DrunkEngineer

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired a top official with the National Institutes of Health who blew the whistle on internal clashes over vaccine research in the early months of the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo received a letter from Kennedy — which CBS News reviewed — informing her that her role leading NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, had been terminated. He did not cite a cause beyond his constitutional authority to do so. Last month, in an exclusive interview with CBS News, Marrazzo said she had been silenced when she and her colleagues pushed back against NIH officials appointed by President Trump who questioned the importance of childhood flu vaccines and canceled long-running clinical trials.

Storefront in Berkeley (of course it is Berkeley).

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251002200413/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/arts/design/trump-eisenhower-king-charles-sword.html

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is providing the following information to urge the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) to take immediate action on the safety recommendations in this report concerning electrical fires aboard Silverliner IV railcars in passenger service. We identified this issue during our investigation into a February 6, 2025, fire in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, and four additional fires involving Silverliner IV railcars over the following months.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, today hailed the success of his bold air quality policies which have led to the capital’s air pollution levels falling to within the legal limit for the first time.  

In 2019, leading experts at Kings College London estimated that without additional action it would take 193 years for London to meet legal limits, but Sadiq has achieved this aim in just nine years – 184 years early.  

New air quality data from Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), published today, reveals that London met the Air Quality Standards regulations for the first time in 2024 (1). This is assessed through modelling and Defra’s approved air quality monitoring networks (2).

Sadiq has achieved this important milestone almost 200 years ahead of predictions, demonstrating the transformative impact of his bold policies to improve London’s air quality and protect Londoners’ health and the environment. Since he took office in 2016, following the implementation of his ambitious policies, such as ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone), levels of toxic NO2 at roadsides has nearly halved (3).

In London, around 4,000 premature deaths per year were previously attributed to toxic air (4) and a recent report from the Royal College of Physicians estimates that air pollution costs the UK more than £27 billion per year (5). Air pollution increases the risk of developing asthma, lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and there is growing evidence that air pollution exposure increases the risk of developing dementia (6). Reaching this milestone of achieving legal limits, years ahead of where we would have been without action, shows that bold policy can produce important benefits.

Despite huge pressure from many different quarters, from politicians to vested interests, the Mayor pressed on with expanding the ULEZ to all of London and it's proven to be even more effective at cutting air pollution than previously predicted.    

Multiple sources close to Fox25 have told us that State Superintendent Ryan Walters is planning to resign, with an announcement expected on Friday, Sept. 26, with plans to take a position in the private sector.

Sources say one person under consideration is former state representative Mark McBride.

Fox25's Wendy Suares asked McBride about the possible appointment, and he stated he hasn't discussed it with the governor but would probably accept the position.

On Tuesday, Walters issued a release advocating for a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Club America Chapter in every Oklahoma high school.

"We will fight back against the liberal propaganda, pushed by the radical left, and the teachers' union," said Walters in the release. "Our fight starts now."

If you’ve wandered onto social media in the last week, chances are good that an algorithm seemingly designed to reward snuff films served you a video of a gruesome killing. Among the clips is footage of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska being brutally, fatally stabbed on the Charlotte Light Rail by Decarlos Brown Jr., who faces both a first-degree murder charge and a federal charge for committing an act of death on a mass transit system.

Over the past few days, the right has sought to capitalize on Zarutska’s horrific murder, arguing that Democrat-controlled cities are hotbeds of violence and lawlessness and using it as further evidence of the wisdom of the Trump administration’s decision to dispatch National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Boston in the name of law and order. In the case of the murder in Charlotte, the right has zeroed in on a particular target: public transit. “The problem is a lot of people, unlike the rich liberals, they can’t ride Uber, they don’t have a vehicle, they have to take public transportation, and public transportation has become an epidemic of violence and homelessness across the country,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. Those same liberals, Duffy said, “hate cars” and “want us all to ride public transportation.”

Duffy’s argument isn’t subtle: Use mass transit, and you’ll get yourself killed. There’s just one problem: He couldn’t be more wrong. According to one recent study, car travel is 10 times as deadly as travel by mass transit. Another report from the nonprofit National Safety Council finds that, for every 100 million miles traveled by passengers, rates of car deaths were 17 times greater than deaths from train travel, and 50 times greater than deaths from bus travel.

An eyewitness said that the driver of a grey BMW 52I hit a man in his 30s walking his German shepherd and dragged him for at least a block, and then looped back, rammed another car, jumped the sidewalk and hit a man on a bicycle, which was left mangled at the scene.

Then, another woman who was jogging was hit so hard that she flipped over the BMW and cracked her head on the sidewalk, the eyewitness said. The BMW now has a large crack in the windshield from the impact of striking the woman.

KTVU obtained some graphic Ring video of the BMW driving on the sidewalk, striking the man with the dog, which then takes off barking. The BMW driver then is seen driving fast on the sidewalk back toward the UC Berkeley campus.

Taxing Britain’s SUVs in line with other European countries could raise almost £2bn a year for the public finances, research has shown.

The Transport & Environment thinktank has urged the government to use the autumn budget to bring in a levy on the largest vehicles, which it said would reflect the damage they caused to the environment and infrastructure.

T&E said the current UK vehicle tax system was not keeping up with the change in the profile of cars sold, with heavier and more polluting cars escaping adequate taxation and coming to dominate the market.

An “SUV loophole” meant UK buyers paid up to 20 times less tax on the biggest models than counterparts in other European countries, it said. Vehicle tax on a new £85,000 BMW X5 would amount to £3,200 in the UK, but the sale would incur taxes of £66,600 in France – driving UK SUV sales to four times the level in France.

California could pay hundreds of millions of dollars to cover maintenance costs at Valero Energy Co.’s refinery in Benicia in an effort to stave off the plant’s closure, according to Bloomberg. 

The outlet reported that California legislators are in talks to spend between $80 million and $200 million in state funds on the facility, which was built in 1968 and is the sixth-largest refinery in California. 

Valero, which is headquartered in San Antonio, said in April that it was considering closing the plant, six months after state and local regulators handed it a record setting fine.

Old Grudge

There's an old wives' tale that Hitler doesn't care for cyclists.

The story (which is not new) is that, in the early days of National Socialism, Hitler was once roaring and ranting at the Jews at a public meeting in Munich.

Screamed the pudgy little horror: "WHO stabbed Germany in the back? THE JEWS! Who grew rich while the Fatherland starved? THE JEWS! Who engineered the Treaty of Versailles? THE JEWS! Who fomented rebellion in the German Navy? THE JEWS!"

Thunderous applause.

Then up got a mild, bespectacled little bloke who said, "Yes, that's right, the Jews and the cyclists!"

"Why the cyclists?" bawled the Fuehrer.

"Why the Jews?" retorted his questioner.

I now read that in France the Gestapo are attacking the cyclists as being carriers of anti-German propaganda. They have forbidden them to ride abreast in the streets of Paris as this...

Daily Mirror Aug 24, 1940

The federal public defender’s office in Los Angeles moved to disqualify acting US attorney Bill Essayli, citing a decision that ruled New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor ineligible to serve on similar grounds.

Essayli, who was kept as the acting head of the Central District of California office at the close of his 120-day interim period, has no lawful authority to participate in criminal prosecutions now under federal appointments law, deputy federal public defenders James Anglin Flynn and Ayah A. Sarsour said in their motion that was signed Thursday and filed Friday.

Essayli is among a “pattern of improper appointments” to lead US attorneys offices under the Trump administration in at least four districts, the attorneys said in the document submitted in Los Angeles federal court before Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes.

The motion said that Essayli didn’t hold a role that would qualify him as an “acting” official under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, has already run out the clock on 120 days of service, and hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate to serve in his role indefinitely, the motion said.

“A private citizen—not lawfully appointed to any government position—is purporting to wield one of the most powerful offices in our criminal-justice system,” the motion said. “Other private individuals’ liberty is on the line.”