July 12, 2026
The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S. Last August, Aria Bendix of NBC News reported that on July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would no longer track infections caused by cyclospora and five other common causes of foodborne illnesses.
The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and ten state health departments covering about 54 million people have run a program called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, since 1995. Until last July 1 it monitored eight pathogens. Now it monitors only salmonella and toxin-producing E. coli.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said then: “The health and safety of the American people is the Administration’s utmost priority. USDA, HHS, FDA, and the CDC will continue to cooperate and maintain the highest vigilance to safeguard our food supply against pathogens.” But director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University Barbara Kowalcyk called the decision to reduce FoodNet surveillance “very disappointing,” saying, “A lot of the work that I and many, many, many, many other people have put into improving food safety over the past 20 or 30 years is just going away.”
Meanwhile, the New World screwworm continues to spread in the U.S. and Central America, where Melody Schreiber of The Guardian reported today conservation cameras are showing the infestations spreading rapidly in deer, jaguars, peccaries, and even porcupines.
While Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly blamed former president Joe Biden for the arrival of the flesh-eating maggots, three former officials from the Agriculture Department, as well as another source, told Marcia Brown of Politico in June that Trump administration officials held up funding for the construction of a facility crucial to slowing the spread of the pest and also delayed funding for a $100 million research initiative to find new ways to stop the screwworm.
Trump administration cuts to staffing at the USDA meant that in 2025 the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service staffing dropped by 25%. More than half of the area veterinarians retired or resigned.
Things aren’t going terribly well internationally, either.
Despite the repeated assertions of administration officials that the U.S. “holds all the cards” in its war with Iran, Edward Wong, Michael Crowley, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today that the memorandum of understanding Trump signed on June 17, 2026, formalized Iran’s power over the Strait of Hormuz. Former U.S. analysts and officials told the reporters that the agreement was dangerously vague and that Iran has interpreted its provision saying that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the strait as giving Iran control of the waterway.
As Iran has attacked ships trying to get through the strait near the Oman shoreline, Trump has ordered airstrikes on Iran. Over the weekend, Iran’s Navy said it was closing the strait “until the end of U.S. interference in the region.”
Today Tara Copp and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported allegations from soldiers who survived the Iranian attack on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait that killed six U.S. military personnel and wounded dozens more that the generals in command ignored intelligence that Port Shuaiba was a probable target. The site was not adequately protected against drones, as scouts noted before the war when the Pentagon began to move troops off large bases onto smaller facilities to make them harder for Iran to target. Port Shuaiba’s emergency warning system wasn’t working, and the facility had no coverings to conceal personnel or hamper drones. Then troops were deployed there without weapons.
After the strikes, wounded soldiers sent to Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center discovered that they had neither been listed in the military’s database as seriously injured nor been recorded on the flight manifest as medical evacuees, so could not be admitted as patients. Doctors treated them as outpatients and sent them to barracks where they waited a week to be sent back to the U.S.
In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that wounded soldiers and their families say the Army downplayed their injuries. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters in March that almost 90% of the injuries 400 service members had sustained had been minor and that the wounded soldiers had returned to duty. One man the Army classified as “not seriously injured” sustained extensive shrapnel wounds, a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and lung damage. Another underwent multiple surgeries to remove shrapnel.
Wounded soldiers told Kaplan and Kaplan that the duty for which they had been cleared was an active order to recuperate from injuries in a specialized recovery unit.
An Army spokesperson explained that the classifications were military designations. The spokesperson explained that the Army classifies soldiers as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within the next 72 hours.
Tonight the U.S. military launched new strikes against Iran. In a brief interview with Reuters over the weekend, Trump said: “We’re beating them up.”
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died Saturday night at age 71, apparently from a rupture of his aorta due to cardiovascular disease. Graham had just returned from a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. A former officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG Corps) in the U.S. Air Force, Graham was a staunch supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and of Ukraine. In that, he stood apart from Trump.
In his earlier years in Congress, Graham was an establishment Republican who pushed for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton but was willing to work with Democrats personally. He once said of then-senator Joe Biden of Delaware: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”
He objected to the takeover of the Republican Party by the MAGA Republicans. In December 2015 he called then-candidate Donald J. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and said: “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.... I don’t think he has a clue about anything. He’s just trying to get his numbers up and get the biggest reaction he can.” “You know how you make America great again?” he said, “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
In 2016, Graham said he voted for Independent Evan McMullin because “Voting for Hillary Clinton was always a non-starter and I couldn’t go where Donald Trump wanted to take the USA & [the Republican Party].”
But after a meeting with Trump in March 2017, Graham became a loyalist. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ushered through Trump’s judicial nominees, and his fierce defense of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings for a position on the Supreme Court has been credited with enabling Kavanaugh’s nomination to go through despite accusations of sexual assault.
Graham was a staunch enough Trump supporter that he urged Trump not to concede the 2020 presidential election because “[i]f Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.” He called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger over the votes in Georgia; Raffensperger believed Graham was suggesting he should throw out legal ballots.
Graham briefly turned against Trump after the president tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but then he came around to Trump again, supporting his 2024 presidential run.
Graham’s sudden death came as a surprise, but Trump was able to find Graham useful one last time. Although Graham’s top priority appears to have been working with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to push more stringent economic sanctions on Russia, Trump told Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that he had spoken to Graham just before he died. According to Trump, Graham “said, ‘We’re all set for the SAVE America Act,’” the voter suppression act that Trump wants so badly. Trump continued: “He was pushing the SAVE America act like crazy…. And I said, ‘Well, we’re gonna get it done, Lindsey. We’re gonna get it done.’”
On May 3, 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham posted on social media: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
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Notes:
https://www.cdc.gov/foodnet/about/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/12/new-world-screwworm-infestation-cattle-industry
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/17/trump-reviews-slowed-screwworm-response-00964448
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wounded-soldiers-families-accuse-army-downplaying-war-injuries/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2026/07/12/us-iran-war-strikes-strait-hormuz/90896753007/
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-cellphone-235778
YouTube:
X:
HunterBiden/status/2076290915602182414
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mqhb63mids23
A government that can’t tolerate the truth will eventually dismantle every system designed to reveal it.
The experts disappear. The warnings are ignored. The suffering is hidden. And the people responsible insist everything is working exactly as it should.
The danger is not only that they’re lying to us. It’s that they’re systematically destroying our ability to know the truth at all.
Such a damaged individual. We’re seeing a battle of the aged playing out where people seem to be dying the way they lived.
Lindsay Graham, ever the diva took the easy way out with sudden death by dissecting aortic aneurysm. Mitch McConnell is bouncing back from the ninth circle of hell just to torture us. Trump the malignant narcissist is taking us all with him for the ride.