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That video looks like Grand Theft Auto which is pretty much how it is now. Will they only reject the notion because its not being untaken by a country or person for that matter with strict Islamic beliefs.
There's nothing on the table for anyone to reject.
FDA advisory meeting to select strains for flu vaccines cancelled
An FDA advisory committee meeting to determine the composition of influenza vaccines has reportedly been cancelled, raising concerns that manufacturers won't have sufficient time to produce the shots ahead of the upcoming season.
The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) was tentatively scheduled to meet on March 13 to discuss which strains should be included in next season's flu vaccine. However, several panel members were notified late on February 26 that it had been cancelled.
"That was the word" that was used, said committee member Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia. Offit and other panel members noted that no reason was provided for the cancellation, and there was no indication of whether the meeting would be rescheduled.
"We have this meeting every year. It's how pharmaceutical companies determine which strains to use," Offit said. "I don't understand. We're all just sort of left in the dark. Will manufacturers now turn to the World Health Organization to determine strains for this year’s influenza vaccines?”
The cancellation marks the second time in less than a week that a key advisory meeting has been called off at the start of long-time vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary. Previously, a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) scheduled for February 26-28 was cancelled, although the postponement was reportedly made to “accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting."
A rapidly spreading outbreak of measles in Texas has killed two people, US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr, said on Wednesday.
They are the first mortalities from measles in the US in nearly a decade.
One of those victims was an unvaccinated child who died in a Texas hospital after testing positive for measles, according to the state's health department.
Secretary Kennedy, who was speaking at the first cabinet meeting for President Donald Trump's current term, did not give any information on the other victim and the BBC was not able to confirm the death.
The Texas Department of State Health Services reported on Tuesday that it was aware of 124 cases diagnosed since the outbreak began in early January, up from 90 cases on Friday. Almost all cases - 101 - were in patients 17 and younger.
The US declared measles "eliminated" in 2000, but the country has seen outbreaks in recent years amid a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment. The last US measles death was in 2015, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
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The Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract to overhaul a communications system that serves as the backbone of the nation’s air traffic control system and awarding the work to Elon Musk’s Starlink, according to two people briefed on the plans.
The move to cancel a major contract in favor of a venture led by Musk — who is leading President Donald Trump’s disruptive overhaul of the federal government through the U.S. DOGE Service — would represent a significant test of protections against conflicts of interest in government projects. It would be an especially extraordinary step for the typically cautious FAA, whose systems are vital to the safety of millions of air travelers every day.
The existing contract was awarded to Verizon in 2023, with the aim of upgrading a platform that different air traffic control facilities and FAA offices use to communicate with one another…
… Verizon was tapped in 2023 to build a system called the FAA Enterprise Network Services Program or FENS, replacing a system that dates to 2002. The contract had a 15-year lifespan, and the system is intended to connect some 4,600 sites, according to the FAA.
The agency was scheduled to make a final decision on whether to start paying Verizon for the contract next month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Instead, Musk’s team determined the job should go to Starlink, the person said. But the process for unwinding a contract and awarding it to another company is lengthy and has not been followed in this case so far, the person said.
Several senior FAA officials have refused to sign paperwork authorizing the switch, according to the person, who has been briefed on the internal deliberations and resulting fallout, so Musk’s team is now seeking help from the acting administrator of the agency, Trump appointee Chris Rocheleau, and Duffy.
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That could not have gone better for No 10. Praised Starmer and Britain, said he probably won't need tariffs and we'll have a trade deal, praised the UK's increase in defence and said we don't need 'backing up' but he would also back Britain if we needed it, said he agrees with article 5 of NATO and praised Ukraine.
Of course Trump says one thing then does another so....
That could not have gone better for No 10. Praised Starmer and Britain, said he probably won't need tariffs and we'll have a trade deal, praised the UK's increase in defence and said we don't need 'backing up' but he would also back Britain if we needed it, said he agrees with article 5 of NATO and praised Ukraine.
Of course Trump says one thing then does another so....
just like Starmer then
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DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week
The cuts, highlighted on an earlier version of the “wall of receipts” posted by Elon Musk’s team, contained mistakes that vastly inflated the amount of money saved.
Last week, Elon Musk’s government cost-slashing initiative, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, posted an online “wall of receipts,” celebrating how much it had saved by canceling federal contracts.
Now the organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, has deleted all of the five biggest “savings” on that original list, after The New York Times and other media outlets pointed out they were riddled with errors.
The last of the original top five disappeared from the site in the early hours of Tuesday, even as the group claimed in its latest update that its savings to date had increased to $65 billion. The website offered no explanation for why it had removed some items or how it had arrived at the higher total. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, sent a written statement that did not address the deletions, but provided a broader defense of the cost-cutting initiative, saying it “has already identified billions of dollars in savings.”
The “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.
These were the original five largest savings on its list:
An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”
Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.
A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.
Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.
The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president - and when DOGE did not yet exist.
$12.1 billion of the DOGE reported savings was actually $26.6 million - 0.22% of reported savings.
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