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New NIAID Director John Powers Is a Former World Health Organization Advisor

Dr. John H. Powers III, M.D., appointed Acting Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) this month, served as an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) on antimicrobial resistance policy.

Powers now leads the $6.6 billion institute responsible for funding experiments and publications on pandemic pathogens.

Congress has declared that the WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—the greatest health crisis in recent history—“was an abject failure” and that its international efforts “may harm the United States.”

More than half of Americans believe the WHO did a “poor or fair job” during the pandemic, according to an April 2021 Social Science Quarterly publication.

And less than half of Americans believe the WHO acts independently of political agendas.

Critics of global health organizations have raised concerns about placing individuals with ties to unelected foreign bodies like the WHO in senior U.S. government positions that influence domestic policy and taxpayer-funded research.

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The MoU Is Not the Final ‘Deal’

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced on Sunday that the U.S. and Iran had reached a “Peace Deal.” Immediately following Sharif’s post on X, President Donald Trump seconded this news:

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

As the media is reacting to the flurry of updates, there is an air of optimism that I fear is blinding many in the public, and the financial markets, to the truth about this deal. There is a crucial detail that the commentator class seems to be largely missing, outside of a few reliable voices:

This “deal” is a Memorandum of Understanding, not a comprehensive “Iran deal” as Trump keeps claiming.

Based on the details being reported, it essentially saves the most complicated issues for later and would establish a 60-day ceasefire period to discuss these points in greater depth. The main issue, Iran’s nuclear enrichment, has not been discussed in any technical way up to this point.

Despite Trump’s claims that “We will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States,” no such agreement has been reached regarding the details of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

Even as this deal was announced, we still have no clarity on the status of the nuclear file in these discussions. Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday:

“‘We’ll get the nuclear dust later on when we’re ready to go in and do it. I’d say over the next month or two, there’s no rush,’ he said. He called it ‘harmless.’”

Besides the fact that this statement contradicts months of propaganda on the “imminent threat” posed by Iran, this signals that details on Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile have not been worked out, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

This agreement also doesn’t set terms on Iran’s missile or drone programs, nor does it discuss Iran’s support for their regional proxies. This has led many prominent neoconservative media voices to criticize the deal, saying that it won’t ensure that Iran is sufficiently weakened in the region.

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Family Owned Bakery in Minnesota Targeted by LGBT Mob for Celebrating ‘Nuclear Family Month’

Rather than bow to whatever PC celebration is being forced on businesses in any given month, the owners of Carl’s Bakery & Coffee Shop in Granite Falls, Minnesota, decided to make June a celebration of something that is important to the family-owned business.

In June, the bakery began celebrating ‘Nuclear Family Month,’ but it comes with a cost as they are subjected to targeting from the woke LGBT mob.

Joshua Streblow, the bakery’s owner, told The Christian Post that the monthlong promotion celebrates “the beauty of God’s design and the beauty of God’s declared word with respect to these designs.”

“We want to see all that God has said is good, true, and beautiful, celebrated in every sphere of life. And that includes our own business, that includes on Main Street in which we live and participate, and the town we have generations of life in.”

Carl’s shared on Facebook, “On this 250th anniversary of our great nation’s founding, the list of troubles that plague us is quite long: from economic woes — to general distrust of our institutions– to a precipitously declining national birthrate– to a major breakdown in generational continuity within families that do have children.”

“In short, we find ourselves as a nation in rather perilous and tumultuous times, and our little town is by no means immune from these woes.”

“Rather than fixating on these woes, however, we would like to focus our attention on what we believe both nature’s law and nature’s God reveal as the primary building block for any great society: The Nuclear Family.”

“So out of love for our neighbors and our nation, and in solidarity with our brethren from the great state of Tennessee, for the month of June we wish to celebrate The Nuclear Family!”

“More pointedly, we wish to do so in honor of the only design we believe brings about the multi-generational good we seek, the one instituted by our Creator: one man and one woman in a covenantal (married) relationship, eagerly receiving the fruit of their union (children) as God allows.”

“Along those lines we will be introducing a number of weekly specials and welcome any and all to join in the fun of the month ahead!!”

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Democrat Candidate George Conway Vows to Put Donald Trump ‘Away for Good’ with Third Impeachment

Democrat George Conway is threatening to put President Donald Trump “away for good” if he wins his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 12th Congressional District.

The Never Trumper lawyer in a video Monday said his fight against the president has only begun, Fox News reported.

Hi Donald, it’s me. George Conway. I cost you $88 fucking million dollars and I’ve only just gotten started. I know you like putting your name on everything from your plane, to the Kennedy Center… sorry about that,” he said.

“But the only thing your name is going to be left on when I’m done with you is the orange jumpsuit you’re gonna have to wear in prison and you see that building that back there?” Conway continued, pointing to the Capitol building. “That’s where we’re gonna hold your third and final impeachment trial. The one that’s gonna put you away for good, and I’m gonna enjoy every minute of that.”

“We’ve got a lot of serious problems in this country, including and especially the price of gas which is hitting $6 a gallon in some places, and that’s all because of you, Donald Trump. We can’t fix those problems until we impeach you and convict you. That’s why I’m running for congress and you are going to regret that,” he concluded.

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Domesticating AI – It’s Not Coming, It’s Already Here

During a recent conversation with a diving buddy, he pulled out his phone mid conversation and said “Hey Grok, show me that dive computer we were talking about this morning.” And yes, it’s $580 worth of gorgeous.

Its translation abilities are spectacular, and occasionally hilarious. It really is the Babel fish. Not that long ago I moved to a bank simply because it supported Apple Pay years before the big players. At that time, paying with just the tap of a wrist always garnered astonishment and commentary. Around the same time, voice assistants started crossing the line from novelty to genuinely useful. Set a timer, make an appointment, play some music. Super!

“Alexa, turn the kitchen light on.” Light comes on. “No, turn it off.” “There is no device called ‘it’ to turn off.” Oof!

No memory, no context.

Enter Nabu (yes I know, I haven’t got round to changing the wakeword name yet). Naby knows it turned the kitchen light on, and knows I was referring to the kitchen light when I said “turn it off.” It remembers, it has context, because it’s not just a dumb voice assistant anymore, it is plumbed into my local AI.

The big commercial AI platforms can be connected to these systems, but running it locally means the data stays within the boundaries of my house. It won’t process that mountain of documents or win that tricky legal case yet, but it can keep track of the state of my home and understand what I mean when I speak naturally.

That’s a big deal – because now I don’t have to write and memorize tiresome automations for rigid pre-programmed commands, I can converse with Nabu in human and it understands “all the lights” or “just the downstairs aircons.”

Only five years ago, running an AI model at home was a ridiculous proposition – you’d need datacenter hardware and a tech-bro budget. Now, it’s dramatically cheaper and easier – with consumer GPUs, mini PCs, Ollama and Hugging Face, technically curious people are quietly building surprisingly capable AI systems at home. The GPU that I can hold in my hands doesn’t compete with a datacenter the size of several football fields – but for my homelab tinkerings, it’s surprisingly capable, and is only becoming more so.

I should probably backtrack a little here – I’m enthusing about Home Assistant, which I’ve been running for about 12 years – originally on a Raspberry Pi, now in a VM on ProxmoxVE. Sensors and controllers are scattered all over the house, with a dashboard in a browser acting as mission control. Lights automated with timers and presence detectors. Sun elevation adjusts blinds, curtains react to sunrise and sunset, and moisture sensors trigger irrigation on demand. Solar and battery systems respond to dynamic electricity pricing, buying and selling power depending on what the grid is doing.

Home Assistant proclaimed 2023 to be the Year of the Voice and duly launched a prototype Voice Assistant. At launch, its capabilities were limited. Today, it is genuinely good at a variety of tasks, and it’s all open source so you can build your own device from very inexpensive hardware, and the software is on GitHub.

Local models – Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Qwen – very much lag behind the giant commercial systems, but for experimentation, home automation, and general day-to-day interaction, they’re becoming more and more usable. I personally care about data sovereignty (a huge topic in its own right), so running a local AI grants me a more privacy-conscious workflow, and it still works when the internet doesn’t.

Quite how many months of commercial AI subscriptions I could have got for the price of my GPU is a question I’m deliberately avoiding, predominantly for marital reasons. I rather think of myself as a data nerd. All those sensors collecting all that data in a “If this, then that” environment makes for endless tinkering possibilities. And with an AI-powered Nabu gradually replacing Alexa, my office edges ever closer to Tony Stark’s lair. We’re no longer at “deploying Kubernetes clusters” level of difficulty, but it’s still very much a tinkerer’s space rather than a mainstream consumer appliance. Even so, it feels like a taste of where we’re heading.

The strange thing is how quickly this all stops feeling strange. Talking naturally to an AI that understands context, remembers previous conversations and controls my house may have garnered astonishment and commentary. Now, it’s just another thing sitting quietly in my server rack.

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INSANE: Liberal ‘Historian’ Tries to Tie UFC Fight at the White House to the Lynching of Black People

Heather Cox Richardson is a supposed historian. During a recent discussion with former CNN employee Jim Acosta, she tried to tie the UFC Freedom 250 Fight at the White House to the historic lynching of black people.

This is the same woman who just last month, claimed that Republicans accuse other people of what they themselves are doing, and then suggested that the GOP learned this tactic from the Nazis.

In short, this woman is completely insane, or a liar, or both. But the left loves her. She has a massive following on the Substack platform.

In the video below, she actually says:

“It’s not really a stretch to say that the same impulse that created the UFC fight on the white House lawn is the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century.”

It’s incredible how she says all of this nonsense with a completely straight face. If she actually believes this, she needs mental help.

Some people on the left are just so desperate to believe the worst about President Trump and his supporters that they dream up dark fantasies like this one, then say them out loud and try to convince others that it’s true.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.

Millions of Americans watched the UFC event and had fun while feeling pride for their country. This makes people like Richardson miserable, so her impulse is to somehow ‘ruin’ the event. That’s what she’s trying to do here.

It just comes off as pathetic and sad.

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Scientists Revisiting the ‘Faraday Effect’ Have Uncovered a Surprising Magnetic Interaction Between Light and Matter

Light’s magnetic field influences matter, according to new findings by Israeli researchers, challenging long-held assumptions that light only illuminates matter and prompting a rethink of how the Faraday Effect works.

Some of today’s most cutting-edge technologies—currently mostly laboratory concepts such as spintronics and quantum devices—could benefit from this revised understanding, as the new work reexamines one of physics’ most fundamental interactions.

First discovered by Michael Faraday in 1845, the Faraday Effect describes what has long been viewed as an interaction solely between light’s electric field and matter. Observations of the effect reveal that light’s polarization rotates as it passes through a material exposed to a steady magnetic field. Traditionally, researchers believed only the electric field of light contributed to this rotation. Now, new work suggests that light’s magnetic field is also a significant player.

A new study provides theoretical evidence that the oscillating magnetic field of light directly contributes to the Faraday Effect. Dr. Amir Capua and Benjamin Assouline of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led the research, published in Nature Scientific Reports.

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Name of Spanish PM Sánchez Found in the Diary of Leire Díez, Accused of Influence Peddling, Bribery, Obstruction of Justice, Fraud, Document forgery and Embezzlement

Díez is also accused of trying to derail the corruption case against Sánchez’s brother.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro better have enjoyed the days he spent in the company of leftist Pope Leo XIV, because those moments of positive agenda didn’t last.

We have been reporting on how the Socialist ‘leader’ is embroiled in an array of corruption scandals and prosecutions that have so far ensnared his brother, his wife, several of his key allies – notably the former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Now, as the days when the Pope treated him like a pop star fade in the past, Sánchez is being dragged to the center of the investigations against a former Socialist Party member, director of public companies, Leire Díez.

Díez is accused of a dizzying list of crimes, such as influence peddling, bribery, obstruction of justice, fraud, document forgery, and embezzlement.

And today (15), it arises that Spanish police have identified the initials ‘P.S.’ that occur several times in Díez’s diary with the prime minister, as they investigate efforts to derail the case against Sánchez’s brother.

Euronews reported:

“A personal diary seized from Leire Díez, a former member of Spain’s ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), contains at least four references to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, according to a report by the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard. In that report, the UCO said that the initials ‘P.S.’ that appear repeatedly in Díez’s notebooks refer to Sánchez. That identification comes via an entry in which Díez herself refers to David Sánchez, the prime minister’s brother, as ‘brother of P.S.’.”

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Power Transformer Lead Times Hit Record Highs As US Grid Equipment Shortage Deepens

Power transformer lead times have reached levels that are now dictating the pace of industrial expansion across the United States. According to Wood Mackenzie’s second quarter 2025 survey, standard power transformers average 128 weeks for delivery. Generator step-up transformers, which connect large power generation assets to the grid, average 144 weeks. Some orders extend to four years.

For plant operators, energy developers, and infrastructure planners, that math has a direct consequence: a facility that breaks ground today cannot energize its electrical systems on a standard timeline. Equipment availability has become the gating factor for industrial growth, replacing capital availability and permitting as the primary project constraint.

Power Transformer Lead Times: What the Numbers Actually Mean

128 weeks is nearly two and a half years of wait time before a transformer ships. That figure comes from actual utility and developer order data, not theoretical capacity projections. Generator step-up transformers, which are larger and more specialized, run even longer at 144 weeks. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation reported lead times crossing 120 weeks in 2024, and the trend has continued upward into 2025.

The cost pressure is equally significant. Power transformer prices have risen 77% since 2019, according to industry sourcing data. Distribution transformer prices have climbed 78% to 95% over the same period. The underlying material drivers are straightforward: grain-oriented electrical steel prices have roughly doubled since 2020, and copper prices have risen more than 50%. Both materials are core inputs in every transformer manufactured.

The demand surge is not temporary. Generator step-up transformer demand has grown 274% since 2019. Power transformer demand has grown 119% over the same period. AI data center construction, large-scale electrification of industrial processes, and grid modernization programs are all pulling from the same constrained supplier base simultaneously.

The Cleveland-Cliffs Bottleneck: One Domestic Supplier for Critical Steel

The transformer shortage is not simply a volume problem. It has a structural bottleneck at the material level. Transformer cores require grain-oriented electrical steel, a highly engineered material that gives the steel specific magnetic properties needed for efficient power transformation. In the United States, Cleveland-Cliffs is the only domestic producer of this material, operating plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

That concentration means that every U.S. transformer manufacturer drawing on domestic steel supply draws from a single source. When that source faces capacity constraints, pricing pressure, or supply disruptions, the effect ripples through the entire domestic transformer manufacturing base immediately. Roughly 80% of large power transformers used in the U.S. are imported, primarily from Mexico, South Korea, and other international manufacturers, creating additional exposure to global trade conditions.

The Biden administration awarded Cleveland-Cliffs $500 million to upgrade its electrical steel plants under the CHIPS and Infrastructure framework. Key elements of that grant have since been reviewed under the current administration, adding uncertainty to the domestic steel expansion timeline.

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Son of Norway Crown Princess, Marius Hoiby Is Convicted of Rape and Several Other Crimes, and Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison

Prosecutors called him as a man who ‘thinks he can do whatever he wants.’

Another chapter has closed in the saga of the 29-year-old son of the Crown Princess of Norway, Marius Hoiby, as he is found guilty of two counts of rape and is sentenced to four years in prison.

Hoiby is the Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s son from a previous relationship, before her 2001 marriage to Crown Prince (heir to the Crown) Haakon of Norway.

The Telegraph reported:

“Marius Borg Høiby had been accused of a total of 40 charges, from rape to traffic violations, carrying a maximum possible sentence of 16 years in prison.

Three judges cleared him of two other counts of rape. But they found him guilty of many other offences, which included filming a woman’s genitals without her consent, abuse and breaking a restraining order.”

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