Iran will not sign any deal "definitely" at thetime announcedby United States President Donald Trump, Iranian Fars News Agency reported on Sunday, citing officials familiar with the negotiating team.
According to the outlet, the Qatari mediators are currently in Tehran discussing Iranian terms. "Even if we go back and forth and go back in the negotiation process, Iran's basic condition is that in the end, all of its concerns are fully taken into account," an official was quoted as saying, adding that "even if all of Iran's terms are implemented, no agreement will definitely be signed at the time Trump announced."
Trump revealed that a peace memorandum would be signed today. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered strikes on Beirut, a decision seen by some as deliberate sabotage of the peace deal.
Europe shows what can happen when countries let bureaucratic procedures take precedence over the well-being of people suffering from rare diseases.
But it's not just Europe. For more than a year, families have staged protests in Georgia, which sits at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, where one in three children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) dies annually due to a lack of access to widely available medical treatments. Duchenne is a progressive, debilitating disease that results in mobility loss, progressive heart failure, and respiratory collapse. Most patients are wheelchair-bound by the time they’re teenagers. Few live beyond their early 20s.
Poland is witnessing a similar debate surrounding Duchenne, centering on the Polish government’s refusal to fund Duchenne therapies, including a steroid treatment whose cost, according to one estimate, amounts to roughly 0.06% of that country’s healthcare budget.
We like to think we’re immune to such abject policy failures, but they’re a warning of what could go wrong in the United States when public health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) act less like a patient ally and more like a barrier to rare disease treatment.
FDA procedures have created a nightmarishly complex regulatory environment, characterized by touch-and-go delays and painfully slow approval timelines. Recent rejections of promising new rare disease treatments have also angered and worried patient advocacy groups, who understand that people with terminal conditions cannot wait for bureaucrats to make their minds up about what drugs they can take. Similarly, major overhauls affecting surrogate endpoints and stricter criteria for accelerated approval suggest regulation could tighten even further, causing more delays in access to life-saving therapies for patients who have no time to wait.
Last year, the FDA restricted the use of Elevidys, an emerging gene therapy that could slow the progression of Duchenne. Trial data reveal promising results, including improved muscle function and improved quality of life in most patients who received this therapy. Citing safety concerns, the FDA placed clinical trials on hold and revoked its use for non-ambulatory patients while arbitrarily and confusingly approving it for ambulatory patients aged four and older.
It’s not the only time recently that the FDA has stopped the release of a treatment that could help people suffering from severe, debilitating diseases. It made headlines earlier this year when it halted the approval of a promising gene therapy for Huntington’s disease, even though data from the treatment’s manufacturers showed that it slowed progression of the disease by 75 percent. The FDA later determined that the comparison to an external control group wasn’t good enough, so it demanded a full Phase 3 trial, which would require control-group participants to be anesthetized and undergo a fake brain-injection procedure -- a concept that Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) called “bureaucratic idiocy.”
Stories like these highlight the Kafkaesque absurdity undergirding our regulatory agencies, often framed as a debate between speed and safety, recklessness and prudence -- a false dichotomy. No one is arguing for eliminating patient safety standards. America’s historically strict drug approval process -- where the average time to go from development to FDA approval is between 10 and 15 years -- reflects the fact that the entire world benefits from our well-studied medical products.
But there’s a lot of daylight between safety and dysfunctional bureaucratic machinery that stifles progress and innovation -- and worse, degrades health outcomes for terminal patients with few options.
The goal is smarter regulation, not deregulation.
This is why the Right to Try Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump, is a step in the right direction. It helps ensure that drug approval timelines align with the urgency of the diseases they treat by allowing terminally ill patients to use experimental treatments that haven’t received full FDA approval. It balances theoretical risks with the very real dangers posed by letting a disease go untreated. The most successful healthcare outcomes are borne on the shoulders of a free market that embraces competition, provides clear and consistent regulatory standards, rewards innovation, and gives patients a voice.
The balancing act between bureaucratic procedure and patient outcome isn’t merely a story about medicine. It’s fundamentally a story about institutional trust and how that trust is intrinsically bound to citizens’ experiences.
The United States remains a world medical leader not only because our country embraces innovation and entrepreneurship, but because we put people first. We lose that standing whenever capricious bureaucratic processes and suppressive government decisions take precedence over human lives and American voices. But we stand as a global leader anytime we empower patients to have a say in their own futures.
Mike Feuz is an economist and holds a Master’s Degree in Economics from George Mason University. He writes frequently on healthcare policy and regulatory reform.
Brussels has weaponized the Digital Services Act against the Chinese online platform Temu. It is only a matter of time before Beijing retaliates with export restrictions on rare earths. The EU has become the useful punching bag of the great powers.
The European Commission has switched the Digital Services Act (DSA) into high gear. Behind the sprawling regulatory framework -- ranging from censorship measures on social media, often hidden behind slogans such as “hate speech,” to mandatory risk assessments, transparency requirements for recommendation algorithms, and alleged consumer protection -- the Commission has created enormous discretionary power over the private sector.
The latest victim of Brussels is the Chinese shopping platform Temu. The Commission imposed a €200 million fine on PDD Holdings, the Shanghai-based parent company of the platform. EU regulators accused Temu of failing to take sufficient measures against the sale of illegal and potentially dangerous products on its marketplace. In particular, the Commission criticized the absence of reliable risk analyses for certain product categories, including electronic devices such as chargers and adapters, toys, and household goods containing safety-relevant components. At the same time, Brussels alleged that the spread of unsafe products within the EU had not been effectively contained.
Without diving too deeply into the accusations themselves, one would not be stretching matters too far by suspecting that this case amounts to a political warning shot aimed squarely at Beijing. In response to Washington’s increasingly aggressive trade policy, China had recently attempted to redirect export flows toward the European market, placing enormous competitive pressure on European industries -- particularly in key manufacturing sectors.
Storm clouds are gathering. The Temu case appears highly constructed, and the accusations tied to it wildly exaggerated. These are issues that could easily be resolved through liability rules, terms and conditions, and the transparency mechanisms already common on online marketplaces -- far more efficiently than through grotesque punitive measures imposed by the European Commission.
Temu is merely the latest case in the Commission’s broader campaign against international digital corporations. We remember well that after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, American tech giants such as Elon Musk’s X, Meta, and Google increasingly found themselves in Brussels’ crosshairs.
In multiple cases, the Commission imposed massive fines. The entire spectacle increasingly resembles a political protection racket -- a bureaucracy that has discovered a lucrative new business model and now uses inflated penalties and questionable legal justifications to punish geopolitical adversaries. In the case of American tech firms, Brussels activated its censorship and narrative-control apparatus as well. Naturally, these powers are also derived from the DSA. Why not combine the useful with the profitable -- censorship enforcement alongside a growing cash flow into Brussels?
In the Temu case, the Commission at least attempted to justify its actions through so-called “mystery shopping” operations designed to identify suspicious products directly. One could describe this test-purchasing division as an operational enforcement arm of the DSA regime -- a bureaucracy likely to experience rapid personnel growth should the DSA extraction model prove to be a lasting success.
Brussels’ protectionism is legendary. Its harmonization catalogs and climate regulations fill entire libraries with rules and directives. The European Commission has erected an invisible wall around the single market that makes even the tariff excesses of the Trump era appear almost amateurish by comparison. Yet one fact should not be forgotten in Brussels: Beijing does not react to provocations such as the Temu fine like an American cowboy. China prepares its retaliation quietly and methodically.
The clock is likely already ticking. It may only be a matter of time before China unsheathes one of its sharpest weapons and cuts off Europe’s access to rare earths. Chinese companies control more than 80 percent of global rare-earth refining capacity. When matters become serious, Brussels holds the weaker hand. The threat is very real. It is so real that production lines in Europe’s key industries -- from machine engineering to automobile manufacturing -- could grind to a halt if the flow of rare earths from China were interrupted. Suddenly, Washington’s resource strategy -- including rare-earth exploration projects in Greenland -- begins to make strategic sense in light of Europe’s extreme vulnerability.
Parallel to its digital crackdown, Brussels is also intensifying direct trade protectionism in an attempt to shield the European steel industry. Reduced import quotas and 50 percent tariffs designed to fend off Chinese and Indian competition are apparently intended to offset the damage already inflicted by excessive regulation, climate policy, and sky-high energy costs across Europe. Naturally, these measures will fail as well -- Brussels has done its work thoroughly.
Brussels’ reflexive response to mounting pressure -- both in geopolitics and global markets -- has become almost understandable. Decades of power transfers away from national legislatures toward the centralized bureaucracy of the European Commission have produced a regulatory apparatus functioning as a gigantic extraction mechanism -- a tax-and-fee machine generating permanent revenue streams through instruments such as carbon certificate trading.
That Europe’s domestic economy would lose competitiveness under such a repressive regulatory regime should have been obvious to anyone. And that attempts to replace traditional industrial strength with pseudo-economies such as the climate complex or an artificial European military-industrial policy were doomed to fail should by now be evident even to Brussels’ central planners.
Under current conditions, only two strategic options remain. The first would be the restoration of a genuine internal market based on free-market principles capable of making Europe competitive again over the long term. Or -- because the first option is politically unthinkable -- Europe continues raising tariff walls and inventing ever more sophisticated methods of wealth extraction. Sometimes the burden falls on domestic businesses and taxpayers. Sometimes, as in the Temu case, it falls on foreign competitors.
At this point, Brussels bureaucrats no longer seem to care where the money comes from.
Oil and gas executives have warned the Trump administration that gasoline prices at the pump could surge in the coming months as fuel inventories fall to critical lows, complicating efforts to contain inflation,The Washington Postreported earlier this week.
Some commercial and government inventories that have mitigated price rises so far are rapidly depleting and could be wiped out within weeks, the executives have warned, coinciding with the peak summer travel season.
"I have absolutely no doubt the White House from the president on down is fully aware of the nearly universal alarm among oil companies and analysts about the direction of travel for oil prices this summer," Rapidan Energy founder Bob McNally told the Post.
The Trump administration is confronting the highest rate of inflation in three years, as the U.S. consumer price index rose at a 4.2% annual pace in the year ending in May, driven by surging gas prices.
Regular gasoline averaged $4.11/gal on Friday, according to AAA, below its May average of $4.49/gal but still significantly higher than its year-earlier average of $3.12.
Industry officials said the White House's reception to their concerns has been mixed, according to the report, with some seeing the warnings as hollow since crude oil prices have not spiked into the triple digits.
Analysts and industry executives warn the critical date that reserves start to run dry could come anywhere from the end of this month to closer to the end of summer. "but they are universally anxious about how quickly the supply is declining," the report said.
Democrats put everything they had in their effort to shut down President Donald Trump’s border control plans. And what exactly have they achieved for their often-infantile antics?
Well, let’s see. This week, the House passed a bill that funds ICE for three years. Deportations are near all-time highs. Oh, and it looks like Trump’s border wall will be completed next year.
On Tuesday, the House passed a “budget reconciliation” bill that provides enough money ($38 billion) to fund ICE for the rest of Trump’s term, plus $28 billion for the Border Patrol, and another $5 billion for border security technology and screening.
And what did Democrats get for shutting down all or part of the government for nearly four months?
Bupkus. Zilch. Nada. Nichts. Niente. 没有什么.This has to be one of the most embarrassing political defeats in history.
ICE and Border Patrol will be funded without the changes Democrats were demanding, including requiring judicial warrants to enter homes and prohibiting officers from wearing masks. The package also lacks reforms with bipartisan support, such as requiring officers to wear body cameras.
Not only is this standoff ending without Democrats achieving the reforms they pressed for, the agencies will be insulated from additional pressure through the appropriations process for three years.
Meanwhile, despite coordinated efforts of party officials, NGOs, the media, and rich backers, the often-violent campaign to disrupt deportations has completely failed.
Average weekly deportation numbers this fiscal year have been consistently higher than they were in 2025.
In the first six months of this fiscal year, ICE carried out 234,236 removals. That compares with 134,500 in the first six months of the previous fiscal year, according to Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University professor who has been tracking deportation data.
Average weekly deportations this April were significantly higher than in January.
Meanwhile, the number of people in ICE detention, while down from a January peak, was still higher in April than it was last September.
Now we come to the cherry on top.
While Democrats were spending all their political capital over the past year and a half fighting deportations, construction on the border wall has continued apace. This week, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said that the wall will be completed next year, with only a few gaps where it makes no sense to construct it.
This is the project, remember, that Democrats tried desperately to stop in Trump’s first term, including engineering what at the time was the longest government shutdown in history. Joe Biden stopped all border work and then tried to dump unused materials at fire-sale prices.
This time around, Trump secured $46 billion in construction funding in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the wall will include electronic surveillance and other tech that will be in place by summer 2028.
Even the attempt to block wall construction in Big Bend National Park failed. As the Texas Tribune notes, “Local residents, ranchers and environmentalists in the Big Bend area and across the state have expressed fierce opposition.” Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar tried and failed to attach language to the funding bill to prevent construction money from being used inside the park.
That is a win, by the way, that will long outlast Trump, since the wall will severely handicap future attempts by Democrats to throw open the Southern border.
What’s truly amazing about all this is how little the Democratic Party has suffered for this string of embarrassing flops.
Nobody’s calling for its leaders to step down for this disaster, or even defend themselves for their failure to get anything. No one is asking them to apologize to all the people whose lives they disrupted by the shutdowns.
It’s almost as if the Democrats never cared if they won or lost on this issue. Which would mean that their actions have been about something else – something like, say, stoking fear, anxiety, division, and hostility throughout the nation for their own political gain?
Either way, it’s been a breathtaking display of political recklessness.
Then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledged that he secretly assisted with a paper stating the virus that causes COVID-19 "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," according to a newly released missive.
"This is work that Tony, Jeremy, Larry, and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper," Collins said in the March 6, 2020, email to NIH officials, which was released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on June 11.
Tony refers to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through late 2022. Jeremy refers to Jeremy Farrar, at the time the director of the Wellcome Trust. Larry refers to Dr. Lawrence Tabak, an NIH official.
Collins noted the conclusion that stated, "The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered." SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The first COVID-19 cases appeared in Wuhan, China, in 2019, near a laboratory that was conducting enhanced experiments on coronaviruses funded by the NIH.
Collins was responding to an email from Kristian Andersen, one of the authors of the paper, which was titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." Andersen and other scientists said in the paper, published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, that they analyzed data and concluded that it came from nature.
To date, no natural source has been identified for the virus. The Trump administration maintains the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
The paper did not mention any contributions from Collins, Fauci, Tabak, or Farrar, who made at least one critical change to the document, according to emails released by lawmakers in 2023. It thanked American virologist Michael Farzan "for discussions" and the Wellcome Trust "for support." Nature did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that his role "was for information, not for me to edit," that he never edited or suggested edits to the paper, and that, to his knowledge, neither did Fauci or Farrar. He also said he is not a virology expert.
Change In Stance
Early drafts of the paper had the authors stating that it was possible that the virus came from a lab. In private messages, since made public, the authors also said that characteristics of the virus indicated it was manmade. They have defended the changes in their stances as being driven by evidence.
In the newly released emails, Andersen, who has said that the paper was "prompted" by Collins, Fauci, and Farrar, had written to the trio.
"Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 'origins' paper," he said.
He told them he welcomed comments, suggestions, and questions about the paper, which had just been accepted for publication.
Collins said in a previously released email to Fauci, Tabak, and others in April 2020 that he was wondering whether the NIH could "help put down this very destructive conspiracy," linking to an article alleging the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan.
"I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this," he said. "But probably didn't get much visibility. Anything more we can do?"
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that in the email, "I meant that we should do what we can to get the truth out there, as opposed to statements that were reckless and speculative that were not based on evidence." He said that the possibility that the virus came from the lab, whether it originated there or not, was not a conspiracy theory.
Fauci Shared Another Paper
Fauci, who has denied allegations that Proximal Origins was written to disprove the lab origin theory, met on multiple occasions with intelligence officials in 2020 and 2021. James Erdman III, a CIA operations officer, told Paul and other senators in May that Fauci provided a list of experts to whom the intelligence community (IC) should talk, and that the list included the Proximal Origins authors.
"Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC's analytic process and COVID origin's findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated Subject Matter Experts (SME), public health officials, and scientists," Erdman said.
Fauci has not returned emails seeking comment on Erdman's testimony and the missives Paul just released.
One of those emails showed Fauci wrote to Beth Cameron, a National Security Council official, on July 8, 2021, a day after he took part in a council briefing.
"The article accessible from the link in the subject line above just came out as a 'preprint' yesterday. It is from a group of highly qualified virologists," Fauci wrote. "Please show it to your team. It summarizes what I said yesterday."
The article, titled "The Origin of SARS-CoV-2," included Farrar and Anderson as coauthors. The authors said that there was "currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin" while there was evidence supporting links to animal markets in Wuhan.
Fauci "was pushing the natural-origin story while secretly getting classified briefings on the actual origins," Paul wrote in a post on X. "The American people were told one story. These documents - and a CIA officer's sworn testimony - tell another," he added in a follow-up post.
