, and creating a dynamic in which “the more it is suppressed, the more people vote for it”. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate for state premier, has said that if efforts to form a government fail because other parties refuse to cooperate, the AfD will push for a fresh election, which he believes could deliver the party an absolute majority of seats. This points to more intense political battles ahead. The second option would be a coalition between the AfD and the BSW. Together, the two parties would command a simple majority in parliament, making this, on paper, the quickest route to forming a government. The BSW is the only elected party that has not ruled out cooperation with the AfD, and the two parties share some common ground, including on policy towards Russia. There is therefore a degree of political basis for cooperation. Were such a coalition to materialise, Germany would see its first state government jointly formed by a party defined as far-right and one with a far-left background, creating what might be called a “bipolar anti-establishment alliance”. Such an outcome would fundamentally break with the ideological boundaries of post-war German party politics. It is worth noting that even if the AfD ultimately fails to enter the state government, its roughly 47 per cent share of parliamentary seats would give it a powerful blocking minority. Without its consent, major decisions requiring a two-thirds majority — including constitutional amendments, significant budgetary adjustments, and state-level institutional reforms — would be extremely difficult to pass. Therefore, whoever ultimately forms the government, the AfD will be an unavoidable force in Saxony-Anhalt politics, with a direct influence on the state’s legislative process. Systemic Failures in Germany’s Governance Model The Saxony-Anhalt election result reflects a systemic failure of Germany’s post-war mainstream-party model of governance to adapt to rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions. It stems from multiple, mutually reinforcing structural tensions and highlights the existing political system’s difficulty in adapting to “an increasingly polarised society First, collective anxiety has replaced individual material hardship as a central driver of political mobilisation. The rise of the AfD can no longer be explained simply by poverty or social marginalisation. Its increasingly cross-class electoral base suggests that what is driving voters towards the party is, above all, concern about the broader direction of society. This anxiety about the future of the political community goes beyond individual gains and losses. In political discourse, economic anxiety has become closely intertwined with immigration, while immigration and refugee issues are, in essence, questions of social fairness. This perception turns conflicts over the distribution of social resources into negative assessments of governing parties, providing a broad social basis for far-right political narratives. Second, regional disparities and East German identity have undermined the strategy of addressing eastern Germany’s structural challenges at the regional level. More than three decades after German reunification, eastern states such as Saxony-Anhalt have experienced periods of economic growth, but their underlying economic structures remain weak, and household incomes and wealth remain significantly below those in western Germany. At the same time, they continue to face population outflow, an ageing population, labour shortages, and other structural challenges. At a deeper level, historical experiences — including the collapse of the former East German economic system, mass unemployment during the transition, and the westward shift of decision-making power over major issues — have left some residents with a sense of being “second-class citizens” and of being excluded. For years, the German government treated the “syndrome” of reunification as a regional problem to be gradually addressed at the local level. That approach is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as regional development disparities emerge as a core structural factor shaping national politics. Third, the erosion of institutional trust is perhaps the most decisive factor. AfD supporters tend to distrust establishment institutions, including parliament, government, and the mainstream media. Their concerns about economic security, pensions, and social fairness are significantly greater than the social average. Increasingly, their support for the AfD reflects not an expectation that the existing system can be improved, but a search for an alternative to the current political order. Such a systemic deficit of trust will be extremely difficult for the traditional parties to repair in the short term. Fourth, a generational shift in political mobilisation has amplified political polarisation. Unlike traditional parties, which rely heavily on offline rallies and mainstream media coverage, the AfD has developed a social-media mobilisation strategy built around “raising an issue — identifying who is responsible — offering a simplified solution — building a shared identity”. It turns complex social tensions into concise political narratives, rapidly channelling public sentiment into political support. The contrast on the eve of the election was particularly telling. The establishment parties, together with trade unions and churches, organised an offline march attended by more than 10,000 people, but its reach was largely confined to those present and to traditional media coverage. The AfD held a much smaller indoor event, yet livestreaming on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms, combined with the involvement of online influencers, gave it a reach and mobilising capacity far beyond that of the march. The contrast illustrates how the traditional parties’ methods of political mobilisation are increasingly struggling to keep pace with a political environment transformed by changes in media technology. A Microcosm of Structural Political Change in Europe The shockwaves from the Saxony-Anhalt election quickly travelled beyond the state to the federal level. Calls for political accountability followed immediately after the results were announced. The governing CDU and SPD are now under enormous pressure, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil face an unprecedented test. Political polarisation in Germany is no longer simply a regional phenomenon. The post-war model of multiparty government by establishment parties is breaking down and being reshaped. Viewed in a broader European context, the Saxony-Anhalt election is part of a continent-wide wave of party polarisation, mainstream-party decline, and rising right-wing forces. Far from an isolated phenomenon, it is a microcosm of the structural political changes unfolding across Europe. Weak economic growth, cultural tensions over immigration, and declining trust in institutions are fuelling the rise of right-wing forces in several countries, challenging the liberal internationalist order established in post-war Europe. As a core member state of the European Union, Germany’s ability to adapt its political system and the direction of its politics will have profound implications for both European integration and the evolution of the international order. Subscribe [ Pekingnology China’s Germany watchers take stock of Berlin’s uneasy turn On 7 December 2025, nearly 50 Chinese scholars and policy researchers gathered in Beijing for the 2025年德国形势年终研讨会 “2025 Year-End Seminar on the Situation in Germany… Read more 9 months ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · YIRUI LI and Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.pekingnology.com/p/chinas-germany-watchers-take-stock?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1151841) [ Jiang Feng on Germany's 2025 and beyond: no easy exit ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond) Yirui LI and Yuxuan JIA · Jan 24 The following is an op-ed by Jiang Feng, published on 29 December 2025 at Shanghai Observer 上观新闻, the digital platform of Jiefang Daily, the official newspaper of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). [ Read full story ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond)
GameStop's Shocking 'Pokémon' 30th Anniversary TCG Prices Have Been Quietly Redeemed
The retailer may be the cheapest way to buy an ETB quickly.
Florida HC Jon Sumrall Shuts Down Ole Miss Hype Quickly
Despite a surprising betting line favoring the Gators, coach Jon Sumrall rejects the underdog narrative, demanding disciplined play to upset the playoff-tested Rebels in Gainesville this Saturday.
Sauce Gardner Injury Update Isn’t Best News For Colts
The Indianapolis Colts had already lost Alec Pierce to a heel injury on Sunday Night Football. They really didn’t need to see anyone else go down. That’s when Sauce Gardner got hurt, though — with the NBC broadcast quickly going to commercial as Mike Tirico informed viewers that Gardner had an injury. It quickly created […] The post Sauce Gardner Injury Update Isn’t Best News For Colts appeared first on HEAVY.
Bucs Rookie LB Trotter Continues Hot Start to NFL Career
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have quickly found their top linebacker of the future in Josiah Trotter, who has arguably been the best player on the team through two weeks.
Bucs Rookie LB Trotter Continues Hot Start to NFL Career
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have quickly found their top linebacker of the future in Josiah Trotter, who has arguably been the best player on the team through two weeks.
Teqball gets its kicks with a quick premier at the Asian Games.
You had to move quickly to see teqball, one of the new sports on view at the Asian Games
In January 2026, researchers completed a drilling project beneath 1,716 feet of ice in West Antarctica, recovering evidence of an ocean that once lay open to sunlight
The discovery rewrites Antarctica's climate history—and raises urgent questions about how quickly ice sheets can collapse.
Chicago Bulls Guard Expected to "Dominate" Trade Conversations
A newly signed veteran could quickly become one of the league’s most closely watched trade candidates, though the Chicago Bulls' emerging young core may give the team reason to keep him.
A Hyrox Competition Incident Went Viral. Here’s the Business Lesson
A PR crisis can escalate quickly, but a fast, responsible response can protect your reputation and turn a mistake into a lesson.
Science Vs on the 49ers Substation: Anatomy of a Hatchet Job
In August, Pablo Torre Finds Out and Science Vs released an episode about my theory that electromagnetic fields from the electrical substation beside the 49ers facility may be contributing to the team’s run of soft-tissue injuries. As the originator of the theory, I was also a subject of the episode. I sat was interviewed by Wendy Zukerman and Rose Rimler of Sciene Vs. I sent them research, connected them with scientists, and spent hours digging through the City of Santa Clara’s and Silicon Valley Power’s records to help clarify critical details. Both Wendy and Rose came off as affable and professional, showing curiosity during the interviews, with Wendy going out of her way to question the “conspiracy theory” framing itself. Then they titled the episode We Solve the 49ers Viral Conspiracy Theory. I was familiar enough with their catalog that I never expected them to agree with my theory, but I did expect them to give it a fair hearing and to deliver their findings honestly. On both counts they came up short. They were not directly dishonest in anything they said, but rather in what they left out, in how what remained was cut, and in the picture painted by those two things in combination. They asked me to recorded the interview on my phone for better audio quality, and I held on to my copy for reference later. That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Here is the raw audio of my first interview, unedited*. Only my side was recorded, so their questions aren’t on it, but you can generally infer them from the answers, and every claim I make below about what I said can be checked against my statements in this clip. (Note: Wendy had connection trouble at the beginning of the interview and was cutting in and out, which accounts for the false starts.) 0:00 -1:19:13 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Science Vs is a fun show. It is pitched at roughly a high-school understanding of science, for an audience that is skeptical, Snopes-oriented, and worried about misinformation. Take a claim circulating online, interview a supporter of the claim, interview consensus scientists, and then tell people which side of the line it lands on. I have listened to their episodes on raw milk, seed oils, 5G and other contested issues in the wellness space. I have problems with all of them, but each at least made an honest attempt to represent the actual range of scientific opinion by talking to credentialed scientists with differing perspectives. Dissenting researchers were heard from, answered, and often given a chance to respond. This episode did not do that. This article is not a relitigation of the science. I have written extensively about that already. This post is for the record. It is simply an accounting of what was wrong with their episode. Contents Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? — the clearest single example of getting something objectively wrong For the record — a high-level overview of all of the problems with their investigation Draw your own conclusions — why they had to make this episode at all What they left out about childhood leukemia — the exposure threshold, and playing games with statistics to minimize sick children What they left out about the mechanism — the body of literature they refused to cover, and evidence for the mechanism used against it The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air — four credential scientists who support myhe theory, recorded and cut, or not even called How they misrepresented me and my case — an answer severed from its question, and three telling edits How you would actually study the injuries — it doesn’t actually matter which team is the most injured, overall The theory: magnetic fields, oxidative stress, and collagen Since the episode never states my theory, here it is below. Those who are familiar with my work can skip this section. Electrical equipment produces magnetic fields, and those fields induce faint electrical currents in anything that passes through them, including people. My argument goes further than induced current. Mitochondria — the structures that generate a cell’s energy — run on continuous flows of electrons and protons, and those flows carry faint electromagnetic fields of their own. Maxwell’s principle of superposition shows that when two fields share the same space, they add together. An external field does not need to be strong to alter an internal field, it only needs to be present. The electron transport chain inside the mitochondria leaks a small fraction of its electrons by design, and those become reactive oxygen species — free radicals, which healthy cells use as signals. External magnetic fields cause the rate of leakage to change, increasing free radicals. When free radicals accumulate faster than the cell’s antioxidant systems can clear them, the result is oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a recognized driver of chronic illness, including cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, diabetes and cancer, and it is in every medical school curriculum. One of its ordinary effects in connective tissue is that it switches on matrix metalloproteinases — MMPs, the enzymes that break collagen apart — while suppressing new collagen synthesis. Tendons are made of collagen. An athlete loading his soft tissue heavily six days a week is already creating oxidative stress in the tendons, so the addition of magnetic field exposure compounds the damage and inhibits repair, making him more susceptible to injury when enormous force lands on a tendon in a fraction of a second. That is the theory. We know that EMF causes oxidative stress, and we know that oxidative stress degrades collagen. The only thing missing is a study showing that direct connection. I have never claimed certainty that the substation is contributing to the elevated injury rate. I do believe it is likely, and I believe it warrants caution, and that a revenue machine like a major NFL team can easily afford to remove the exposure out of precaution. Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? Here is the clearest single instance of the problem with this episode. It requires no knowledge of electromagnetic fields at all. This story first came to me through Jon Feliciano, a former 49er, in an interview on Willard & Dibs on 95.7 The Game. Asked about why the 49ers are always injured, he said players used to joke that it was the power plant behind the practice fields. Wendy Zukerman corrects him on air. “It’s important to say that it’s not a power plant near the 49ers site.” Torre then asks her to explain the difference between a substation and a power plant. Her answer: a power plant generates electricity and transmits it to a substation, which converts the voltage into something your house can use and sends it on to your home or your business. There are two problems with that. The first is that there is a power plant on that site. The Gianera Generating Station is a natural-gas-fired peaker plant owned by Silicon Valley Power, and it has been there since 1986. I have published aerial photographs of the location from 1987 in which the gas plant is the only thing standing, before the practice facility was even there. I even mentioned the gas plant in my first interview. (Feliciano has since gone on record about this issue, and it is clear he had the substation in mind rather than the gas plant.) The second is that her definition describes a distribution substation, and the facility beside the 49ers is not that. It is the Northern Receiving Station, which takes in bulk power from outside the city’s grid and delivers it to distribution substations. Silicon Valley Power’s own map distinguishes receiving stations from substations, and Rose Rimler even reads the label out loud in the episode when she walks through that map on air. A few minutes before the map segment, Zukerman tells Torre: “like I said, we fact check everything.” Well, maybe not everything. I made a mistake On the morning of July 6th, at 10:20, I sent Rose and Wendy two studies. During the interview I had been asked which human studies show oxidative stress from electromagnetic fields, and I had not been able to name one on the spot. Rose emailed asking for the studies, I quickly searched for a couple, and I wrote that I thought these were the most relevant from that search. Unfortunately, I was busy and did not read either one closely at first. I picked them because they were topically relevant — one on substation workers, one on power plant workers. Neither were great studies, and their problems go past the ones raised in the episode. That was careless on my part. There is context that did not make the episode, though. Before that email I had been on a Zoom call with Rose talking about EMF and oxidative stress, and I pointed her to Dr. Henry Lai at the University of Washington, who has spent years aggregating the literature on this question. His tallies show that roughly 90% of studies since the late 1990s find oxidative effects from electromagnetic field exposure — hundreds of studies, systematically counted. Rose told me she was already aware of his work. So when she asked for studies, I understood her to have the aggregate view already and that she would report anything within that context. Not reading those two carefully was still a mistake, but the larger mistake was assuming the episode would be based on a thorough review of the actual body of literature, rather than on whatever I happened to send that morning. The second email At 1:49 that same afternoon — three hours and twenty-nine minutes after the first — I sent them a second email that I had been preparing for a while. It was a structured document in six numbered sections, written in response to a request they had made two weeks earlier, laying out my entire argument with citations attached to every link in the chain. The episode aired on August 13th, five weeks later, and not a single item from the second email is in it. Here is how it opens: The full email is included at the bottom of this post in Appendix B. Nearly 1,500 words in total. It contains two named mechanisms with the physics behind them. Occupational studies in humans. The literature on oxidative stress and collagen. A section addressing the strongest counter-evidence against my own theory, which I raised myself. And a closing section stating plainly what the theory cannot yet show. My entire argument, in writing, with detailed citations for every claim, provided to them five weeks before broadcast, and none of it made it into the episode. That is the single largest omission, but it is not an isolated one. The whole episode is riddled with similar problems, and the conclusion they came to is not merely a difference of opinion about the scientific evidence. Through omission and through strategic editing, Science Vs misinformed its audience — about what the evidence shows, about what I argued, and about who they spoke to. That is a notable outcome for a show whose stated purpose is correcting misinformation. For the record I am not going to tell you that Science Vs set out to discredit me, or that they had come to their conclusion before they reported the story, or that they used misleading editing to make me look like a man retreating from his own theory. I cannot know what was in anyone’s head, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, either. What I can tell you is what is on the record. They asked me for evidence and aired the weakest thing I sent. They interviewed three scientists who supported my theory and aired none of them. They discussed childhood leukemia without ever saying the exposure level at which it appears. And they took an answer I gave weeks before Ken Karipidis, the one EMF scientist who was put on air, was interviewed, and placed it directly after his critique, where it comes off as a major concession. A friend of mine who has worked as a journalist for thirty years read that last one and called it sleazy. I agree with her. Those are just the four issues that are impossible to defend as pure editorial decision, but they are not the only issues. The most glaring issues stem from what they left out: The exposure level at which the childhood leukemia association actually appears — three to four milligauss, a number the episode never states despite it being much lower than what I measured. The mechanism itself: The episode gets as far as “oxidative stress could weaken collagen,” which leaves it sounding like speculation, rather than a known pathway. The second email, and all the studies in it. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill, whose work my proposed mechanism rests on, whose contact details I supplied, and who was never called. Dr. Beatrice Golomb at UC San Diego, who runs a research group on oxidative stress and mitochondrial function and has specific expdertice in collagen, interviewed and not aired. Dr. David Carpenter at Albany, the most prominent academic voice on the harm from magnetic field exposure, interviewed and not aired. Dr. Joel Moskowitz at Berkeley, interviewed and not even credited. The specific, testable condition I put in writing that would make me abandon the theory. My own unprompted statement of the theory’s evidentiary gap. My caveats about my own measurements. My ranking of EMF as one factor among several rather than the only one. The new equipment installed at those facilities between 2010 and 2014, and the sharp rise in system load from 2013 onward. But that is not all. What they kept, they selectively edited to serve a narrative that was not served by the raw transcripts of the interviews. A description of thousands of commercial routers in a workplace, reduced to the Wi-Fi in your house. My own acknowledgment, multiple times, that "I'm not a scientist" clipped in an episode that spends considerable energy pointing out that I am not a scientist. And a qualification I volunteered about my own measurements, cut from my answer and delivered later by their EMF expert as a correction. Together their edit produce a portrait of a wellness guy with Wi-Fi phobia and two bad studies, backing away from his theory the moment a “real” scientist looked at it. A practice facility where nothing changed because no new substation was built. Injuries written off as random because the 49ers were not quite the single most injured team in the league over the period in question. That portrait is false even though almost no individual statement made in the episode is. Draw your own conclusions At the top of the episode, Pablo Torre says his show had been flooded with requests to investigate the substation — that it was the thing they were asked to look into over and over again. Neither show went hunting for this story. It arrived from their own audience, in volume, and it could not be waved off. A thread I posted on X reached twenty-two million people. A guy with a gaussmeter and a brand-new Substack obligated a Pultizer prize winning program to spend an hour on a question about player health, that is considered fringe enough that most media operations won’t touch it. Pablo Torre Finds Out could not ignore it. So Science Vs came in and ran a “debunking” operation instead of an investigation. Everything below is what had to be left on the cutting room floor to deliver the “debunking”. They could not ignore it. So they tried debunked it instead. The demand was strong enough to force an episode, and since the episodes release the 49ers have sustained more injuries, including season ending ones, and interest has only grown. Demand from fans and playets is strong enough to force a better investigation from someone else. An omission is not a lie until you find out what was omitted. What follows is the detailed record so you can see the full picture. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine. I am going to keep publishing. A note about Pablo Torre Finds Out After the episode aired I posted publicly, calling out Pablo Torre Finds Out for concerns I had about the integrity of their investigation, and about an interview directly with Pablo Torre which had been offered but never happened. I have since spoken with a producer at PTFO. The offer had rested on a misunderstanding about where things stood between us, and it fell away as the Science Vs part of the production widened past the science. He apologized for the miscommunication and I accepted. The producer also confirmed to me that they did essentially hand off the entire investigation to Science Vs for narrative purposes — so Pablo would be genuinely curious or potentially surprised by their findings — while still taking responsibility for what went out under their name. I appreciated the candor and the accountability, and I am comfortable with where we left things. So this post is not about PTFO. My disagreement is with Science Vs. What they left out about childhood leukemia Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They gave no number at all. 1. They built an EMF ruler, then discussed childhood cancer without it. The sequence on air went like this: First I measured almost 9 mG, then I measured up to 50 milligauss. Torre reacts with concern — “that sounds high.” Cut to Karipidis: the public limit is 2,000 milligauss. Torre reacts again — “What happens at 2,000?” Karipidis explains that nothing happens at 2,000, that safety factors are built in. Then: at more than 50,000 milligauss you get flickers of light in the retina, and higher still, nerve stimulation. The listener now has a ruler (their ruler) to measure these numbers with. Fifty is nothing by their ruler. Then the episode turns to childhood leukemia and states, accurately, that there is a real association — but tellingly, they never give the exposure level at which that association appears. Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They conveniently left that out. The pooled analyses that produced the World Health Organization’s carcinogen classification found roughly a doubling of childhood leukemia risk above three to four milligauss. That is the number that belongs in that segment, and it is more than ten times below the reading that had just been dismissed as trivial. I gave them that number myself, on tape, in the interview. Describing my own threshold, I said my comfort level for long-term chronic exposure is three to four milligauss, but preferably one. 2. Six children in thirteen million. The episode reports that these fields might explain one to four percent of childhood leukemias, then reframes it as a German estimate of perhaps six cases among thirteen million children. Torre, to his credit, is uncomfortable. What never gets explained is why that number is small. Almost no children lives above three milligauss in Europe. Fewer than two children in a hundred, in the Italian data. So even if the risk to those children doubles, the number of additional cases across an entire country stays small — not because the hazard is small, but because hardly anyone is exposed to it. Count the whole population and the few who are exposed disappear. And the reason hardly anyone is exposed is that siting rules keep housing away from transmission lines. In Europe, at least. The Dutch government has a standing precautionary policy against building new homes in any zone where the annual average magnetic field exceeds 4 milligauss — the same number the episode never mentioned. Denmark and Norway treat 4 milligauss as the level that triggers a look at mitigation. That is five hundred times below the ICNIRP figure quoted on air. The United States has no federal equivalent. That is evidence of infrastructure siting policy working. It is not evidence that there is no hazard. It is evidence that we already act as though there is one. If you listen to the raw audio you will hear that my proposed solution is EMF exposure is to build better infrastructure. What they left out about the mechanism 3. They accused me of cherry-picking, and then cherry-picked themselves. On air, Zukerman tells Torre that people who worry about electromagnetic fields dismiss the studies showing null results and collect the ones showing harm, and that this is why you have to be careful not to cherry-pick. They had two papers I had rattled off in a hurry, and a second email containing a carefully chosen set. They ran the two weakest, graded them on air, and presented the result as the state of the evidence for not only my theory, but the whole question of oxidative stress from magnetic fields. That is cherry-picking from my emails. The bigger picture is what they did with the literature as a whole. Zukerman acknowledges it exists, dismisses it, and disposes of it in a single stroke. You can go online right now, she tells Torre, and find scores of studies showing these fields increase oxidative stress. The issue, she says, is that they are not studies in people. Many of them are in people. The occupational studies in my second email are in people. That email had been in her inbox for five weeks. She waved off the literature on a factual claim that the documents in her possession contradict. (I have written separately about the evidentiary standard at work here). The effect was that they essentially baited me: ask the subject to supply the evidence, take the weakest thing he sends, and let that stand as a proxy for the whole argument. Wendy has been doing this show for ten years and clearly knows how to extract what she needs for her desired narrative. 4. They presented the collagen-improvement research as a gotcha, but I had already addressed it. The episode treats the existence of studies showing that EMF can improve collagen as a surprise that undercuts me, but I had pre-emptively addressed that five weeks earlier in the email they ignored. Those studies use measured, high-intensity pulsed dosing. The mechanism by which they work is oxidative signalling. The cell reads a controlled rise in reactive oxygen species as a warning, upregulates its antioxidant defenses, mounts a repair response, and the therapy stops before the system is overwhelmed. The key point is that it induces an oxidative response, which means those studies are actually evidence for my proposed mechanism, not against it. A field that produces a therapeutic effect cannot be biologically inert (which is the implication when they say “Nothing happens at 2,000 milligauss). Chronic ambient exposure is the same pathway with no off switch, and it is most consequential during the evening and while sleeping, when the body is in repair mode and the exposure does not stop. Section 5 of my email is titled What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis. I raised the counter-evidence myself, explained why I did not think it refuted the theory, and wrote that I was disappointed the question had not come up in the interview. That is worth holding against the cherry-picking charge in the item above: the studies they presented as inconvenient for me were studies I had gone out of my way to put in front of them. 5. Section 1 of my email stated a critical argument that was never put to the expert directly responsible for it. My email says the exposure limits exist to prevent acute effects and do not address chronic exposure at all, and that my dispute is with the entire framework. Zukerman gestures at this once. After Karipidis gives the 2,000 milligauss figure, she tells Torre that I would object because those levels do not capture “more subtle effects.” That is not my argument, and “subtle” is doing a lot of work here. My argument is that the limits are built to prevent acute effects — nerves firing, muscles twitching, etc — and were not designed to address chronic exposure at all. In fact, ICNIRP’s own documents state as much themselves. Mine is a structural objection to what the standard measures, reduced as a concern about subtlety, it becomes a matter of degree, rather than a categorical difference. They interviewed Ken Karipidis, vice chair of ICNIRP — the body that writes those limits. He was asked what the limit is, but he was never asked how it applies to chronic exposure. The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air 6. They interviewed four officials of the standards body. The episode credits roughly a dozen researchers. Four of them are associated with ICNIRP. Ken Karipidis is the vice chair. Rodney Croft chaired ICNIRP from 2020 to 2024 and led the development of its current guidelines. Dan Baaken is ICNIRP’s scientific secretary. Frank de Vocht sits on the Main Commission. One of them speaks in the episode. Their institution’s position is more than adequately represented — the 2,000 milligauss figure, the safety factors, the assurance that nothing happens below the line. 7. The four who were left out. Dr. Beatrice Golomb is Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego — a physics undergraduate degree, a PhD in biology, an MD. She directs a research group whose stated focus is the relationship between oxidative stress, mitochondrial function and health. That is the mechanism the episode spent its first half dismissing. Her published work includes the fluoroquinolone case series behind the FDA’s black box warning on an antibiotic class that ruptures tendons, where the accepted mechanism is oxidative stress and mitochondrial toxicity — the back half of my chain, already on a drug label. She is in the credits. She is not in the episode. She has told me she finds my theory biologically plausible, and that she has a recording of her interview. Dr. David Carpenter directed the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany for decades and is the most prominent academic voice arguing these fields cause harm. Childhood leukemia is the reason these fields carry a WHO classification at all, and Carpenter is the person you call if you want that case made by someone who has spent a career on it. He is in the credits. He is not in the episode. He has told me that when he was interviewed they could not have been less interested in what he had to say. Dr. Joel Moskowitz directs the Center for Family and Community Health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He told me directly that they interviewed him and that he thought it went well. He does not appear in the episode, and unlike Golomb and Carpenter, he does not even appear in the credits. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill is the researcher whose work provides the foundation for the oxidative stress mechanism my theory rests on. I gave Rose his email address and phone number. He was never interviewed. They never even called him. 8. “He’s not a scientist.” The episode leans hard on the fact that I am not a credentialed scientist. Zukerman says it. Torre repeats it. “At all.” Having built a segment on that, they then left out the physicist-biologist-physician, the professor of public health, the director of a university environmental health institute, and the McGill researcher whose work the primary mechanism comes from. They spent the episode telling their audience I am not a scientist, and then kept four actual scientists who support the theory off because their argument does not survive otherwise. How they misrepresented me and my case 9. They played my words as a response to an interview I had never heard. Near the end of the hour, Zukerman says she went to me and told me the evidence was lacking. Then she plays me saying I am not wedded to it being an EMF, that I have staked my reputation on it needing more study, and that I am not certain of anything. That segment was placed immediately after Karipidis had finished taking the cherry-picked papers apart. It plays as a man folding under expert scrutiny. Commenters have used it against me since, but it is incorrect. Here is the sequence as it happened. I was interviewed. Karipidis was interviewed weeks later. I was never told what he said, or even who he was. I was never asked to respond to it. I did not know his name until the episode aired. That is not a simple editing decision. That is a quote from one interview, moved to follow a critique from a different interview it was not a response to, so that it would land as a concession. A friend of mine who has spent thirty years as a journalist read that sequence and called it sleazy. She is right. The full passage is reproduced in Appendix A, and it is worth reading. What airs is the preamble. Four paragraphs later I say “to directly answer your question” — and that answer, about what would change my mind if the team relocated, is not in the episode. Neither is the sentence two paragraphs on, where I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. I will say the underlying point again, though, because I meant it and I still do. I am not wedded to my theory that magnetic fields from the substation are contributing to the 49ers injuries. I could be wrong. What I am wedded to is the process of scientific inquiry, and the fact that we should be cautious around these exposures and we need more independently funded studies. 10. Three telling edits. They cut “I’m not a scientist” mid-sentence. What I said: “...and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS...” What aired: “...and that I am not certain of anything. I’m not.” The clip ends on the first two words of the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist, in an episode that spends considerable energy establishing that I am not a scientist. The full sequence is in Appendix A. They cut my own description of my work. Asked what I do, I said I run a wellness business, that I am focused on writing software to help people navigate environmental stressors, that environmental health is my focus, and that I also do independent journalism and research. What aired is the wellness business and the environmental health, with the software and the journalism removed from my own answer. The software engineering does come up later — narrated by them, as a hacker who grew up to write firmware — but my current work, in my own words, arrives as “wellness guy.” Thousands of commercial routers became home Wi-Fi. What I described: working at a wireless networking company surrounded by thousands of Wi-Fi routers, and a stress-induced health collapse afterward that working in that environment contributed to. What aired: Wi-Fi, the kind you have at home — reinforced by a clip of Christian McCaffrey talking about turning his router off at night. Three cuts, and every one of them makes me seem less credible. That is not a coincidence. 11. I gave them my own caveats and the test that would disprove me. In the first email I wrote that a well-designed chronic, ambient-level exposure study in tendon showing no collagen degradation, run over many months, would undercut my confidence in the theory. That is a specific, testable condition, stated in advance and in writing. There was a second interview, weeks later, which was not used in the episode, but in that I asked again for the falsification criterion to be included. What the episode presents instead is a man saying “we need more study,” which reads as a hedge, an open-ended request for the benefit of the doubt. It is the opposite of a hedge. Section 6 of my second email says, unprompted, that as far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human in vivo or in human tendon in a lab. I wrote that because it is true and because it is the first thing anyone should check. Under their standard it becomes the hinge of the entire first half, framed as something they had to surface without my cooperation. I had handed it to them five weeks earlier. And in the interview I said that my 25 to 50 milligauss readings were taken at knee level, and that these fields attenuate quickly, so by the time it reaches your head it is not that high anymore. That did not air either. The qualification arrives later, from Karipidis, as a correction. How you would actually study the injuries 12. They measured the wrong thing. The episode spends its final act on whether the 49ers are the most injured team in the NFL, finds no clean ranking, and lands on “injuries are random”. That is the wrong test. You would define the exposure — measured field levels at the facility — and the outcome narrowly: soft-tissue injuries, not a single MSK injury count that a broken finger and a ruptured Achilles both land in. Then you would compare the 49ers to themselves before and after the exposure changed, and compare that change against every other team over the same window. That controls for league-wide shifts in rules, turf and training load. It is a difference-in-differences design, and it is standard. I sent them that argument on July 28th, in writing, along with the fact that in eleven of the past twelve seasons the 49ers had finished top ten in Adjusted Games Lost. And by the episode’s own reporting, the 49ers are second in games lost to injury over the past decade, with FTN’s Aaron Schatz confirming that once you adjust for starters they come out second worst in the league — after having been one of the healthiest teams for years before that. A finding like that is where an investigation starts, not where it stops. 13. I did a lot of substation research for the episode that was never aired. I had reported that the substation next to the facility was expanded in 2014. That was wrong, and Rose Rimler and I sorted it out together. They gave me credit on air, which I appreciated, but framed it as a concession on my part to something they had found. In fact I had been investigating it myself, was uncertain before they asked, but was waiting for clarification from Silicon Valley Power. The uncertainty centered around a substation named “Esparanca” that was proposed right behind the facilities as part of the stadium construction, but now appears to never have been built. I spent days in Silicon Valley Power’s records, and did eventually reach Silicon Valley Power for confirmation and indentified the mistake myself. I also gave them highly detailed documents on what we do know about those facilities: new equipment installed between 2010 and 2014, and load growth across the system with an inflection around 2013–2014, with the Northern Receiving Station carrying the highest capacity in the system and sitting closest to the data center corridor. None of that is in the episode. I have a separate piece about it coming out soon. *I cut 2 seconds from the raw audio to remove personal information that had no connection to anything in the episode. Appendix A: the passage the clip was taken from This is the sequence from my first interview, in full. The episode uses one fragment of it. It’s tricky because my understanding is that there’s something like a 15-year half-life on collagen remodeling issues. They’re going to get a new crop of players. What I really need, though, is for the injuries to be broken down so we can see the soft tissue injuries. Right now, they’re categorized as MSK injuries, but let’s say we can actually identify them more specifically. Is that right? He was able to do that? Oh, cool. I wasn’t able to find that information. Interesting — I didn’t know that data existed. I tried so hard to get it, and I didn’t know it was available. Maybe you could connect me with that person. That would be amazing. I’m not wedded to it being an EMF, honestly. I’m not. I would say that, to a certain extent, I’ve staked my reputation on the fact that it needs more study. It’s important to look into it, and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a tendon hypermobility issue. This condition is documented to be partially caused by oxidative stress. I’ve worked with them to mitigate their EMF exposure and have seen people improve. I think it’s a bigger story. In a way, the 49ers represent an occupational cluster with specific exposure risks. If someone would conduct a study on this, I believe we could learn a lot. Perhaps we would discover that it’s like, okay, maybe it’s 10% of the problem. I don’t know the exact number, but I think either way, conducting the study would provide valuable insights. To directly answer your question, it’s challenging for me because it’s part of a bigger story. If the 49ers move and stop having injuries, I might conclude that it was related to the substation. However, if they move and still experience injuries, I would want to analyze the nature of those injuries. Are they primarily soft tissue injuries? I don’t think it’s necessarily a case closed, but the story might lose traction at that point regardless. Three things are worth noting. The aired fragment stops immediately before the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist — the cut described in item 10. It also stops four paragraphs before the words “to directly answer your question.” What the episode plays is the throat-clearing. The actual answer, about what would change my mind, never airs. And two paragraphs in, I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. That is the ranking the episode says I never gave. Appendix B: the full email, July 6th, 1:39 PM Hi Rose, You asked me to send you some studies a couple of weeks ago. I apologize for the delay. I have been incredibly busy. I also wanted to give you a chance to dig in yourself, and get your own perspective before I influenced you too much with mine. That said, I do want to make sure that the actual argument is abundantly clear, so here it is! One note before I begin, there are really two separate questions here: Does the substation cause the soft-tissue injuries? That was my specific claim, and what the podcast is about. Is the theory biologically sound? Can 50/60 Hz fields at these levels do anything biological below the safety limits? Question two is why people have been calling me a conspiracy theorist. The regulatory and advisory bodies (ICNIRP, etc) maintain that anything below their exposure limits is biologically inert, and that position is broadly accepted within the mainstream, but the actual science paints a different picture. To defend my theory I’ve had to defend a much larger claim: that the advisory bodies have the biology wrong. I can’t honestly answer question 1 without first addressing that. Here’s is a simplified outline of my theory, with links to studies: 1. Advisory body thresholds for biological effects The ELF magnetic-field limits (ICNIRP’s ~2,000 mG public / 10,000 mG occupational) exist to prevent acute effects from exposure. If a magnetic field is strong enough, it makes nerves fire and muscles contract. Muscles twitch. You can see faint flashes of light in your vision. People can even feel tingling or even a shock. That happens due to Faraday’s law, which states that a time-varying magnetic field induces an electric field inside the body via the creation of Eddy currents.The standards assume that those currents do nothing below the twitch threshold. They do not consider chronic effects at all. My argument is that they are biologically active and do have chronic effects. 2. There are multipe ELF-EMF mechanisms for inducing oxidative stress. This is basic biophysics. Below are the two primary mechanisms. Simplest first. Dr. Paul Héroux of McGill has the most intuitive explanation, which rests on Maxwell’s principle of superposition: because Maxwell’s equations are linear, two sets of electromagnetic waves sharing the same space simply add together. In the interview I pictured a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out clean ripples. Then a boat motors past at distance, sending larger waves, and where they meet the ripples, the two add together and the original pattern gets distorted. In our cells, the mitochondria run on continuous currents of electrons and protons that carry their own faint electromagnetic fields. An external field from a substation, by the principle of superposition, adds to those internal currents and shifts the pattern. The electron transport chain in the mitochondria leaks a fraction of its electrons by design as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which act as signalling molecules in a healthy cell. Distorting that field increases that electron leakage, creating oxidative stress. A tiny electromagnetic interference results in a large downstream effect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844025006474 The more complex pathway is Dimitris Panagopoulos’s Ion Forced-Oscillation / Voltage-Gated Ion Channel (IFO-VGIC) mechanism. Weak, polarized, low-frequency fields force the ions (calcium, potassium, sodium) next to an ion channel’s voltage sensor to oscillate; because that force scales with the inverse cube of the distance involved, fields far below the stimulation threshold can still force the channel open, disrupting the cell’s ion balance and driving ROS overproduction (Nitric oxide and superoxide interact and produce peroxynitrite, a highly unstable cytotoxin that breaks down into free radicals). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366088934 https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/59/5/92 https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/18/10041 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1585441/full https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3772193/ 3. Evidence of oxidative stress, in vivo, in humans from ELF-EMF There are many studies, and the strongest are occupational, which applies to the 49ers situation. 115 power-plant workers vs. 145 office controls. Serum malondialdehyde (MDA, the standard lipid-peroxidation marker), superoxide dismutase, and catalase were all significantly higher in the exposed group, and the markers rose with increasing field exposure. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/WOR-203244 A follow-up where they reversed the oxidative stress in power plant workers. A double-blind randomized controlled trial: 91 power-plant workers given vitamin E, vitamin C, both, or placebo for 90 days. The antioxidant groups showed reduced lipid peroxidation and raised antioxidant capacity versus controls. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32191586/ A spot-welder study: 46 welders occupationally exposed at 50 Hz, showed significantly altered red-blood-cell antioxidant enzyme activity and concluded ELF-MF “might act as an oxidative stressor… even at the recommended levels of exposure.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18504600/ A substation-specific study found oxidative stress and DNA damage https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24460415/ 4. Oxidative stress degrades collagen This half isn’t controversial at all. Oxidative stress activates the matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) that break collagen down and suppresses its synthesis. Here are three example studies: Siwik et al. 2001: Oxidative stress raises MMPs and lowers collagen synthesis in cardiac fibroblasts. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11121376/ Fisher et al. 2009: Collagen fragmentation drives oxidative stress and elevates MMP-1 in aged human skin. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2631323/ Varani et al. 2006: Decreased collagen production in oxidatively aged skin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16723701/ 5. What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis I’m glad you asked this question, and I’m bummed we didn’t get to it in the interview because it is a great question, and very important to understand. Superficially it may appear to be a refutation of my theory, but I would argue that it actually supports the underlying argument. That study used a short, high-intensity pulsed dose: therapeutic-PEMF, the same type of field used clinically to stimulate bone and tissue healing. The reason this works is because it triggers the very same biological pathways that can lead to oxidative stress. The exposure still stimulates ROS production, but done at a controlled dosage, for a limited duration it has a different effect. The cell reads the ROS as a warning signal and it upregulates its antioxidant defenses, and mounts a repair/proliferation response. The therapy is then stopped before the cell gets overwhelmed. That is essentially a hormetic response: a small dose of a stressor producing a beneficial adaptation. Two things follow: At the very least, this means the field is biologically active, which by itself undercuts the regulatory claim that these fields are inert below their thresholds. There is a wealth of literature on PEMF (pulsed EMF) bone regeneration and calcium channel signalling (which is the second mechanims in section one). Here is one. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13856 At best, it leads us straight to my actual concern, which is that under chronic, chaotic and unregulated exposure, the cell’s antioxidant capacity gets overwhelmed, resulting in oxidative stress. There are plentiful examples of things that are beneficial at controlled doses, but harmful at uncontrolled doses. Excecise is one obvious, uncontroversial example. Botox is perhaps a more interesting example. 6. What about a study that shows EMF causing collagen degradation in humans? As far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human, in vivo, or in human tendon in a lab. There are studies involving isolated fibroblasts though, which secrete collagen. The most relevant one showed that human fetal scleral fibroblasts exposed to 50 Hz ELF-EMF showed a significant decrease in collagen synthesis and that MMP-2 expression was upregulated, which is the exact mechanism I described in section 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3626379/ That’s it! Thanks again for the interview. Best, Peter Anthony Cowan Environmental Health · Wellness Tech · Researcher & Journalist Publisher & Editor, Living Energy Bio: petercowan.comSocial: X · Instagram · TikTokApp: sunlightis.lifePhone: [redacted]
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Lena Dunham welcomes her first baby via surrogacy
(CNN) — Actress and writer Lena Dunham and her husband Luis Felber have welcomed a baby daughter via surrogate.Writing in an op-ed published by Vogue on Wednesday, Dunham, 40, who is best known as the creator of hit TV series “Girls,” revealed that the couple’s first child had arrived 13 days late, before describing the moment of her birth.“I was so focused on our surrogate — in awe at her concentration, her period of quiet followed by what sounded like a roar — I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry,” she wrote.“I saw her face, gasping just as she did. Her eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the light and shadow, blinking rapidly.”Dunham said she was “bashful and dizzy with joy.”In 2018, Dunham revealed that she’d had a hysterectomy in an attempt to end the pain caused by endometriosis.Endometriosis is a common and often painful condition that happens when tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus itself. It’s estimated to affect more than 11% of women between the ages of 15 and 44 across the United States.The surgery removed her cervix and uterus, meaning that she was unable to conceive naturally.On meeting her surrogate, Dunham wrote in the Vogue piece: “While I’ve been known to make friends quickly — airport terminals, veterinary offices — this was the quickest leap from first coffee to gynecological procedure I’d ever done.”Dunham said in the months before the embryo transfer date, as she “got to know our surrogate and to trust her,” she thought she would feel “jealousy” towards her, but she did not.“Instead, I felt a different kind of jealousy — toward said baby, for the chance to be tucked into someone who radiated such safety. I could just tell she knew how to steer an SUV in the snow,” Dunham added.The pregnancy came after “12 years circling the fertility drain,” Dunham wrote, and revealed how she dealt with the nerves of the intervening months.“Powerless and unable to feel the physical changes that signal a growing fetus, I horrified friends and family who adhere to the Jewish superstition prohibiting anticipatory purchases, and I started shopping,” said Dunham, before recounting her journey into the world of baby fashion.“I was looking for garments that allowed her personality to develop and express itself rather than announcing an identity she didn’t yet have,” she said.“She would be a person that we helped to dress, who made an impression on the world based on our choices, until she was old enough to do it herself.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.THE-CNN-WIRE (TM) & © 2026 CABLE NEWS NETWORK, INC., A TIME WARNER COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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What Does the Science of Climate Change Really Look Like?
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy. Read Chris Barnard on Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left. More than a decade ago, the world’s governments negotiated and signed the Paris Climate Agreement, committing to hold global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. In the following years, climate had immense cultural power. Greta Thunberg emerged. Fortune 500 companies established net-zero plans. The U.S. got the Inflation Reduction Act. Then the pendulum swung back. President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, speaking of green energy as a “scam” and carbon footprints as a “hoax” and on all matters of international policy emphasizing bilateral engagement and power over globalism and cooperation. The technology companies that had been at the forefront of net-zero pledges and green leadership discovered the importance of all-of-the-above power to their visions for artificial intelligence and began quietly postponing or removing their targets. On the left side of the political spectrum, rising concerns about inflation and cost pushed climate lower down in the stated priorities of voters and stump speeches of politicians. The moment is ripe for a reset on the politics of climate change and for conservatives especially to chart a course that acknowledges and addresses the real challenges in plausible ways. So what should we think about climate change as we enter a post-peak climate era? If it is neither an apocalypse nor a hoax, what will hold up as a durable view of climate change? And how does it project onto the concerns and priorities of the right-of-center’s emerging coalition? New to Commonplace_? Subscribe below to get the magazine in your inbox._ Subscribe A Solid Foundation As the politics and economics of climate careened over the past ten years, the physics carried on regardless. In 2015, the year the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted, the world emitted 41.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2025, emissions had risen only 2.4%, to 42.2 gigatonnes, because falling emissions from land use offset increasing emissions from fossil fuels. But slow growth in annual emissions is not rapid decline, let alone net-zero, so carbon dioxide kept accumulating in the atmosphere, going from 399 to 426 parts per million. Global temperature kept rising too, from about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average in 2015, to 1.4 degrees above it in 2025. None of this should surprise anyone. Even most prominent skeptics, like the authors of the 2025 report commissioned by the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, accept the basic physics. Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere at industrial volumes accumulates and traps heat that would otherwise escape to space. That heat warms the upper ocean and increases temperatures at the surface. Increased ocean heat and melting of land ice cause sea levels to rise. Changes in the climate become noticeable to us as subtle shifts in temperature and precipitation, seasons arriving early or late, changes in the surrounding ecosystem, and weather extremes. The much more meaningful debate is not about whether these things are happening, but about what it all means for human societies. (While it is a proxy measure of overall risk, no one experiences global surface temperature.) This debate invokes at least three interesting questions: how much today’s warming is showing up in regional climate trends, how much more warming we should anticipate, and how extreme weather events can be understood in the context of climate change. Recent scientific advances give us new insights into each of these, but there is still much to learn. This is the context in which the next generation of conservative leaders will be the first to deal with significant climate change as a fact, not a forecast. It will be with them for their entire careers. Our evolving scientific picture of climate change will come from weather and climate records stretching further into the past, new kinds of observations in the present, better modeling tools for the future, and simply more time to observe the emergence of climate signals and their tangible effects on ecosystems and communities in the United States and around the world. The policy landscape will be shaped by not only the impacts of changes in the climate, but also by the ways in which societies respond and by the emergence of new technologies for both altering the trajectory of emissions and adapting to new climate realities. Global climate records now show the fingerprints of warming in different phenomena around much of the world. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, documents warming trends over all land regions, even as natural variability adds substantial variance to local trends. And the highest temperature extremes have become more intense and frequent, almost everywhere, since the 1950s. Scientists are highly confident that these changes are attributable to human influence. But confidence in detecting trends and attributing them to human influence degrades across heavy precipitation events; drought trends are heterogeneous and not attributable to human activity with great confidence. For hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe storms there is even less confidence in trends or their relationship to climate change. In general, a fair summary of the evidence is that for well-observed phenomena, like surface temperature or heavy rainfall, with a clear relationship to warming, our multidecadal observations are consistent with human influence overcoming natural variability over long time periods and extremes increasing. For regions that are sampled more sparsely, or phenomena with a higher noise-to-signal ratio, we will need to observe them longer to understand the magnitude of the climate signal or improve dynamical understanding using models and observations together. But for Climate For those who can’t wait, we also have new techniques that attempt to understand the role climate change has in influencing particular extreme events. When the climate is changing and disaster strikes, it is natural to ask whether that disaster was somehow “caused” by climate change. For scientists and policymakers acting in good faith, answering that question helps develop a more accurate picture of the problem, how it may be getting worse, and what preparations we should be making to respond to it. It may, at some point, give some weight to how liability is assigned by courts or adaptation funding is distributed by society. But how we ask this question is extremely important. It is easy to get the analysis wrong by discounting the role that meteorology plays. As meteorologist Theodore Shepherd explained in a clear 2016 review of climate attribution methods, “if a weather or climate event is truly extreme in the present climate, then perforce it requires unusual meteorological conditions, which means that climate change is at most a contributing factor.” Share Scientists have two ways to probe climate as a contributing factor, both of which have entered media coverage of extreme weather events. One asks a probabilistic question: How much more likely is a particular event (e.g., a temperature record over a particular area) amid global warming? The answer involves using historical records and computer simulations to estimate the likelihood of such an event in both a changed and a preindustrial climate. The findings are less about the specific event, and more about events of that nature. The other question is: How has the changed climate affected the specific event in question? Here, scientists try to understand what a similar event would have looked like in the preindustrial climate. This is sometimes called the storyline approach, where the story is the specific meteorological details of the event. These methods offer ways to test the intuition of scientists about real weather extremes. In late June and early July of 2021, a persistent high-pressure ridge, or heat dome, set up over the Pacific Northwest and an extraordinary heat wave affected the area from Oregon to British Columbia. For six days, it shattered temperature records across the region and hundreds died from heat-related causes, in an area where such high, and persistently high, temperatures were well outside of experience and many live without air conditioning. Scientists have studied its connection to climate change using multiple approaches. This specific event was created by a rare combination of meteorological factors, a strong high-pressure ridge created the conditions for extreme heat, which occurred on top of higher average temperatures in the region from global warming. Probabilistic analyses showed that climate change increased the likelihood of such an event by at least 8-fold to more than 100-fold. One standout example found that such an event had effectively zero probability of occurring in the preindustrial climate. The enormous range in these assessments reflects how hard it is to estimate probabilities of events at the tail of the historical record. Estimates of the effect on the temperature of the event are more clustered. A recent review paper documents how multiple methodologies have found a positive influence, roughly 1-2 degrees Celsius of an anomaly that exceeded 15 degrees, of climate change on the temperature magnitude of the event. Multiple studies have investigated and found some positive influence of climate change in other extreme events. Attribution studies found climate likely increased the heavy rainfall that accompanied Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and surrounding regions in 2024. The extensive fires that struck Los Angeles in 2025 illustrate how the causal chain can become messy, though. Studies do detect a positive influence of climate on the event’s likelihood, but while climate change likely contributed to underlying aridity, it would not have played a role in the heavy winds or land practices that preceded disaster. These event attribution studies will become more common for extreme, or damaging, weather events. They can be produced quickly, and often are reported before peer review. As the Pacific Northwest heatwave example shows, when multiple methods converge on a positive attribution, the finding should probably carry some weight even if you have to be careful about accepting the results from a single study. I expect that as climate change proceeds and the climate thus departs further from a preindustrial counterfactual, the influence will become more detectable across a variety of extreme events and more easily identified. This will be used to cast blame, but can also be used to inform how communities and society adapt to ongoing change. We May Still Be Surprised One positive development, insofar as less climate change is better, has been that our central estimates for future climate change should probably be revised downward. Mostly, that is because the high-end warmings that scientists regularly analyzed about ten to 20 years ago, driven by high emissions throughout the twenty-first century, now appear to be somewhere between unlikely and impossible. At one time, the upper end of mainstream climate projections extended well into 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century, which, models suggest, would have wrought enormous real-world damage. Current energy and policy trends now point toward 2.5 or 3 degrees. Damages and risks are commonly modeled as increasing steeply with more warming, so this is already a better-than-previously-expected outcome for the climate (which is independent of the physical response to emissions). But we should maintain a wide range for plausible outcomes and prepare for the possibility of being surprised. Emissions trajectories are subject to deep uncertainty, the physical climate response is still developing, and whatever change occurs in the climate will then be mediated through unpredictable economic, social, and political institutions. Over the past decade, the pace of warming surprised some keen observers and appeared to accelerate, though not yet outside the range of expectation provided by climate models. The reasons for that apparent acceleration are being actively studied (as was the apparent pause in warming from 1998 to 2012), but no single driver has emerged. Some blame it on the El Niño, variability which would have no bearing on climate. Some think it is a result of factories in East Asia and global shipping fleets cutting aerosol emissions, which in the strongest version of the argument would indicate higher climate sensitivity to carbon-dioxide emissions. Others are more measured, not yet ready to draw solid conclusions as to whether climate projections require revision. We will have to see. Long-Term Thinking Climate change asks us to think over long time scales. But the pace of human-driven warming is compressing a large global change into a century. Changing weather patterns and extreme events are already causing adjustment costs and damages and will do more. Adaptation will help, but it is not free. For some communities, these costs will erode livelihoods and well-being, and may force migration. Are we prepared for large-scale managed retreats in the United States? Thankfully, American wealth, geographical diversity, and moderate climates may leave us better prepared than many around the world. But wealthy countries can still suffer serious disruption from narrowly concentrated costs, even if they appear entirely manageable in aggregate. Readers of Commonplace are familiar with the challenges of rapidly adapting to economic forces. The displacement that came from the China Shock is barely perceptible in aggregate GDP and employment data, but it affected millions of people and those people were far less mobile than economic models tended to assume. Deindustrialization rippled through the nation with enormous effects for not only our economic vitality, but also our national security. The forces surrounding climate change may not be so different; the world gets richer and must accept some diffuse costs. Those may be modest overall, but cause all manner of unpredictable effects with which policymakers must cope. In the case of the China Shock, our faith in a growing pie served us poorly. We’ll need to do better on climate. Leave a comment
Fencing goes up around the main Kennedy Center building after Trump-aligned board votes to close it
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Specialties Honor Roll: Health Law
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EU membership bid gives boost to Moldova’s fledgling R&D landscape
Moldova’s push to join the EU is having the spillover effect of helping to improve the country’s R&D landscape, which in recent years has suffered from fragmentation, decreasing personnel and a lack of research infrastructure.The country became an EU candidate country in 2022, alongside Ukraine, and officially began accession negotiations in 2024. With a pro-EU government, Moldova has been actively carrying out reforms to align with EU standards. This has helped accelerate the development of R&D, said Igor Chiosa, acting head of the Research and Innovation Policy Directorate at Moldova’s Ministry of Education and Research. “Our R&D landscape is moving up, and we are more and more involved in the European Research Area,” he said. “The support we receive from the EU is very important, not only financially, but also because of incentives, consultation and capacity building.”The R&D landscape in the former Soviet republic is still relatively underdeveloped, despite attempts at improvement going back to a 2004 law on science and innovation and later reforms in 2017 and 2018. But the system remains in a “precarious situation” and “in the process of contraction,” according to an assessment carried out by the government for the current National Programme for Research and Innovation, which runs from 2024 to 2027. The analysis highlights in particular the declining number of researchers and PhDs, which has been continuously falling, as well as limited research funding. This is around 10 times lower than the EU average and “insufficient to maintain a level of research activity that supports higher education and meets the needs of the economy.” The mechanisms for allocating research funds are also described as inefficient, as well as the general fragmentation of the landscape, with research and innovation activities being carried out in 67 different places. The lack of strategic vision for research infrastructure is also noted. The strategy sets out to address these issues and is being fuelled by reforms linked to EU accession. Moldova now has a regulation on open science and gender equality. There is also a new support mechanism for technology transfer offices and a business-academia roadmap. In 2025, the country also became the first Eastern Partnership country to approve a Smart Specialisation strategy, which will coordinate its R&D efforts to focus on strengths, within a European context. “We’ve done a lot in terms of normative acts,” Chiosa said. Horizon Europe successMoldova is also seeing more success in the EU’s flagship R&D programme, Horizon Europe. The country has now won nearly €15 million in funding, already double the amount won under the previous programme, Horizon 2020, and more than the €10 million target set by the government. Chiosa said the priority has shifted now to winning more research-centred projects, rather than those related to support and capacity. Moldova is also targeting further involvement in large European projects. Last year, it joined the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking giving Moldovans access to Europe's supercomputing network. The country is also a member of Danubius-RI, a European research infrastructure focused on river and sea research. Despite these efforts, Moldova’s research capacity is still shackled by its limited R&D budget, which equates to 0.23% of its GDP. This is around half of what its neighbour Romania spends, which is the lowest in the EU. According to Chiosa, the research budget is increasing year-on-year, jumping by €6.34 million between 2024 and 2025. But this doesn’t show up when looking at it as a proportion of GDP. “Of course, it’s difficult,” he said. “That is why we are putting more emphasis on collaboration between business and academia, as well as participation in Horizon Europe, to try to diversify our sources of funding.”A World Bank loan of €30 million, plus a grant of €7.8 million, was agreed in 2025 to support the modernisation of Moldova’s universities. As part of this, a call was launched this year to provide universities grants of up to €900,000 to develop their research infrastructure. Moldova is also collaborating closely with Romania, with which it shares a common language, funding 100 joint projects in 2023 and 2024. This support has been instrumental. “They are helping with sharing their expertise, inviting us into consortia, and lots more,” Chiosa said. Looking forward, Moldova is eagerly anticipating joining the EU. “We are looking closely at what the EU is doing and will shape our future national programme in research innovation accordingly.”EU accession “blocked at a technical level”Moldova is aiming to join the EU by 2028, but despite its swift and eager efforts to meet the accession criteria, there remain obstacles outside of the country’s control. For a country to join the EU, it must have certain legislation in place and meet specific standards in various areas. This is categorised into six thematic clusters containing 33 chapters. Moldova and the EU have so far opened two of the clusters, numbers one and six. The first covers fundamental laws, such as the judiciary, security and financial legislation. The sixth covers external relations. The remaining four clusters are still unopened. This includes the third cluster, on competitiveness and growth, which contains the chapter on science and research.Related articlesQ&A: Albania’s ambition to become a ‘moderate innovator’Data corner: Horizon success rates are droppingThe European Commission has confirmed that these clusters are ready to be opened, with an official saying that the Commission is encouraging EU governments, who have the final say, to move forward on the matter. However, both clusters two and three remain blocked by the EU Council’s working party on enlargement and countries negotiating accession to the EU, a different official, representing the Council, confirmed.This working party is set to meet several times in the coming weeks, with a Council meeting scheduled for mid-October in which enlargement, and Moldova’s bid, will be discussed. But there is no certainty that these talks will lead to progress. According to the Council source, it is “completely impossible to foresee if and when the file will be unblocked,” citing the sensitivity of the matter. Moldova’s situation is particularly complicated. One factor is that it borders Ukraine and is increasingly embroiled in Russia’s war, with drone incursions occurring more often on its territory. Another is Transnistria, a Russian-backed breakaway state that lies within the territory of Moldova. It is unclear how the EU would be able to accept Moldova into the bloc while this situation remains unchanged. While there is no direct reason to delay opening cluster three with Moldova, as it covers matters unrelated to security, it could be that the EU is reluctant to speed through accession negotiations without first resolving broader, geopolitical issues.Chiosa is confident that, if and when the chapter on science and research is opened, Moldova will be able to finalise it quickly. It doesn’t require any legislative changes and is only a matter of proving certain standards, which Chiosa believes Moldova is well prepared to do. “We hope that chapter 25 on science and research will be one of the first chapters opened and closed,” he said.
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Germany’s Political Tailspin: Your Weekly SPIEGEL Recap
It might be tempting to dismiss the results of last Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt, in which the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party raked in 43.8 percent of the vote, as a rather unimportant extremist blip in a state that hardly anyone can find on the map. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to do so. The state’s population – around 2.1 million – is a mere 2.5 percent of the German total. And while the state capital of Magdeburg was once the political heart of the Holy Roman Empire back when Otto the Great used to hang out there (more than a millenium … no … milennium … nope … millennium ago), it is today something of a backwater, albeit one with a ginormous cathedral in its center. We wanted to briefly interrupt this week’s newsletter to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of our subscribers, both new and old. And to remind you all that a free subscription gets you access to this newsletter every Saturday. A paid subscription, by contrast, gets you one DER SPIEGEL article every weekday, delivered to your inbox. We strive to select pieces that both demonstrate what Europe’s leading newsmagazine has to offer and provide an international audience – namely, you – with an insight into how Germany and Europe view the world. If you haven’t already signed up for a paid subscription, please consider doing so if you can. Our Substack channel relies entirely on reader support and we are excited to continue offering you the best of DER SPIEGEL. Subscribe But even beyond the fact that a huge percentage of the voters in the state decided to place an X next to a party with an ideological lineage that runs rather directly back to the right-wing extremist soup out of which the Nazi Party was born, the results are a perfect example of a phenomenon that has been plaguing German elections in recent years: the lack of an obvious path to a majority. Call it the Balkanization of German politics. There are a number of developments driving the phenomenon, but for the purposes of this newsletter, here are two of the most salient: Persistent voter frustration with the country’s two (former) big-tent parties – the Christian Democrats (CDU) on the center-right (17.2 percent in Saxony-Anhalt last Sunday) and the Social Democrats (SPD) on the center-left (9.3 percent). The presence of parties on the far left (Left Party), the populist left (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – BSW) and the far right (AfD) with which mainstream parties are reluctant to form coalitions. So what happens now? Stories of the Week A Lack of Leadership The answer for many people in the country, and particularly within the CDU, is clear: pin (some of) the blame on Chancellor Friedrich Merz. According to a survey taken directly after the election in Saxony-Anhalt, 88 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that if the federal government in Berlin were doing a better job, the AfD wouldn’t be as strong. And it is true that the predominant impression of the federal government ever since Merz was sworn in on May 6, 2025, is one of ineffectiveness and bickering. His rather unique combination of bumbling-plus-bravado has also not exactly endeared him to the German public. Indeed, his standing in the country is so shaky that his popularity – according to recent polls – has now dropped even below the historic lows associated with his predecessor Olaf Scholz. The situation is such that the CDU even opted to keep him largely out of the campaign ahead of the Saxony-Anhalt vote. And since then, dissatisfied rumblings within the CDU have grown louder. DER SPIEGEL’s Swantje Karich notes that the problems with the CDU go much deeper than Merz. “The center-right has a trust problem. At a press appearance following the devastating election result in Saxony-Anhalt, Friedrich Merz said that the party wanted to ‘reach people more effectively’ through ‘emotional engagement.’ It sounded as though he were announcing a political program. On the basis of that statement, it is difficult to take his empathy seriously.” “The Chancellor’s chastened appearance did, at least, reveal where he stands: with his back to the wall. Elections will be held in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania next week, and the CDU could fare even worse there. The party is polling at between 8 and 10 percent in the state.” “What is at stake is the political tradition that has lent stability to the Federal Republic since 1945: a democratic conservatism that understands what must be preserved, but also how to embrace progress and openness to the world. If the Union continues along its current path, it risks becoming politically irrelevant after the 2029 federal election – and Germany could soon find itself with a government of the far right.” The Trumpification of Political Debate? It is often said in Germany that to understand the political and social trends that will soon be dominant in Europe, one need only look across the Atlantic to the United States. When it comes to political debate, that has certainly proven true. Donald Trump understood early on that triggering mouth-foaming outrage among Democrats is an ideal way to both generate headlines and to secure loyalty among supporters. And he realized that far more quickly than the left side of the political spectrum understood that simply ignoring the old man might be the best recipe. To be sure, there have been signs recently that the US president may be over-relying on the strategy. Earlier this week, in an apparent grandpa-discovers-AI moment, Trump sent out 60 posts in the space of 10 hours, many of them AI-assisted images portraying him as a hero – or showing Iceland as part of the US (outrageous!!!). It was also during that slew of schlock that he explicitly backed the AfD with an “MGGA” post. In Germany, though, the outrage cycle remains in full swing, with much of the focus on those who would dare to vote for the AfD. They are alternately portrayed as being dim-witted, ungrateful, backward, racist or all of the above. That, argues DER SPIEGEL columnist Sabine Rennefanz, is not particularly helpful. “Everywhere on election night, people spoke of a watershed moment, a rupture, a turning point. But what is that supposed to mean in concrete terms? A watershed would imply an interruption, a moment of pause – perhaps even a willingness to rethink and learn. At first, there was little sign of that in the main television panels. Instead, the familiar rituals that had already shaped the election campaign continued: outrage, lecturing and abuse.” “That’s just the tone, one might object. They’re only talk shows. Given that the party’s state branch has been classified by domestic intelligence officials as confirmed right-wing extremist, there are more important problems than hurt feelings on television. Yet although the condescending tone is not the cause of the AfD’s success, it is an expression of the broader mood within the so-called political center – a kind of institutional blindness that too often treats material concerns as a communications problem.” “People have a pretty good sense of whether you like them – whether you approach them with curiosity or merely study, lecture and manage them as a problem group. They notice whether you genuinely want to understand their fears and pain, or whether you are simply waiting for the chance to correct them. They can also tell whether someone still has the energy to change things, or whether they have barricaded themselves behind platitudes and empty phrases.” “Anyone who wants an egalitarian democratic society cannot promise equality only to those whose language, tastes and moral convictions they share. They must also acknowledge the wounds, resentments and fears of those whose political conclusions they consider wrong. Acknowledging them does not mean agreeing with them. But a democracy that communicates with almost half its citizens only through warnings and labels gives up on political debate before it has even begun. An atmosphere must be created in which people can express their opinions without fearing that they will be canceled. We are currently a long way from that.” East-West? One of the clear undercurrents in the election last Sunday was, of course, Germany’s ongoing east-west divide, particularly as it pertains to the success of the AfD. Historically, the party has been far stronger in the former East German states than in former West German states. The fact that this generalization no longer reliably holds is certainly one of the primary concerns that many have about the party’s growth. And yet, there is still a distinct flavor of “stupid easterners, they don’t understand democracy” to the coverage. In the weeks before the vote, there was even a rather interesting back-and-forth in Germany’s culture pages about how ungrateful eastern Germans allegedly are for being pulled out of their pre-reunification backwardness and into the light of the West. DER SPIEGEL’s Jochen-Martin Gutsch has had enough. “Ten years ago, in 2016, elections were also held in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD won more than 20 percent, which at the time rightly provoked outrage and incomprehension in western Germany. Today, in 2026, the AfD is also polling at around 20 percent in western German states, but this no longer provokes outrage and incomprehension. Instead, it is now regarded as proof of democratic conviction and civilizational resistance. After all, in the east, it’s 40 percent!” “This allows people to continue feeling morally superior to the East, but the wiser course would be to admit: if something doesn’t happen soon, the West will turn AfD-blue too. Or bluish.” “But will anything happen? The truly depressing thing about election night was not so much the AfD leaders intoxicated by their own success. It was the representatives of the other parties, who once again said that they were utterly shocked, needed some time to digest the result and would, of course, not simply return to business as usual. The SPD, a former big-tent party, celebrated its ‘stable’ result of 9.3 percent. Congratulations!” “For 10 years, the AfD has gone from one electoral success to the next. And still, the established parties remain ‘shocked’ and scratch their heads in astonishment. How long can they keep being shocked? Friedrich Merz says he may need to communicate his reform ideas in a more ‘emotional’ way. So the CDU’s political professionals sit down together after the election, mull over a strategy, and in the end come up with this: Fritz, try to be a little more relaxed, charismatic and emotional – or something. Beyond that: no political plan, no defiance, no promise of a future. That is frightening.” What was good, what was bad for democracy? Good: Voter turnout in Saxony-Anhalt was 77.8 percent, the highest ever recorded in the state. Whatever one thinks of the result, that figure is encouraging. Democracy needs citizens to take an interest. Bad: Although a strong AfD result had been expected in Saxony-Anhalt, many politicians from the mainstream parties – including in Berlin – appeared confused, helpless and overwhelmed in their initial reactions. That is not how they will win back voters’ trust. Last Week’s Highlights: 🗳️ Meet the Germans Who Voted for the AfD: Why would voters in a country like Germany, with its Nazi past, vote for a right-wing party? It’s a question only an editor in Berlin could come up with. On the ground, the view is different. 🟦 How the AfD Wants to Expand Its Power Across Germany: The far-right AfD is planning to decimate public broadcasting in Saxony-Anhalt, revamp education and install extremists in positions of power. And it is eyeing victory on the national stage as well. 🕯️ The Continuing Reverberations of September 11: It was a generational shock, and the consequences can still be felt today - from massive surveillance and significant increases in presidential power to violent excesses at ICE. 🤝 “For Europe, Canada Is the Preferred Partner in Trans-Atlantic Relations”: In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne discusses his country’s failed trade deal with the US and why Canada is looking to Europe. 🏛️ The True Historical Roots of the AfD: During the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, there were numerous parties on the extreme right espousing “Germany first” nationalism. The Nazis may not be the best comparison for today’s AfD. 🌊 AfD in a Landslide: Merz Is the Wrong Leader for Germany: The right-wing Alternative for Germany won in a landslide in Saxony-Anhalt state elections on Sunday. What does that mean for the country at large? Thank you for your continued support and have a wonderful week! Subscribe Share Leave a comment Your SPIEGEL Substack Team Compiled and edited by Charles Hawley
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Fact check: Trump, RFK Jr. and others make false claims on night 2 of GOP convention
(CNN) — President Donald Trump delivered another rapid-fire series of false claims on the second night of Republicans’ midterm convention on Thursday. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did his own barrage of wrongness. And various other speakers uttered statements that were untrue, misleading or missing critical context.Here is a fact check of some of the assertions from the final day of the convention. This is not intended as a comprehensive list of Thursday’s falsehoods.Trump’s many false claimsTrump made numerous false claims, some of which he also made in his longer speech Wednesday.Trump claimed that there were “no empty seats” in the Dallas arena as he spoke Thursday, which was visibly untrue. CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene, who was there, wrote in a live chat right after Trump made the claim that “I’m looking at rows of empty seats” and that “the idea that there are ‘no empty seats’ is just laughably untrue,” though she also said the room was mostly full. Trump has for years made false claims about supposedly never having had an empty seat.Trump further inflated one of his favorite fictional figures, claiming Thursday that “$22 trillion” in investment has come into the US; on Wednesday, he had put it at “over $20 trillion,” and even that lower figure has no apparent basis in reality. As of the time he spoke Thursday, the White House’s own website claimed there had been “$11.2 trillion” in “major investment announcements” this term, not “over $20 trillion,” and the White House figure was itself a major exaggeration of actual investment.Trump, talking about elections, lied that “there’s never been bigger cheaters” than Democrats; there is no basis for broadly describing Democrats as election cheaters. For the second straight night, Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration allowed “25 million people” to pour into the country, though that number is nowhere close to correct. Trump again falsely claimed that former President Joe Biden and other Democrats “created the worst inflation in American history,” though even peak Biden-era inflation, 9.1% in June 2022, was far from the all-time record of 23.7%; it was a 40-year high, but the rate then fell sharply before Trump returned to office.Trump also baselessly claimed that Democrats would “defund the police” and give “voting rights and welfare to 25 million illegal aliens” if they won the midterms. Republicans will still control the White House in 2027 and 2028 and the president would be in position to veto any such changes if a Democratic-controlled Congress sought to make them, but there is no indication that Democrats want to do so. Also, even groups favoring strict immigration policies estimate that the total undocumented population is far less than “25 million” or even 20 million.As he did Wednesday, Trump claimed the US now has the world’s lowest prescription drug prices. The assertion is so broad that it is unclear what exactly Trump is referencing. But experts told CNN they highly doubt that the prices for brand-name drugs in the US are generally less than they are in other countries, and the Trump administration has not provided details to prove the claim.“It’s tough to claim that you’re getting the lowest prices anywhere in the world and then also not have any evidence to support that,” said Andrew Mulcahy, a senior health economist at RAND, while Diederik Stadig, senior healthcare economist at financial institution ING, said, “To say that the US now has the lowest drug prices in the world is at this moment not true.”And as he did Wednesday, Trump said “more Americans are working today than ever before” – which is true but nearly meaningless, since the number of people working in the US generally rises over time simply because the population rises over time.“There are more Americans working because there are more Americans. That’s the entire analysis,” Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor of public policy and economics, wrote in his newsletter in August.RFK Jr.’s false claims on the pandemic, Trump’s record and moreFalse claim about Democrats and the 2024 electionKennedy unsuccessfully ran for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination before withdrawing to run as an independent and then eventually endorsing Republican candidate Donald Trump. In Kennedy’s Thursday convention speech, he complained of how the Democrats handled the nomination race.At one point, he said, “For the first time in history, they cancelled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris, no elected delegate was ever consulted; the party of ‘No Kings’ simply anointed a queen.”Kennedy is entitled to express unhappiness about how quickly Democratic leaders coalesced around then-Vice President Harris after Biden unexpectedly dropped out of the race in July 2024, after the primaries were over and less than four months from Election Day. But it’s not true that the party canceled its convention or that delegates didn’t get any say.The convention was held; it was a four-day event in Chicago in August 2024. Democratic convention delegates officially nominated Harris in a virtual roll call vote in advance of the convention. It’s true that Harris was the only candidate on the roll call ballot, but that’s because she was the only candidate who gathered enough delegate signatures to appear on the ballot.It’s clear that party elites’ backing of Harris played a key role in the unusual nomination process. But Kennedy’s specific allegations that the convention was abandoned and delegates were cut out of the process are not true.False claim that Democrats closed ‘every church’ during the Covid-19 pandemicWhile attacking Democrats, Kennedy claimed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, “They closed every church in our country for a year.”It’s not true that every church in the country was closed for a year, nor even that every church in a Democratic state was closed for a year.Every state issued some type of guidance or order about social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic, but many states – including some led by Democrats and some led by Republicans – incorporated religious exemptions into those limitations on social interactions.According to a Pew Research Center analysis from April 2020, 15 states allowed religious gatherings to continue without a limit on their size. That set of states included Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which all had Democratic governors. And at least two states with Republican governors, Alaska and Idaho, were among the states that prohibited religious gatherings at least briefly.False claim that Trump ‘ended nine wars’Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has ended “eight wars.” Kennedy went one higher on Thursday, declaring, “President Trump has ended nine wars.”That’s false. Trump hasn’t even ended eight wars.Trump’s list of eight includes two situations that were never actually wars during his tenure: a diplomatic dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia and a mysterious supposed situation between Serbia and Kosovo. The list also includes a war, involving Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that hasn’t actually ended despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration.In addition, the list includes the war between Israel and Hamas, but Israel continues to conduct frequent attacks in Gaza despite a US-brokered ceasefire agreement. And it includes the brief 2025 conflict between Israel and Iran, though Israel proceeded to join the US in starting another war against Iran in 2026.Claim about reversing a decline in longevityKennedy speaking of the Trump administration, claimed Thursday: “We have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity. “Kennedy referenced preliminary data that he said he had received from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, but it’s unclear what metric of longevity he’s referring to.CDC data shows that US life expectancy had been steadily increasing for decades before a sharp drop during the Covid-19 pandemic. Life expectancy had already started to rebound in 2022, under the Biden administration, and reached a new record high in 2024 before Trump’s second term began.Preliminary data shared by the CDC in July suggests that life expectancy probably hit another record high in 2025.CNN has reached out to HHS for clarification on Kennedy’s comments.Claim that Democrats ‘lost 360,000 children’Speaking about Democrats, Kennedy said: “They somehow lost 360,000 children and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.”Trump and other Republicans have made similar claims. But there’s no basis for the assertion that Democrats “lost” so many children or that the federal government was engaged in human trafficking.A 2024 report from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had reported that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear as scheduled for immigration court hearings after being released or transferred out of custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – a period that, notably, includes two years and four months under the first Trump administration. The report also said that 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children during this period were not given notices to appear in court.The report said that ICE had “no assurances” these children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not say all the children were actually “lost” and did not definitively assert that any of them were trafficked – let alone that the government was somehow involved in a trafficking operation. And, again, the report spanned parts of both a Republican administration and a Democratic administration.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN in 2024: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. 32,000 kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the (Office of the Inspector General) are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”Vance on inflation, crime and taxes on Social SecurityA false claim about the media and Biden-era inflationVice President JD Vance mocked the media during part of his speech on Thursday. But he made a false claim about Biden-era inflation while lampooning how the media supposedly challenged him over another false claim on that subject.Vance said: “The president and I would go during a campaign, we’d say, ‘You know, inflation is as high as it’s been in 100 years,’ and the fake news would say, ‘No, no, no, it’s as high as it’s been in 68 years.’ That ain’t good, ladies and gentlemen.”Mainstream journalists, at least, wouldn’t say that inflation under Biden was as high as it had been “in 68 years.” Rather, CNN and others noted that peak inflation under the Biden administration, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in about 40 years.Vance is entitled to make his general point that this correction still doesn’t make Biden-era inflation sound good, but his specific number was, again, wrong. And he didn’t acknowledge that inflation fell sharply under Biden after hitting the 40-year high, declining to 2.9% in Biden’s last full month in office, December 2024, and 3.0% in January 2025, when Trump and Vance were inaugurated.The rate was 3.4% in July 2026, the most recent month for which data is available.Trump didn’t end taxes on Social SecurityVance claimed, “We’ve ended taxes on Social Security.” Several other convention speakers, including Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, Rep. Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania and Ohio House candidate Derek Merrin, similarly said the administration has achieved “no tax on Social Security.”It hasn’t. The big domestic policy bill Trump signed in 2025 did create an additional, temporary $6,000-per-year tax deduction for individuals age 65 and older (which phases out for individuals earning $75,000 per year or more), but as the White House has implicitly acknowledged, millions of Social Security recipients will continue to pay taxes on their benefits even before the temporary new deduction expires after 2028.The Social Security Administration said in 2025 that “the bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits.Claim about violent crime rate under BidenWhile criticizing the Biden administration, Vice President JD Vance claimed Thursday that the US “became a country where violent crime exploded, unless, of course, you could afford private security.”But violent crime did not explode under Biden. In fact, as FactCheck.org reported last month, data collected and published by the FBI shows that the national violent crime rate was at a lower level in 2023 and 2024, the last two full calendar years of Biden’s term, than it was in 2020, the last full calendar year of Trump’s first term. The year 2020 was highly unusual in many ways – violent crime jumped amid the Covid-19 pandemic – but Biden nonetheless left office with violent crime lower than it was when he took over. In fact, the 2024 violent crime rate was even lower than the 2019 rate under Trump before the pandemic.There was an increase in violent crime during the earlier part of Biden’s term. But given the subsequent decline, it’s misleading at best to claim violent crime “exploded” with no further context.Asked earlier this month about Trump’s similar previous claims to have reversed a Biden-era upswing in violence, crime data expert Jeff Asher said in an email: “No, crime began dropping significantly in 2023 during the Biden administration. Murder fell at record rates in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and, while 2026 may not feature a record decline nationally, it is still on track to see a sizable double-digit decline this year. Violent crime similarly fell nationally in 2023 and 2024, though the drops were more muted than the decline that was recorded by the FBI in 2025.”Other GOP speakersMike Johnson’s false claim about the inflation Republicans inherited from BidenSome other speakers at the convention took aim at inflation under Biden. House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that “Republicans inherited from the Biden administration record-high inflation.”That’s not true. The inflation rate was 2.9% in Biden’s last full month in office, December 2024, and 3.0% in January 2025, when Trump took over. That’s lower than the most recent rate, 3.4% in July 2026, and nowhere close to the all-time record of 23.7%, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980.Johnson correctly said moments later that inflation reached “a 40-year high of 9.1% inflation” under Biden. But a 40-year high is not an all-time record. More importantly, Johnson didn’t explain that 9.1% was much higher than the rate Trump inherited or that the 9.1% rate occurred in June 2022, with roughly two-and-a-half years left in Biden’s term.The cumulative increase in prices from the beginning of the Biden administration to the end was also not the highest in US history. Federal figures show that beginning-to-end inflation under Biden was less than half of that during Carter’s term.What Johnson left out of his claim about a congressional resolutionWhile attacking Democrats as extreme, Johnson said: “Just last week, nearly every Democrat in the House of Representatives voted against condemning socialism and Marxism. They voted against it.”But the resolution didn’t use the word “Marxism.” And Johnson didn’t mention that the resolution wasn’t only about condemning socialism. Rather, it contained other language that Democratic leadership said was the focus of the party’s opposition to the resolution.The resolution’s first provision said it “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.” But its fifth provision said it “calls for enactment of the SAVE America Act,” Trump’s favored elections bill, which contains various provisions opposed by many Democrats.So while it’s very possible many Democrats would have opposed the resolution even without its expression of support for the SAVE America Act, the call to pass this elections bill served as a poison pill that ensured most Democrats wouldn’t support it.“House Resolution 1490 explicitly calls for enactment of the so-called SAVE America Act, which is the top legislative priority of far-right extremists,” Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement last week.A New Mexico candidate left out key context in an attack on his opponentGreg Cunningham, a Republican House candidate in New Mexico, used some of his Thursday speech to criticize his Democratic opponent, Rep. Gabe Vasquez. Cunningham said of Vasquez: “He even voted against a resolution honoring the sacrifices and service of the brave men and women in law enforcement who protect, every day, our communities.”But Cunningham left out important context about the resolution. While its focus was expressing support for law enforcement, its preamble contained statements praising the Trump administration and criticizing “leftist activists,” “progressive politicians” and “sanctuary city policies” for allegedly making law enforcement less safe.In other words, a House member might vote against such a resolution, as the vast majority of Democrats did, because they disagreed with conservative components of it, not the general expressions of support for law enforcement. (CNN has reached out to Vasquez’s campaign and House office for comment on his vote.) It’s common for parties to write resolutions in a way that would make it difficult for opponents to support but would open those opponents to campaign attacks if they voted “no.”An Ohio candidate’s misleading attack about Democrats and votingMerrin, the Republican candidate running against Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur for a House seat in Ohio, claimed in his speech, “While Democrats talk about letting illegal immigrants vote in our election, Republicans fight for proof of citizenship, photo ID and fair elections.”It’s a big country, so it’s possible some Democrat somewhere is talking about letting undocumented people vote in some election. But Merrin’s claim is misleading at best. There is no proposal from Democrats in Congress to let undocumented people vote in the 2026 midterms – the election Merrin appeared to be referring to when he said “our election” – or vote in future federal elections.CNN has reached out to Merrin’s campaign for an explanation of his claim.House Majority Leader Steve Scalise invoked a similar theme in his speech Wednesday, claiming that Democrats had voted last week “to allow illegals to vote in our federal elections.” But there was no congressional vote on letting undocumented immigrants vote in any elections.Rather, there was a vote on the non-binding Republican resolution that included multiple provisions, including one that “reiterates the notion that American elections are for American citizens only,” one supporting Trump’s favored elections bill and one denouncing socialism.Opposing that multi-clause resolution doesn’t necessarily mean someone supports voting by any non-citizens, let alone non-citizens in the country illegally.This article has been updated with additional items.CNN’s Deja Oliver contributed to this report.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
David Petraeus: George W. Bush, Political Courage, and the Surge in Iraq
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush launched what he called the War on Terror. It began with the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, which quickly toppled the Taliban and expelled al-Qaeda from its most crucial sanctuary. Then, in early 2003, American forces—with the support of foreign allies like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland—attacked Iraq, toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing an occupation force in hopes of quickly transforming the country into a free and democratic state. Instead, the post-regime coalition authority made significant missteps, and a devastating insurgency erupted. And despite President Bush’s 2004 reelection, the war quickly lost popular support among the American public. In early 2007, Bush appointed General David Petraeus, who had already served in Iraq as a two- and three-star general, to lead allied forces in Iraq, which heralded a sea change in American strategy known as “the surge.” As part of our coverage looking back on 9/11 and the world it created, General Petraeus tells the inside story of one of the most consequential moments in the War on Terror. The general’s essay today is both a crucial history and a profile in political courage. It demands reflection as we take stock of the last 25 years. —The Editors By the end of 2006, the war in Iraq was failing. There is no useful purpose in softening that judgment with the passage of time. The bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra by terrorists that February had accelerated sectarian violence and pulled Iraq into an increasingly vicious Sunni-Shia civil war. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Sunni insurgent groups controlled substantial areas, Shi’ite militias operated with growing impunity in other parts of the country, and the Iraqi security forces were no longer capable of arresting the downward spiral. The strategy of transitioning security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, consolidating American troops on large bases, and progressively reducing the U.S. presence had clearly been invalidated by the escalating violence. The numbers conveyed the horror imperfectly but unmistakably. In December 2006, an average of 53 Iraqi civilians were killed by violence every 24 hours in Baghdad alone. Washington, meanwhile, was approaching its own breaking point. Public support for the war had fallen dramatically, President George W. Bush’s Republican Party had just lost control of both houses of Congress, and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group—of which future defense secretary Robert Gates was a member—had recommended a course that anticipated a substantially reduced American combat role. Many senior military leaders were deeply skeptical of sending substantial additional forces, advocating instead for an accelerated transition to Iraqi forces, the deployment of additional trainers and advisers, or other more modest measures with an eye to withdrawing U.S. forces. Virtually every political incentive pointed toward reducing America’s commitment. President Bush chose instead to increase it, a decision that remains, in my view, one of the most courageous presidential decisions of the 21st century.
How geopolitical rifts cut scientific collaboration
Researchers have measured how worsening geopolitical relations hobble scientific collaboration, at last quantifying the impact of rifts between governments on cooperation between labs. Over the last decade, a tenser world has thrown up new barriers to cross-border science. Collaboration between the US and China has dimmed as the two countries have sunk into an ever-deeper rivalry. Links between Russia and Europe have collapsed following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But while a concern, the magnitude of the damage is less than might be expected. For all the geopolitical turmoil of the last decade, international scientific collaborations are near a record high. “Some part of the story is positive,” said Shreyas Gadgin Matha, a social scientist at Harvard University and an author of the new study. “Research collaborations are largely resilient.” Matha and colleagues looked at data on cross-border research papers and patents in the period 2000-23, and analysed how they were impacted by countries’ political relations, as measured by how often states voted together in the United Nations. They found that when states drift apart at the UN by the median difference in votes between all countries, joint scientific papers decline by 3.1% over the next three-year period. To put that in context, over the last decade, the US and China have diverged by around a third of that difference in votes every three years. In other words, on average, it takes quite a significant diplomatic rift even to trigger a small single-digit percentage drop in joint papers. “In the short term, even something like a 3% reduction [in joint papers] is, in some ways, not that big of a number,” said Matha. Research remains more international than ever, according to an analysis extending to 2023 released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2025. We’re still living in an era of unprecedented scientific globalisation, the analysis says, with 27% of papers in OECD countries written across borders. In 1970, just 2% of articles had authors from different countries. Longer-term damage?However, this trend towards increasing international collaboration “has lost momentum and might be partly breaking down,” the OECD analysis says, largely due to a fall in the intensity of US-China joint papers since 2018. Matha and his colleagues stressed they are not complacent about the global science system. For now, “it's pretty resilient,” said co-author Muhammed Yildirim, director of academic research at Harvard’s Growth Lab. But if links are weakened, through the denial of study visas, for example, then this could have a much longer-term effect, cascading through generations of scientists, he added. Related articlesChina becomes Russia’s biggest collaborator after war decimates science ties with the west US scientists prefer German to Chinese collaborators, study finds Horizon Europe is now truly global. But what comes next? Another finding of the study, Burning bridges or bridging divides: Geopolitics and collaboration in research and innovation, is that trust appears easier to destroy than create.The hit to scientific collaboration when countries drift apart is around three times as big as the growth in joint papers when they move closer, the paper finds. “It's far easier to break these ties than to mend them, and that that also perhaps has some larger policy lesson,” said Matha.PatentsThe results around patents were less clear cut. Some methods of analysis found a statistically significant link between a diplomatic rift and a drop in co-patenting, but others did not. According to Yildirim, patents with cross-border inventors are often developed by multinational companies, which may have invested heavily in global R&D facilities, so are less likely to change how they operate simply due to a change in the geopolitical weather. “That's why we might not be seeing the effect immediately in technology,” he said.By contrast, researchers might be more sensitive to geopolitics, because visa policies can quickly affect who meets who at academic conferences, he went on. International collaboration on patents is much lower than for academic articles, the study shows. It peaked at around 10% in 2010, and has since fallen back to around 8%. This could be because China dramatically ramped up domestic patents in the 2010s, said Yildirim, squeezing the international share.
How geopolitical rifts cut scientific collaboration
Researchers have measured how worsening geopolitical relations hobble scientific collaboration, at last quantifying the impact of rifts between governments on cooperation between labs. Over the last decade, a tenser world has thrown up new barriers to cross-border science. Collaboration between the US and China has dimmed as the two countries have sunk into an ever-deeper rivalry. Links between Russia and Europe have collapsed following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But while a concern, the magnitude of the damage is less than might be expected. For all the geopolitical turmoil of the last decade, international scientific collaborations are near a record high. “Some part of the story is positive,” said Shreyas Gadgin Matha, a social scientist at Harvard University and an author of the new study. “Research collaborations are largely resilient.” Matha and colleagues looked at data on cross-border research papers and patents in the period 2000-23, and analysed how they were impacted by countries’ political relations, as measured by how often states voted together in the United Nations. They found that when states drift apart at the UN by the median difference in votes between all countries, joint scientific papers decline by 3.1% over the next three-year period. To put that in context, over the last decade, the US and China have diverged by around a third of that difference in votes every three years. In other words, on average, it takes quite a significant diplomatic rift even to trigger a small single-digit percentage drop in joint papers. “In the short term, even something like a 3% reduction [in joint papers] is, in some ways, not that big of a number,” said Matha. Research remains more international than ever, according to an analysis extending to 2023 released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2025. We’re still living in an era of unprecedented scientific globalisation, the analysis says, with 27% of papers in OECD countries written across borders. In 1970, just 2% of articles had authors from different countries. Longer-term damage?However, this trend towards increasing international collaboration “has lost momentum and might be partly breaking down,” the OECD analysis says, largely due to a fall in the intensity of US-China joint papers since 2018. Matha and his colleagues stressed they are not complacent about the global science system. For now, “it's pretty resilient,” said co-author Muhammed Yildirim, director of academic research at Harvard’s Growth Lab. But if links are weakened, through the denial of study visas, for example, then this could have a much longer-term effect, cascading through generations of scientists, he added. Related articlesChina becomes Russia’s biggest collaborator after war decimates science ties with the west US scientists prefer German to Chinese collaborators, study finds Horizon Europe is now truly global. But what comes next? Another finding of the study, Burning bridges or bridging divides: Geopolitics and collaboration in research and innovation, is that trust appears easier to destroy than create.The hit to scientific collaboration when countries drift apart is around three times as big as the growth in joint papers when they move closer, the paper finds. “It's far easier to break these ties than to mend them, and that that also perhaps has some larger policy lesson,” said Matha.PatentsThe results around patents were less clear cut. Some methods of analysis found a statistically significant link between a diplomatic rift and a drop in co-patenting, but others did not. According to Yildirim, patents with cross-border inventors are often developed by multinational companies, which may have invested heavily in global R&D facilities, so are less likely to change how they operate simply due to a change in the geopolitical weather. “That's why we might not be seeing the effect immediately in technology,” he said.By contrast, researchers might be more sensitive to geopolitics, because visa policies can quickly affect who meets who at academic conferences, he went on. International collaboration on patents is much lower than for academic articles, the study shows. It peaked at around 10% in 2010, and has since fallen back to around 8%. This could be because China dramatically ramped up domestic patents in the 2010s, said Yildirim, squeezing the international share.
Venezuela’s Oil Revival Won’t Be Decided by Politics Alone
Political stability could bring oil investment back to Venezuela, but money alone cannot quickly rebuild the country’s lost production capacity.
Thursday Dawg Bites
We are off and running, quickly making our way into week 2 of the college football season. Our beloved Georgia Bulldogs got off to a good start with a dominating Week 1 win over Tennessee State, but like a cheap hotel breakfast buffet, I didn’t take much from it. The offense was clean like you […]
First Juventus Idea to Fix Attack Fell Through Quickly
Juventus acquired Randal Kolo Muani and Nick Woltemade to address their frontline this summer, moving on from Dusan Vlahovic. While they had been chasing the former for a long time, their initial plan...
‘Horrible Game From Drake (Maye), Disgusting’ — Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy Rips Patriots QB After Meek Week 1 Loss to Seahawks
The New England Patriots opened the season with a result that has quickly turned optimism into frustration. A promising 10-0 start against the Seattle Seahawks on Wednesday night disappeared as the Patriots struggled to finish drives and protect their lead against a team that lost its quarterback on the opening drive.
Washburn football opens up MIAA play this Saturday
TOPEKA (KSNT) – The Ichabods will take on a ranked opponent to kick off conference play. Washburn football travels to Maryville, Mo., to take on No. 7 Northwest Missouri State on Saturday, Sept. 12, to begin MIAA play. The Ichabods have quickly turned the page after the 16-16 tie to Colorado School of Mines last […]
Whoopi Goldberg shuts down audience booing ‘The View’ guest Sen. Ted Cruz
‘The View’ audience booed Sen. Ted Cruz and was quickly scolded by cohost Whoopi Goldberg, who told them to be respectful.
Viewpoint: Unlocking Europe’s wildfire data
Europe is already investing in the science, technology and infrastructure needed to understand, prevent and fight wildfires. Copernicus provides satellite-based Earth observation and environmental information, while the European Forest Fire Information System provides information on fire danger and forest fires across Europe. Weather and climate systems add forecasts of heat, drought, wind and humidity; historical fire databases show where fires have occurred; and researchers generate increasingly detailed knowledge about fuels, fire behaviour, forecasting, modelling and risk management. Meanwhile, new European research projects are adding digital twins and other tools to this growing ecosystem.However, these data do not necessarily sit together, nor are they necessarily described, structured or governed in ways that allow them to be used together. Much of the information is public, but some is commercially held. Some is sensitive. Some is subject to legal, security or operational restrictions. Even when data can be legally accessed, different systems may use different formats, terminology and rules.Europe therefore faces an unusual paradox: we have vast amounts of relevant information to respond to the wildfire challenge, but not the means to bring it together. For example, a wildfire researcher or emergency service might need to ask whether a particular combination of vegetation, drought, wind and topography has historically been associated with rapid fire spread. The relevant information may exist in several institutions, using different systems and subject to different conditions of access.The challenge is to conduct an authorised analysis that interacts with these sources, combines the results and respects the rules imposed by each data custodian.An important part of the answer can be found in the Fair principles, the idea that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Developed more than a decade ago, these principles have become a central reference point for modern data stewardship, making it easier for people and machines to find data, understand what it means and determine whether it can be reused.Readability by machines is essential, since AI systems will be key to meeting the data challenge. Bring analysis to the dataThe proposition is not to give an AI system unrestricted access to sensitive databases. Quite the opposite. The goal is to make it possible for approved algorithms to go to the data, rather than requiring sensitive data or large datasets to be copied to wherever the analysis happens.Imagine an analysis asking a series of questions of different data stations. At one station it might examine weather and climate data; at another, historical fire records; at another, experimental measurements of fire behaviour. The algorithm does not need to download everything. It can operate within the environment permitted by each data custodian and return only the results that the rules allow to leave.This is sometimes described as data visiting, and related approaches already exist in areas such as federated analysis and federated learning.Sensitive data should therefore not be treated as a free-for-all for machines. This requires appropriate governance at multiple levels. Access needs to be authenticated and authorised. The purpose of an analysis should be defined. The code or model being run should be controlled. Data custodians should be able to specify what can be queried and what results can leave their environment. Activities should be auditable and human oversight should remain where the consequences require it.In other words, the objective is not to trust AI with the data. It is to design systems in which AI never has more access than it needs.As open as possible, as closed as necessaryFair data should also not be confused with open data. Some wildfire data should be openly available. Other information may legitimately need to remain restricted because it concerns critical infrastructure, security, commercial interests, privacy or operational capabilities. The principle should be: as open as possible, as closed as necessary.The important point is that restricted data should not automatically become unusable data. If machines can discover what information exists, understand its meaning, establish where it came from and determine the conditions under which it can be used, authorised analyses can potentially be carried out without the underlying data ever leaving the environment in which it is protected.Restricted data can still be Fair and machine-actionable.This is also an important question of data sovereignty. European institutions should not have to surrender control of their data to a handful of technology platforms in order to benefit from AI. Nor does Europe need to start again by building one giant repository for every piece of wildfire information. The better approach is to connect what already exists.This is the principle behind emerging approaches such as Tryangle, developed through the Leiden Initiative for Fair and Equitable Science. Rather than creating another centralised data warehouse, the approach seeks to provide an interoperable layer through which approved algorithms can visit distributed data sources while respecting the rules of their custodians.In this way, a data station can remain where it is. Its custodians can retain control. Existing databases and applications do not have to be abandoned. What changes is their ability to communicate with other systems through common, machine-readable descriptions, access rules and interoperability mechanisms.But approaches like this need data that meets the Fair principles. Only then can an interoperable ecosystem safely begin to turn fragmented information into collective intelligence.Data infrastructure is wildfire infrastructureThe implications of this approach are entirely practical. Firefighters could gain better intelligence about local and evolving risks. Land managers could test prevention strategies using more comprehensive information about fuels, weather and past fires. Researchers could compare evidence across ecosystems without repeatedly moving huge datasets between institutions. Smaller regions and resource-constrained teams could access analytical capabilities without having to build large data infrastructures themselves.Europe is already investing heavily in satellites, databases, research programmes, forecasting systems and scientific expertise. The question is whether we will connect those investments well enough to turn them into actionable intelligence.That requires policymakers and funders to treat data infrastructure as seriously as physical infrastructure. Data generated or supported through European public funding should be Fair, verifiable and machine actionable by design, wherever legally and ethically possible.Related articlesData Corner: Europe’s burning need for wildfire mitigation researchClimate monitoring must remain a global enterprise, experts sayIn practice, that means funding not only the production of data, but also the infrastructure that makes data usable across systems: metadata, provenance, interoperability, access mechanisms and governance. Where data must remain restricted, we should ensure that it can still be securely discovered, verified and used for authorised analysis.Initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud offer an existing framework through which these principles can be put into practice. What is needed now is to accelerate implementation and make them a standard part of how Europe funds and builds research and innovation systems.We do not need another generation of disconnected databases. The data is already there. The opportunity is to make it work together, securely, responsibly and quickly enough to help prevent the next fire, rather than simply document the last one.Jean-Claude Burgelman is professor emeritus at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and editor-in-chief at Frontiers Policy Lab. For more than 20 years he held leading roles in research and innovation policy at the European Commission.
Closing health workforce gaps for emergency response: the Western Pacific steps up
Over 100 health emergency experts from 56 institutions across 21 countries in the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region who are part of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) concluded their annual regional partners’ meeting with a commitment to bridge gaps in emergency workforce capacities and advance regional emergency readiness and resilience.Co-hosted by WHO and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency in the Republic of Korea, the two-day event aimed to strengthen the Region’s collective ability to detect, prepare for and respond to health emergencies.Partners mapped capacities and priority technical gaps across the Region — including cybersecurity and critical infrastructure resilience; water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and environmental health; biological emergencies, nuclear emergencies, and nuclear and radiological security.The result: a renewed commitment to close these gaps by working together through shared expertise and coordinated action. Advancing the Global Health Emergency CorpsReflective of regional solidarity and partnerships in action, GOARN – which is coordinated globally by WHO - enables a stronger, better-connected emergency health workforce that is ready to surge wherever and whenever requested by WHO Member States.This year alone, GOARN partners across the Western Pacific have supported nine experts on six missions - from measles outbreaks in Viet Nam to HIV outbreak response in Fiji - providing surge support in epidemiology, surveillance and clinical case management.Photo: Participants at the Global Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Partners Meeting 2026. Credit: KDCA/Shin Dong Myoung“GOARN partners across the Western Pacific and globally have repeatedly demonstrated the power of what we can do collectively, when we join forces, share expertise and build on each other’s strengths,” noted Dr Gina Samaan, WHO Regional Emergency Director for the Western Pacific, in her opening remarks at the gathering. “Let us continue to forge long-term partnerships grounded in mutual respect that will protect the Region for generations to come. We are smarter, faster and infinitely stronger when we work together,” she added.Reiterating Dr Samaan's call, Dr Seung-kwan Lim, Commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, emphasized the value of GOARN: “The Republic of Korea is pleased to stand alongside our regional partners in building an emergency workforce that is ready and resilient. GOARN turns national expertise into regional readiness - catalysing national strengths into collective resilience.”GOARN advances the Global Health Security Action Framework (GHEC) initiative by “convening, connecting and capacitating” regional leaders and surge workforce – “the three Cs”. Years of GOARN leadership and outbreak response training programmes have cultivated a deep bench of fit-for-purpose, seasoned outbreak response experts and forged an alumni network of emergency leaders worldwide. The Western Pacific network alone has now grown to 94 partner institutions across 19 countries. Photo: Participants at the Global Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Partners Meeting 2026. Credit: KDCA/Shin Dong Myoung Putting partnerships into practiceDuring the Regional Partners’ Meeting, health experts identified and catalogued the technical expertise currently available across the Western Pacific Region, so that the right skills could be better matched quickly to needs wherever emergencies occur.Three priority areas emerged for further strengthening:Cybersecurity and critical infrastructure resilience - protecting essential systems, including healthcare networks, from digital disruptions.Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and environmental health - reflecting the ongoing nexus between climate change and health.Biological emergencies, nuclear emergencies, and nuclear and radiological security - requiring specialized technical capability that remains limited across many national response systems.Meeting participants reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening workforce capacities in the Region, with a particular focus on these three areas, and to working collectively to better prepare the Western Pacific for the next health emergency.Photo: Dr Gina Samaan, WHO Regional Emergency Director for the Western Pacific, delivers opening remarks at the Global Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Partners Meeting 2026. Credit: KDCA/Shin Dong Myoung“GOARN is truly turning preparedness into action - giving our Region the surge capacity it needs for fast, coordinated response when it matters most - and building more resilient health systems along the way,” said Dr Samaan. “As health emergencies mount in this age of permacrisis, emergency preparedness and response must be woven into the fabric of health. This is not an option, but an imperative as we seek to achieve health for all.”____ About GOARNThe Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), coordinated by the World Health Organization since 2000, strengthens global health security by advancing preparedness for and response to public health emergencies. The network brings together more than 390 institutions, including national public health agencies, technical organizations and nongovernmental partners, to support coordinated international action during outbreaks and other health emergencies. There are 94 GOARN partners in the Western Pacific Region (as of August 2026), accounting for approximately 25% of global partners. For more information and media interviews, please contact: WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.intAra Johannes: johannesa@who.int
Saints’ Rookie Named ‘Future Hit’ Ahead of Week 1
The New Orleans Saints still have some questions to be answered at the wide receiver position.If Bryce Lance reaches his potential quickly, though, that could solve a lot of potential issues.And there appear to be at least some people around the league who are big believers in Lance.The Saints took Lance in the fourth round […] The post Saints’ Rookie Named ‘Future Hit’ Ahead of Week 1 appeared first on HEAVY.
Will Chargers Really Have RB By Committee Approach?
Mike McDaniel has made it clear the Chargers will use all three running backs, but that doesn’t mean the workload should be equal. If Omarion Hampton is who the Chargers believe he can be, he should quickly emerge as the clear centerpiece of this backfield.
3 Things the Lions Cannot do Sunday
The Detroit Lions are heavy favorites against the Saints, but three costly mistakes could quickly turn a favorable matchup into a disappointing start to the season.
UN hails Libya election deal as Security Council urges Libyans to seize the moment
The UN Security Council has welcomed a breakthrough agreement between Libya's rival political blocs, calling it "an important step" towards the country's first national elections in over a decade – while pressing all sides to move quickly from paper to practice.
The moon may have formed in just 5 hours, new simulations suggest
Novel simulations, which reassessed the ancient collision between Earth and the protoplanet Theia, suggest that the moon could have emerged from the aftermath of this impact much more quickly than scientists previously thought.
Federal health officials warn Nashville hospital risks losing Medicare deal
Federal health officials are warning Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital that it must quickly fix serious patient-safety problems or risk losing Medicare.