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The Club PUBlication 12/15/2025

12/15/2025

Scientists are told:
‘Come to Canada’
$1 billion effort aims to attract researchers, including from the U.S.
By MATINA STEVIS-GRIDNEFF The New York Times

CANADIAN PARLIMENT IN SESSION

TORONTO - Canada is making an aggressive effort to attract highly skilled researchers from around the world, including H-1B visa holders in the United States who are coming under growing pressure because of the Trump administration's restrictive immigration policies and cuts to research funding.

The Canadian government said Tuesday it would spend more than $1 billion over the next few years to attract and retain scientists from around the world, including those at major hospitals and universities.
It also said that in coming months it would create an "accelerated pathway" for U.S. H-1B visa holders. H-1B visas are issued to highly skilled people working for American companies and are concentrated in major industries that compete for global talent, such as technology and medicine.

"As other countries constrain academic freedoms and undermine cutting-edge research, Canada is investing, and doubling down, on science," Mélanie Joly, Canada's industry minister, said in written comments to the press, without explicitly mentioning the United States.

In an interview with the Times on Tuesday, Joly said that the new money would create 100 new research chairs, by funding not just individual senior researchers at the top of those efforts, but their entire teams and labs.

She said her top priority was to lure back Canadian researchers.
"For decades, Canada has had a brain drain issue, and now we are in a brain gain mode," Joly said. "My message to Canadians around the world is: It's time to come home."

But she added that the push to attract top global researchers was also about creating a stable environment for those wanting to move to Canada.

"If you want to live in the best country on the Earth, that is also the safest, and the one that will actually respect your work and offer you the right environment to flourish, well, come to Canada," she said.
The question of H-1B visa holders, on whom the U.S. tech industry, in particular, relies, has opened a fault line within President Donald Trump's base and unsettled planning in the tech, pharmaceutical and other highly competitive industries.

Influential figures in the tech world, such as Elon Musk, fiercely support maintaining the pathway for high-skilled immigrants, while others from the so-called MAGA movement demand that the number of H-1B visas be slashed alongside all other types of immigration into the United States.

The questions around the long-term prospects of highly skilled immigrants in the United States create an opportunity for Canada and other developed economies to attract some top scientists concerned about their status in the U.S. or affected by the Trump administration's cuts to research funding.

The Club PUBlication 12/08/2025

12/8/2025

Trump’s new strategy slams European allies
He praises right-wing populists, appears to echo Putin on NATO.
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, JEANNA SMIALEK and LARA JAKES The New York Times

LONDON - The Trump administration said Friday that Europe is facing the "stark prospect of civilizational erasure" and pledged that the United States will support likeminded "patriotic" parties across the continent to prevent a future in which "certain NATO members will become majority non-European."

The dark assessment of Europe's future was released overnight as part of an annual update to the United States' national security strategy around the world.

Without naming them directly, the document says the United States should be "cultivating resistance" across Europe by supporting political parties that fight against migration and promote nationalism.

That describes several rightwing populist parties such as Reform U.K. in Britain and the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which has been classified as an extremist party by German intelligence services.

"In everything we do, we are putting America First," President Donald Trump wrote in a foreword to the document, which he called a "road map to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history."

In a section called "Promoting European Greatness," the document offers a searing critique of the United States' closest allies.

It warns that Europe is on a path to becoming "unrecognizable" because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it says the policy of the United States should be to help Europe "correct its current trajectory" over the course of the next several decades.

"We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation," the 33-page document says.

Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the political leadership in Europe, and he has repeatedly pressured those leaders to bend to his will on funding for NATO, trade and tariffs. Vice President JD Vance issued a broad critique of Europe's mainstream political parties in a speech in Munich in February, and urged them to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent.

But the document released overnight is the clearest statement yet of how the president wants his "America First" foreign policy to be a clarion call for other nationalist politicians to overhaul their political systems.

And it echoes some of the language of the Great Replacement Theory, a nationalist conspiracy theory embraced by some of his top aides that warns of a deliberate effort to replace white people with nonwhite immigrants.

The document accuses the European Union and other "transnational bodies" of undermining liberty and sovereignty, censoring free speech and trampling on basic principles of democracy to suppress political opposition.

"The growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism," the document says.

"Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory."

Within hours of its release, the document was already provoking sharp retorts from across Europe.

Johann Wadephul, the foreign minister for Germany, responded Friday by saying Germany did not "believe that we need to get advice here from any country or party."

He told journalists in Berlin that the United States was Germany's most important ally in NATO but that "questions like freedom of expression, freedom of opinion and how we organize our liberal society here in the Federal Republic of Germany are not part of that."

"It's a frontal attack on the European Union," said Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Parliament who chairs the delegation for relations with the United States. He called the document "totally unacceptable," full of "extreme, shocking phrases," and said some of its statements amounted to direct calls for election interference.

The administration's approach to Europe, as described in the strategy document, was in stark contrast to the way it said it would treat some countries in other parts of the world.

A section of the document titled
"The Middle East: Shift Burdens, Build Peace"

argues that while the United States should "continue to encourage" the countries in the region to combat radicalism, it should not overly meddle in their internal concerns.

It calls for "dropping America's misguided experiment with hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government," adding: "We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without."

The document adds that what is crucial to a successful Middle East policy is "accepting the region, its leaders and its nations as they are" and makes no mention of human rights issues like the treatment of women or the killing of a Washington Post columnist, which the CIA believes was approved by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

In addition to calling for a new political trajectory in Europe, the document is also likely to raise fresh concerns about Trump's relationship with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the United States' approach to ending the war in Ukraine.

The document criticizes "European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition."

And it appears to echo Putin's language by insisting that the United States should be "ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance."

Ian Lesser, who heads the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund, a research group, said the document would reinforce Europe's existing concerns about the state of the transatlantic relationship and the U.S. position toward Russia, and that it might further embolden the far right in Europe.

"The piece treats Europe as a sort of other, one that is a model of what not to do," he said, adding that it underscores that the United States is not isolationist, but rather "unilateralist."

"It really reinforces existing concerns and puts a sharper edge on them," he said.

Carlo Calenda, a center-left pro-European senator in Italy, said Friday that the document shows that Trump is an "enemy of Europe," and "an enemy of democracy." He said that efforts by European politicians to try to flatter Trump had not worked to promote their own interests.
"He's a bully, and you cannot face a bully by being warm and kind," he added. "It's not the way in which you can manage him."

By contrast, one of Trump's top supporters in Europe, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, criticized the E.U.'s support for Ukraine while praising the U.S. and Russian presidents' negotiations to end the war.
Orban did not directly address the new U.S. strategy during an interview on the state-funded Kossuth Radio, but broadly echoed its tone.

"Those who have power, act; those who don't only speak," Orban said.

"This is why strong players like Russia and the United States negotiate and make deals, while weak Europe is left out of shaping its own future and chooses to talk instead."

The Club PUBlication 12/01/2025

12/1/2025

CDC’s new No. 2 leader was vaccine skeptic in Louisiana
Ralph Abraham halted promoting vaccinations such as flu shots.
By LENA H. SUN The Washington Post

Dr. Ralph Abraham

A Louisiana health official who ordered his health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations this past winter during a surge in influenza cases has been tapped to serve as the new No. 2 leader at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ralph Abraham, who is Louisiana's surgeon general, has been hired to be the principal deputy director at the CDC, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, who confirmed the appointment. It is not clear when Abraham begins in the position. He is listed in the CDC's internal directory as principal deputy director; a CDC email listed for him does not work.

The nation's top public health agency currently has no permanent director, and Abraham would essentially be running the agency. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted CDC Director Susan Monarez this summer after she resisted his requests to agree to vaccine recommendations he wanted an influential CDC advisory committee to make. HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill is serving as acting CDC director.

Abraham adds to the vaccine critics working at the CDC under Kennedy, a prominent antivaccine activist before becoming the country's top health official. Kennedy fired all of the CDC's federal vaccine advisers and replaced them with people who have criticized coronavirus and other shots.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, who took office in 2024, appointed Abraham as his top health official as a medical freedom movement grew in the state to oppose vaccine mandates.

Abraham drew intense criticism in office for instructing health officials to stop promoting vaccines including flu shots and instead emphasize personal choice and consulting with doctors. In a December legislative hearing, Abraham said he regularly sees patients injured by coronavirus vaccines and alleged adverse reactions were being covered up, NPR reported. He has also supported research into an extensively debunked connection between vaccines and autism.

In a February letter explaining his perspective on vaccines, Abraham argued that government agencies should avoid promoting "pharmaceutical products" when the manufacturers are protected against lawsuits for harm.

"It is understood that the products pushed will benefit some and cause harm to others, but public health pushes them anyway with a one-size-fits-all, collectivist mentality whose main objective is maximal compliance," Abraham wrote.

He accused the CDC and other public health agencies of overreaching in response to the COVID pandemic and damaging public trust.

"Vaccination against any disease should remain a personal choice ," he said.