'Ukraine Claims It Can Intercept Conversations Of Kremlin Officials'

 The head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency has boasted of being capable of intercepting conversations of senior Russian officials. He made the big claim in a fresh local media interview, but didn't back it up by proof or any specifics.

"Yes, we can. We get paid for this," stated the agency's chief, Kyrylo Budanov, to RBC-Ukraine on Sunday. He had specifically been asked whether Ukrainian intelligence can eavesdrop on Kremlin officials.

AFP via Getty Images

The remarks come after recent leaks hit Western press related to Trump officials negotiating with Kremlin officials over the future of the Ukraine war and Trump's peace plan.

But Kiev has obviously not been happy with the White House plan, which offers Russia significant territorial concessions in the Donbas and Crimea, and along with European leaders has been actively trying to thwart it. Thus Ukraine has motive to try and leak as much as possible of interactions between the US and Russia.

In late November, Bloomberg reported that the 28-point peace proposal was drafted by Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff together with Russian lawmaker Kirill Dmitriev during a meeting in Miami in October. As a result, Ukrainian and EU officials tried to smear it as ultimately a 'Russian-desired plan'.

The outlet later released two transcripts of conversations involving Russian and US officials. They purported to reveal Witkoff advising the Russian side on how to best pitch the Kremlin’s ideas to Trump.

Spy chief Budanov in touting Ukraine's eavesdropping capabilities seems to be hinting at involvement; however, these leaks could have just as easily come from the Russian side, or even someone within the a delegation.

After all, the Kremlin has benefited from courting Witkoff and Kushner, while being in the driver's seat militarily on the battlefield. It is enjoying projecting to the world it is not so 'isolated', and is calling many of the shots with Washington because it has real leverage.

On Monday, President Zelensky is in London meeting with Europeans, where they are working on what they call a more 'fair' and 'just' ceasefire plan.

The president and the pretender. Zaluzhny greets Zelensky in London. pic.twitter.com/JEGO58lffp

— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) December 8, 2025

The European outline so far makes no mention of giving up territory, and even leaves the door open for Ukraine's future path to NATO membership. These things are of course a non-starter for Moscow, and that might be the point.

President Putin has already long said that any plan which refuses territorial concessions or to rule out NATO membership would be dead on arrival, and could never be accepted by Russia.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukraine-claims-it-can-intercept-conversations-kremlin-officials

The Other Screen Time Risk We Rarely Hear About — Hearing loss

 Schoolkids now spend an estimated 7.5 hours per day using phones, computers, and tablets -- an all-time high. This screen time doesn't merely increase the risk of mental health concerns like anxiety and depression. It's also linked to alarming rates of hearing loss.

As an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, I have seen firsthand how hearing loss impacts kids, their families, and their learning. When we're exposed to loud noises, those sound waves can permanently damage the cells that transmit signals to the brain.

Children's auditory systems are especially vulnerable. Not only are they more susceptible to damage from loud sounds, but kids are also less likely to recognize or report the signs of hearing loss. That's why it's so critical for physicians and public health officials to make parents aware of the dangers -- and educate them on ways to prevent such damage before it happens.

Generally, noises over 85 decibels can cause hearing damage, particularly with prolonged exposure. The World Health Organization recommends that children keep listening volumes on devices below 75 decibels -- roughly as loud as a vacuum cleaner -- for no more than 40 hours per week.

Those limits, however, are easily exceeded in daily life.

Screen time often exposes children to prolonged high-volume noise, particularly through headphones and earbuds. Last year, the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health found that two-thirds of parents reported that their children use headphones or earbuds, with most parents agreeing that "headphones are fine for children as long as the volume isn't too loud."

But children and parents don't always realize when the sound is too loud. Part of the challenge is that kids often feel invincible. They assume nothing can really harm them, including exposure to very loud sounds. That belief is especially risky given that devices -- even those marketed as "kid safe" -- can reach volumes well above the threshold known to cause hearing damage. And many children spend hours at a time immersed in streaming, gaming, or online learning with headphones on. Without safeguards, they may be unknowingly causing themselves a lifetime of hearing issues.

In fact, between 13% and 17% of students ages 12 to 19 already have measurable hearing loss resulting from excessive noise exposure -- as many as one in every six to eight middle and high school students. This is not only from screen time use but also exposure at school. Nearly three in four adolescents say they're subjected to loud noises at school for more than 15 minutes a day, almost every day.

The consequences of hearing loss extend well beyond missing a word or two. Even mild to moderate hearing loss can undermine learning -- studies show that students with hearing impairments tend to underperform their peers. That disadvantage can snowball into academic struggles in later grades, reduced confidence, and stress for both students and families.

And the effects don't end in childhood. On the other end of the age spectrum, brain scans show that those with hearing loss can experience faster rates of brain atrophy, which is the loss of brain cells and tissue and is connected to dementia. One study found that hearing loss, untreated by hearing aids, was associated with a 7% higher risk of dementia. Another study suggested that up to 32% of dementia cases may be attributable to audiometric hearing loss.

We cannot afford to tune out the threat of noise-induced hearing loss in children. Federal agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission ought to better enforce pediatric noise exposure standards by requiring toy manufacturers to label products that exceed safe thresholds and to design with children's health in mind.

In the meantime, it's up to physicians to educate families about the risks posed by headphones, screens, and even toys that exceed safe sound levels. As a general rule, the American Academy of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery encourages parents to implement the 60-60 rule: children should listen to 60% of the total volume, for less than 60 minutes at a time, then take a break for a minimum of 30 minutes to allow their ears to recover.

And protecting hearing health can extend to offline activity too. Children should be wearing earplugs at loud concerts and sporting events, where noise can easily exceed that 85 decibel threshold. I myself had my ears ring for days after going to an AC/DC concert when I was a teenager!

Most parents, and their kids, probably haven't heard much about this under-discussed risk of screen time. But the evidence is clear, and alarming. If we don't decrease the volume of kids' screen time -- literally and figuratively -- the next generation could suffer permanent hearing loss that undermines their ability to learn, connect, and thrive.

Bobby Mukkamala, MD, is an otolaryngologist in Flint, Michigan, and president of the American Medical Association.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/118844

CDC Panel Targets Size of Childhood Vaccine Schedule, Safety of Aluminum Adjuvants

 The CDC's revamped Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) discussed shrinking the childhood vaccination schedule and setting up a working group to assess the safety of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines during the final day of its 2-day meeting.

The committee, which was completely overhauled by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this year, took no votes Friday on any topics. Instead, the day's agenda showcased vaccine-skeptical arguments and sidelined decades of data and the CDC's own subject matter experts. ACIP presenters launched broadsides against the safety data underpinning approved childhood vaccines, questioned the need for a relatively extensive childhood immunization schedule, and proposed a closer look at the safety of vaccine adjuvants like aluminum, including possible links to autism.

Earlier in the day, the panel had voted to stop recommending that every newborn receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth.

Hours after the meeting's end, President Donald Trump announced he'd direct HHS to review the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule, compare it with other nations' schedules, and make changes.

The panel gave the presentation stage to vaccine injury lawyer and author Aaron Siri, along with ACIP committee member Evelyn Griffin, MD, an ob/gyn at Baton Rouge General Medical Center in Louisiana, and Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD, the newly appointed acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

In a presentation that lasted over an hour and a half, Siri delivered an extensive overview of the immunization schedule's history and expansion and questioned the safety data used to license many vaccines. He asserted that there are no studies that have ruled out a causal relationship between autism and vaccines such as the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP) shot, and repeatedly cited a common argument among vaccine skeptics: that a lack of control or placebo groups in pivotal vaccine trials led to safety gaps, which he called "unethical."

Siri's presentation prompted an incredulous response from ACIP member H. Cody Meissner, MD, of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. "What you have said is a terrible, terrible distortion of all the facts," he countered.

"You clearly confuse associations, that is, there is a temporal association and a causal association," he said. "Just because there's an adverse event that occurs around the time of vaccine administration, it doesn't mean there's any causal association. And you're jumping to the conclusion that, yes, there is."

Høeg's presentation compared and contrasted the childhood vaccination schedules in Denmark and the U.S. "Why are we so different from other developed nations, and why is it scientifically justified?" she asked.

Høeg showcased a slide showing 72 total core childhood vaccine doses in the U.S. schedule, compared with 11 in Denmark, though she noted that European countries give more combination vaccines.

She also questioned a vaccines-for-all approach. "Just because the U.S. has a larger population of high-risk children, should the core childhood vaccination schedule be larger?" she asked. "Or should healthy children without underlying risk factors really receive different vaccines than they do in Denmark or other high-income nations?"

"Just because a vaccine is approved, it doesn't mean it should be approved for all children," she added.

The ACIP liaison for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Flor Munoz-Rivas, MD, questioned the value of Høeg's comparison with Denmark, a nation of 6 million people. "It seems to be irrelevant to compare U.S. policy with Danish policy, given that the data and the decisions need to be based on our local information and needs," she said.

Stacy Buchanan, DNP, RN, of the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, agreed. "There are lots of pockets of communities within the United States that are unvaccinated," she said. "It doesn't look like Denmark has those pockets of communities. ... When we talk about changing policy for the entire United States, we need to take that into consideration."

Aluminum Adjuvants Under the ACIP Microscope

In the day's final presentation, panel member Griffin floated the idea of an ACIP working group focused on the safety and effectiveness of adjuvants in vaccines. Griffin's talk included alleged data gaps in aluminum adjuvant safety studies, and the potential risks to infants and children of cumulative aluminum exposure through multiple vaccines.

Among the areas she posed as potential group topics were the administration of multiple aluminum-containing vaccines on the same day in early infancy, a potential preference for lower-aluminum vaccine formulations, and establishing an evidence-based safety margin for the adjuvant.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/pediatrics/vaccines/118888

'Adding Procedures, Cutting the Paperwork=--Easier Said Than Done'

 A couple of months ago, one of the partners in our practice came to me and told me they were interested in adding on a simple office procedure that we've never undertaken at our practice before.

This is a procedure that they've been trained in doing, have their certifications for, and have several years of experience doing it in other settings, including on the inpatient floors and at a practice that they worked at several years ago. Seemed like a reasonable thing -- a nice opportunity to provide some augmented care to our patients, especially in this day and age when getting patients into proceduralists and subspecialists can be incredibly daunting.

As I think I mentioned before, one of the most frequent portal messages we get from patients are something along the lines of "That doctor who you wanted me to see -- when I called they told me they were not going to be able to see me for (6, 9, 12, 18) months. Is there anything you can do? Can you beg for a favor, can you call them, or can you get me in to see someone outside your institution?"

While subspecialty care is critical, there certainly are some minor procedures well within the realm of reasonably being done by general internists, often within our scope of practice, and on our institutional certifications as being something we can do. This includes joint injections, shave biopsies, punch biopsies, freezing off superficial skin lesions, injections with long-term steroids to alleviate pain and inflammation, implanting long-term contraceptives, and more.

Occasionally, when we try to set up a program like this, we can get pushback from specialists within the institution. Often the message we get is that we are stepping on toes, stealing their bread and butter, taking away the simple moneymaking things they do in their practice that helps support them. But if the patient has to wait weeks or months to get a skin lesion biopsied or a cortisone injection in their knee, wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we took some of this off of the specialists' hands? Think of it: if we freed them up from these minor procedures, they may be available to see more complex patients in a timely manner.

Similarly goes the argument I've made in the past about getting specialists and subspecialists to relinquish the care of patients with stable chronic problems back to their primary care providers. This just seems to make a lot of sense.

No one really needs a cardiologist to manage their stable hypertension, their high cholesterol, or their mild heart failure. No one really needs an endocrinologist to manage their stable diabetes, hypothyroidism, obesity, or osteoporosis. No one really needs a gastroenterologist to manage their reflux, dyspepsia, constipation, IBS, or fatty liver disease.

Most of the time.

Sometimes, we send these patients to specialists when we don't know what's going on, when patients are convinced that what we are doing won't work, or if we think maybe we're missing something so that we need someone else to offer an opinion or confirm our suspicions. But then return them to us, and we'll take it from there.

Maybe the pain management folks really like it when a simple joint injection patient is on their schedule, a quick 5-minute visit for a very billable procedure with very little risk. It probably doesn't take much time, or much intellectual input, and the documentation is probably all standardized at this point.

Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there in the community who make a great deal of their income off of these minor procedures, but here at an academic medical center, I bet, if you did the math, it's worth it to clear the decks of these kinds of visits from the specialists so they can handle the tougher patients, the more complicated cases.

And how do we get the general internists and other primary care doctors to take on more of these simple procedures? Already we're overwhelmed, burned out, trying to squeeze too many patients into too busy a schedule, dealing with overwhelming demands, endless paperwork and documentation, portal message after portal message coming at us in wave after wave, and endless forms that need to be filled out.

Maybe, just as we move these simple cases away from the subspecialists, we can find ways to offload much of this extraneous administrative stuff that isn't what we chose to do and isn't about practicing medicine. That way we can practice up to our licenses, manage our patients' acute and chronic problems, quickly perform minor procedures that patients need, and enlist the assistance of our colleagues for complicated cases when we've tried A, B, C, and maybe even D, and are not sure what to do next.

Maybe some of this is going to include more non-physician providers. Maybe some of this is going to be about changing expectations and moving this away from the work of physicians to platforms that can handle much of this, including artificial intelligence and other smart systems. And maybe some of this is just us rising up and shouting that we didn't go to medical school and train all these years to fill out durable medical equipment forms for surgeons who don't want to do them, or to spend hours on the phone convincing insurance companies that our patients need a medication or imaging study that we've decided, in our medical wisdom, is the right thing for them to do right now.

So, let's move everything around, shuffle the chairs a bit, rearrange things, even out the playing field, smooth out the rough edges, and get us to a better healthcare system that works for everybody.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/patientcenteredmedicalhome/118889

Von der Leyen pushes action on frozen Russian assets

 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Monday that using the profits from immobilized Russian assets is essential to raising "the cost of war for Russia." She urged European leaders to swiftly approve the proposed Reparations Loan to strengthen Ukraine's support and Europe's overall defense.

Von der Leyen stressed on X that "we do not have any more time to lose," adding that Europe has "the means and the will" to amplify pressure on Moscow. She noted that Ukraine appears in 15 of the 19 Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defense plans submitted by European Union states.

Her remarks follow a joint letter from the leaders of seven EU countries calling the frozen-asset proposal "the most financially feasible and politically realistic solution" to sustain Ukraine's defense. Earlier in the day, Zelensky said he and the United Kingdom, German, and French leaders aligned on next steps for "security guarantees and reconstruction."

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Von-der-Leyen-pushes-action-on-frozen-Russian-assets/65316118

'Zelensky, European leaders agree on next steps'

 Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed in a statement on Monday that important things were discussed during a meeting with other European leaders, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

"Today, we held a detailed discussion on our joint diplomatic work with the American side, aligned a shared position on the importance of security guarantees and reconstruction, and agreed on the next steps," Zelensky said.

He further mentioned that separate talks were held on defense support for his country. Zelensky expressed gratitude to the leaders for their "willingness" to continue helping Ukraine.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Zelensky-European-leaders-agree-on-next-steps/65315934

Apple's chip chief denies departure rumors

 Apple Inc.'s Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji told employees that he does not plan to leave the company in the near future, denying previous media reports on the matter, CNBC reported on Monday.

"I know you've been reading all kind of rumors and speculations about my future at Apple, and I feel that you need to hear from me directly," Srouji said in a memo to staff, according to the media outlet. "I love my team, and I love my job at Apple," he added.

Earlier this month, Apple announced senior leadership shifts, including the retirement of its artificial intelligence chief, John Giannandrea.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Apple's-chip-chief-denies-departure-rumors/65315870