💧Helen Dawson ⧖

#NobodyIsAboveTheLaw Bird v DP 2024 #HighCourt ruling is a disgrace! Expand the law of vicarious liability to include all Catholic priests, bishops and Archbishops, #CatholicChurch in the State of Victoria Australia parliament.vic.gov.au/get-involved/p… #SpringSt

This is the film they didn't want you to see, the film that the BBC refused to air. Watch 'Gaza: Doctors Under Attack' NOW at gazadoctors.film.

All medical professionals should watch it, and decide for themselves what to do next. NB this documentary - that BBC refused to air - was produced during the first year of the genocide. Since then, Israel has destroyed most of what you see (being still Gaza) in the documentary.

@sciam Greed. Pure greed. Billions of humans are allowing a few elite billionaires to control their lives, damage their health, and they will tolerate the destruction of our planet because they are enablers of others' wealth and indifferent to greed. pbs.org/newshour/healt…

I stand in solidarity with Palestinians who are commemorating the Nakba today. The Israeli Government’s continuing genocide in Gaza is an extension of the Nakba, despite Palestinians having every right to self-determination and to live in peace. #auspol #politas

🚨 The @AfricaCDC statement on the new #Ebola outbreak in #DRC is deeply concerning. 🔬 This is a non-Zaire ebolavirus outbreak 🧪 13 of 20 samples tested positive ⚠️ 246 suspected cases reported 🕊️ 65 deaths, including 4 laboratory workers This highlights the urgent need for enhanced surveillance, rapid diagnostics, infection prevention and control, and protection of frontline healthcare and laboratory personnel.

🇦🇺AUSTRALIA Weekly COVID Update: 15 May 2026 🔹NSW: ⬆️(+20.9%) 🔹WA: ⬆️(+7.6%) Avg 66/day in hospital, due to an increase in cases among long stay patients 🔸SA: ⬇️(-1.0%) 🔸VIC: ⬇️(-7.0%) 🔸QLD: ⬇️(-20.4%) 37 in hospital 🔸TAS: ⬇️(-64.2%) 🔹Aged Care: Weekly reporting ended

1/ There is a large Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC. Challenges include: 1. Early findings suggest a non-Zaire Ebola virus species, limiting vaccine & therapeutic options. 2. Security complicating a public health response. 3. Proximity to international borders -> regional risk.

Pentagon Staff Left in the Dark as Hegseth Pulls the Plug on Poland Deployment Pete Hegseth cancelled 4,000 troops to Poland last week. Nobody at the Pentagon knew it was coming. No explanation has been offered. At this point, the absence of an explanation is itself the explanation. The most expensive rounding error in history The cost of rotating a few thousand soldiers through Poland for nine months is, in Pentagon terms, statistical noise. It disappears into the budget without a trace. European nations buy American weapons because they trust America as a partner. That is the entire business model. Not specs. Not price. Partnership. The moment that trust breaks, the contracts go elsewhere. Not some of them. All of them. Forever. Europe just opened its wallet. America just lost the contract. For years, the United States pressured European allies to spend more on defense. For years, European governments resisted, citing budget constraints and the comfortable assumption that America would always be there. Washington complained. Brussels shrugged. The two percent target became a running joke. Then Trump told Europe he could not be trusted. And Europe believed him. The result is the largest sustained defense spending surge on the continent since the Cold War. This is not an opinion. It is the official assessment of NATO headquarters itself. Member states are no longer nudging toward two percent. They are legislating emergency procurement packages, fast-tracking capability programs, and signing multi-decade platform commitments at a pace that would have been politically unthinkable three years ago. Several trillion dollars in contracts over the next fifty years. Fighter jets, air defense systems, armored platforms, missile defense networks, logistics infrastructure, sustainment agreements that generate revenue long after the hardware is delivered. The European defense market is not opening. It has already opened. The money is real, the budgets are passed, and the contracts are being written right now. The question, the only question that matters to Lockheed, Raytheon, and every other prime contractor, is who fills them. And the answer, increasingly, is not American companies. The buyers in Warsaw, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Berlin are now deliberately designing their procurement strategies around one central requirement: do not depend on Washington. European defense industrial initiatives that were fringe proposals two years ago are now funded national priorities. The Franco-German platform investments are not speculative anymore. They are in production. America spent eighty years building the access that makes this market captive. Trump has spent just over a year handing it to Europe's own industry, one snub at a time. Where are the thousand CEOs? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. These are not timid companies. They have spent decades shaping American foreign policy more effectively than any diplomatic corps ever managed. Their lobbyists have direct lines to every committee chairman on Capitol Hill. And right now they are watching in complete silence as the president saws off the branch the entire industry sits on. The short-term calculus of that silence is understandable. Iran has accelerated domestic procurement. Quarterly numbers look fine. Nobody wants to be the CEO who publicly challenges a president with a well-documented appetite for revenge. But an F-35 sale is not a quarterly transaction. It is a fifty-year revenue commitment. A European nation that anchors its next-generation defense around a domestic platform in the next five years is not a customer you win back with a better offer. Ever. These decisions, once made, are permanent on any timescale that matters to anyone currently alive. Every strategy team in every glass tower in Arlington knows exactly what is happening to their order books for the 2040s and 2050s. And they are saying nothing. History will find this astonishing. An administration is converting the world's most powerful arms exporter into a supplier its own allies no longer trust, and the thousand most powerful industrial voices in America have chosen silence. The only president who benefits from this is in Moscow No sitting American president has done this kind of structural damage to the US defense industry's global position since John F. Kennedy. Trump is dismantling the same architecture. Not out of principle. Not out of strategy. Apparently out of irritation at European press conferences. The difference is that Kennedy was trying to reduce American military overreach. What is happening now serves no coherent American interest whatsoever. Every troop withdrawal, every cancelled rotation, every deployment weaponized as political punishment lands in Moscow as a strategic gift requiring no effort and no cost on Russia's part. Putin has spent twenty years trying to fracture NATO and reduce American influence on his western border. He has failed repeatedly. He is now watching an American president do the job for him, apparently for free. A senior NATO source offered reassurance that Canada and Germany are increasing their eastern flank presence. It was the kind of statement you make when the alternative is saying what you actually think.

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus go.nature.com/4nAMi6g

Australian citizens who were on a Dutch-flagged luxury cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak returned home on Friday and will isolate for at least three weeks at a quarantine facility. reut.rs/4tF88qG reut.rs/4tF88qG

🛰️🎯 Sur cette vidéo embarquée du vaisseau Soyouz prise le 27 mars 2015, on peut voir l’approche complète du vaisseau vers la Station spatiale internationale. L’objet visible en rotation est l’antenne du système automatique d’amarrage Kours. 📹 : Vidéo accélérée 50x.

US interest expense on public debt just crossed $1.27 trillion over the last 12 months. It took 73 years to 109x that number from 1947 to 2019. It has more than doubled in the six years since. The 30-year treasury just cleared 5% for the first time since 2007. Japan's 20-year bond hit its highest yield since 1997. This isn't an isolated move. This is a global repricing of sovereign debt risk happening in real time. The doom loop is simple: higher rates mean higher interest expense, which means more borrowing, which means more supply, which pushes rates higher. At this pace, interest on the debt will surpass Social Security as the largest line item in the federal budget. The US government will spend more servicing past borrowing than on the retirement safety net for 70 million Americans. Global money supply just crossed $121.9 trillion, up $17.1 trillion in two years, growing at 7-8% annually. Central banks are trapped between inflation that won't die and debt loads that require low rates to service. Cut rates and you pour gasoline on the inflation fire. Hold or hike and the interest expense spiral accelerates. There is no clean exit. The inflation side is getting worse. Electricity prices up 50% in five years. PPI leading CPI higher. Data center construction at $50 billion annualized, up 437% since 2021, now exceeding office construction. The Informationist's CPI overlay tracks the 1970s pattern with a 0.93 correlation. April 2026 CPI sits at 3.78%, right at the inflection point where inflation re-accelerated before peaking near 14%. The Fed declared victory prematurely then, too. Meanwhile the S&P 500 just set a record for the most components hitting new 52-week lows on a day the index poked above its prior all-time closing high. The six-week rally is the biggest since QE1, concentrated in a handful of AI and infrastructure names. The index is a mask. Underneath it, the average company is deteriorating. Twenty-one million against all of it.

Examining bonds, it appears we're approaching the doom-loop event horizon. The US, Japan, and UK are all experiencing 30-year bond yields not seen in 10, 20, and even 30 years. This is serious...especially with massive inflation on the way (and massive US rollover refundings this year).

Sunset on Mars For thousands of generations, every human who ever lived watched the Sun set from the same world. The same horizon. The same sky. And now, for the first time in history, we are the generation that can witness a sunset from another planet.

Jack Fischer's view of Earth while on a spacewalk outside the ISS. This was shot on May 12, 2017 with a GoPro on his suit during a spacewalk with Peggy Whitson that lasted more than 4 hours. You can clearly see the curve of the planet, the thin blue atmosphere, and the clouds below.

An ICE detention contractor made $254 million in profit last year. The detainees doing the labor to keep these facilities running? They make $1 a day. Getting filthy rich off mass detention and forced labor IS the business model.

- Anne Applebaum: "Steve Witkoff has no experience with Russia or diplomacy. I fear he imagines a US-Russia pact where he, his son, Trump's family or their circle benefit personally. It's disturbing that American foreign policy conducted not for the US, allies or world peace, but for private interests. Putin knows Trump is vulnerable to such deals ... that's why he keeps suggesting them. Witkoff and Trump's entourage behave like Russians: capture the state, use it for personal wealth."

"This is not the next pandemic. But it is a stress test, and a reminder of something we keep relearning the hard way." - @DreJoanneLiu This is an incredible Hantavirus write-up by McGill's Pandemic and Emergency Readiness Lab. #OneHealth #WearN95 theconversation.com/hantavirus-a-c…

The key Figure from a 2020 publication on a hantavirus outbreak, buried in the supplement of the paper. @donmilton, an international authority on airborne transmission and respiratory viruses, discussed this with me yesterday. erictopol.substack.com/p/assessment-o…

With No Equipment Allowed Into Gaza, Palestinians Are Digging With Their Hands to Retrieve the Dead dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-retriev…