Let’s get into the executive summary.

NEWS NEWS.

Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment one hundred eleven times at a Senate hearing on COVID’s origins and the government’s pandemic response. Rand Paul says President Biden’s preemptive pardon removed Fauci’s legal exposure and is preparing a contempt vote. Fauci says years of public perjury accusations still make any answer risky.

The real oversight questions concern an N I H-funded Eco Health Alliance subaward for bat-coronavirus work in Wuhan, weak monitoring documented by an inspector-general audit, and Fauci’s categorical twenty twenty-one denial that the N I H funded gain-of-function research there. Officials later said the work fit the phrase’s broad scientific meaning, while Fauci says he used a narrower federal definition. None of that proves Fauci created COVID, funded the virus that caused the pandemic, or concealed a known origin. The origin question remains unresolved.

Next, Dulles. Trump announced a twenty-two-and-a-half-billion-dollar airport overhaul that would replace the mobile lounges with new terminals and an underground connection system. The announcement included no construction schedule, funding source, or clear approval status. Dulles already had a separate four-and-a-half to five-billion-dollar revitalization package in procurement. The number to watch is not the headline price; it is the first funded, approved construction package.

NOT NEWS NEWS.

Now, African city growth. African cities are projected to drive much of the world’s late-century megacity expansion. In one European Commission model, Luanda grows from about nine-point-eight million people in twenty twenty to thirty-point-seven million by twenty-one hundred, while São Paulo and Shanghai eventually peak. Cairo, Dar es Salaam, and Addis Ababa also keep growing. These are projections, not forecasts carved in stone; migration, fertility, land use, and urban boundaries can all change the path. The durable point is where the century’s biggest infrastructure pressure is likely to land.

The other long read: Cambridge professor Jason Arday faces plagiarism allegations involving more than one hundred passages in his twenty fifteen doctoral thesis. Public side-by-side comparisons show identical or nearly identical language, and a separate twenty eighteen paper later received a correction changing or removing eighteen of thirty-one interview quotations. Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University say investigations cleared him, but neither has released a detailed public comparison explaining that decision. His widely repeated biography is a separate evidentiary question and should not be treated as proved or disproved by the plagiarism material.

Now, the Quick Bites.

The Government Accountability Office says the Energy Department is not systematically importing nuclear cleanup lessons from Britain, France, and Canada, even though the remaining American mission may cost six hundred forty-one to eight hundred forty billion dollars and last until twenty-one hundred.

The Tax Foundation modeled eighty-six federal tax changes, showing why headline revenue estimates can shrink once economic feedback is included.

More than two terawatts of proposed power and storage remain in grid-connection queues. The median wait now exceeds five years, and only thirteen percent of capacity requested from two thousand through twenty twenty was operating by the end of twenty twenty-five.

Seventy-seven percent of registered voters in one national survey called billionaires elite, far ahead of professors, journalists, or government employees.

A median-home mortgage consumed a smaller share of median income in twenty twenty-four than in nineteen seventy-nine or eighty, but the price-to-income ratio is much worse now, making the down payment harder to assemble.

A I use is broadening. Nearly forty-five percent of working-age adults reported weekly generative-A I use outside work, while Gallup found fifty-two percent of employees use it at work at least occasionally.

The Senate unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution opposing clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump asked the Supreme Court to erase E. Jean Carroll’s eighty-three-point-three-million-dollar defamation award, though the filing does not mean the justices will hear the case.

Elon Musk is reviving America P A C for a Republican midterm turnout push. No budget has been disclosed.

And that wraps the executive summary.