 |
|
|
|||||
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Wednesday night that Susan Monarez has been removed from her position as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Monarez, who began her tenure just under one month ago after being confirmed by the Senate on July 31, was reportedly asked to resign on Wednesday because she clashed with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over proposed changes to vaccine policies. After refusing to resign, she was fired. Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the HHS wrote on X Wednesday night. We thank her for her dedicated service to the American people. The announcement of her removal came just hours after the FDA approved new COVID-19 vaccinationswith limits for who qualified to receive them. The new vaccines are available to only younger adults and children with certain medical conditions, a significant change from past policies that approved them for everyone 6 months or older. Lawyers representing Monarez have asserted that her firing is legally deficient and that, as an appointee, she will remain in the position until President Trump himself fires her. Even though her firing is contested, Monarezs departure is making waves. It sparked a series of resignations by other top CDC officials and calls for Kennedys ouster. Here’s what to know. Who is Susan Monarez? A longtime civil servant, Monarez is the first CDC director to be confirmed by the Senate, following a 2023 law requiring confirmation for the position. She is also the first person without a medical degree to be chosen for the role since the 1950s. Earning her PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of WisconsinMadison, Monarez spent years researching infectious diseases. Her expertise led her to serve in several government agencies, helping to transform prevention, diagnosis, and treatment efforts for infectious diseases. She became director of the CDC after serving as acting director for the seven months between Trumps inauguration and her confirmation. Before that, she served as director for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, another HHS agency. “Dr. Monarez is a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials,” Kennedy said in a statement after Monarez was confirmed as CDC director. Why do Monarezs lawyers contest her firing? Soon after the HHS announced Monarezs departure, her lawyers issued a statement condemning the agency for weaponizing public health and denying that her termination had come through proper channels. When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda, Mark S. Zaid and Abbe David Lowell, Monarezs lawyers, wrote in a statement posted to X on Wednesday night. Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign. Later that night, Zaid confirmed that White House staff had notified Monarez that she was fired, but they did not accept this notification. As a presidential appointee, senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her, Zaid wrote on X. For this reason, we reject notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director. We have notified the White House Counsel of our position. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Monarezs job status, but at a press briefing Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that the president issued her termination and was within his rights to fire her. It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly reelected on November 5th. This woman has never received a vote in her life, and the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission. What are other leaders in medicine and politics saying about this? Monarezs ousting seems to be the final straw for many public health and political officials who disagree with the new administrations approach to public health, which has undermined federal health institutions with budget and personnel cuts while public trust in these institutions continues to fall. Last nights removal of CDC Director Susan Monarez and the resignations of other senior CDC leaders are highly alarming at a challenging moment for public health, Bobby M. Mukkamala, president of the American Medical Association (AMA), said in a statement Thursday. In the wake of CDC budget cuts and the termination of hundreds of employees earlier this year, the AMA is deeply concerned that this turmoil leaves us highly susceptible to public health threats. At the CDC itself, at least three leadersincluding Demetre Daskalakis, Debra Houry, Daniel Jernigaresigned Thursday, citing ongoing changes at the agency and issues with RFK Jr.s values and approach to managing the agency. Top Democrat lawmakers have also weighed in on the agencys turmoil, calling for the replacement of RFK Jr. RFK Jr. is a catastrophic failure and a clear danger in office, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado wrote on X. He never shouldve been confirmed in the first place, and every day he stays in power puts the American people at risk. He needs to be fired. In a statement, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia wrote that putting a quack like Bobby Kennedy in charge of public health was a grave error and that the administration is putting lives at risk. Who will replace Monarez as CDC director? With Monarez out after just under one month at the helm, the CDC is once again looking for a new director. At a press briefing Thursday, Leavitt said a decision would be announced by President Trump or Secretary Kennedy very soon.
Category:
E-Commerce
One of the many mysteries surrounding today’s housing market in the United States is why existing homes are now more expensive than new ones. Traditionally, it’s the other way around. A look at the June housing numbers showed that the medium sale price for an existing home was $441,500, while new ones sold for $401,800, according to Forbes. Do that math and that means brand-new homes were 9% cheaper, than old, or “existing” onesa new record. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the medium price for a new home sold in July 2025 was 0.8% below June 2025 prices, and 5.9 percent from July 2024. So, not only are new builds less expensive, they are now selling at a sharp discount. That’s especially true in some of the weakest markets, where new construction prices are falling the fastest. (For example, in Little Rock, Arkansas, the $321,520 median listing price was down 15.6% from a year ago; in Austin, Texas, it’s down 8.5%); Wichita, Kansas, it’s down 7.9%; and in Jacksonville and Cape Coral, Florida prices are down 7.8% and 7.4% respectfully.) Why are new homes cheaper than old homes? There are a few other reasons for the trend. “The affordability difference goes beyond sticker price, too, as many builders are offering incentives like cash at closing or reduced mortgage rates that make a major difference in upfront costs and monthly payments,” Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner explained. New homes are also relatively cheaper now because, in an effort to keep costs down, builders are creating new homes with smaller floor plans. And geography plays a role, too, with new home builds more often located in lower-priced markets. And that brings us to the sellers, themselves, who have low or no mortgages thanks, in part, to rate drops during COVID-19. With little to no incentive to move, home owners are more likely to stay put, and reject an offer to sell, rather than cut prices. Data shows nearly 40% of U.S. owner-occupied housing units in 2023 were mortgage-free, marking a new high. Factor in with that a huge inventory of unsold new-builds, especially in softer markets like the Sun Belt, and a clearer picture begins to emerge.
Category:
E-Commerce
Three years ago, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had a scientific breakthrough: as they fired lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel, they achieved fusion ignition for the first time, a key step in making fusionclean, safe, abundant nuclear powerpossible. Now, a new startup called Inertia is spinning off to commercialize the lab’s approach and aim for the end goalaffordable clean energy that could be available 24/7. Andrea Kritcher, the fusion energy pioneer behind the work at Livermore Labs, is founding the company along with Mike Dunne, a Stanford professor focused on fusion power plant design, and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson. Lawson previously cofounded Twilio, a cloud communications platform, and grew it to a company with $4 billion a year in revenue, but left last year after pressure from activist investors. As he considered starting something new, he knew that he no longer wanted to work on software. (In a very different side project, he also bought The Onion and brought back its print edition.) Then he happened to meet Kritcher, and saw the opportunity to work on something transformative. “There are a lot of startups out there pursuing fusion with a number of different methods,” Lawson says. “But none of them were really basing their work on Livermore and just taking the most direct possible path, from what has now been working at Livermore to a working power plant design.” The exterior of the target chamber of LLNLs National Ignition Facility. [Photo: LNLL] The lab’s initial breakthrough in 2022 was an early but historic step. In the experiment, researchers pointed 192 powerful lasers at a can roughly the size of a pencil eraser that contained a tiny capsule made of fusion fuel. The laser beams entered the end of the can and created a 3 million-degree oven, heating up the pellet and exploding it. “You get to these extreme starlight conditionsminiature stars inside of the can for a brief second in time,” Kritcher says. The energy output from fusion reactions was larger than the energy input from the lasers. That’s the definition of ignitionand the point of the experiment and others that followed it at the lab. But the lasers still used an enormous amount of grid power. The next step is showing that it’s possible for the system to produce more energy. The interior of a LNLL target chamber during maintenance. [Photo: LNLL] That should be feasible. “The lasers are inefficientbased on very old technology,” says Kritcher. The lasers were also much smaller than they would need to be in a power plant. The experiment “was never meant to generate more energy than we pull from the wall,” she says. Now, the team will adapt modern, much more powerful laser tech. “Number one, we have to build the world’s most energetic lasera giant laser that is far more energetic and far more powerful than what they have at [the national lab], but also is actually physically much smaller,” Lawson says. The technical risk is low, he argues, and the challenge is more about ramping up manufacturing of parts that are already possible to make. A target housing similar to the type used in the 2022 test. [Photo: LNLL] The tiny fuel “targets” in the system also need to be manufactured. The prototypes have been proven, Lawson says, and will now need to be mass produced in factories. The final step will be building a power plant. The startup aims to have early design proofs for the target and lasers in 18 months. In three to four years, it expects to have scaled-down versions of the assembly line for both key parts. They believe that a working plant could be possible in around 10 years, and a fully scaled-up plantproducing 1.5 gigawatts of power, enough for a medium-sized citycould be possible in 12 years. Other companies are taking different approaches. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, which recently signed a deal with Google to provide future power to data centers and has raised nearly $3 billion to date, uses powerful magnets. But Inertia has the advantage of proof of ignition in the lab. “Every approach to fusion has two things they primarily have to do,” Lawson says. “Number one, they have to build some really big, powerful driver to impart all this energy on the fuel. For CFS, it’s a magnet. For us, it’s a laser. The second thing they have to do is get the plasma physics of ignition to work, meaning the plasma actually does what you want it to do, remains confined. And when you reach these temperatures and pressures that are so extreme that you get fusion, you’re able to control it. Those are two very hard problems. The benefit of working from what Livermore has accomplished is the second one is now proven. That’s really, really valuable. That’s theunbounded basic science problem, and that’s the one that the US government has spent billions of dollars and 60 years to prove.” In a new agreement, Kritcher will continue working for the national lab while the startup grows in a nearby facility. The company has licensed nearly 200 patents from the lab related to reaching fusion ignition. A colorized image of a target shot. [Photo: LNLL] “This is the first of a kind of agreement to allow a national lab employee to also be an entrepreneur in their area of expertise,” says Lawson. “The labs have been around since basically post-war, and there’s been probably hundreds of thousands of employees, and this is the first time it’s ever happened.” It’s possible because of the CHIPS Act, which encourages national labs to let employees pursue this type of public-private partnership. Though the lab continues to do related scientific research, its purpose was never to build a commercial power plant. The startup could make that possible. It will also speed up research that was already underway; in the national lab, for example, it was only possible to run experiments a few times a year to optimize the energy output. Being able to quickly iterate through design changes “will be a game changer,” Kritcher says. The startup also plans to use AI to help dramatically speed up the design process. The timeline is obviously very different from a software company. “For the next decade, the company is not going to be one where the story is told of revenue,” Lawson says. “It’s going to be told in terms of engineering, progress, and retirement of risks that stand between us and energy going on the grid. So you have a different set of milestones and a different way of measuring your progress.” The stakes are also higher. “This is the holy grail of energy,” he says. “We’ve known that for 75 years. The only question has always been, is it possible? The question’s never been, is this a good form of energy? Everyone knows it is. The only question has been: Are we able to build the technology? And I think that we are very close.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||