#political-interference

#political-interference

This use of 'gold standard science' is deceptive. It sounds really good on its face. It's advocating for things that are normative in the scientific community.

Lawyers for former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have asked the country's Supreme Court to approve visits from Darren Beattie, a far-right adviser for the administration of United States President Donald Trump. A court filing revealed on Tuesday showed that Bolsonaro's lawyers were seeking to arrange a meeting with Beattie next week, either on March 16 or 17, during normal visiting hours.

A senator 'intervened' to see if a promotion for an Inland Fisheries employee who was to be a 'key witness' in a garda probe into alleged fraud in the organisation could be blocked, its ousted former CEO has said.

Thursday's arrests of Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort like the recent raid on the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson demonstrate the administration's lawless crusade against routine journalism. In normal times the expectation is that even when a journalist's conduct might technically fit the legal elements of a crime jaywalking to get footage of a protest, for example prosecutors will exercise their discretion and judgment to not apply the law in a manner that chills the free press. Those assumptions are inverted now.

I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be

State of play: Democratic attorneys general fromthefivestates - California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York - filed a lawsuit against the administration just one day prior. The Department of Health and Human Services officials claimed cutting off funding was necessary due to systemic fraud in the child care system. Yes, but: The suit, filed Thursday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the freeze was triggered by viral misinformation, political rhetoric and public threats from Trump and top officials, not by fraud findings.

The chief minister of Gibraltar made a series of grossly improper and sinister interventions to interfere in a live criminal investigation in order to protect his friend, mentor and business partner from the consequences of a search warrant, a public inquiry has found. The retired England and Wales high court judge and inquiry chair, Sir Peter Openshaw, concluded that Fabian Picardo acted to protect James Levy KC when police were at Hassans law firm, where Levy was a senior partner, on 12 May 2020.

Lex Greensill has accused Kemi Badenoch of interfering in an insolvency case for political ends as the last Conservative government sought to protect David Cameron from scrutiny for his involvement in a lobbying scandal. The financier, whose companies paid Cameron millions of pounds, claimed that the current Tory leader used her former ministerial position as business secretary to restructure an inquiry into his activities.

Queensland's controversial ban on puberty blockers and other hormone therapies is unlawful because of a failure to properly consult health executives on a decision affected by political interference, a court has heard. The supreme court in Brisbane on Wednesday heard the ban should be overturned as part of a legal challenge launched by the mother of a transgender child. The mother cannot be identified for legal reasons.

If I were a federal prosecutor in Utah bringing murder charges against Tyler Robinson in the killing of Charlie Kirk, this would strike me as more than a little ominous. The future of their case would likely rely in large part on the president and the crew of his big ship of fools. They've already mucked around with the case of Luigi Mangione in New York, who is charged with the murder of healthcare executive Brian Thompson.

The already tumultuous landscape of U.S. vaccine policy faces more turmoil in what's anticipated to be a politically charged two-day meeting of a recently overhauled advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is an independent panel of experts that has traditionally met three times a year to make science-based recommendations about who should receive certain vaccines.

Even under pressure, I could not replace evidence with ideology or compromise my integrity,

The first part of this past summer, I was preoccupied with preparing three different grant applications. Writing grants is a normal part of my job. Heck, sometimes it feels like it is the majority of my job as an academic scientist. So, those couple of months were not out of the ordinary; I often spend those early summer months preparing for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) summer cycle.

US president Donald Trump is an avowed climate science sceptic who during his second term has followed through on promises to slash funding for renewable energies like wind, and to promote oil and gas. But the administration has also gutted agencies that produce climate information used by millions of Americans. In February, only weeks after taking office, around 800 people were dismissed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),

The complaint asserts that FBI Director Kash Patel indicated directly to one of the ousted agents, Brian Driscoll, that he knew the firings were likely illegal but was powerless to stop them because the White House and the Justice Department were determined to remove all agents who had helped in investigations surrounding Trump.

The move is a chilling escalation of Trump's weaponization of the DOJ against perceived political opponents. It's also part of an obvious and long-standing effort to gain control of the Fed. Like the politicization of law enforcement, seizing power over the central bank is a power grab straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and one with predictable, ugly outcomes for America's economy and democracy.

In 1937, Joseph Stalin commissioned a sweeping census of the Soviet Union. The data reflected some uncomfortable facts in particular, the dampening of population growth in areas devastated by the 1933 famine and so Stalin's government suppressed the release of the survey results. Several high-level government statistical workers responsible for the census were subsequently imprisoned and apparently executed. Though the Soviet authorities would proudly trumpet national statistics that glorified the USSR's achievements, any numbers that did not fit the preferred narrative were buried.