Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Dec. 3 that it has launched an investigation into a school that officials said illegally vaccinated a child without parental consent.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Washington on Dec. 2, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

HHS did not name the school. The department said it is in the Midwest and acted illegally in part because it ignored a religious exemption for the vaccination that had been filed pursuant to state law.

The HHS Office for Civil Rights will be looking into the matter to ascertain whether the school failed to comply with a requirement under the federal Vaccines for Children Program. The program, which provides vaccines to various institutions, mandates that immunization providers comply with state law surrounding exemptions from mandated vaccines.

“To protect the integrity of the investigation, HHS cannot share additional details at this time,” an HHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

Officials also released a letter on Dec. 3 to doctors and others, informing them that they must generally provide parents access to the medical records of children, with limited exceptions. The letter warned that HHS was making access to minor records a priority and that the agency will use tools it has at its disposal, including fines, to ensure compliance.

“Today, we are putting pediatric medical professionals on notice: you cannot sideline parents,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. “When providers ignore parental consent, violate exemptions to vaccine mandates, or keep parents in the dark about their children’s care, we will act decisively. We will use every tool at our disposal to protect families and restore accountability.”

Jim O’Neill, deputy HHS secretary and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the Vaccines for Children Program “should never circumvent parents’ rights.”

The program, which began operations in 1994, sends vaccines to providers to administer to children at no cost. The program “reduces disparities in child vaccination rates, ensuring that any child can access recommended vaccines regardless of income or geography,” the CDC states on its website.

Schools across the country mandate multiple vaccines for school attendance, based on the CDC’s immunization schedule.

Exemptions are granted in all 50 states on medical grounds. Most states also allow exemptions for religious reasons.

HHS officials also said on Dec. 3 that they directed the Health Resources and Services Administration, which is part of the department, to start requiring that grant recipients adhere to both federal and state parental consent laws for any health care services at health centers supported by the administration. That includes obtaining parental consent before a minor receives medical or dental work.

The Trump administration’s just published new National Security Strategy has generated a lot of ‘shock’ and discussion since it appeared online early Friday. One of its more ‘controversial’ elements is the stark contrast in outlook on Europe in comparison with prior years’ national security strategy documents.

It warns that some of America’s oldest allies in Europe face “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure” as a result of unchecked immigration, as well as the erosion of democratic principles. Alongside calling out irresponsible unchecked EU immigration policies, it further cites the curbing of free speech – also with the support for EU censorship excesses by transnational elite institutions, describing that “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

AFP/Getty Images

The National Security Strategy even suggests Washington is distancing itself militarily from NATO (but something which should come as no surprise given recent Trump statements related to the alliance’s lagging spending), saying “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies” to the United States.

It also references a “lack of self-confidence” by Europe which “is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia.” It cited as evidence that Europe should have a clear “significant hard power advantage” over Russia, but now because of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European leaders “regard Russia as an existential threat.” FT notes of this section:

Donald Trump’s first NSS since returning to office blames European officials for thwarting US efforts to end the war in Ukraine and accuses governments of ignoring a “large European majority” who want peace.

The document further highlights that this current reality of European weakness could have certain negative implications for potential for heightened Western escalation with Russia:

“Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states,” the document reads.

Most analysts see the language in the document as opening the door for unapologetic meddling in European affairs.

“Washington is no longer pretending it won’t meddle in Europe’s internal affairs” Pawel Zerka, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, observed.

“It now frames such interference as an act of benevolence (‘we want Europe to remain European’) and a matter of US strategic necessity. The priority? ‘Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations‘,” he concludes.

Holy. Shit.

Trump’s National Security Strategy questions Europe’s future as reliable allies:

“Their economic decline is eclipsed only by the real and stark prospect of civilizational erasure. If present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years.” pic.twitter.com/o0JjuI6eMd

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) December 5, 2025

Another one of the more talked about aspects to the 33-page national security document is the laying out of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine…

“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity — a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” the document states.

“The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence — from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined,” it adds.

Some expected initial angry reaction out of unelected Eurocrats…

In saying that Europe faces ”civilizational erasure” the Trump 🇺🇸 new security strategy places itself to the right of the extreme right in Europe. Its language that one otherwise only finds coming out of some bizarre minds of the Kremlin 🇷🇺. pic.twitter.com/29vytDp6Hm

— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) December 5, 2025

This strongly suggests that things will keep heating up in the Caribbean, also as several outlets have been reporting that the Pentagon is getting ready to keep a significant troop presence in the region for years to come.

By Michael Kern of Oilprice.com

Helped by the newly-issued crude import quotas, China’s independent refiners are buying sanctioned Iranian crude again and raising their processing rates, making room for Iran’s oil to move out of floating and bonded storage and potentially easing the year-end glut on the market. 

Chinese teapot refiner

The independent refiners in China’s Shandong province, the so-called teapots, have been buying cheap Iranian oil from onshore storage in China, including bonded storage, since the Chinese authorities issued a fresh batch of import quotas last week. 

These quotas are important for China’s purchases and storage of crude as all refiners except the five big state-owned giants need to be allocated quotas in order to import crude. 

The teapots are now using their quotas to buy Iranian crude from bonded storage and boost processing rates, traders and analysts told Reuters on Friday. 

The independent refiners exhausted their previous quotas as early as in October and were waiting for a new issuance at the end of the year. Authorities issued quotas of a total volume that was higher compared to last year’s last batch. 

“As for the effect on sanctioned flows, the new quotas will sustain — rather than lift — China’s sanctioned crude inflows,” Emma Li, Lead Market Analyst at Vortexa, said on Thursday. 

Despite tightening sanctions against Iran and Russia, and the U.S. now targeting China’s hubs for Iranian oil imports, shipments into the Shandong province have remained robust this year, Li noted. 

Part of the volumes have been accumulating in onshore storage, including in bonded storage, instead of going into processing immediately. 

“This means new quotas will partly be used to draw down inventories rather than drive incremental seaborne imports,” Li said. 

The new quotas have already spurred higher processing rates, with utilization rates estimated to have jumped to over 60% compared with about 50% of the past few months when the teapots were out of quotas. 

Due to the more active independent refiners, analysts at Energy Aspects have raised their estimate of China’s crude processing volumes in December by about 150,000 barrels per day (bpd), senior analyst Sun Jianan told Reuters.   

A widely hyped climate-doom study published in Nature in April 2024, and then amplified by left-wing corporate media outlets (CNN, Bloomberg, you name it), desperate to push the “green” narrative and weirdly obsessed with driving Americans into a state of severe climate shock, has now been embarrassingly retracted.

On Wednesday, Nature retracted the study titled “The economic commitment of climate change“ after economists discovered that flawed data from Uzbekistan had heavily skewed the results.

If Uzbekistan data were excluded, the paper’s eye-popping forecast of a 62% collapse in global economic output by 2100 under unabated emissions would only fall to 23%.

The retraction should intensify the debate over how accurate long-term climate forecasts actually are – and by our estimates, Al Gore, thirty years and counting, is still very wrong.

For 20 months, the study was touted by Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, and countless MSM outlets, and even cited by the World Bank and the OECD. This helped manufacture a wildly misleading narrative of an impending climate catastrophe.

The study’s authors, led by Leonie Wenz of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and Maximilian Kotz, a postdoctoral researcher at the institute, wrote in a retraction notice that the issues were “too substantial for a correction,” forcing the paper’s withdrawal.”

The retraction will send shockwaves through the Network for Greening the Financial System, a coalition of central banks and financial supervisors that leaned heavily on the study to shape its outlook.

In recent months, Bill Gates, one of the biggest climate-alarmism offenders, right alongside Al Gore, had to acknowledge that the climate-crisis narrative was mostly fake news.

But why did left-wing billionaires, their networks of NGOs, their allies in Washington, and the left-wing MSM push climate doomerism to such extremes, a propaganda campaign that only really kicked off after Marxist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the “Green New Deal” in 2019?

Because it was never about “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis. It was about looting the U.S. Treasury, which is exactly what they accomplished through the Inflation Reduction Act. 

And we’ll leave you with Victor Davis Hanson proclaiming, “The End of Climate Change.”