iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO information

 Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings — a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met.

Apple designs security into all of its products from the start, ensuring the most sophisticated protections are built in across hardware, software, and Apple silicon. This unique approach allows Apple users to benefit from industry-leading security protections such as best-in-class encryption, biometric authentication with Face ID, and groundbreaking features like Memory Integrity Enforcement. These same protections are now recognized as meeting stringent government and international security requirements, even for restricted data.

iPhone and iPad previously received approval to handle classified German government data on devices using native iOS and iPadOS security measures, following an extensive evaluation by the Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, or BSI). Now, iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are certified for such use in all NATO nations.

As part of this effort, BSI conducted exhaustive technical assessments, comprehensive testing, and deep security analysis, ensuring Apple’s built-in platform security capabilities met NATO nations’ exacting operational and assurance requirements.

“Secure digital transformation is only successful if information security is considered from the beginning in the development of mobile products,” said Claudia Plattner, BSI’s president. “Expanding on BSI’s rigorous audit of iOS and iPadOS platform and device security for use in classified German information environments, we are pleased to confirm the compliance under NATO nations’ assurance requirements.”

The approval marks a defining moment for Apple’s mobile platforms, as iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are now listed on the NATO Information Assurance Product Catalogue in recognition of their built-in security capabilities.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/iphone-and-ipad-approved-to-handle-classified-nato-information/

US FDA to offer bonuses to staff for faster drug reviews: Bloomberg

 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration plans to give quarterly bonuses to scientific staff for quicker completion of drug reviews, Bloomberg ​News reported on Thursday, citing an FDA official ‌familiar with the matter.

Staff reviewers could receive bonuses worth several thousand dollars per quarter for high-quality work completed ahead of schedule, the report said, adding that the program is expected to be ‌announced ​at an internal FDA meeting later ⁠today.

The Department of Health ⁠and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The initiative follows the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program, launched ​in June, which speeds FDA decisions on critical drugs to one to two months from the standard six ⁠months.

FDA has awarded up to ⁠18 vouchers so far, and granted its ​second approval under the program on Thursday to Boehringer Ingelheim’s ​lung cancer drug Hernexeos.

The agency is also working ‌to hire more than 1,000 new scientists as part of a broader effort to accelerate drug evaluations, Bloomberg said.

The FDA has faced turbulence, with top career officials leaving ⁠under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It recently also changed course on Moderna’s new flu vaccine, agreeing to review its ⁠amended application after ‌initially rejecting it, fueling concerns over ⁠policy changes at the agency under President ​Donald ‌Trump.

The bonus initiative is scheduled to begin ​on April ⁠1 and will apply to reviewers in the FDA’s two main centers that evaluate drugs and vaccines, with first payments expected around August, according to the Bloomberg report.

https://wkzo.com/2026/02/26/us-fda-to-offer-bonuses-to-staff-for-faster-drug-reviews-bloomberg-news-reports/

Zai Lab 2026 strategic priorities and key pipeline milestones

 

Zai Lab reports Q4 2025 results with non-GAAP EPS $-0.46 on revenue $127.6M, misses EPS but beats revenue estimates

• Non-GAAP EPS $-0.46 was +42% YoY and Q4 revenue $127.6M increased +17% YoY.
• Full-year 2025 revenue totaled $460.2M, with the company reporting a narrowed net loss.
• Company outlines 2026 strategic priorities and key pipeline milestones alongside the earnings release.

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=ZLAB&p=d

Medline Q4 2025 non-GAAP EPS $-0.01 miss, revenue $7.8B beat, completes IPO

 

Medline reports Q4 2025 results with non-GAAP EPS $-0.01 miss, revenue $7.8B beat, completes initial public offering

• Q4 2025 net sales rose 14.8% to $7.8B, while net income declined 37.7%.
• Company issued 2026 guidance for 8–9% organic sales growth and adjusted EBITDA of $3.5–$3.6 billion.
• Q4 2025 results and IPO completion were disclosed in an SEC report filed earlier today.

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=MDLN&p=d

"You're Not Alone": Reporters Comfort Those Triggered And Traumatized By Scenes Of Patriotism

 by Jonathan Turley,

This week, most Americans found a moment of rare unity in our pride over the performance of our athletes in the Winter Olympics.

After years of rage politics, there was a brief respite as we joined in cheering our team in representing the United States in Milan and Cortina.

Well, most of us. Some in the media found the entire demonstration of patriotism to be intolerable and triggering.

What is striking is how this aversion to our flag and country was so openly expressed in major media.

This week, the nightmare continued for some on the left who were traumatized by seeing the American flag and open displays of patriotism.

Jack Hughes, one of the heroes of the gold medal hockey game, returned to New Jersey to play and was met with cheers of “USA, USA” and a sea of American flags. Hughes immediately called his Olympic teammate Tage Thompson of the visiting Buffalo Sabres to the ice to join him. The two skated arm in arm as the crowd celebrated them and our country.

It was another unifying moment for the country. The fans joined arm in arm to relish this moment for the nation.

These scenes are clearly having a different impact on some on the left.

The HuffPost even published an article with therapeutic advice for liberals triggered by seeing so many American flags. The liberal publication ran an article titled “There’s a Name for the Discomfort You’re Feeling Watching the Olympics Right Now.” It then published it a second time before the gold-medal hockey game with Canada — presumably to prepare its readers for the nightmare of the United States actually winning.

The subheading read, “If waving the American flag or chanting ‘USA!’ turns you off right now, you’re not alone.”

Senior writer Monica Torres began the article with this line: “While President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda separates families, and federal agents detain 5-year-olds and kill unarmed civilians, American athletes are winning medals on behalf of the nation at the Olympics right now.”

Torres goes on to interview three therapists for this “story” about how the celebration of the United States team has forced many liberals into therapy over their trauma and “the cognitive dissonance of rooting for U.S. sports.”

Los Angeles-based licensed clinical social worker Aimee Monterrosa explained that the “atrocities” of the United States can trigger feelings of guilt, despair, shame, anger” in seeing the country celebrate these sports victories.

Expert Lauren Appio echoed how “waving the American flag or chanting, ‘USA!’ [can make] us feel grossed out or ashamed.”

Over at Vox, Senior correspondent (and former Atlantic writer) Alex Abad-Santos wrote an article on the winners and losers of the Olympics. The column perfectly summed up the pathological opposition of some to this country’s symbols and celebrations.

Abad-Santos declared the men’s hockey team one of the biggest “losers” of the games. He blamed that team for alienating citizens by their patriotic statements: “The conversation surrounding the win quickly shifted into how the team celebrated and who it celebrated with.” He expressed outrage over the team accepting the celebratory call from the President of the United States.

In the meantime, the “winner,” according to Abad-Santos, was . . . wait for it . . .  Eileen Gu, the American who reportedly took millions from the repressive Chinese regime to ski for China.

Gu used the games to criticize the United States while saying nothing of how China arrests anyone who speaks out against that country.

Abad-Santos gushes:

“Gu symbolizes the reality that athletes don’t need the US’s backing or support to be commercially successful. That makes some Americans like Vance uneasy. She also embodies the very American idea of relentlessly pursuing success and maximizing it, no matter what it takes. Gu represents the American dream and the startling concept that America isn’t necessary for it.”

The last line is particularly telling. Abad-Santos is celebrating the idea that you can live the American dream without America.

Others joined in lionizing Gu. Charlotte Harpur, writing for The New York Times’ (NYT) The Athletic, virtually declared her a new deity: “You would be forgiven if you thought Gu was a quasi-human robot expertly created by artificial intelligence, so eloquent are her responses to the media.”

The next day, the Times then slammed Men’s Hockey Team in an article titled “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room.” The Athletic‘s Jerry Brewer acknowledged that speaking with the U.S. president after such a win is “an obligatory celebration.” However, he declared that these are not “normal times”:  “This isn’t a neutral climate. This isn’t a neutral president. And in a nation this polarized, the proximity carries weight whether the players are being intentional or merely naive.”

These columns on sites like HuffPost and Vox stripped away the pretense of past pieces and laid bare the antagonism for the United States by some on the left. The open celebration of the country was too much for many rage addicts today.

Fortunately, these writers are largely writing for each other. The public long ago left these sites. They now write for a minority of Americans who are triggered by the appearance of American flags or traumatized by expressions of patriotism.

What these writers find repulsive is rousing for the rest of us. Watching Hughes and Thompson skate together last night was everything that is great about this country, as those Jersey fans went wild. Hughes said that he was struggling not to get emotional at that moment. He was not alone.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the New York Times bestselling “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/youre-not-alone-reporters-comfort-those-triggered-and-traumatized-scenes-patriotism

Side Effects of the No Surprises Act

 by James Capretta

In the final days of the first Trump administration, Congress attached a long-debated measure—the No Surprises Act (NSA)—to a must-pass appropriations bill with the intention of protecting patients from unexpected and expensive medical bills. The good news is that “surprise” bills are now less common, although they still occur. The bad news is that the law had other, less favorable effects which will likely inflate health insurance premiums for American consumers. It is an unfortunate reality in US health care that efforts aimed at protecting patients often end up increasing overall costs.

Members of both parties in Congress were eager to get the NSA enacted because they believed it offered a reasonable solution to a persistent problem. Prior to the implementation of the law in April 2022, it was possible for patients to receive bills with exorbitant fees charged by out-of-network providers, such as emergency room physicians and anesthesiologists, even when the relevant services were delivered at in-network hospitals or during episodes that prevented patient discretion. Insurers would cover a fraction of the bills with the rest passed onto patients in the form of “balance billing.” With resentment building at this practice, Congress stepped in by prohibiting higher costs for patients under these circumstances.

That was not the end of the story, however. To get the NSA enacted, key policymakers had to strike a compromise between insurers and the holdout physician groups refusing to sign in-network contracts. The two sides agreed to a new independent dispute resolution (IDR) program to settle their disputes, with arbitrators choosing the fee specified by one side or the other when making their binding decisions. The law did not allow for a compromise fee to factor into the proceedings.

Now in its fifth year, it is clear that the NSA’s IDR process favors clinicians over insurers. Arbitrators sided with emergency room physicians in 80 percent and then in 85 percent of the disputed cases in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Large companies investing in specialist physician groups have backed a push to flood the IDR process with contested claims.

With each passing year, as the wins pile up for physicians, insurers lose leverage. The holdouts like their odds in the IDR process, so they are less willing to make pricing concessions. The overall effect has been to push up the expected market rates for the services that frequently end up in IDR. At the same time, insurers expect to lose most IDR cases, which means they are building the added costs into the premiums they charge for coverage.

The administrative burden of IDR is heavy too, with the federal government paying for the many millions of submitted claims through fees charged to both parties in the disputes. Over time, those charges will get passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums for health coverage.

Insurers are so disappointed with how the NSA has played out that they would like Congress to step in again, this time with a fix to what they see as a broken and biased IDR process. It is unlikely that the holdout physician groups will agree to reopen the deal that allowed the NSA to pass in 2020.

That the NSA was seen as a necessary political intervention is an indictment of the health sector. Hospitals and insurers were well aware that balance billing would harm patients, and yet they continued to sign contracts that allowed some physicians with privileges at the relevant facilities to opt out of in-network contract terms. None of the actors were willing to take responsibility for forcing a market solution, one way or another. Instead, they turned to Congress to fix a problem that no law or regulation prohibited them from addressing on their own. The result is a politicized and unwieldy administrative process for settling millions of billing disputes which the federal government was not responsible for creating.

Congress should reconsider its role in this mess. Instead of trying to fix every problem insurers, hospitals, physicians, and drug companies bring to them, it should establish simple rules that protect consumers and force the market participants to find an equilibrium. Hospital systems should be barred from signing in-network contracts that exempt some of the physicians practicing at their facilities and clinics from the relevant terms. Similarly, insurers should be barred from signing preferred provider contracts that allow some physicians to opt out of in-network rules when participating in otherwise covered in-network procedures.

The micromanagement of the market that the NSA represents invites more lobbying and rent-seeking rather than greater market efficiency. Painful as it might be initially, consumers would be better off in the long run if politicians did not always step in to solve problems that providers and insurers should be expected to address on their own.

https://www.aei.org/health-care/the-side-effects-of-the-no-surprises-act/

Hillary Clinton Says She Knew Nothing About Jeffrey Epstein's Crimes

 by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Hillary Clinton told members of Congress on Feb. 26 that she does not have knowledge about crimes carried out by the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 14, 2026. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

“I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes, or offices,” the former first lady and secretary of state said in her opening statement to the House Oversight Committee.

Clinton said she was horrified to learn about the crimes and was disappointed that Epstein only received 13 months in prison in 2008 after pleading guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, was also slated to testify to the panel in its investigation into Epstein. The Clintons agreed to testify after the House of Representatives was prepared to hold them in contempt for originally declining to answer questions on the matter.

Epstein died by suicide in federal prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse young girls.

Bill Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs and photographs. Court documents stated he went to Epstein’s island, where authorities say Epstein repeatedly abused minors.

Maxwell told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in 2025 that she was friends with Bill Clinton and that the former president never went to the island.

“He never, absolutely never went. And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would have gone. I don’t believe there’s any way that he would’ve gone to the island had I not been there,” she said. “Because I don’t believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein.”

Epstein also went to the White House multiple times while Clinton was president. Maxwell also attended the wedding of the Clintons’ only daughter in 2010.

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrive for former President Donald Trump's inauguration as the next president of the United States in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2025. Shawn Thew/Reuters

Bill Clinton’s spokesperson told New York Magazine in 2002, “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science.”

A spokesperson for Bill Clinton said after Epstein was arrested by federal authorities that the former president “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.”

The spokesperson said that the trips on Epstein’s plane included stops for Clinton Foundation work and that Bill Clinton briefly visited Epstein’s home in New York and met with Epstein in a Clinton office in the city.

“He’s not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade and has never been to Little St. James Island, Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida,” the spokesperson added.

A letter from lawmakers to the Clintons said they wanted to question them, given their family’s past relationships with Epstein and Maxwell. Lawmakers also told Hillary Clinton, “Given your past service as Secretary of State, the Committee believes that you may have knowledge of efforts by the federal government to combat international sex trafficking operations of the type run by Mr. Epstein.”

“The American people have a lot of questions,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters in Washington as lawmakers prepared to question the Clintons. “To my knowledge, the Clintons haven’t answered very many, if any, questions about their knowledge or involvement with Epstein and Maxwell.”

Comer said that no one is accusing the Clintons at this time of wrongdoing but that the committee is trying to find answers regarding Epstein, including how he accumulated so much wealth and whether he worked for the government.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hillary-clinton-says-she-knew-nothing-about-jeffrey-epsteins-crimes