Sweeping through southwestern France, these wildfires are endangering crucial defense and nuclear sites around Bordeaux. The fires have compelled evacuations and urgent measures at missile production facilities, military research centers, and aerospace plants, as reported by various sources.

These severe blazes coincide with France’s anticipation of its fourth major heat wave this year, set to hit on Tuesday. The extreme temperatures and dry conditions are adding to the challenges faced by firefighting teams as they strive to control the infernos near Bordeaux, according to Reuters.

Forecasts for the French region predict temperatures soaring to 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius), significantly higher than the seasonal average by about 13 degrees (7 degrees Celsius), as indicated by the Reuters Climate Monitor.

“The situation we are dealing with today is the most severe we have ever recorded, the toughest since the Second World War,” President Emmanuel Macron, who flew to the area, had said Sunday.

French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said the fires have disrupted more than 13,000 businesses in the Gironde region, with many forced to close or evacuate.

According to The Telegraph, the fires are closing in on missile and rocket factories that store explosive materials.

At least seven sites holding hazardous substances are within 12 miles of the blaze.

Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, to the west-northwest, is one of the evacuated towns and is home to a large factory that produces propellants for Ariane space rockets and France’s strategic missiles.

A nearby plant in Sainte-Hélène also produces ammonium perchlorate, a key oxidizer used in solid rocket propellants.

According to Defense News, the fires are also threatening factories that make key parts for France’s nuclear missiles, Rafale fighter jets and military missiles.

ArianeGroup evacuated employees from sites in the fire zone, while France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) closed its military research center in Le Barp as the wildfires first advanced toward Bordeaux.

Officials said there is no risk of radioactive leakage because the facility contains no nuclear materials, the outlet reported.

French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said July 24 that protective measures had been deployed around the sites “given the nature of the products stored there,” Le Monde said.

Meanwhile, France’s Defense Ministry said 1,500 military personnel have been deployed since Friday to support firefighting operations and help secure strategic industrial sites.

So far, the fires have scorched more than 104,000 acres (42,000 hectares) in the Gironde region, making them among France’s largest wildfires on record.

Authorities said about 240 homes have been destroyed, while nearly 4,000 holidaymakers have been evacuated from campsites, holiday villages and tourist resorts in Lacanau, about 35 miles west of Bordeaux.

As France and Spain battle one of Europe’s worst wildfire seasons in decades, roughly 360,000 people have been forced to evacuate in recent days.

In a move laden with political and legal implications, New Jersey’s Governor, Mikie Sherrill, has boldly chosen to deny a request from the U.S. Justice Department. The department had sought detailed information about 6,600 non-citizens who inadvertently found themselves registered to vote in the state.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, formally requested an array of personal data on these non-citizens. Her inquiry demanded their names, dates of birth, addresses, nationalities, and registration dates by July 21, pertaining to an investigation where 400 of these individuals reportedly participated in the voting process. Sherrill was given a mere five days to respond.

“Today, I informed [Dhillon] that New Jersey will not provide the personal information of thousands of New Jersey residents,” Sherrill announced through a post on X, an online platform. She firmly asserted that the federal demand lacked any legal standing, vowing to protect the personal data of New Jerseyans.

Accompanying her statement, Sherrill shared a letter addressed to the Justice Department, explaining that the erroneous voter registration occurred beyond the control of the non-citizens involved. She highlighted the relentless efforts of state and local election officials to correct this oversight.

In response, Dhillon maintained that Sherrill’s refusal to assist federal law enforcement only undermines the protection of law-abiding voters in New Jersey.

“NJ has a legal duty to keep ineligible voters off its rolls, & our request is grounded in that legal authority,” the DOJ official wrote on X. “DOJ will get this information through all legal means!”

In her initial request for information, Dhillon said the DOJ would be investigating the matter as an “unlawful dilution of American votes.” 

The DOJ also cited the debacle in its ongoing lawsuit against the Garden State seeking access to its voter roll data.

Last week, Sherrill blamed a “serious software error” in the state’s Motor Vehicle System involving French tech company IDEMIA for the mishap. 

The software company, however, argues that the state’s department of elections is “ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote.”

Sherrilll has also faced criticism for slamming President Trump’s July 16 comments about election integrity even though she may have already known about the major voter registration problem in her state.

Following Trump’s address, Sherrill signed on to a statement with 23 other Democratic governors calling Trump’s comments about non-citizens being registered to vote and Chinese efforts to interfere in US elections “deeply alarming” and an attempt by the president to “undermine free and fair elections” 

Sherrill’s co-signed statement went on to accuse Trump of trying to “intimidate and silence voters” while claiming Democrats are the ones “actually making life better for American families by lowering costs, creating jobs and protecting our freedoms.”

Dhillon claims Sherrill already “knew” thousands of non-citizens were registered to vote in New Jersey but “still went online and called the president a liar and said he was exaggerating.

“Shame on you, governor,” the DOJ official added.

Remarkable video footage has surfaced, capturing the courageous moment when a 16-year-old lifeguard heroically saved a young boy from being swept away by powerful waves.

This dramatic rescue took place on Cypress Beach in California, as the teenage lifeguard, who wishes to stay anonymous, braved treacherous conditions to pull the boy to safety from the relentless ocean currents.

Photographer Scott Vander Dussen, who documented the rescue, expressed his amazement at the young lifeguard’s swift response. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Vander Dussen highlighted that this impressive feat was accomplished by someone still in their first year on duty.

Vander Dussen described how the day began with calm waters, but unexpectedly turned hazardous when a ‘sneaker wave’ abruptly crashed onto the shore, creating perilous conditions.

“He was just sucked out,” the photographer recounted, recalling the moment when they noticed the child’s head bobbing up and down, approximately 200 meters from the shoreline.

In a flash, Vander Dussen said the lifeguard leapt into the ocean, and fought his way through the waves to drag the boy back to safety. 

‘It is unbelievable,’ he said of witnessing the courageous moment. 

Vander Dussen said he spoke with the lifeguard and victim when they were back on the beach, and said the heroic lifeguard continued working for the rest of the day after catching his breath. 

After the boy was saved from the ripping currents, Vander Dussen said he was thankful to see the swimmer was not seriously injured. 

He said the boy was able to stand under his own strength soon after, and was cleared by paramedics at the scene before being released to his grateful parents.  

Vander Dussen’s footage of the rescue went viral across social media and racked up millions of views, as the 16-year-old lifeguard was praised for likely saving the boy’s life. 

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that he was inviting the lifeguard to the White House to honor his efforts. 

‘We’re going to bring this heroic young man, and his family, into the White House with, perhaps, the boy he saved, to give him a High Civilian Honor,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. 

‘Very brave, he deserves it!’ 

Vander Dussen said he feared for the worst as the boy’s terrifying ordeal played out in the waters, but was thankful for the teen lifeguard’s ‘absurd’ heroics for saving the day. 

He said he lives blocks from the beach and knows the lifeguards well, and described the 16-year-old lifeguard as an excellent athlete who excels at water polo. 

‘It’s his first year on lifeguard patrol,’ he added. ‘It was unbelievable.’ 

While the lifeguard was able to finish his shift that day, the next day he had to be replaced because he became a local celebrity on the beach, the photographer said. 

‘He had so many people wanting to thank him, so they took him off’ his shift, Vander Dussen said. 

With the lifeguard set to be honored at the White House, Vander Dussen said he is just happy that the near-disaster turned out well. 

‘I’m glad it has a positive spin,’ he said. 

‘Hopefully we can capitalize it into something positive.’ 

A tragedy struck as a young woman from New Jersey lost her life while vacationing in Florida with friends, touring ancient ruins, as per reports.

Victoria Zardoya, aged 20, reportedly fell fatally while exploring Fort Dade on Egmont Key, Florida, on Friday.

This secluded island, nestled at the entrance of Tampa Bay, can only be reached by boat.

Zardoya was known to be a good friend of Milania Guidice, the daughter of Teresa Guidice from “Real Housewives of New Jersey.”

The Guidice family has been posting tributes and condolences on various social media platforms, E! News reported.

A woman named Victoria Silberbusch, who said she was a friend of Zardoya, created a lengthy post on social media detailing her account of the alleged incident.

Silberbusch said Zardoya fell from the ruins while the group of friends was on a boating tour of the island.

She described Zardoya’s injuries as “brutal” and maintains that “no one hesitated” to jump into action to render aid to the victim.

After the group called 911 and sent flares from boats, paramedics reportedly responded by boat and a medical helicopter flew the victim to a nearby hospital.

The victim reportedly died of her injuries two days later.

“Victoria was never alone. From the moment she fell, every person there did everything within their power to help her,” Silberbusch said.

According to calls for service logs from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, it appears the agency responded to an incident on Egmont Key on Friday just before 5 p.m. and cleared out the event by 11:16 p.m. on the same day.

News Media has requested a copy of the incident report from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

It is not uncommon for Congress to discreetly insert controversial special-interest provisions into expansive, must-pass legislation when public attention is diverted elsewhere.

However, according to recent claims from Capitol Hill, a new level of subterfuge may be occurring: Congress is allegedly on the cusp of ceding control of the US military to a foreign power, something unprecedented in its history.

The House has passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an extensive bill with a staggering $1.15 trillion budget. Embedded within its pages is a contentious provision purportedly aiming to “merge” the military forces of the United States and Israel.

Section 219 of the bill has become a lightning rod for criticism from an array of political figures known for their contrasting views on Israel. This unexpected coalition of voices, ranging from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and from Tucker Carlson to Cenk Uygur, has condemned what they perceive as a breach of American integrity.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has expressed strong opposition, stating that the provision poses “an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene has said anyone who voted for the bill “sold out the American people to a foreign country.”

Tucker Carlson wants literal treason trials. 

So, what is the substance of Section 219? Legislation often has obfuscatory titles but this provision is deemed, with admirable clarity, The United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. 

It calls for the secretary of Defense to designate “an executive agent” to coordinate between the US and Israel on “bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.”

The Pentagon will come up with a plan for such cooperation and report back to Congress.

That’s it. There is nothing about merging the general staffs of the US military and the IDF; nothing about creating a joint office where Pete Hegseth and his Israeli counterpart, Israel Katz, work together; nothing about giving Bibi Netanyahu partial control of CENTCOM.

That the United States would want a close working relationship with Israel on military technology is hardly surprising.

Israel is one of the world’s most innovative societies and, given its precarious security environment, has become a leader in advanced defense technologies.

That a nefarious interpretation of the bill has gotten some traction underlines how any preposterous lie, so long as it’s about Israel, gets a hearing these days. 

Like many conspiracy theories, this one depends on a dark view of American society.

We are allegedly so corrupt that we are handing control of our military to a foreign country without any senior military leaders or officials in an “America First” administration lodging a complaint.

No wonder Tucker Carlson wants the kind of tribunals that attended the end of World War II. 

At the first Nuremberg Trials, Wilhelm Keitel was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged; at the second Nuremberg Trials, Mike Johnson will be found guilty of supporting mutually beneficial technology-sharing between allies — means of execution yet to be determined.

One perversity here is that Bibi Netanyahu conceives of the technological cooperation as a substitute for the US military aid that he supports phasing out.

In other words, enemies of Israel oppose US military aid and when a constructive plan is offered for how to go about ending it, they oppose that, too, as an Israeli plot. 

Another perversity is that the United States should want a very close relationship with Israel regarding, say, missile defense, an area where Israel excels and that, as we’ve seen in the Ukraine and Iran wars, is crucial to modern warfare.

And yet, the same people who portray themselves as zealously protective of the US national interest want us to turn our back on a source of technological advance. 

Israel naturally fits in the Western alliance, but nations ultimately pursue their selfish interests.

If we spurn the Jewish state out of irrational animus, it will inevitably look elsewhere and perhaps build a stronger relationship with China. 

Then, we will surely be told by the same people now obsessed with ending the US-Israel relationship that Israel showed its true colors and deserves even more of our scorn.

X: @RichLowry

Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci quietly stood as one of Washington’s most respected figures, diligently serving under seven different presidents in his role as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Throughout nearly half a century, Fauci garnered bipartisan appreciation for his pivotal efforts in battling diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and SARS. While known well within presidential circles, earning accolades like the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush and praise from Barack Obama, he remained largely behind the scenes to the general public.

However, in January 2020, the discovery of a ‘novel virus’ in the United States catapulted Fauci into an unforeseen level of fame, morphing him from a renowned yet low-profile expert into a global household name almost overnight.

‘The public admiration has been overwhelming,’ Fauci expressed in his personal diary in March 2020, recounting how individuals ranging from young interns to seasoned White House veterans approached him with gratitude, seeking to congratulate him and even requesting selfies.

This diary entry is just one among more than 1,100 pages that Fauci reportedly documented on US government servers during his time as a pivotal figure in President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force.

Health and Human Services director Robert F Kennedy said Monday that he gave the material to Senator Rand Paul, who released it this past weekend. These contents will likely serve as the gunpowder for inevitably explosive Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearings, overseen by Chairman Paul, on Wednesday.

As early as September 2020, Paul, a trained medical doctor, established himself as Fauci’s chief antagonist. He challenged Fauci’s vaccine and masks mandates, safe-distancing recommendations and lockdown and school closure proposals.

Perhaps more than anything else, Paul clashed with Fauci over whether COVID was a naturally occurring virus that emerged from the wet markets of Wuhan, China or the result of a laboratory experiment gone wrong.

Paul argued evidence showed the National Institutes of Health, run by Fauci’s boss Dr Francis Collins and with Fauci’s knowledge, funded risky ‘gain-of-function’ research in China that potentially created the disease.

‘We’re saying they are gain-of-function viruses, because they were animal viruses that became more transmissible in humans and you funded it. And you won’t admit the truth,’ Paul told Fauci in a furious July 2021 hearing.

Fauci: ‘You are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals… I totally resent that.’

Paul: ‘It could have been. It could have been.’

Fauci: ‘If anybody is lying here, senator it is you.’

The diary only adds more fuel to this raging dispute. 

On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote: ‘Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier… Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.’

Days later, Fauci noted that scientists called him to say they believed the virus was ‘either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.’

Expect that to be a flashpoint on Wednesday.

Yet, the diary itself has generated surprisingly little curiosity in establishment quarters, despite its revealing portrait of one of the most influential public officials of the modern era.

Fauci’s old guard media defenders are already preparing their defense. CNN’s Brian Stelter laughably wrote: ‘While MAGA media ridicules Fauci’s ‘obsession’ with fame, the diary entries read more like someone documenting the objectively wild speed at which a government immunologist became internationally famous.’ Stelter, meanwhile, neglected to chronicle the chummy on- and off-air relationship between Fauci and his CNN colleague, Jake Tapper.

The fact that Fauci is no longer in the government may explain the lack of mainstream media coverage. Perhaps there is scant interest because of President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci in the closing days of his presidency largely extinguished the possibility of any criminal prosecution for perjury. More likely to me, it is because the press and popular culture seem to like Fauci more than they like Trump – and because Fauci served as a foil to Trump in the President’s first term.

Late-night hosts competed to book him. The Washington Nationals invited him to throw out the first pitch at Major League baseball’s opening day. Brad Pitt portrayed him admiringly on Saturday Night Live, while Matthew McConaughey told him: ‘Not all heroes wear capes. You are a shining example of that.’

Fauci’s likeness appeared on candles, T-shirts, bobbleheads and coffee mugs. Television anchors thanked him for his service before every interview, not a standard professional greeting. One interviewer called him ‘the coolest man on the planet.’ Another described him as ‘a godsend.’

Here’s the thought experiment I can’t shake. Imagine if White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, not Anthony Fauci, had kept a White House diary filled with giddy entries about television bookings and celebrity admirers, all while serving at Trump’s right hand through national crises.

Does anyone honestly believe the coverage would be, ‘Nothing to see here?’ Every honest editor in America knows that every front page and cable TV panel would be busy diagnosing the breathtaking narcissism. There would be endless thought pieces about vanity, ego and the corrupting effects of fame.

What makes the newly released diary notable is not that famous people admired Fauci. It’s that Fauci himself seems so captivated by their regard. The diaries do not present as the historic record of a public servant trying to navigate a once-in-a-century emergency. Instead, they read as a rapturous catalog of his personal fame, on celebrity encounters, media invitations (Jonathan Karl’s book party and private dinners with Jake Tapper and his wife) and frustrations about not appearing on television often enough.

Even on days when thousands of American citizens died of the disease, Fauci’s entries centered on his private brand success.

None of it, to Fauci’s defenders, yet proves misconduct. The entries do, however, reveal something ignominious and timeless about Washington.

Fame is an intoxicant. Very few people prove immune to it, particularly those who spend decades laboring in obscurity before suddenly finding themselves treated like rock stars.

Wednesday’s hearing will likely hinge on what much of the press will say about it afterward.

To many Democrats, Fauci remains exactly what he has been for decades: an American hero who devoted his life to public service, guided the country through an unprecedented catastrophe and became the target of relentless attacks for simply following the science.

Many Republicans see an almost perfectly inverted picture: an unelected bureaucrat who accumulated extraordinary influence, made flawed decisions, resisted accountability and became the embodiment of an establishment unwilling to admit mistakes.

The hearing won’t settle the lab-leak debate, rewrite the history of lockdowns or change many minds, but it may remind us of something else: how deeply the COVID pandemic divided the nation and how desperately we are still in need of healing.