The flu outbreak at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland has now become more than a military installation health problem. It is a real-time stress test of a political claim: that vaccine mandates are mostly an assault on personal liberty, even inside an institution built around collective discipline. As of early July, the outbreak had reached nearly 300 confirmed cases and four hospitalizations. And it's now been confirmed that Keon McDaniel, an Air Force trainee, died from influenza.

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A flu outbreak has torn through the basic training wing at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, sickening more than 220 recruits and raising hard questions about War Secretary Pete Hegseth's decision, less than two months earlier, to drop the requirement that all troops get a flu shot.

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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has turned a recognized challenge — medical students receive too little practical nutrition training — into a sprawling federal initiative. He and his supporters in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) establishment argue that physicians receive too little formal training about diet — and, in Kennedy's view, in how we grow our food, and that more comprehensive nutrition education is needed to address chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. A greater focus on the "root causes of chronic diseases" is MAHA's mantra.

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Most of us take for granted that what we can hear represents the full acoustic world around us. It doesn't. Beneath the threshold of human perception lies an invisible ocean of sound — and scientists are just beginning to learn how to navigate and exploit it.

Called "infrasound," these ultra-low-frequency vibrations fall below 20 hertz, the lower boundary of normal human hearing. They travel through the atmosphere, oceans and solid ground, carrying remarkable information about natural events and human activity across vast distances. The Earth, it turns out, is far from quiet.

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There is a word for what the federal government has done to American science during the past year and a half: sabotage. Not reform. Not streamlining. Not the "realignment of priorities" the White House prefers to call it. Sabotage — the deliberate, systematic destruction of one of the most productive enterprises in the history of human civilization, inflicted at a time when the nation can least afford it, for reasons that range from the ideological to the incoherent.

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