51 countries are united today in our support for Ukraine at the UN General Assembly. Since March 2025, Ukraine has agreed to a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire. We call on Russia to finally do the same. Ukraine wants peace. We want peace. Russia must stop its aggression, accept a ceasefire, and engage meaningfully in negotiations towards a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in accordance with international law.

Soldiers’ testosterone is sometimes below optimum levels, according to the self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth. Hegseth says that US soldiers with testosterone levels lower than expected can choose to have treatment to raise their testosterone level bmj.com/content/394/bmj-2026…

This has been bothering me. The Rand Paul tweet below has Tony Fauci walking into a room and overruling a panel of scientists. Yet that never seems to have been alleged to have happened in the testimony he collected. The testimony of James Erdman III, the CIA operations officer, said CIA officials, not Fauci, overruled a group of six of seven analysts who favored a laboratory-based origin of Covid. But what he alleged against Fauci is that he told the CIA to talk to his own favored experts, who believed Covid occurred naturally. So, he's accusing people of crafting narratives and then making up dramatic scenes that never occured -- but that generate a million hits on X. @Grok am I getting that right?

Ashish Jha, who was Biden's Covid czar, says on CNN that he favors a lab leak, not transmission from wildlife, as the most likely explanation for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus -- although he is uncertain. "This is going to surprise some people," Jha said. "When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak. "Here's the bottom line. No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are people -- officials in China, and we still need transparency and accountability on that. So that is my best assessment. I'm not suggesting I know for sure, but I'm saying my best assessment."

At a highly anticipated Senate hearing, Anthony Fauci evoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions about the Covid-19 pandemic and its origins. trib.al/ZZMSGgz

Trump responds to Fauci diaries: ‘I grew tired of him’ thehill.com/homenews/adminis…

There's a trick in this post that makes it misleading. The interview from Mike Allen is from May 2021, when the Covid vaccine efficacy was upward of 90%, meaning that a person who was vaccinated was 90% less likely to have a symptomatic infection than one who wasn't. But the book party Fauci worried about attending was in November 2021, after the Delta strain had emerged. The vaccine was less effective against this new strain. So the efficacy against symptomatic infection dropped substantially. There is a lot in Fauci's diaries, and there are going to be a lot of debates about what they mean for vaccine policy, masks, and lab leak. But one thing I'm commonly seeing in posts on X is people taking comments from different time periods when the facts changed substantially - or when scientists' understanding of them did. This would be a very good thing to watch for when Fauci testifies to Rand Paul's committee tomorrow morning. (Updated from a previous version to clarify that this was symptomatic infection.)

There’s a lot in the Fauci diaries. Here’s my take. nytimes.com/2026/07/27/us/po…

RTÉ News: What are the policies that will define Ireland's EU presidency? rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/062…