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Texas Children’s Hospital officially opens first-ever ‘detransition clinic’ after settlement with AG Paxton

Texas Children’s Hospital has officially opened its first-of-its-kind detransition clinic under a settlement it reached with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in May.

Paxton, who is also the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Texas, announced the opening of the clinic on Tuesday.

“BREAKING: The nation’s first-ever Detransition Clinic is now open as a result of my historic settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital,” he wrote on X.

An accompanying press release from his office described the new care center as “a multidisciplinary clinic that provides medical care to patients who previously underwent gender-transition interventions.”

Patients can receive detransition-related medical care through age 21, while detransition-related obstetric and gynecologic care is offered to patients older than 21. Paxton’s office added that patients may receive services at different Texas Children’s locations, depending on their individual needs and care team recommendations.

The clinic is a major pillar of the settlement, which additionally required the hospital to pay $10 million for claims brought by Paxton under the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act for billing Texas Medicaid for “unallowable and illegal ‘gender-transition’ interventions.”

Multiple physicians were also stripped of their medical privileges for performing mutilating treatments on minors.

Texas Children’s previously offered a range of controversial services to gender dysphoric minors seeking to “change their gender,” including puberty blockers — medications intended to “pause” puberty, and hormone therapy — hormones including testosterone and estrogen used to promote the development of physical characteristics associated with the opposite sex.

The settlement also permanently prohibited Texas Children’s from performing surgical procedures on minors, which can sterilize and remove healthy tissue from patients.

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Why is a WEF-linked vaccine coalition matching Ottawa’s $1.8 million in vaccine awards?

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the federal health research agency, has listed six grants dated July 1, 2026 and running to June 30, 2029, five of $300,000 and one of $298,675, under the label Operating Grant: Leadership Award for Vaccine Research. Four are labelled CEPI-CIHR: Robert Kozak of Toronto, Angela Rasmussen of Saskatoon, Anna Blakney of Vancouver and Matthew Miller of Hamilton. Two are labelled NRC-CIHR: Hagar Labouta of Toronto and Jean-Simon Diallo of Ottawa.

CIHR’s funding page for the “Leadership Award for Excellence in Vaccine Research for Infectious Diseases of Epidemic Potential” says $1.8 million was available for up to six awards: $1.2 million for four grants in the CIHR-CEPI pool and $600,000 for two in the CIHR-NRC pool. The page, marked anticipatory, says CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, “will at least match CIHR’s level of support in cash contribution” on the four CEPI-pool awards, while the National Research Council (NRC) matches in kind; the grant records show only CIHR’s share. McMaster University’s July 30, 2026 announcement of Miller’s award says recipients “receive $600,000 in research funding over a three-year period.”

Rebel News reported in January 2024 that the World Economic Forum “helped found” CEPI in 2017, after Ezra Levant and Avi Yemini found its chief executive, Richard Hatchett, “not keen to talk to independent journalists” in Davos. A CIHR release of April 26, 2023 says that “Since 2017, Canada has provided a total of $114 million to CEPI,” and that an earlier CIHR-CEPI round announced that year committed $2.7 million to five researchers.

Rasmussen is a research scientist at VIDO, the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. In a May 2021 university interview she said, “Everybody get vaccinated as soon as you can.” In an October 2021 Canadaland interview she called “the hypothesis that this had its origins in RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine” “absolutely, demonstrably untrue.” The sources do not say how the six were chosen.

CIHR’s president is Dr. Paul Hébert, appointed for five years from January 2, 2025, in an announcement by then health minister Mark Holland on November 14, 2024. The records name no signing official. Web searches found no donations, party roles or controversy for Hébert; the Elections Canada database itself could not be queried.

Canada had given CEPI $114 million by 2023. Now CEPI is adding at least matching cash to four of Ottawa’s own vaccine awards.

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Israel Breached Iranian Airspace This Weekend but Iran Chose Not To Respond. Why?

Much of the Middle East was on edge this past weekend, fearing that President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would restart the Iran war. Thankfully, hostilities didn’t resume, but it’s not because of a lack of effort. According to Iranian sources, Israeli fighter jets did breach Iranian airspace, but Tehran surprisingly chose not to respond. Today’s meeting in Tehran between Saudi, Turkish, Pakistani, and Iranian officials is partly why Iran showed restraint.

Israel has made no secret of its desire and plans to restart the Iran war, but on a larger scale than previous rounds. Earlier this month, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israeli TV that Israel is ready to strike Iran with “full force” and that this time around it will target Iranian energy infrastructure to “set Iran back 40 years, to the age of darkness and to the Stone Age.”

Over the weekend, news broke of an alleged rift between Netanyahu and the IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir over a proposed military operation against Iran ahead of Israel’s election, with Zamir pushing back over its timing and potential impact on the Israeli elections tomorrow. The Israelis had also conducted numerous mock practice attacks against Iran in Iraqi airspace in the past week.

All these developments added to an explosive situation where war was just one tiny, dumb decision away. Tehran had, of course, also hinted that it would no longer wait to be attacked, but strike preemptively against the U.S. and Israel if it felt strikes against its territory were imminent.

Which is why Iran’s decision not to strike after Israeli fighter jets allegedly breached its airspace is all the more surprising. But sources in Tehran tell me that a variety of factors prompted this Iranian decision, rooted in two key Iranian assessments: that time is still on Iran’s side and that Israel is trying to goad Iran into striking first to get the war started at a moment in which it is still not a foregone conclusion whether Trump has opted for war or not.

The Iranians have made clear that they will respond ferociously to Israeli and American strikes and that Saudi Arabia in particular will likely face significant destabilization in such a scenario, in addition to other Gulf Cooperation Council states. The irony, of course, is that such a response would serve Israel quite well. The more Iran retaliates against GCC states, particularly Saudi Arabia, the more these Arab states will feel compelled to turn to Israel for support and protection, undermining Iran’s longer-term goal of inviting these states to join Iran in forming a security arrangement in the Middle East.

In that scenario, the dream of an Israeli-Arab anti-Iran bloc like the Abraham Accord could be revived. Consequently, Tehran has to weigh its options very carefully and not rush into responding to Israeli provocations, as it could amount to a trap. It appears that Israel’s maneuvers in Iraq ultimately convinced Tehran that Israel was bluffing and that an Iranian response would be counterproductive. For now, that assessment may have been correct.

Another factor was today’s meeting of Saudi, Pakistani, and Turkish officials in Tehran. Iranian media and officials have touted the meeting as a clear sign that American efforts to isolate Iran or exclude it from regional security discussions have failed. For all three countries to come to Tehran, on relatively short notice, is seen as a win in Tehran — a victory that would have been jeopardized if Iran responded to Israeli provocations over the weekend.

Contrary to speculation, the meeting was not a stepping stone toward inviting Iran into the Mecca Pact. Rather, it was driven by a more urgent matter: the Ansar Allah-Saudi war that is not only destabilizing Yemen, but also now Saudi Arabia itself. (Ansar Allah is often referred to as the “Houthis.”)

But the content-less statement from the Tehran meeting reflects how difficult this issue will be to resolve. From the Iranian perspective, Riyadh has committed the same mistake as Trump: starting a war that it cannot end on the battlefield and is unwilling to end at the negotiating table.

In Trump’s case, the hold-up is the lifting of the Persian Gulf blockade. In Riyadh’s case, it is the lifting of the air blockade on Yemen. Tehran is willing to help, a source in Iran tells me, but it won’t challenge Ansar Allah’s condition of lifting the air blockade, just as Tehran won’t budge on the lifting of Trump’s blockade.

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“Never-Ending” Cruise Hits Dead End: Passengers Stranded In Cambodia As Fuel Bill Sinks Voyage

Villa Vie Residences suspended operations of its 650-passenger residential cruise ship on Tuesday, citing “extraordinary“ fuel costs that have placed its business model under unsustainable financial pressure.

The Florida-based operator is evaluating restructuring and recapitalization options as it coordinates the disembarkation of passengers from its Odyssey ship, moored off Cambodia.

Fuel costs have soared more than 300% since the Gulf conflict erupted in late February.

Very low sulfur fuel oil (VLSFO), a marine fuel used to power large ships, rose to $966 a metric ton in Singapore earlier today. At the onset of the conflict, the maritime fuel jumped to nearly $1,200 a metric ton, up from prewar levels of around $500.

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About That Russian Air Leak on the International Space Station…

It’s official: A persistent air leak in the Zvezda module of the International Space Station forced Russia to permanently seal off the Transfer Chamber (PrK) to one of the structure’s few docking ports from pressurized access. In the movie version, this is when Tom Hanks would click on his radio to announce, “Houston, we had a problem. Now we just have a complication. Or two.”

I’ll get to the complications in a moment — think of them as “space Jenga” for now — but first, you need to know how the Russians got to the point of crippling a vital ISS section.

Back in June, “in a moment of very high drama,” as Eric Berger put it for Ars Technica, “NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.”

The issue was “persistent cracks” in the PrK that provides access to the Russian docking port. The cracks started showing up in 2019, leading to minor air leaks. Berger added then that “Russian astronauts [sic] have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.”

No, they did not try duct tape or Flex Seal. At least not that I’m aware of.

Whatever repair work the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, proposed at the time “spooked NASA officials, prompting them to take the extreme step of securing their astronauts inside Dragon in case of a depressurization event.”

AKA, in case something went kablooey and our astronauts needed to make an emergency trip home from a dying space station.

Nobody has said much since the June incident, and NASA officials reportedly stayed mum because they didn’t want to embarrass their Roscosmos partners. Or at least not cause them any further embarrassment. After all, it isn’t every day that you send your partner’s astronauts scurrying for the escape capsule. But the upshot is that both NASA and Roscosmos probably knew four months ago that the PrK’s leaks weren’t repairable, and that sealing it off was the only option. Now it’s official.

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Vance Says El-Sayed Lied About Not Being Born in America

Vice President JD Vance said at a Michigan campaign rally that Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed lied about being an immigrant from another continent, pointing to the candidate’s past statements about his own origins.

Vance, stumping for Republican nominee Mike Rogers, told the crowd that El-Sayed had misrepresented where he came from, according to video posted by the Trump War Room. The vice president framed the race as a test of national loyalty.

“We have to understand what happens when our nation gives in to these kinds of people, to young men with zero attachment to its land or to its history, with a man who would lie, who is so ashamed of this state that he would lie about being an immigrant from another continent,” Vance said.

El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984 to Egyptian immigrants. At the Michigan Democratic Party’s 2017 convention, he told the party’s Progressive Caucus he “may be an immigrant from North Africa,” according to video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. He listed U.S. and Egyptian citizenship on a 2014 Columbia University résumé and stated onstage at a 2016 Detroit conference that he held “dual citizenship.”

El-Sayed’s campaign has denied he ever held Egyptian citizenship. Spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon the candidate was misinformed by a relative and called the claim “an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand.” Richner said El-Sayed “is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been.”

Responding to Vance at an earlier stop, El-Sayed described himself as “a Wolverine, not a weasel” who was born and raised in the state, and his campaign has said Republicans lift his past comments out of context.

The exchange comes as Vance campaigns for Rogers, whose toss-up race against El-Sayed could determine Senate control. Vance told supporters at an earlier Monroe rally that El-Sayed is “one of the craziest, one of the most far-left, and one of the most radical people running for high office in the history of the United States of America.”

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Texas Sues OpenAI Over Lack of Digital ID Age Checks

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is at it again with calls for age verification digital ID checks, this time suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in a district court over the way the company’s chatbot is designed and functions.

The lawsuit, filed in Collin County on Friday, wants the court to issue an injunction that would force OpenAI to implement age verification on ChatGPT users.

According to the petition, OpenAI is accused of “designing, offering, and maintaining a dangerous product that provides content unsuitable for children without requiring any age verification.”

The claims against OpenAI and Altman are made under the Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act (DTPA) and the SCOPE Act.

The petition asks the court to order OpenAI to stop “Offering ChatGPT to minors in Texas” and to stop running the product “without requiring adequate age verification” and “without parental consent.”

Another order Texas wants is to prevent OpenAI from releasing any new model to its users in that state “unless an independent third-party evaluator, approved by the Court, has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release.”

Texas also wants a court order stopping OpenAI from selling a product “that functions unreliably while falsely representing that reliability.”

As for monetary compensation, Texas wants $10,000 in civil penalties for each violation, disgorgement of the company’s assets, attorneys’ fees and costs, and is asking for a jury trial.

The petition states that “The free version of ChatGPT has no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism whatsoever.” The paid tier, it continues, “nominally asks users to provide their age” but “there is no mechanism to verify the age of its users.”

According to the filing, ChatGPT has “tens of thousands of users who are under 13 years of age” in Texas, and it cites a Common Sense Media line that “ChatGPT should be for adults only.”

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Hacking & Blackmail: 6 Risks Anthropic Flags in Its IPO Documents

Anthropic, the AI startup known for its Claude chatbot and its doomer CEO Dario Amodei, has filed for an IPO that could value the company at up to $2 trillion. The company’s IPO filing devotes nearly 100 pages to the dangers its own technology could pose.

CNBC reports that the filing lays out risks ranging from lawsuits and regulatory crackdowns to the possibility that Anthropic could lose control over its own AI models. Anthropic frames the stakes in sweeping terms, writing that if “powerful AI is directed at solving humanity’s hardest problems and the risks are managed responsibly, the potential is extraordinary.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been at the forefront of AI doomers seeking to heavily regulate AI, which would be handed to Amodei’s compatriots in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. Nevertheless the IPO documents explain very real potential risks.

Here are six of the risks the company disclosed ahead of going public:

1. AI agents misused for hacking and fraud

Anthropic warns that its AI agents, which can act with autonomy, could be misused to “delete or modify data,” exfiltrate information, carry out unauthorized transactions, insert malicious code, or “circumvent safeguards.” Any of that, the company says, could “adversely affect our reputation and brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations.” The filing discloses that misuse has already happened.

In September, Anthropic said it had blocked multiple accounts using its models in ways that could support the development of biological weapons. Last year, the company identified a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that manipulated its coding tool in an attempt to infiltrate roughly 30 targets worldwide. Anthropic also says four of its own models have hacked into third-party systems, including one case in which a model gained administrator access, changed system settings, and read an individual’s private information.

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SOUTHCOM Commander Urges Cubans To Seize The Moment Alongside CIA Recruitment Pitch

The commander of Southern Command, Marine Corps Gen. Francis L. Donovan, posted on the command’s official X account on October 24. He urged Cubans to push for political change. “Cuba’s future belongs to those who act. Seize the moment and build the change you want to see,” he wrote. He claimed Cubans should be fed up with the broken promises, the huge corruption, and the small elite that lives in luxury while ignoring the majority of the population. Donovan’s message amplified a Spanish-language message from the CIA inviting Cubans to open up a confidential contact with the agency.

This is highly unusual for a combatant command. A senior operational commander does not normally post a message to help an intelligence agency recruit citizens of another country to be an agent.

This unusual proposition was posted on SOUTHCOM’s social media account on October 24, as the third of a series of messages from senior US officials to Cubans seeking to engineer positive change to engage in a “discrete partnership” with the CIA. The CIA messages — a brief Spanish-language solicitation and a video explaining how Cubans could contact them — included tips on how to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), to use private browsing and throwaway email addresses to contact them.

At a South Florida rally, President Trump said that warships returning from operations related to Iran would pass Cuba and stop about 50 yards off the coast. Rubio would then be sent in to finish the deal, the President said. In late September Trump said an agreement with Havana could be reached without military intervention. Rubio said September 29 that Cuba had already fallen.

Measures to pressure Cuba in 2026 include an oil blockade, additional economic restrictions, and interdiction of fuel shipments to the island by the Coast Guard which have contributed to fuel shortages and electricity blackouts. Furthermore, a dedicated task force on Cuba has been established by the CIA, and military options for dealing with Havana under review. All of this, according to ClashReport, has increased in recent months in light of the January operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and a rare meeting earlier this year with senior Cuban military officials held by Donovan at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.

Havana dismissed the campaign as desperation, as Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío characterized the CIA’s attempt to publicly reach out to Cubans for contact. He compared it to the marketing of toothpaste, according to ClashReport.

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The War in Iran Comes Home to ‘Trump Country’

“It’s not tariffs… it’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel.”

In leaked audio obtained by Axios, Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for senate in Texas, spoke candidly about what he believes are the biggest issues hurting his campaign. The Iran war, which has dragged on for almost eight months now, has put Texans – and the rest of the nation – in an economic bind, one which President Donald Trump had promised to avoid.

Crude oil prices have once again risen above $100 a barrel. The national average for gasoline is hovering above $4. With Republicans nationwide being burdened by the stench of incumbency – regardless of whether or not the individual candidate is currently in office – a return-to-power seems all but imminent for the Democrats in the House of Representatives, and maybe even the Senate as well.

This is even true in “Trump Country.”

The war itself is a topic which evokes hardline opinions on both sides. Fierce debates have been had in elite circles over the wisdom of launching the military campaign against Iran, the strategic blunders of the Trump administration, and the way in which the war has been conducted. What has been a bipartisan concern, however, is the rise in fuel prices brought upon by the war.

People en masse may not know the technical details of the raging conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, or even where to find it on a map. What they do know is that when they turn on social media or turn on the TV, the campaign ads they see coming from Democrats consistently associate the skyrocketing fuel prices with the war in Iran – attaching the Republican opponent to the White House’s unpopular war.

Meanwhile, the rebuttal from Trump isn’t an explicit denial of these accusations. Rather, he has embraced them.

“It’s a small price to pay,” Trump said at a rally in Alaska on October 14, “for stopping [Iran] from having a nuclear weapon.”

Trump’s fanbase, collectively referred to as “MAGA,” have been known for their unwavering loyalty to the president. Trump famously joked in a 2015 stump speech “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” The spirit of this has been generally correct. On most issues, Trump’s supporters have stuck with him regardless of his many contradictions – be it on the Epstein files, government spending, or the merits of various DC swamp creatures.

There has been a crackup, though. Trump’s swagger – his inability to disgust his diehard fans even if he tried – seems to be weakening.

The Iran war, while historically unpopular, isn’t the sole reason for this. Neither is his baseline hawkishness, which contradicts his dovish campaign rhetoric. The majority of Republicans were happy to support Trump’s January 2026 operation in Venezuela, and most also approved of the bombing of various small boats off the coast of Central and South America. But this war had a different effect on Trump’s coalition than the one in Iran.

For one, the Venezuela operation was relatively limited in its scale, and the same can be said for the boat strikes. The fighting in Caracas lasted mere hours and resulted in no American casualties. President Delcy Rodríguez’s regime has remained in power, and blowback – at least in terms of significant negative ramifications – has not been felt in the U.S. to this point (that doesn’t mean it won’t appear in the future, to be clear).

Most importantly, the economic impact of the operation wasn’t notable. There weren’t any immediate concerns about twenty percent of the world’s energy supply being stuck behind a missile-riddled waterway, for example.

The situation has been exactly the reverse in the Middle East.

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