Authored by Laura Dodsworth via DailySceptic.org,

I recently returned from holiday. The segue from hot dry days oiled with rosé and factor 30 to a best-of-British grey rainy day was harsh. But as I took myself out for provisions, slapping my sandals through puddles under a leaden sky, my mood lifted. The high street was lined with our beautiful Union flags. Bright red, white and blue cut through the drizzle like fireworks. A reminder that this is home.

Not everyone feels the same. X, that great sewer of national neurosis, is on fire with polarised responses to a few flags on lampposts. Some of us see hope, pride and courage. Others see racism, fascism and the end of civilisation. And so I would like to coin a new word for our times: Vexillophobia.

Vexillology is the study of flags. A vexillophile is someone who loves them.

I am amazed that no one else has coined the obvious opposite, vexillophobia, until now. Yet here we are, in a country that actually needs a word for people who recoil in horror at bunting.

A vexillophobe hates flags. They are allergic to bunting. They start to twitch at the sight of a fluttering Union Jack. The St George’s cross provokes maximum fear and outrage in the vexillophobe.

Take Andy Burnham, who said:

“You can obviously display a flag if that’s your choice but I don’t know, I do wonder about the times we’re living in. It’s like people are seeking confrontation.”

I think Andy Burnham is a vexillophobe.

He is not alone — vexillophobia is sweeping the land. Professor Kehinde Andrews told Good Morning Britain that people who put up flags are really signalling that “Britain is white and we shouldn’t be here”. Essex County Council sent staff a note warning that England flags on roundabouts might make people feel “unsettled”. The Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, complained last summer that nationalists “defile the flag they wrap themselves in”. Poor Justin, what does he make of the Last Night of the Proms when the Albert Hall becomes a glorious sea of flags, Rule Britannia! soaring and hearts pounding with joy? Perhaps he considers it a televised hate crime.

The media is consumed with bunting panic. NBC asked, ‘Patriotic pride or anti-immigrant campaign? Why the English flag is suddenly everywhere‘ and the BBC dourly warned: “National flags have started lining our streets. They may say something more.”

A YouGov survey last year revealed that one in four Britons has an unfavourable view of people who fly the Union Jack or St George’s Cross. Keir Starmer claimed that the Labour Party was the patriotic party, but Labour voters were 13 times more likely than Conservative supporters to describe England’s flag as “racist and divisive”. Almost half of Labour voters took a negative view of those who hang a St George’s Cross outside their home.

Parliament has an APPG on British Muslims, building on the APPG on Islamophobia which preceded it, and is determined to push for legal and institutional recognition of Islamophobia as a form of racism. There are APPGs dedicated to health and mental health. So, why is there no All-Party Parliamentary Group on vexillophobia? This country urgently needs one. MPs must step up and support sufferers of this terrible malady. Imagine how difficult it must be to go about your daily business while breaking into a cold sweat every time you pass a car dealership or a Wetherspoons festooned with Union Jacks. Truly, this is a silent epidemic.

And it gets worse, since I suspect the vexillophobes don’t just complain, they project. They accuse people who love flags of being “flag-shaggers”. No one is shagging flags — one wonders whether there is something distinctly Freudian about this insult?

No, I am afraid that vexillophobia is a giant red flag for hatred of one’s own nation — in other words, a form of contorted self-hatred. If you cannot take joy in your own country’s symbols, if you sneer at those who fly the flag at home, if it drives you mad to see your flag in the high street, then you have a deeper problem.

J.D. Vance has told patriotic Britons to “push back against the crazies”. But what should we do about the crazies themselves?

British humour at its finest

Fortunately, psychology has answers. The classic treatment for phobias is exposure therapy. Arachnophobes are encouraged to look at a spider from a distance, then closer, then to hold one in their hands until the fear subsides. Likewise, we can only hope that if vexillophobes are exposed to more and more flags they will not only be de-sensitised, but even learn to enjoy the thrilling colours and elegant geometry of one of the best flags in the world.

There is no cure but courage. Vexillophobes must learn to stand tall, eyes fixed on the flagpole, and embrace what they fear.

So, people, you know what to do. Proudly raise the colours. Hang a flag from your window, tie bunting across your garden, stick a Union Jack on your car. If nothing else, it will help our poor vexillophobic neighbours confront their demons.

The red, white and blue is ours. Let it fly.

This article was first published on Laura’s Substack, the Free Mind. Subscribe here.

Islam is the world’s second-largest relgion and 1.8 billion Muslims are spread across every continent.

The visualization below, via Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao, ranks each country by the number of adherents, along with their share in the population revealing where Muslim communities are largest.

The data for this visualization comes from two complementary sources: Pew Research, which tracks global religious affiliation, and the CIA World Factbook, which publishes the latest national demographic splits.

Due to data restrains, the most recent figures between 2020–2023 have been used, depending on availability per country.

Ranked: Countries With the Most Muslims

Indonesia (242 million), Pakistan (235 million), India (213 million), and Bangladesh (150 million) alone account for nearly 40% of the world’s Muslims.

Each of these densely populated nations has seen steady population growth over the past two decades, and fertility rates in Pakistan and Bangladesh remain above the global average.

Together, they underscore the demographic weight of South and Southeast Asia, regions sometimes overlooked when the focus is on the Middle East.

The presence of Malaysia and Uzbekistan in the top 20 further highlights Asia’s central role in shaping global Muslim demographics.

Muslim-Majority and Muslim-Plurality States in Africa

Meanwhile, Africa is home to some of the fastest-growing Muslim populations.

Nigeria, already the continent’s most populous country, now counts more than 124 million Muslims, over half its citizens.

In North Africa, Egypt and Algeria each report that roughly 95-98% of their inhabitants identify as Muslim, reflecting centuries-old cultural and religious continuity.

Across the Sahel, countries like Niger and Mali post near-complete Muslim majorities, even as they grapple with rapid urbanization and climate pressures that influence migration patterns.

Minorities in Demographic Giants: India and China

While India’s 213 million Muslims comprise only 15% of its population, that minority is larger than the total populations of most countries.

China’s Muslim share is just 1.4%, yet the absolute number—25 million—is comparable to the entire population of Australia.

These examples illustrate how sheer population size can translate even small percentages into tens of millions of adherents.

Demographers expect India’s Muslim community to surpass Indonesia’s by mid-century if current fertility differentials persist, potentially redrawing the global ranking.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out America’s Religious Landscape on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The Chancellor seems to have collided with reality during the summer break. Merz sees the German social system in deep crisis. Meanwhile, his political allies in Brussels are calling for an increase in the very dose of poison that is making Europe sick.

Let’s be blunt: Large parts of the political elite have a fractured relationship with reality. This applies equally to the economic decay of Germany and the EU, as well as to the public communication of strategic political goals, which are systematically obscured. Open criticism of the course could cause the political fairy tale to collapse faster than reality seeps into public opinion.

Merz and the Welfare State

All the more remarkable are the warning words of Chancellor Friedrich Merz during his Saturday appearance at the CDU state party conference in Lower Saxony. “I am not satisfied with what we have achieved so far – it must be more, it must be better.”

Hear that! A faint tremor of self-criticism from the Chancellor. Rare, indeed. Yet the statement raises the question: what exactly does Merz mean by “achievements”? Is he referring to the so-called investment booster, supposedly providing marginal relief to the German economy while it teeters on collapse? Or does he mean the massive debt packages and widening financing gaps, most likely to be closed with tax hikes?

In his speech in Osnabrück, Merz later spoke unusually clearly about the state of the welfare system: “The welfare state, as we have it today, is no longer financially sustainable given what we can deliver economically.” A blunt diagnosis, leaving little to be desired in clarity.

There was, however, no mention of a market-oriented turn, trust in individual solutions, personal responsibility, or rapid bureaucratic reduction. The message seems to be: stay the course.

Moments of Honesty

Merz also spoke unequivocally about citizen welfare payments: it cannot continue like this. 5.6 million people receive the payments. Many could work but do not, he said. A reality that politics usually avoids.

A tentative attempt to openly name the precarious state of German social insurance. In times when political sugar-coating is routine, it’s almost a stroke of luck when a leading politician at least partially acknowledges economic realities.

Have the latest economic data perhaps shaken Merz and his colleagues in Berlin? GDP shrank again in the second quarter, and the outlook remains bleak. With the state intervening via massive credit programs and new debt hitting about 3.5% this year, the private economy is contracting at 4–5%. Calling this a recession would be euphemistic — we are in a depression.

More EU Centralism

While the Chancellor stumbled through Germany’s harsh economic reality, EU representatives launched media trial balloons.

It was Mario Draghi, the EU’s political all-rounder, who easily alternates between former Italian PM and ECB chief, presenting yet another report.

He reiterated his familiar demand: the European Union must act more cohesively, like a single state, if it wants to retain a geopolitical role.

More of the medicine that made Europe sick: more centralization, less subsidiarity, and intensified technocratic rule. Draghi once again demonstrates Brussels’ plan — as during the sovereign debt crisis 15 years ago: power concentrated in Brussels, decisions outside democratic control, enforced by a political apparatus orchestrating media narratives. Strict censorship, media manipulation — dirty tools to silence opposition to centralization. The same authoritarian logic that worked then is being revived.

Lagarde and Migration

Draghi’s ally, ECB President Christine Lagarde, also hit the media circuit. She touched on migration, a topic skillfully avoided or distorted in German politics and media.

Lagarde floated a trial balloon at the Federal Reserve meeting in Jackson Hole, subtly testing Europe’s mood. According to her, Europe could no longer grow without massive migration (of which growth exactly?). She claimed Germany’s GDP would be roughly six percent lower today than in 2019 without foreign workers.

That the country has been in a depression for some time seems not to have reached the ECB leadership. Then came the familiar trump card: without migration, the labor shortage cannot be addressed. No mention of technological advances via AI or robotics, which could offset labor shortages. No mention of migration as a security risk, of cultural conflicts, or a political Islam incompatible with European values.

Lagarde’s stance was particularly striking as the U.S. begins repatriating illegal migrants, ending the Europeanization of American policy. Her speech in the land of rational awakening and political turnaround likely caused nothing but raised eyebrows.

Jackson Hole highlighted the EU’s trajectory: open borders, elites ignoring risks, while the left expands its voter base at Europe’s cultural and economic expense.

Bitter Balance

Combine the three events — Merz’s speech, Lagarde in Jackson Hole, and Draghi’s latest report — and the conclusion is alarming: the economy is accelerating toward collapse due to a self-inflicted energy crisis and overregulation. Social funds, strained by mass illegal migration, risk implosion. The proposed solution? Centralization, regulation, and continued unchecked migration.

Even Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil’s usual tax hike debates fit seamlessly: the individual counts for nothing, the state controls everything, increasingly burdening citizens. The audacity to attack private property and raise taxes further is staggering, meeting little resistance. The Merz CDU has become a paper-thin bourgeois protective wall of hot air.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Oh, what a show that was. A pan-Asia, pan-Eurasia, crossover Global South ball, with glittering dynamo Tianjin as backdrop, enjoyed as such by the overwhelming majority of the planet, while predictably generating cascades of sour grapes among the fragmented West – from the omnipotent Empire of Chaos to The Coalition of the Toothless Chihuahuas.

History will register that as much as BRICS finally stepped into the limelight at the summit in Kazan in 2024, the SCO replicated the move at the summit in Tianjin in 2025.

Among a feast of highlights – hard to top Putin and Modi walking hand in hand – this was of course M.C. Xi’s ball. The original RIC (Russia, India, China), as conceptualized by the Great Primakov in the late 1990s, were finally back in the game, together.

But it was Xi who personally set the main guidelines – proposing no less than a broad, new Global Governance model, complete with important ramifications such as a SCO development back, which should complement the BRICS’s NDB, as well as close AI cooperation in contrast with Silicon Valley’s techno-feudalism.

Global Governance, the Chinese way, encompasses five core principles. The most crucial, no doubt, is sovereign equality. That connects with respect for the international rule of law – and not a shape-shifted, at will, “rules-based international order”. Global Governance advances multilateralism. And also inevitably encourages a much-lauded “people-centered” approach, away from vested interests.

Putin for his part detailed the role of the SCO as “a vehicle for genuine multilateralism”, in tune with this new Global Governance. And he crucially called for a pan-Eurasian security model. That’s exactly the “indivisibility of security” that the Kremlin proposed to Washington in December 2021 – and was met by a non-response response.

So taken together, BRICS and SCO are totally engaged in burying the Cold War-era mentality, a world divided by blocs; and at the same time they are visionary enough to call for the UN system to be respected as it was originally conceived.

Now that will be the Mother of Uphill Battles – including everything from taking the UN out of New York to completely revamping the Security Council.

The dance of Bear, Dragon and Elephant

If Xi set up the guidelines in Tianjin, the strategic guest of honor had to be Putin. And that extrapolated to their one-on-one meeting on Tuesday at the Zhongnanhai in Beijing: very private, as only special conversations are held at the former imperial palace. Xi greeted his “old friend” in Russian.

As Putin emphasized the central role of the SCO Development Program for the next 10 years, he was playing it very much the Chinese way, when it comes to all those successive, successful 5-year plans.

These roadmaps are essential to set long-term strategies. And in the case of the SCO, that means organizing its progressive shift from initially an anti-terrorism mechanism to a complex multilateral platform coodinating infrastructure development and geoeconomics.

And that’s where China’s new idea – the establishment of the SCO Development Bank – comes in. It’s a mirror institution to the NDB – the BRICS bank based in Shanghai, and parallel to the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the multilateral bank based in Beijing.

Once again, BRICS and SCO run intertwined, as their key focus is to progressively ditch dependence on Western paradigms and at the same time fight the effect of sanctions, which not by accident hit hard on the four top members of both BRICS and SCO: Russia, China, India and Iran.

And of course, among all the camaraderie in Tianjin, there was Modi in China for the first time in 7 years. Xi went straight to the point: “China and India are great civilizations whose responsibilities extend beyond bilateral issues.” And M.C. Xi once again hit the dancefloor: the future lies “in the dance of the dragon and the elephant.” Cue to the Three Eurasia amigos chatting amicably in the corridors.

The Tianjin Declaration – not as extensive as Kazan last year – still managed to emphasize the key points that apply to Eurasia: sovereignty, above anything else; non-interference in internal affairs of member-states; and total rejection of unilateral sanctions as tools of coercion.

Crucially, that should apply not only to SCO member-states but to partners as well – from the Arab petromonarchies to the Southeast Asian powerhouses. Development strategies of different nations already cooperate, in practice, with BRI projects, from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to the China-Belarus Industrial Park, extrapolating to cross-border e-commerce, AI and Big Data.

The SCO’s astonishing geographic scale, combined with half of the world’s population, carries tremendous potential across the spectrum – for instance on trade, transport infrastructure, cross-border investment and financial transactions. The potential is far from being realized.

But the high-speed trains are already rolling: geopolitical imperatives are guiding increased pan-Eurasia geoeconomic interaction.

Shanghai Spirit eviscerates “War on Terror”

So this is the top takeaway of the Tianjin Show: the SCO affirming itself as a solid strategic pole uniting a great deal of the Global Majority. And all that without the need to metastasize into an offensive military behemoth like NATO.

It’s a long way from a pavillion in a Shanghai park in 2001, only three months before 9/11 – which was marketed by the Empire of Chaos as the foundation stone of the “war on terror”. That other initially modest foundation stone – with Russia, China and three Central Asian “stans” – was the “Shanghai spirit”: a set of principles based on mutual trust and benefit, equality, consultation, respect for the diversity of civilizations, and an emphasis on common economic development.

How the Shanghai spirit actually outlasted the “war on terror” leaves us with much to ponder.

In his toast at the elegant banquet offered in Tianjin for SCO guests, Xi had to quote a proverb: “In a race of a hundred boats, those who row the hardest will lead”.

Hard work. Results of which can be seen by anyone facing Tianjin’s spectacular development. That has absolutely nothing to do with “democracy” – as debased by its allleged practitioners as it is across the collective West – opposed to “the autocrats”, or “villains”, or Axis of Upheaval, or any other stupidity. It’s always about hard work – for the common good. That’s what BRICS and SCO are fighting for.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

The more information we get about the “Trump economic zone” proposal in southern Lebanon, the worse it seems for the people who live there. The latest reports reveal the plan to totally depopulate the south of the country, to place the whole area under US military control, and to grant Israel to right to build “permanent” bases in what are currently Lebanese towns and villages.

The plan first appeared a little over a week ago, with the US presenting it as their proposal while Israel maintains they came up with the idea. The broad strokes are that it is meant to replace border villages with Lebanese government-run industrial zones.

But the plan would involve no less than 27 villages being depopulated, spanning the Israel-Lebanon border from Naqoura to Marjayoun. Among those, Israel is demanding it be granted permission to construct permanent military sites within 14 of the former villages.

The plan would involve the absolute destruction of Odaisseh, Kfar Kela, Houla, Markaba, and Ayta al-Shaab. Israel wants rights to occupy those militarily as well as Khiam, Ramiya, Yaroun, Aitaroun, Alma al-Shaab, Al-Dhayra, Marwahin, Maroun El-Ras, and Blida.

Underpinning the plan would be 1,500 to 2,000 US troops occupying the Trump Zone, which will be meant to “assure” Israeli settlers in northern Israel.

It is unclear from the reports if these will be US military personnel or simply American military contractors. Either way though, Lebanon would be ceding all sovereign authority over the south of their country.

The economic aspect of the zone is to create state-run industry in the south, which US officials have suggested would provide jobs even though nobody would be allowed to live there anyway. They have tapped Saudi Arabia and Qatar to bankroll this scheme.

Though presented as mainly about harming Hezbollah, the Trump Zone is depopulating not just Shi’ite villages, but also Sunni towns in the west like al-Bustan and even Christian-heavy towns like Rmesh. Lebanon is known being split among Sunni, Shi’ite and Christian populations, and none of them are spared in this plan.

In a stunning shake-up at one of Japan’s biggest beverage giants, Suntory Holdings Chairman and CEO Takeshi Niinami has resigned after being questioned by police over an overseas purchase of supplements allegedly containing THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis that’s illegal in Japan above certain levels, Japan Times reports.

The company announced Tuesday that Niinami, one of Japan’s most prominent business leaders and a member of a government economic panel, stepped down after police launched an investigation tied to supplements he bought overseas – products he insists he believed were legal.

“We apologize from the bottom of our hearts for causing trouble over the incident,” Suntory Holdings President Nobuhiro Torii said at a hastily convened news conference in Tokyo.

The Breaking Point

Torii said Niinami informed Suntory on Aug. 22 that he was under police investigation. The company brought in an external attorney, who confirmed Niinami’s account that he purchased the supplements “with the understanding that they were legal.”

But the Fukuoka Prefectural Police suspect otherwise. Investigators believe the products may contain THC and became aware of Niinami’s possible involvement after another man was arrested in July over illegal drugs.

Niinami has denied wrongdoing, telling investigators that a female acquaintance ordered the supplements and had them sent to him. He voluntarily submitted to a urine test for THC, which came back negative.

Guess times aren’t so relaxing for Niinami…

Despite the pending investigation and the absence of confirmed wrongdoing, Suntory’s board urged Niinami to resign, citing concerns over his judgment and the company’s reputation.

Torii said the controversy “makes him unfit to remain as chairman,” especially since Suntory itself sells supplements. After initial reluctance, Niinami agreed to step down on Monday, ending his more than 10-year tenure with the company.

Torii nonetheless praised Niinami’s leadership – saying “He was a bold, decisive and capable business leader,” adding “For the 10 years he was with the company, he significantly expanded the company’s sales and profitability. That is an undeniable fact.”

Suntory Vice President Kenji Yamada stressed that Niinami’s resignation was final regardless of whether police eventually clear him:

“This decision was made in light of the seriousness of the issue, which concerns his qualification to be the leader of a company that deals in supplements. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, this matter will remain unchanged.”

Niinami, who became Suntory’s president in 2014 and took over as chairman in March this year, also serves as head of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai Doyukai), a high-profile business lobby.

Investigators have not located the supplements in question, and no formal charges have been filed.

Wonder if Sammy Davis Jr. was on THC when he adlibbed this Suntory ad? Maybe something with a little more kick. 

Authored by James Lyons-Weiler via The Brownstone Institute,

When Demetre Daskalakis resigned as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, his letter to leadership carried a tone of finality and moral conviction. 

“Enough is enough,” he declared, explaining that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s leadership had made it impossible for him to continue. The letter has been praised as principled, but when read closely it is less a defense of science than a portrait of the very rhetorical habits that drove the public away from CDC in the first place: appeals to authority, catastrophic predictions, ad hominem attacks, and factual distortions.

Consider his charge that he can no longer serve in an environment that “treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” 

This is a false dichotomy. It frames the choice as binary: either one accepts CDC’s “scientific reality,” or one is accused of designing policies to harm.

Yet the last five years have shown what most Americans already know: what CDC has called “science” has often been neither transparent nor replicable, but political judgment dressed in a white coat. 

He accuses the new HHS of narrative enforcement, when, in reality, CDC has become infamous for the same partly on his watch.

Lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates were not the inevitable products of neutral science — they were policy choices, frequently contradicted by the very data the CDC refused to release. Kennedy did not cause that collapse of trust. Power overreach and failed policy did.

Still, Daskalakis appeals to institutional sanctity: “unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC.” 

But the claim that CDC represents “gold standard science” rings hollow. The agency’s failures are well documented: contaminated Covid tests that delayed early detection, failure to use standard qRT-PCR to control for false positives, shifting guidance on masks that left the public whiplashed, withheld vaccine safety data buried in VAERS and VSD, and FOIA evasions that stonewalled independent scrutiny. To describe this record as “gold standard science” is an appeal to authority wholly unsupported by the evidence.

The catastrophism in his letter is striking but rings hollow. He warns that Kennedy’s policies will “bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.” He’s pretending that Kennedy has said he wants no vaccines for anyone. This is a combined fallacy: false dichotomy and slippery slope. Questioning the safety of excipients, the timing, number, or necessity of vaccines does not condemn the country to Darwinian misery. 

In fact, mortality from infectious diseases like measles, pertussis, and diphtheria had already declined long before mass vaccination, thanks to sanitation, nutrition, and reduced exposure to livestock reservoirs. The fact of loss of protection due to waning immunity is not found in his resignation. Balanced debate about risks and benefits does not mean “returning to the dark ages.” It means practicing science as it should be — open, skeptical, and transparent and will full accountability on scientific claims.

At points, the rhetoric becomes openly hostile. ACIP members are dismissed as “people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor,” and Kennedy himself is cast as an “authoritarian leader.” These are ad hominem attacks, not arguments. They dismiss individuals rather than engage with data or reasoning.

I’ve worked with Secretary Kennedy long enough to know him as a sensitive, thoughtful, non-reactionary, considerate leader. He is so considerate it can at times nearly irk his underlings who would like to see him come to decisions faster. But that’s because they have already made up their minds. Kennedy works arbitrarily and uses contrarianism – debate, adversarial set-ups – to hammer out the details until the description of a problem and its solution fits the mold. I’ve never heard of anyone spun out of his orbit for doing due diligence-based dissent. Meanwhile, Daskalakis pines for the old “following the leader” model of authoritarian “trust the science” CDC. Those days are gone.

The gravest claim in the letter is that “eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated.” Daskalakis gives us no quotations, policies, or documents. Sometimes words just sound right when one is upset, I suppose. Ironically, the accusation is not only unsubstantiated but inverted. Kennedy has consistently warned against coercive health policies and corporate capture, both of which he argues worsen inequality. To portray his emphasis on transparency and medical freedom as eugenics is a straw man — a distortion intended to silence rather than to debate.

Daskalakis goes further, blaming Kennedy for violence: “I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that his and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.” 

This refers to a shooting at CDC. Again, no hint of evidence has been offered by Daskalakis or anyone else to connect Kennedy’s words to the crime. It is a post hoc fallacy, exploiting tragedy to smear a political opponent. It’s shameless and ripens the fruit of his letter to rot.

Perhaps most jarring is his claim that Kennedy’s HHS has sought to “erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming, and terminate key research to support equity.” 

The rhetoric here is catastrophic, baseless, and false. In reality, under Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s leadership, the NIH has made HIV a top research priority. Far from “ceasing HIV programming,” Kennedy’s administration has pledged to tackle the epidemic with fresh eyes, free from the pharmaceutical capture that distorted earlier approaches. To suggest otherwise is not just hyperbole; it is disinformation.

Daskalakis also insists he has “always been first to challenge scientific dogma.” His self-nomination as a leader in this activity is again unsupported by evidence. Did Daskalakis speak up when Moderna and Pfizer inflated their efficacy estimates? Did Daskalakis write a letter of complaint when CDC reported that 20 layers of cloth masks, no 16, no, thank you Dr. Fauci, only 1 layer of cloth mask was sufficient to stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus in its tracks? I could go on, but the answer is not one peep from this challenger of dogma.

And yet, in practice, his defense of CDC orthodoxy shows the opposite. The real challenger of dogma has been Kennedy, who has questioned the sacred cows of American public health — vaccine trial design, regulatory capture, chronic disease drivers, and the silencing of dissent. What Daskalakis calls “dogma” is only that which challenges the CDC. What he calls “science” is whatever the CDC itself declares. Policy-first narrative enforcement activities.

None of this is to deny the human element. Daskalakis thanks his colleagues as “dedicated professionals committed to improving the health and well-being of communities across the nation.” 

Burnout and disillusionment are real, and his sense of betrayal is palpable. But compassion must extend beyond the walls of the CDC. For decades, the American people have suffered from rising chronic illness. Six in ten live with at least one chronic disease. Life expectancy has declined relative to peer nations. Autoimmune conditions, autism, and metabolic disorders have surged. To claim that Kennedy caused mistrust is to invert reality: mistrust grew because what CDC did was not science but policy, enforced without transparency, accountability, or humility.

The refrain “enough is enough” was meant as a rebuke of Kennedy’s HHS. But for the American people, it applies first and foremost to the CDC itself. Enough of secrecy disguised as science. Enough of fear-based rhetoric to silence dissent. Enough of sanctimony about “gold standards” while health outcomes decline due to medicine optimized to proxy outcomes. Kennedy’s critics mistake his reforms for authoritarianism when, in fact, they are the first genuine challenge to authoritarian policy disguised as medicine.

The resignation of a career official should not be mocked. But it should be read for what it is: a defense of a failed paradigm, framed as a moral stand. The task ahead is not to preserve the CDC’s aura; that is undeserved. It is instead to put public health on a foundation of honesty, openness, and freedom worthy of trust. That — not resignation letters steeped in fallacy — is what will truly make America healthy again.

Among the major agreements to come out of President Vladimir Putin’s official visit to China, hosted by President Xi Jinping this week (for the SCO conference and upcoming Chinese military parade, also to be attended by North Korea’s Kim), is the signing of a legally binding deal to construct and bring online the much-delayed Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline.

Alexei Miller, chief executive of Gazprom, confirmed to state news agencies that a memorandum of understanding has been signed on the construction of the new, ambitious gas pipeline.

It will transit gas reserves in Russia’s West Siberia to northern China via eastern Mongolia, at an expected estimated supply of 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas per year, Miller said, Interfax reports.

This is a three-decade long commitment and contract for the Power of Siberia 2. Miller further revealed that the price of gas transferred will be subject of a separate agreement.

Coinciding with this new deal, widely seen as an act of defiance aimed at that West and at a moment the US is threatening strong secondary sanctions on any country importing Russian energy, is that Gazprom will ramp up supplies to China via the existing Power of Siberia pipeline.

An industry executive and insider has underscored to CNBC that this sends a strong signal of the Russia-China-India desire to push back against Western economic bullying as BRICS countries forge ahead with their ‘multi-polar world’ platform:

“For the past decade, Gazprom has been pushing China to give the go-ahead for Power of Siberia-2, only to be met – until now – with positive but non-committal noises. So today’s signing of a MOU is a step forward for Gazprom,” Granville told CNBC by email.

“The fact that this has happened against the background of the fraught Ukraine war endgame, is a clear enough signal of China’s steady strategic backing for Russia as the lynchpin of the new multipolar order to which both these core Eurasian powers aspire,” Granville said.

Given the by and large loss of the European market, Moscow will be forced to sell gas at a lower than what Gazprom charges its European customers – no doubt part of the big appeal for Beijing – which could prove a big hurdle given the extreme cost and difficulty of constructing Power of Siberia 2 across a difficult and lengthy geographical terrain.

Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh is also in Beijing, where he has held meetings with Putin and Xi, during which time nearly two dozen agreements were signed. Russian state media has hailed it as a Warning to West, and a beacon for the Global South…

Russia remains third-largest provider of liquified natural gas (LNG) to China, after Australia and Qatar. The current 3,000 km pipeline, Power of Siberia, went online in 2019 as part of a 30-year, $400 billion deal.

Interestingly, President Putin while in China has struck a positive tone anytime US pressure is brought up in the context of the Ukraine war and American-led sanctions regimen. Putin said this week that the Trump administration “is listening to us” – unlike the prior Biden administration.

“Now we see this mutual understanding, it’s noticeable,” Putin told Slovak President Robert Fico in a bilateral meeting in China. “We are very happy about this and hope this constructive dialogue will continue.”

The world’s largest group of genocide scholars has overwhelmingly approved a resolution asserting that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide. “The government of Israel has engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, including indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure,” said the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), joining a growing list of institutions and governments who’ve reached the same conclusion. 

About a quarter of IAGS members participated in the balloting, with 86% voting to approve the resolution. IAGS second vice-president and University of the Bundeswehr Munich professor Timothy Williams told the Financial Times that “the association believes there is considerable merit to the largest group of genocide scholars saying: ‘Yes, we do believe this is genocide’.” As defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the term applies to actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” 

Israel’s foreign ministry swiftly condemned the group of academics, saying their “disgraceful” resolution is “entirely based on Hamas’ campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others…IAGS has set a historic precedent – for the first time, ‘Genocide Scholars’ accuse the very victim of genocide.” 

pic.twitter.com/Ulp1HybrmG

— Niz (@NizMhani) September 1, 2025

Linking to sources, the three-page IAGS resolution includes a list of points offered to substantiate the overall conclusion. Among them: 

• “Israel has forcibly displaced nearly all of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip multiple times, and demolished more than 90 percent of the housing infrastructure in the territory” 
• “Israel has destroyed schools, universities, libraries, museums, and archives, all of them essential to the continued existence of Palestinian collective well-being and identity”
• “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed the current US President’s plan to forcibly expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with no right of return” 
• “The deliberate destruction of agricultural fields, food warehouses, and bakeries and other violence that prevents food production, in conjunction with denial and restriction of humanitarian aid, indicate the intentional infliction of unlivable conditions“
• “The actions of the Israeli government against Palestinians have included torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual and reproductive violence; deliberate attacks on medical professionals, humanitarian aid workers and journalists; and the deliberate deprivation of food, water, medicine, and electricity essential to the survival of the population”

Sara Brown, an IAGS member who also leads the Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education and is a member of the American Jewish Committee, criticized IAGS for bringing the resolution to a vote without holding an online debate. Times of Israel says it obtained emails in which IAGS had initially told members a debate would take place. IAGS rejected Brown’s criticism, saying debates aren’t required by the group’s bylaws, and aren’t always held before votes. Brown attributed the low turnout to members who felt unqualified to address the topic. (Who are these genocide scholars who haven’t been keeping up on the biggest genocide debate in generations?)

Nuclear-armed Israel is not hurting, and they’ve already proven that they are more than capable of not only defending themselves, but annihilating their enemies to the point of genocide.

The reason why AIPAC is attacking me is because I dared to tell the truth.

We’re $37… pic.twitter.com/S8SXdQRCWg

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) August 8, 2025

According to the IAGS resolution, other organizations and authorities who’ve declared that Israel is committing genocide include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, DAWN, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, and the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In addition to being under rhetorical fire, Israel is the subject of genocide and war-crime cases at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice.

In August, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on four members of the ICC. 

In response to the declaration, Israel’s Foreign Ministry called it “disgraceful” and “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard” in a post on X.

Accusing the IAGS of not verifying any of the information upon which its declaration is based upon, Israel said the group’s statement “is entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.” 

The ministry also called out these “Genocide Scholars” for backing those who have openly declared the “goal of killing every Jew.”

The statement of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard.

It is entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others. The IAGS did not do the most basic…

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) September 1, 2025

Wielding his standard Orwellian bludgeon for those who criticizes Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared the the Hague-based court a “national security threat.” 

https://t.co/y1Pgwk4pQ0

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 28, 2025

Authored by RFE/RL staff via OilPrice.com,

• Ukraine called on China to take a more active role in pressuring Russia toward peace as Putin arrived in Beijing after the SCO summit.

• Kyiv criticized the summit’s Tianjin Declaration for omitting any reference to the war in Ukraine.

• European leaders plan to meet in Paris to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine, while Trump’s proposed trilateral peace summit remains uncertain.

Ukraine urged China to pressure Vladimir Putin to move toward peace as the Russian president arrived in Beijing following his participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he defended the war that has killed tens of thousands of people.

“Given the significant geopolitical role of the People’s Republic of China, we would welcome a more active role [for Beijing] in bringing peace to Ukraine based on respect for the UN Charter,” Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement as Putin arrived in the Chinese capital on September 2.

The ministry statement noted that the SCO’s final declaration avoided mention of the conflict, which has become a full-scale war since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“We consider it eloquent that the main final document of the summit, the 20-page Tianjin Declaration, does not contain a single mention of the Russian war against Ukraine,” the statement said.

“It is surprising that the largest war of aggression in Europe since World War II was not reflected in such an important, fundamental document, while it mentions a number of other wars, terrorist attacks, and events in the world.”

It said the failure to mention Russia’s war in Ukraine in the declaration “indicates the failure of Moscow’s diplomatic efforts.”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has consistently called on China — a close ally of Russia — to put pressure on Putin to end the war.

Another high-profile diplomatic event in China will be held on September 3 — a massive military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Many leaders — including Putin — are remaining in China after the SCO to attend the parade.

Putin Blames The West

At the SCO in Tianjin outside of Beijing, Putin sent a defiant message against the West over his invasion of Ukraine after standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Putin said the war in Ukraine came about “not as a result of a Russian attack” but because of a Western-backed coup in Kyiv, according to comments carried by the Russian news agency TASS.

That was an inaccurate reference to the Maidan protests that pushed Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014, after he scrapped plans for a trade agreement with the EU and turned toward Russia instead.

Putin added that what he called the West’s attempts to draw Ukraine into NATO posed a “direct threat to Russia’s security,” a claim that the military alliance has repeatedly denied.

Meanwhile, Kyiv’s European allies in the so-called Coalition of the Willing — led by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer — are set to meet in Paris on September 4 to discuss potential security guarantees for Ukraine.

“Together with our partners, and in coordination with NATO, we will work to define robust security guarantees for Ukraine. These are a necessary prerequisite to move credibly towards peace,” Macron wrote on X following talks with NATO chief Mark Rutte.

“We will also review Russia’s stance, as it persists in its war of aggression and continues to reject peace,” Macron added.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on August 31 said Kyiv’s European allies were working on “pretty precise plans” and a “clear road map” for a potential deployment of troops to Ukraine should a peace deal be struck between Kyiv and Moscow.

Von der Leyen, in comments published in The Financial Times, added that any such venture would have the full backing of the United States, which has swayed back and forth on potential involvement over the past year.

‘No Concrete Plans’ For Trilateral Summit

Separately, on the sidelines of the SCO, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov said there were no immediate plans for a trilateral meeting between Putin, Zelenskyy, and US President Donald Trump, contradicting recent remarks by Trump that he was arranging such a meeting.

“Now everyone is talking about a trilateral summit…but there has been no concrete agreement on this between Putin and Trump,” Ushakov said.

Trump, who has made ending the war a top priority of his administration, has grown increasingly frustrated with Putin’s refusal to meet with Zelenskyy but has suggested he was moving toward a trilateral meeting with himself included.

Trump has also expressed anger with Russia’s nonstop campaign of air assaults on Ukrainian cities, causing civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure.

On September 2, Mykola Kalashnyk, head of the regional military administration, said an overnight Russian air strike on the city of Bila Tserkva near Kyiv killed one person and created a massive blaze at a multistory building. Attacks were also reported near the cities of Chernihiv and Sumy.

Inside Russia, the Rostov regional governor reported early on September 2 that some 320 people were evacuated from an apartment block after a Ukrainian drone attack. Details were not immediately available.