“The government shutdown costs taxpayers $400 million every day to pay federal employees who are not actively working, totaling $1.2 billion as of Friday, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data published by the office of Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, estimates. … A law passed in 2019 requires furloughed employees receive backpay after a funding agreement is reached and a shutdown ends. The CBO found that the furloughed employees’ daily cost of compensation sits at about $400 million, or a total of $1.2 billion as of Friday.” (10/04/25)
“It was an action-packed week in America that ended with a government shutdown as Democrats and Republicans failed to arrive at a compromise on health care benefits. But despite what you heard from the mainstream media, that wasn’t the big health care story of the week. It was this: On Tuesday, the Trump administration reached a deal with Pfizer to lower the cost of drugs for Americans, reversing decades of unfair pricing in which American patients paid up to four times more than Europeans for drugs that were developed in our own country. Pfizer agreed not to launch new drugs at a higher price in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries. It also agreed to sell drugs to Medicaid at lower prices and to sell drugs at a discount to Americans without insurance.” (10/04/25)
“Police in Georgia have clashed with anti-government protesters trying to storm the presidential palace in the capital, Tbilisi. Security forces used water cannons and pepper spray to disperse demonstrators. The Caucasus country has been in crisis since the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed victory in last year’s parliamentary election, which the pro-European Union opposition says was stolen. Since then the government has paused talks on joining the EU. The protest took place on the same day as local elections, which the opposition is largely boycotting following a government crackdown. One organiser had earlier called for leaders of the Georgian Dream party to be arrested. Waving Georgian and EU flags, tens of thousands of protesters marched in central Tbilisi on Saturday.” (10/04/25)
“Taylor Swift’s surprise midnight Friday album drop has taken over the internet and quickly worked itself into the current biggest personal rivalry in American politics. Gov. Gavin Newsom released a TikTok video Friday afternoon showing a montage of his interactions with President Donald Trump set to Swift’s new song ‘Actually Romantic.’ The video shows Trump’s tweets attacking Newsom captioned with the lyrics, ‘It’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me.’ The Friday video is only the latest jab in a duel that’s come to epitomize the subterranean lows American political dialogue has reached. Trump has spent the past decade eroding political norms with a constant stream of name-calling, overstatements, outright lies and all-caps social media posts aimed at whoever crosses his mind. Newsom has recently responded in kind, with his own stream of rants and foul-mouthed social media posts, usually aimed at Trump or one of Trump’s followers.” (10/03/25)
“In Gaza, 200,000 Palestinian children have already been murdered by the Netanyahu regime, with American weapons. A survey last year by a British civic group found that 46% of the children in Gaza wanted to die, and over 95% believed they would be killed. This is not surprising. The Israeli genocidal regime has daily bombed tiny Gaza’s 2.3 million residents (the geographical size of Philadelphia) with the TNT equivalent of seven Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, smashing civilians and their infrastructure from water mains, electricity, fuel supplies, roads, agricultural crops, to hospitals, clinics, schools, housing, and bakeries into bits and pieces of flesh and debris. Imagine the horror, the screams, starvation, chronic diseases, and untreated, bleeding injuries, the huge number of limbs amputated from children, most severed without any anesthesia.” (10/04/25)
“U.S. Border Patrol agents shot an armed woman in Chicago Saturday after an angry mob tried to attack the law enforcement officers. The group of agents were conducting their routine patrol near 39th Place and South Kedzie Avenue in the city’s South Side ‘when they were attacked and rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars,’ the Department of Homeland Security said. ‘The officers exited their trapped vehicle, when a suspect tried to run them over, forcing the officers to fire defensively,’ according to DHS, which called the incident ‘an evolving situation’ and noted FBI agents were currently on the scene. The suspect, who is a U.S. citizen, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon, department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.” (10/04/25)
“Hamas’[s] signaling Friday that it will accept the peace plan President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rolled out last week has raised hopes for an end, once and for all, to the ugly war the terrorist group sparked two years ago Tuesday. And that, indeed, it will lead to a permanent peace not just in Gaza but across the Middle East: an end to the nearly 80-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet even if it does, Jewish pain from the horrific Oct. 7 massacre that ignited the war, and from the antisemitism it unleashed, will long endure.” (10/04/25)
“Billionaire businessman Andrej Babis has won parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, although his populist ANO party fell short of an overall majority. ANO received just under 35% of the vote, earning them 80 seats in the 200-seat lower house – up from 72 seats four years ago, according to preliminary results. Babis – who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2021 – is expected to be invited to lead talks on forming a new coalition. ‘This is a historic success,’ Andrej Babis announced to cheering supporters at the ANO headquarters in the suburbs of Prague. He’d entered the building holding aloft a Bluetooth speaker blasting a remix of the 1981 hit ‘Sarà perché ti amo’ by the Italian pop trio Ricchi e Poveri. The same song resounded across the stage as he accepted the applause. Some colleagues – including the former finance minister Alena Schillerova – danced along to the beat.” (10/04/25)
“The state’s insurance commissioner — the person who helps advocate for everyday consumers and prevent industry overreach — is under scrutiny after allegations that he has spent exorbitant amounts of taxpayer dollars on questionable expenses. Ricardo Lara, a former legislator in both the state Senate and Assembly, is being probed by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, a bipartisan independent oversight agency. An KGO-TV investigation earlier this year revealed that he racked up expensive receipts on at least a dozen trips, including paying for significant security and high-end dining and hotels, since he assumed office in 2019.” (10/03/25)
“The idea of a wealth tax on society’s richest people is suddenly in vogue, thanks to the political stalemate in France. Economist Gabriel Zucman, who divides his time between Berkeley and Paris, has proposed a wealth tax that maxes out at 2 percent, on France’s top 0.1 percent of households, just 1,800 people, whose wealth exceeds 100 billion euros, about $118 billion. So highly concentrated is wealth in France that the tax would bring in between $15 billion and $25 billion annually, enough to substantially reduce France’s huge budget of close to 6 percent of GDP without unpopular budget cuts. More than anywhere else, France poses that stark choice. … What gives the Zucman tax special resonance at this moment is that three French governments have fallen in the past year over demands for cuts in popular social spending.” (10/03/25)
