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Agency says application rejected due to lack of ‘adequate and well controlled’ trial, but experts say ‘they’re just coming up with reasons’

A senior US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official says Moderna’s clinical trial on a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine was a “brazen failure” and that the FDA is now calling it into question.

The FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts say is already having a chilling effect on vaccine development.

Officials say the issue is the design of the study, in which control group participants over the age of 65 should have received a high-dose flu shot instead of a standard flu shot.

Outside experts say the reasons seem to go deeper. “It’s all pretext and obfuscation when the real agenda is rejecting conventional science and serving a predetermined anti-vaccine agenda,” said Richard Hughes IV, a partner with Epstein Becker Green and law professor at George Washington University.

Republicans may be willing to stick with Donald Trump through almost anything, but his recent push to seize control of Greenland has turned off many in his own party, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that about 7 in 10 U.S. adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the issue of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark. That’s higher than the share who dislike how he’s handling foreign policy generally, suggesting that Trump’s Greenland approach has created a weak spot for the administration.

Even Republicans aren’t thrilled. About half disapprove of his attempt to turn the icebound landmass into American territory, something that Trump has insisted is critical for national security in the Arctic, while about half approve.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis from North Carolina suggested Thursday he could support a compromise that would allow the Senate Banking Committee to start hearings on Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve.

“What I heard being floated could be an off-ramp,” Tillis told reporters Thursday after a meeting of Senate Republicans. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suggested that the banking committee, rather than the Justice Department, investigate cost overruns on the Fed’s $2.5 billion renovation of two Washington, D.C., office buildings, according to other senators at the meeting.

Tillis said last month that he would block any consideration of Warsh or any other Trump nominees to the Fed until the DOJ drops a criminal investigation of Fed chair Jerome Powell over his testimony last summer about the renovation. Tillis on Thursday reiterated that view in comments on the Senate floor.

Donald Trump plans to scale back some tariffs on steel and aluminum goods, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Officials in the Commerce Department and U.S. trade representative’s office believe the tariffs are hurting consumers by raising prices for goods including pie tins and food-and-drink cans, the FT report said.

Voters nationwide are worried about prices, and cost-of-living concerns are expected to be a major factor for Americans heading into the November midterm elections.

Donald Trump’s son-in-law was reportedly being discussed in call between foreign intelligence officials that was intercepted and allegedly supressed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard

A whistleblower complaint raised against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last year revolves around President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to reports.

The highly-classified complaint, submitted in May 2025, alleged that the National Security Agency failed to publish an intelligence report about a phone conversation, intercepted by a foreign spy service, between two overseas intelligence officials concerning Iran in which a person linked to Trump was under discussion.

Instead, the complaint alleged, Gabbard presented a paper copy to the president’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, and told the NSA to supply further details to her office, rather than making it more widely available within the intelligence community as would have been expected.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal now report that the Trump associate who was mentioned in the call was Kushner.

A federal judge on Thursday shut down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempts to punish Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly over his urging of US service members to refuse illegal orders, ruling that the Pentagon chief’s actions were unconstitutionally retaliatory.

The decision landed two days after a grand jury in Washington, DC, declined to approve charges sought by federal prosecutors against the Arizona senator and several other Democratic lawmakers who taped a video last year warning that “threats to our Constitution” are coming “from right here at home,” and repeatedly implored service members and the intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders.”

Together, the grand jury declination and ruling from senior US District Judge Richard Leon represent major impediments to efforts by aides of Donald Trump to use the levers of government to punish Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, over his participation in the video.

The United States will send the world’s largest aircraft carrier to the Middle East to back up another already there, a person familiar with the plans said Friday, putting more American firepower behind Donald Trump’s efforts to coerce Iran into a deal over its nuclear program.

The USS Gerald R. Ford’s planned deployment to the Mideast comes after Trump only days earlier suggested another round of talks with the Iranians was at hand. Those negotiations didn’t materialize as one of Tehran’s top security officials visited Oman and Qatar this week and exchanged messages with the U.S. intermediaries.

Already, Gulf Arab nations have warned any attack could spiral into another regional conflict in a Mideast still reeling from the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Iranians are beginning to hold 40-day mourning ceremonies for the thousands killed in Tehran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month, adding to the internal pressure faced by the sanctions-battered Islamic Republic.

Donald Trump's administration cannot rescind $600 million in public health grants allocated to 4 Democratic-led states, for now, a federal judge in Illinois ruled Thursday.

California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota sued Wednesday to try to block the planned funding cuts to programs that track disease outbreaks and study health outcomes of LGBTQ+ people and communities of color in major cities.

U.S. District Judge Manish Shah stopped the cuts from taking effect for 14 days, saying in his order that the states "have shown that they would suffer irreparable harm from the agency action." That will keep grant money flowing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to state and city health departments and their partner organizations while the challenge proceeds.

One year after taking charge of the nation's health department, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn't held true to many of the promises he made while appealing to U.S. senators concerned about the longtime anti-vaccine activist's plans for the nation's care.

Kennedy squeaked through a narrow Senate vote to be confirmed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services only after making a number of public and private guarantees about how he would handle vaccine funding and recommendations as secretary.

Prosecutor says ‘newly discovered evidence’ in case against Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis ‘materially inconsistent with the allegations against them’

Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis have moved to drop felony assault charges against two Venezuelan men, including one shot in the leg by an immigration officer, after new evidence emerged undercutting the government’s version of events.

In a filing on Thursday, the US attorney’s office for the district of Minnesota said “newly discovered evidence” in the criminal case against Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis “is materially inconsistent with the allegations against them” made in a criminal complaint and a court hearing last month.

The government’s motion asked the judge for “dismissal with prejudice”, meaning the charges against the two men cannot be resubmitted.

European leaders divided over how far to accommodate Trump’s ‘wrecking ball’ politics and foreign policy

US Democrats will use a security summit this weekend to urge European leaders to stand up to Donald Trump, with the continent divided over how to keep the unpredictable US president on side.

Democrats at the annual Munich Security Conference will include some of Trump’s most outspoken critics, such as the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Arizona senator Ruben Gallego and the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

Newsom has already urged Europeans to realise that “grovelling to Trump’s needs” makes them “look pathetic on the world stage”, telling reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month he “should have brought a bunch of knee pads”.

Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to slash the national deficit and curb debt during his second term, but a sobering assessment of the nation’s financial health by one of the federal government’s premier fiscal watchdogs suggests Trump 2.0’s policies have not only collectively pushed the federal deficit significantly higher, but put the country on an unsustainable path.

In its latest budget and economic outlook, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan federal agency, revised its cumulative deficit projection for the 2026–2035 period upward by $1.4 trillion compared with its forecast from just a year ago.

“Our budget projections continue to indicate that the fiscal trajectory is not sustainable,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel said in a statement, noting the agency’s latest projections. Under laws passed in Trump’s first year back in office, the national debt in 2030 will surpass the historic high of 106% of GDP, which it reached in 1946. Meanwhile, the balance of Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted in 2032, one year earlier than the CBO projected last January.