Friday News Roundup
Pandemic Watch
The California Department of Public Health has recently detected H5N1 bird flu virus in California grocery stores after testing a batch of raw milk. The milk is sold by Raw Farm LLC of Fresno, which had earlier this year been tied to a multistate E. coli outbreak, due to a batch of its raw milk cheddar cheese.
Trump has picked Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya's track record from the COVID-19 pandemic leaves much to be desired, including a prediction he made in 2020 that deaths caused by the coronavirus would not exceed more than 40,000 people. In reality, total deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have been greater than 1.1 million.
Trump's selection for heading the Food & Drug Administration is the surgeon Marty Makary, who also has a record of bad COVID predictions. In February 2021, he predicted that America would reach herd immunity from COVID only two months later, but instead of subsiding, America was hit by an outbreak of the Delta variant in the same month that Makary said the pandemic would be over. Both the Bhattacharya and Makary appointments are signs that Trump is handing over our public health agencies to a group of "COVID contrarians" who have the right academic credentials, but misuse those credentials to legitimize RFK Jr's anti-vaccine quackery, while lending legitimacy to fringe theories about how COVID-19 was deliberately engineered in a Chinese lab.
Mass Deportation Watch
According to the American Immigration Council, Trump's mass deportation plans could split up 4 million families with both undocumented and documented family members. If Trump follows through with his threat to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, Axios estimates that it will lead to a backlog in immigration courts that could last for 16 years. That is, if Trump doesn't wipe out due process rights for undocumented immigrants and citizens suspected to be undocumented immigrants altogether.
Other News Highlights
A series of bomb threats against Donald Trump's nominees was followed by another series of bomb threats against Congressional Democrats during the Thanksgiving holidays.
Islamist rebels have overtaken Syria's second largest city Aleppo in only three days in an uprising against Russian troops and Syrian dictator Bashr al-Assad.
A cease-fire in the Kurram region of Pakistan has been established after sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims has led to a death count of over 100 people.
A secret planning document from Germany's pro-business Free Democrats party suggests that the party deliberately tried to collapse the government of Social Democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz. The document, a PowerPoint titled "D-Day Scenarios and Measures", has sparked outrage in Germany based on its title alone.
UK transport secretary Louise Haigh recently resigned from the current Labour government after it emerged that she pleaded guilty to a fraud offense in 2013. Haigh had reported a phone as stolen after a mugging, but later found the phone in a drawer.