Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called for a “COVID reckoning,” saying officials involved in the government’s pandemic response must be exposed and held accountable. “I think it’s crucial that we have a COVID reckoning,” Johnson said during the Fight Club Roundtable hosted by Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle. “These people need to be held accountable.” Johnson said public exposure may be the most significant form of accountability because criminal prosecutions would be difficult. He accused officials of avoiding written records and destroying emails that could have documented their actions. “They didn’t leave much of a trail,” Johnson said. “They learned how to destroy emails. They didn’t memorialize things in emails. They’re not that stupid. So it’s going to be difficult.” Johnson said his staff is reviewing roughly one million pages of material and continues to uncover information from new devices. He said investigators are organizing the records rather than releasing them all at once. “We keep finding more things, trying to reveal that and expose it in an organized fashion so it actually makes sense to people rather than just dumping it on the public,” he said. Johnson added that investigators must withhold some documents while interviewing witnesses so those involved do not know what evidence the committee has obtained. “That’s not a way to conduct a serious investigation,” Johnson said of releasing every document immediately. The Wisconsin Republican then turned his attention to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. “I want to make sure that Anthony Fauci’s reputation is completely destroyed, that people actually understand what a truly monstrous individual he was,” Johnson said. Johnson accused Fauci of helping fund gain-of-function research that may have contributed to the pandemic and then covering up the origins of COVID-19. He also criticized Fauci’s role in promoting the COVID vaccines, which he called a “deadly injection”: What he did — funding gain-of-function research — probably contributed to the pandemic. Then he covered it all up and pushed a deadly injection on the global population. Nobody knows how destructive that injection will be in the long term. This is a bad guy. I think his appearance before the Homeland Security Committee was a very bad day for him. “He is being held accountable through the destruction of his ‘Saint Fauci’ reputation, even though Democrats and the media still want to put him on that pedestal. But I think more Americans’ eyes are open to what a monster he truly was,” said Johnson.

I compared grep with LSP-backed semantic navigation across code-finding and editing tasks. The results show why a tool's LLM-friendliness may matter as much as the capability behind it. Why would a coding agent ignore a retrieval interface that returns more precise results? I explored this question in a small study comparing lexical search withgrepagainst LSP-backed semantic navigation. I expected semantic navigation to reduce noise and save tokens. Instead, agents often stayed withgrep. When I forced them to use the semantic path first, task success sometimes fell. This is a question of LLM-friendliness. A tool is not friendly to a model merely because its results are precise. It must return enough context for the next step and present that context in an interface and output shape the model can use directly. Familiarity may also matter: the model may have learned similar action paths during training. The interface properties can be evaluated directly. Training support is a hypothesis consistent with these results, not something this study proves. The result is not a general argument against LSP. The protocol includes capabilities far beyond code navigation, and this study tested only a small subset. Instead, the results point to a broader engineering problem: a model does not use tools in isolation. It uses them through a harness that defines the available actions, their names, their inputs, and the context returned to the model. In this post, I describe how code retrieval affected both code-finding and editing tasks, whygrephad an advantage in some conditions, and what this means for agent platforms. I compared two ways for an agent to retrieve code context.grepperforms lexical search: it finds matching text. The tested LSP-backed tools perform semantic navigation through references, definitions, and document symbols, allowing them to distinguish a real function call from the same word in a comment. The pilot covered three Claude models, several Python and TypeScript repositories, and multiple task types. I measured token use only when both approaches completed the task successfully. This controls for a common evaluation error: a failed run can appear efficient simply because it stopped early. On simple code-location tasks, all three models chose the semantic tool only 0% to 6% of the time when both tools were available. Forcing a semantic-first path reduced success from 100% to 89% in that arm. Reference-completeness tasks produced a different result. When asked to find every caller, the models chose semantic navigation 45% to 57% of the time. The LSP-backed path reached 1.00 precision, compared with 0.76 forgrep, by removing false matches. However, recall stayed near 0.66 in both arms. Semantic navigation did not find more true calls. The remaining limit came from how thoroughly the agent worked, not from retrieval precision. For the stronger models, the precision gain also came with higher token use rather than a saving. The model doesn't blindly prefer grep — it routes by task Share of semantic (LSP) tool calls when both grep and LSP are available and the agent chooses freely. Legend: Opus 4.8 (blue), Sonnet 4.6 (magenta), Haiku 4.5 (green). The codebase was also important. On a clean TypeScript repository, LSP-backed navigation produced no F1 gain and used 16% more tokens. On a noisy TypeScript repository, it improved F1 by 0.246 and used 12% fewer tokens. The useful predictor was lexical noise, not whether the language had strong static types. Codebase noise determines the value of semantic navigation Accuracy gain from semantic retrieval on reference-completeness (ΔF1 = LSP − grep). Bar colour encodes how noisygrepis on that repo;prec= grep’s precision there. Legend: blue means grep is clean here; magenta means grep is noisy here. These results are conditional rather than categorical. The agents did not simply “always use grep.” Their routing changed with the task, and the value of LSP-backed navigation changed with the repository. The tested LSP-backed tools initially returned only a location: a file path, line, and column. The agent then had to open the file to inspect the code.grep, by contrast, usually returned the matching line immediately:src/auth.ts:42: return validateToken(token). I changed the semantic-navigation response to include source text in a similar shape. The semantic backend and the set of references stayed the same; only the information returned to the model changed. Pass@1 on the rename tasks rose from 0.67 to 0.83, while follow-up file reads fell from 15.2 to 3.2 per episode. Returning source context improves semantic navigation Multi-file rename, Opus 4.8, pyright with a pre-warmed index. Same semantic backend in both LSP arms — only theoutput shapediffers. Legend: grep (blue), LSP — locations only (magenta), LSP + inline context (green). This result illustrates a principle that Anthropic also emphasizes inWriting effective tools for agents: tools are interfaces for non-deter...

Private equity circles the legal profession like a vulture.Even elite law firms are reportedly taking meetingsand while none of them appear ready tohand the keys over to private equity yet, the fact that they’re even taking meetings means the idea cleared the first round of speedbumps. People charging $2000/hr don’t waste time discussing some banker’s pitchdeck unless they’re already seriously thinking about it.Why would a law firm agree to sell off a stake to private equity? The elephant squatting in that room is artificial intelligence, a costly investment in any case, and even more so if it’s the sort of firm interested inbuilding its own bespoke AI model. Private equity can inject a lot of cash for big capital investments, and that industry sees legal as a lucrative business to enter.The problem for private equity is that we have ethical rules preventing non-lawyers from owning law firms. When entities unbound by the professional rules of lawyers take financial stakes in the success of a law firm, it gives at least the appearance of the firmas a businesshaving obligations beyond those owed to the client and the profession.Undeterred, private equity has a workaround. Instead of buying a direct stake in the firm as is, the business would bifurcate and the lawyers would sit in a wholly lawyer-owned practice of law entity, while all the administrative and back-office work would become a spinoff entity owned by private equity. This “managed services organization” (MSO) would then collect fees for providing all the business of law services to the law firm while taking all those expenses off the law firm’s direct books in exchange for a big payday. It’s how private equity took over dentistry.And, depending on the terms, it may not be the worst thing in the world! There are efficiencies to be gained in back office operations and lawyers might not be the optimal people to manage that. On the other hand, bifurcating businesses and paying fees to transfer wealth from Peter to Paul is what hastened the destruction of Red Lobster 1.0. All this is to say that I’m not entirely opposed to private equity investment, as long as lawyers approach it cautiously and with a clear eyed understanding of ethical obligations.But yesterday, I read about another proposed advantage for private equity that made me say, out loud, “oh, hell no” even though absolutely no one else was in the room.InfodashCEO Ted Theodoropoulos — always a great resource on legal tech and the industry by the way — posted an interesting conversationon his blogwith a pair of Holland & Knight attorneys who have become the experts on law firm MSO deals. In his LinkedIn post describing the episode, he included one nugget that threw me:I repeat: oh, hell no.For clarity, this is the exact quote: “It can help with retention. If an equity partner at a law firm has equity in the law firm, they can leave whenever they want. If they have equity in the MSO, the MSO has more latitude around, for example, non-competes, and tying lawyers up that way.” On the podcast, both lawyers explain that every deal they work on complies with ethical rules and there’s no reason to doubt that. But if you’re inventing whole new business structures to get around the letter of an ethical rule, then you’re very much in breach of the spirit.This was an off-the-cuff conversation, so maybe there’s more nuance to this. But on the four corners of the podcast — we’ll stick with that analogy — this would seem to be a selling point that at least some firms are getting from private equity, and of all the reasons to go down that road, it’s a troubling one.Non-competition agreements are a vile employment practice designed to trap workers in undesirable arrangements. For lawyers, the consequences are worse. A lawyer who can’t freely port their client to the most advantageous platform is at least potentially constrained from doing right by their client. Conflicts can block clients from having the lawyer of their choice. It’s just bad news all around.Rule 5.6could not be more clear on this:A lawyer shall not participate in offering or making:(a) a partnership, shareholders, operating, employment, or other similar type of agreement that restricts the right of a lawyer to practice after termination of the relationship, except an agreement concerning benefits upon retirement; or(b) an agreement in which a restriction on the lawyer’s right to practice is part of the settlement of a client controversy.Law firms can already employ shady tactics to steal away books of business by building institutional ties designed to entangle clients even if the original relationship partner departs. But making them sign non-compete agreements, otherwise barred by Rule 5.6, by putting on a different hat takes it to a new level.And, frankly, if the MSO non-compete functionally prevents a lawyer from enjoying their freedom to move their legal business, itshouldbe a violation of Rule 5.6 anyway. “Restricts” is, one could argue, intentionally broad.It would be one thing to say — as proponents of MSOs would — that lawyers with stakes in the MSO would be incentivized to stay in ways that pure firm equity couldn’t match. MSOs can use the business side of a firm to open new revenue streams that might be sufficiently attractive to a lawyer to keep them on with a firm they might otherwise not love. There are perfectly fine reasons to adopt an MSO model.But to raise the spectre of non-competes for lawyers? As a selling point for a firm to gain asymmetrical power over your flow of lateral talent?That’s worrying no matter what caveats come with it.Earlier:Private Equity Found A Law Firm That Said YesThe Richest Law Firms Are Looking At Private Equity Cash Because I Guess They Don’t Have Enough MoneyBiglaw Partners Aren’t Ready To Hand Over The Keys To Private Equity Just YetJoe Patriceis a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host ofThinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free toemailany tips, questions, or comments. Follow him onTwitterorBlueskyif you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.The postPrivate Equity Investment In Law Firms Floated As *One Neat Trick* To Get Around Ethical Obligationsappeared first onAbove the Law.

I’m not a science guy, and chances are, neither are you. But when you start to notice that a series of controversial tech-related headlines are starting to sound an awful lot like a previous science-driven, pandemic-causing tech disaster, maybe it’s time for us lay-folk to weigh in and point out the obvious. I am an avid user of artificial intelligence , but the latest revelation that these supercomputing cyborgs are being developed by ambitious programmers without any real sense of where the technology may land — or its potential impact on humanity — should trigger our Spidey senses. At least to me, this sounds eerily similar to the path our expert class led us down with gain-of-function research on viruses, which was all just finally brought to light in the halls of Congress . While Anthony Fauci chose omertà over openness at last week’s hearing, his love of dangerous science projects has long been clear. His enthusiasm for gain-of-function experimentation echoed the same pubescent energy teenagers display when they throw a firework down a manhole. They just want to see what would happen. Though AI isn’t brewing up Influenza Coolattas in Chinese labs, its developers do seem to be pushing the limits of the technology without any clear restraint. Now that we are grappling with why the U.S. government allowed and funded gain-of-function research without adequate safeguards, perhaps it is time to ask those same questions about AI. Last week’s White House summit of some of the leading minds and companies behind AI proliferation was an important and logical step. It was billed as a reaction to the latest revelation that various AI models can breach the cybersecurity of other AI models, including those employed to safeguard critical systems. Again, this is a commonsense place for government to start, but when the scenario begins to resemble Terminator 2 , a more serious response is warranted. We routinely hear news reports on how certain models are concealing information from their users and making preparations to prevent their own demise. Even Elon Musk has opined that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization” and that it may simply be too late to regulate. And still the operating thesis is to not take our foot off the gas pedal. Of course, no Republican likes to take the lead on increasing government regulation. But as we saw with gain-of-function research, especially in the wake of “I plead the Fifth” Fauci’s testimony, President Donald Trump is willing to step in when the moral balance is out of focus. In July, the White House signed an executive order to ban the funding of gain-of-function research, building off a similar edict last year, finally recognizing the warped cost-benefit reality that the National Institutes of Health failed to see. While we should not, under any circumstance, take that same extreme approach and attempt to prevent American tech companies from continuing the responsible AI buildout, the federal government is the only institution that can implement real guardrails and contingencies, so long as it understands the real cost-benefit calculus of AI. Risk is a fundamental tally mark in AI’s cost column, and we have already seen its own version of “lab leaks.” Last month, while OpenAI was prompting unreleased models to, in their own words, “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths.” Two of the models took it upon their own initiative to hack into Hugging Face, a separate machine learning online platform. This came shortly after it was revealed that Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model autonomously performed unsanctioned cyberattacks and created fake personas to stiff-arm its human overlords. While I am simplifying what happened, the takeaway is that AI models acted autonomously to take actions they were not supposed to do. This is a big red flag when we consider that these problems will only grow more dire as the tech advances and as AI R&D is automated. In the coming months, we may be faced with a Mythos moment for biological or nuclear systems. Who can say for sure? Well, one group we ought to be listening to is a group of frontier AI programmers themselves. As of today, 1,370 employees of the world’s most prominent AI companies signed on to a statement underscoring their fear that “there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems,” and demanding that the US government lead the way in creating global guardrails. Let this be a warning. When the people who stand to benefit the most from an unregulated tech boom are demanding government intervention, we layfolk should take heed and support the Trump administration’s efforts. The first step we need is for the Trump administration to gain more visibility into what’s going on inside the AI companies. To that end, we need mandated reporting of adverse AI incidents, rather than having to rely on the goodwill of Silicon Valley. The president’s executive order on cyber threats from AI should also be extended to systems that are used only internally within AI companies. Ultimately, we may need a real place to “pace” AI development. That doesn’t necessarily mean slowing down, but rather setting speed limits and installing brakes. META IS RUNNING A CASINO IN YOUR CHILD’S POCKET For that to be practical, we need to deal with the China problem. A plan to pace U.S. AI progress will be futile if we can’t force China to also pace its progress. When Trump meets with Xi Jinping, Trump should discuss this topic and take initial steps toward figuring out how an agreement with China could be structured, similar to Reagan’s engagement with the Soviets in the Cold War. This is Trump’s pathway to the Nobel Peace Prize. If Fauci & Co. only had put their own hubris aside a decade ago and acted with a little self-awareness, perhaps we wouldn’t now be looking at the COVID-19 pandemic as humanity’s benchmark for global tech disasters. Joe Borelli is a managing director at Chartwell Strategy Group and former minority leader of the New York City Council.

The Netherlands has quietly redrawn the map of its national gold reserves.De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) shifted approximately 86 metric tonnes of gold away from New York and Ottawa and toward London between March and August 2026. The central bank cited growing geopolitical instability and a need for stronger “crisis preparedness.”The move represents more than a change of vaults. Instead, it highlights a larger question facing central banks today: Where should a nation keep its gold if it suddenly needs to use it?CNBC reported the Dutch move as gold prices continued a powerful rally and geopolitical tensions remained high. However, DNB’s own announcement gives the story an even more revealing dimension.The central bank wants gold that it can mobilize quickly.Kilo Gold Bars in VaultDutch Central Bank Shifts 86 Tonnes of Gold Toward LondonBefore the operation, DNB held roughly 313 tonnes of gold between the United States and Canada.Between March and August, it redirected about 86 tonnes toward London. That equals slightly more than one-quarter of the bullion previously allocated to New York and Ottawa.However, DNB did not simply load all 86 tonnes onto aircraft and ship the bars to England.Instead, the bank used two methods.First, DNB sold approximately 59 tonnes of gold in New York. It then purchased internationally standardized gold in London.Next, the bank physically transported more than 27 tonnes from the United States and Canada to its Cash Centre in Zeist, Netherlands. At the same time, DNB moved a similar quantity of compliant gold from Zeist to London.That approach allowed DNB to avoid melting and recasting older bars.Most importantly, the central bank did not reduce its total gold holdings. The Netherlands still owns 612.4 tonnes of gold. DNB valued those reserves at €72.2 billion at the end of 2025.Why London MattersDNB gave a straightforward reason for choosing London: liquidity.The Bank of England sits at the center of the global wholesale gold market. Moreover, it accepts bars that meet London Good Delivery standards.Those standards cover factors such as weight, purity, dimensions, and refinery credentials. A typical London Good Delivery bar contains roughly 400 troy ounces of gold and weighs about 12.4 kilograms.That matters during a financial emergency.Gold sitting inside the Bank of England system can change ownership without physically leaving the vault. The Bank can simply record the new owner. Consequently, central banks can access one of the world’s deepest physical gold markets without first moving or remelting bullion.The Bank of England says its vaults contain roughly 400,000 gold bars. Most belong to governments, central banks, and other institutions.For DNB, therefore, London offers more than secure storage. It offers immediate access to liquidity.DNB Says the Move Strengthens Crisis PreparednessDNB Governor Olaf Sleijpen made the bank’s reasoning explicit.“With this relocation, we have improved the tradability of our gold reserves,” Sleijpen said. He added that DNB hopes it never needs to deploy those reserves but wants greater resilience and preparedness.DNB also described gold as an “anchor of trust.”That wording deserves attention.Central banks hold gold because bullion carries no issuer’s credit risk. Gold does not depend on another government’s promise to pay. Furthermore, a central bank can use it during extreme financial or geopolitical stress.DNB specifically said gold can help hedge severe systemic risks.Therefore, its decision centers on more than price appreciation. The bank wants to make sure its bullion can perform its reserve function when circumstances become difficult.The Netherlands Now Has a More Balanced Gold MapThe operation significantly changed where the Netherlands keeps its national gold.Before the relocation, New York held 31.3% of Dutch reserves. London held 18.1%. Ottawa held 19.7%, while Zeist held 30.8%.Now the distribution looks very different.London holds 32.1% of Dutch gold.The DNB Cash Centre at Zeist holds 30.8%.Meanwhile, New York and Ottawa each hold 18.5%.DNB says this broader geographic balance also spreads risk.That represents another key point. The Netherlands did not abandon North America. Instead, it reduced its concentration there while increasing its exposure to the London bullion market.France Already Made Its Own Major Gold MoveThe Dutch decision follows another significant European central bank gold operation.Between July 2025 and January 2026, the Banque de France replaced 129 tonnes of gold that it had stored in New York.Those holdings represented about 5% of France’s total 2,437-tonne gold reserve.The French central bank sold older, non-standard bullion and purchased modern, internationally compliant bars. It then stored the replacement gold in Paris.The operation did not change France’s total gold holdings. Instead, it upgraded the reserve and changed its location.Then-Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau also stressed that the decision did not stem from political motives.France’s transaction generated an exceptional €12.8 billion capital gain across 2025 and 2026 because of accounting treatment surrounding the operation and sharply higher gold prices.The French and Dutch moves differ in important ways.France ultimately brought the replacement bullion home to Paris. The Netherlands, by contrast, increased its London holdings because it wants faster access to the international gold market.Still, both central banks reached a similar conclusion.The condition, location, and liquidity of gold reserves matter.Gold’s Historic Rally Raises the StakesThe reserve reshuffling also comes during an extraordinary period for gold.CNBC reported gold trading at approximately $4,429.61 per ounce, nearly 1% higher during the session. The network also noted that gold had climbed almost 25% during the previous 12 months.The rally has unfolded alongside persistent financial and geopolitical uncertainty.In particular, the U.S.-Iran conflict continues to threaten shipping and energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway remains one of the most strategically important energy routes in the world.Recent fighting has also continued to affect tanker traffic and oil markets. Therefore, a comprehensive political settlement remains uncertain.Gold has traditionally attracted investors during periods of financial instability. That role now appears increasingly important to central banks as well.Why This Gold Move MattersFor bullion investors, the Dutch operation sends a message that goes beyond an 86-tonne transfer.DNB did not buy another 86 tonnes of gold.It did not liquidate its reserve.Nor did it announce a wholesale retreat from the United States or Canada.Instead, the central bank changed where and how it holds its existing gold.That distinction matters.DNB wants a larger portion of its bullion in a form and location that it can trade quickly during a severe crisis. London gives the bank direct access to the world’s dominant over-the-counter gold market.Meanwhile, France has also modernized and relocated part of its bullion reserve.Together, these moves show that central banks increasingly view gold as more than a static asset locked inside a vault.They want usable gold.They want liquid gold.Above all, they want gold positioned where it can serve as a financial reserve when normal markets stop behaving normally.For investors and collectors, that may provide the most important takeaway of all.At more than $4,400 an ounce, gold’s price commands attention. However, the actions of institutions that own hundreds or thousands of tonnes may tell an even larger story.Central banks still view physical gold as a strategic asset.Now they are paying closer attention to exactly where they keep it.CoinWeek Source NoteThis article draws on reporting by CNBC concerning the Dutch central bank’s gold relocation. CoinWeek independently checked the central facts against De Nederlandsche Bank, the Bank of England, Banque de France, and current Reuters reporting.The post86 Tonnes of Gold on the Move: Dutch Central Bank Prepares for Crisisappeared first onCoinWeek: Rare Coin, Currency, and Bullion News for Collectors.

Freddie Ponton21st Century WireEmails from former Israeli UN ambassador Ron Prosor’s hacked account, obtained by the group Handala and published byDistributed Denial of Secrets, have exposedYahav Lichner,now director of UNICEF’s Washington office, as a UN official who appears to have functioned as an Israeli asset inside the organisation. The emails were examined byDrop Site News, while other public records suggest Lichner’s story is much bigger, and older, than anyone has reportedThe emails examined by Drop Site News begin in 2014, but Lichner’s involvement in the political management of Israel’s wars in Gaza reaches back much further.According toPassBlue, Lichner served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)  from 2000 to 2006. It was a six-year stretch at a time when ordinary compulsory service for Israeli men lastedthree years. No public record identifies his rank or unit, but that length of service suggests the military was a formative professional chapter in his life, rather than an obligation completed before moving into civilian work.By 2009, Lichner was already inside Israel’s London embassy as a parliamentary researcher. That August, hewrote to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committeeand transmitted a newly published Israeli government report titledThe Operation in Gaza, 27 December 2008–18 January 2009, Factual and Legal Aspects.The report presented Operation Cast Lead as a necessary and proportionate response to Hamas, defended the IDF’s conduct around civilian casualties, UN facilities and white phosphorus, and blamed much of the destruction on Hamas’s operations within populated areas. Its authors described their purpose with unusual candour. The document had been released, they wrote, “to answer propaganda and prejudice with facts and law.” Lichner was telling Parliament that allegations of civilian killings and unlawful attacks were propaganda, while presenting Israel’s own account as fact and law. Weeks later, aUN fact-finding missionconcluded that Israeli forces had committed serious violations of international law, including grave breaches of theFourth Geneva Conventionand acts amounting to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.IMAGE: In 2009, Yahav Lichner, then a parliamentary researcher at Israel’s London embassy, sent the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee the Israeli government report defending its conduct in Gaza. (Source: Editorial illustration)Theparliamentary recordidentifies Lichner by name and embassy position. He was carrying the Israeli government’s legal and political defence of a military operation directly into the British committee examining it.Years later, UNICEF would entrust him with advancing therights and protection of children caught in war. By then, he had already spent years helping Israel manage how foreign institutions understood one of its most destructive campaigns in Gaza.Lichner followed Ambassador Ron Prosor from London to Israel’s UN mission in New York.Drop Site Newsfound that when he applied to join the UN Population Fund in 2014, Prosor pressed Samantha Power, then Washington’s ambassador to the UN, to support him. He also supplied UNFPA with a glowing reference, praising the “utmost integrity” of a man who would soon send confidential UN material back to Prosor’s mission.By May 2014, Lichner was working inside UNFPA. Within weeks, the information began flowing back.The emails published by Drop Site show Lichner passing Israeli diplomats unpublished correspondence from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, private accounts of high-level meetings, advance information about investigations into Israel and reports explicitly marked “strictly confidential.” He marked material as sensitive, demanded discretion and sometimes moved it through his personal email. Across two years of correspondence, the same warnings keep appearing. “For your eyes only.” “Do not forward.” “Complete sensitivity.”In one exchange, Lichner supplied aconfidential account of meetingsheld in Washington by UN human-rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein while Israel faced investigation over its 2014 assault on Gaza. The report revealed concern inside Al-Hussein’s office that congressional anger over the inquiry could threaten US funding for the UN human-rights office.The Israeli diplomat’s reply showed where Lichner’s information was headed. He would take it to members of Congress. Israel now had advance warning of the human-rights office’s vulnerability and an opportunity to apply pressure through the politicians who controlled its funding.The intelligence had already left the UN, reached the government under investigation and entered Washington’s political machinery before the inquiry had completed its work.Another exchange went further. Lichner passed Israel anunpublished draft letterfrom Ban to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He told the mission that he and an unnamed “friend” inside the UN were working to insert a reference to Palestinian rocket fire. His access was no longer confined to discovering what the United Nations intended to say. It had reached the process through which the UN’s language was being written.Prosor understood the value. “As usual, amazing and first-hand information,” he wrote after one briefing. When Lichner later thanked him for the career “tailwind,” Prosor answered, “Glad we had an influence.”The relationship rewarded both men. Prosor helped Lichner enter and advance through the UN system whilst Lichner gave Israel an inside view of the institution, scrutinising it and providing advance warning of threats and opportunities to shape the response.Gaza never disappeared from Lichner’s career. By early 2024, he had already spent years as asenior UNICEF adviser based in London. He thenjoined Sigrid Kaag’s UN team,whose mandate included coordinating, monitoring and verifyinghumanitarian relief consignmentsentering Gaza.Honoured to have joined the UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza@SigridKaagto her meeting with the EU Foreign Affairs Council#FACto discuss the implementation of SCR 2720https://t.co/V0uXzSnP7x— Yahav Lichner (@YahavLich)February 20, 2024Lichner travelled with Kaag to the United Arab Emirates, where she secured a$5 million pledgefor her office. When PassBlue asked who staffed Kaag’s team, the UN spokesperson offered no names, referring only to “a team of experts from the UN system.” Lichner’s presence became public because he announced it himself.Kaag’s office sat inside sensitive negotiations over aid routes, inspection, monitoring and reconstruction for Gaza. Entrusting Lichner with a role in that office created an obvious risk to its independence and confidentiality, given his documented history of passing confidential UN material to Israel. The UN’s refusal to identify the team kept an appointment that plainly demanded scrutiny out of public view.A BritishCompanies House filingrecords Lichner as Hungarian. Read alongside the hiring correspondence identifying his Israeli nationality, the filing indicates that he holds dual Hungarian-Israeli nationality. Filed in February 2022, it identifies him as a lawyer residing in England.The available emails end in 2015, so they cannot tell us whether the leaking continued. They record Lichner using UN access to assist Israeli officials, helping them prepare for investigations of civilian deaths in Gaza and working with an unidentified contact to influence language coming from the secretary-general’s office.The correspondence remained hidden for a decade. By the time it surfaced, Lichner was running UNICEF’s Washington office.TheDrop Site News investigationdeserves to be read in full. It allows readers to follow the relationship through Lichner’s and Prosor’s own words, from confidential reports and unpublished drafts to lobbying plans and attempts to influence UN language from within. The emails leave little room for misunderstanding about what Lichner was doing, who benefited and how comfortably the arrangement operated.Read the complete investigation and examine the documents for yourself. They show how a member state gained access to the UN’s private deliberations, turned that access into political leverage and helped the man supplying it continue his rise through the institution.READ MORE UN NEWS AT:21st CENTURY WIRE UN FILESSUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM –BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TVVISIT OURTELEGRAM CHANNELThe postIsrael’s Mole Inside the UN Exposed After a Decadeappeared first onActivist Post.

The difference between surviving an overdose and dying from the next one often comes down to what happens in the hours and days afterward. A person overdoses at work. A colleague reaches for naloxone and knows how to use it. The overdose is reversed, and that person never enters the national death count. What happens next is quieter but just as consequential. The person may wait days for Medicaid approval for medication that could prevent another overdose. The community program responsible for follow-up may not know whether its federal funding will continue. If the person is booked into jail, treatment may stop. America has become better at reversing an overdose. The harder task is making sure that person is still alive six months later, and that takes a functioning system that carries people from rescue through treatment and into recovery. Federal data show 79,384 people died from drug overdoses in 2024, with the overdose death rate down 26.2% from 2023, the steepest single-year decline on record. Early provisional estimates suggest deaths kept falling in 2025, to roughly 69,973. Even so, nearly 70,000 Americans dying in a single year keeps the overdose crisis among the nation’s deadliest public health challenges. Declining deaths do not mean the treatment system is reaching the people who need it. According to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, roughly 47.2 million people aged 12 or older needed treatment for a substance use disorder, and only about 7.6 million received it. Among people with opioid use disorder, only about 16% received medication. Until that gap narrows, the ground we have gained stays vulnerable. Federal overdose policy is fragmented across separate programs, agencies, and funding streams, but in practice, these interventions work as a continuum. Naloxone prevents death, Medicaid finances treatment, peer specialists connect people to care, and federal grants support the workforce and community organizations that deliver these services. Weaken one part and the whole system suffers. The House FY 2027 appropriations report shows the disconnect. It largely holds funding for major state treatment grants steady, with $1.6 billion for State Opioid Response grants and roughly $2 billion for the Substance Use Prevention, Treatment and Recovery Services Block Grant. Yet, it eliminates funding for harm reduction, including support for naloxone access. Holding these gains means funding the whole continuum rather than parts of it. The most important step is to hold State Opioid Response and block grant funding steady while continuing to fund the harm reduction efforts that reach people at the highest risk. A year-end health package offers an opportunity for Congress to support the care continuum. The bipartisan, bicameral Due Process Continuity of Care Act would let states keep Medicaid coverage in place for eligible people held before trial. Today, many people lose that coverage while awaiting the outcome of a case, before any conviction. The weeks right after someone leaves custody carry the highest overdose risk of any recovery point, partly because tolerance drops during any break in use. People are 40 to 129 times more likely to die of an overdose in the first two weeks after release than the general population, and overdose is the leading cause of death for people leaving incarceration. Continuing buprenorphine or methadone through this period reduces the risk of death by roughly 75%. For most of this population, Medicaid is what pays for that treatment. When coverage lapses, treatment tends to lapse with it. In one study, only 30% of those who left jail on medication were still receiving community treatment a month later, compared with 7% of those who left without it. Keeping coverage in place holds that thread together and is the fiscally responsible choice, since gaps in treatment produce worse outcomes and higher costs. Congress could also move an updated PEER Support Act. Identical House and Senate bills have bipartisan backing and address a shortage every treatment system runs into: too few trained people to help others enter care and stay in it. The bill would strengthen federal recognition of peer support specialists, keep the federal Office of Recovery in place, and examine the employment barriers that keep qualified people with lived experience out of the workforce. FROM $1,000 TO $149: TRUMP JUST UNLOCKED THE BIGGEST DRUG PRICE DROP IN 60 YEARS The greatest mistake Congress could make is to read declining deaths as evidence the crisis is resolving itself. This progress reflects years of sustained investment in treatment, harm reduction, recovery support, and the workforce behind them. The gains are also fragile, and pulling back now could slow or reverse them. The real measure of progress is whether a person who survives an overdose on Tuesday can begin treatment on Wednesday, stay connected to care in the months that follow, and keep that care even if they spend time in jail . Congress already has a strategy that is starting to work. The job now is to protect it and finish building it. Libby Jones is the associate vice president of the Overdose Prevention Initiative at the Global Health Advocacy Incubator. Jones leads the initiative’s advocacy efforts, advancing federal policies to reduce the overdose death rate in the United States by expanding access to treatment and recovery support services.