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The Summer Of Foodborne Illnesses & The U.S. Military's Leadership Crisis

An Unwelcome Guest At The G20 & Amazon's $20 Billion Lawsuit

Author

Marcus Gee-Lim
September 01, 2026

Hi readers, happy Tuesday! Today we’re covering a surprise guest at a G20 summit, another Army leader leaving, the Iran war heating up again, more flash flood rescue efforts in Nepal, another big tech lawsuit, the ruling on Trump’s ballroom, and why foodborne illnesses are everywhere.

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” ― Ansel Adams

Hey, Who Invited This Guy?

@FP_Champagne via X.

On Monday, finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations met for a global finance summit in Asheville, North Carolina. The meeting was supposed to be focused on setting up global sanctions against Iran and finding new strategies for global economic growth, but was disrupted by a surprise visit from Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov.

Siluanov’s presence marked the first time Russia’s finance minister attended the G20 summit in four years, and drew criticism from Ukraine and other European nations due to Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. European leaders were especially bothered by Russian participation in the meeting as they’d planned to discuss a new round of Russian sanctions with U.S. leaders. “A joint approach would ​be best, yet it is sometimes unclear whether there might be a loosening of the stance over there. That is why I find the signal sent by receiving the Russian finance minister ​here quite troubling,” German finance minister Lars Klingbeil told reporters. “I would have wanted greater clarity from ​the American side that he should not be received here as a normal guest.” 

“The mere fact ​that the Russian finance minister is back - after, I believe, four ​G20 meetings ⁠without Russian participation - indicates an attempt at normalisation, and that makes it all the more important for us to push back,” he went on. While Siluanov participated in the meeting, European ministers evidently drew the line at being photographed alongside the Russian minister, and the customary group photo from the summit was taken without him. 

An Army Adrift

The Army’s top civilian leader just resigned from his position after months of conflict with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. According to sources within the administration, Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll handed in his resignation letter on Monday as a way to protest Hegseth’s firings of multiple experienced Army leaders as well as the Defense Secretary’s decision to block the promotions of multiple qualified leaders because they’d worked for people he personally disliked.

Driscoll’s resignation leaves the Army with vacancies in its top civilian and officer roles, as Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George in April. While he has avoided naming a replacement for George (rejecting three candidates over the past few months), it appears that Hegseth has a successor lined up for Driscoll: Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.

Either way, Driscoll’s resignation highlights a serious problem for the Army, especially as the U.S. military has its fingers in both the Iran and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. Since taking office after a confirmation process centered on his abuse of women, cheating, and alcoholism, Hegseth has fired a half-dozen senior military leaders, essentially alienating an entire generation of top brass from the country’s armed forces. “Hollowing out the most battle-tested and most lethal, proven leaders in a time of war means troops are less safe and we’re less likely to win,” said Representative Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat and former Army intelligence officer.

The Hormuz Gets Hot Again

“U.S. Forces Patrol Arabian Sea near M/V Touska” by NAVCENT Public Affairs.

  • Summer is coming to a close, but things are getting hot again in Iran. On Sunday, the U.S. military launched strikes on Iran for the first time since July. The missiles allegedly targeted two missile launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, killing two people and injuring two others. According to the U.S. military, the “limited, precise action” was aimed at stopping an Iranian attempt to “launch rockets and deploy sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz.”

  • Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) promised to undertake “response and punishment” for the strikes. On Monday, Tehran followed through on that promise, launching its own strikes aimed at U.S. military bases in Jordan as well as an air base in the UAE. According to both countries, neither of those attacks landed; Jordan claims it shot down eight Iranian missiles before they found their targets, while the UAE said it intercepted a drone near its Al-Minhad Air Base. It’s unlikely that the strikes will reignite the conflict, though the price of a barrel of oil rose 2.7% on the news, ending up at $90.49 per barrel to end Monday.

Extended Excavation Efforts

  • Last Wednesday, flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border caused massive damage along the banks of the Trishuli River, wiping away entire buildings in the towns lining the river’s banks. The disaster’s death toll has now eclipsed 950, and more than 4,400 people are still missing in the aftermath of the floods. 

  • Rescue efforts across the affected region are still ongoing, with much of the emergency response focused on 12 hydropower projects located along the Trishuli River. Those hydropower facilities are host to a series of cavernous tunnels normally used to control the flow of water into the facilities’ turbines – now, those tunnels are acting as a sort of prison to an estimated 600 trapped workers inside them. 

  • A joint team of Chinese and Nepalese military personnel is working to dig the workers out of the tunnels as oxygen levels within the sealed-off tunnels continue to drop. At one of the hydropower plants, rescuers have blown into a hillside in order to pump oxygen into the tunnel system, though families of the trapped workers are increasingly worried that their time is running out.

Additional World News

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A Prime Target For A Lawsuit

  • On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging that the ecommerce giant has “secretly and systematically overcharged” companies looking to purchase advertising spots on its platform. According to the lawsuit, Amazon made more than $20 billion from the “ad-rigging scheme,” overcharging roughly 1.2 million companies including over 500,000 small- and medium-sized businesses.

  • “Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices. These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers,” said FTC chair Andrew Ferguson in a statement. The lawsuit is focused on Amazon’s ad auctioning system, which allows companies looking to advertise their products to buy ad spots by placing bids. The FTC is claiming that Amazon used “shill bids” to force advertisers to pay more in their auctions, even going as far as testing how much it could run up the price for an ad spot before companies pulled out of bidding. The plaintiffs are pushing for Amazon to end its ad auctioning program, refund advertisers, and pay a series of fines.

The Ball(room) Must Go On

  • Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that the construction of Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom can continue. The ballroom project was paused in April, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit arguing that the president lacks the authority to unilaterally order construction projects at the White House without Congressional approval. 

  • The court’s 5-4 ruling granted an emergency request from the Trump administration pushing for construction to continue. The decision didn’t actually rule on the legality of the National Trust’s case, meaning it’s still expected to bounce around in the lower court system for a while. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s three left-leaning justices in dissenting against the ruling, stating that “construction is likely unlawful” because Trump started the project without the approval of Congress. But while the legal battle surrounding the case is set to drag on, the actual construction project has had its timeline accelerated, meaning the ballroom might actually be completed before a final ruling is established.

Additional USA News

 

  • If you’ve been following the news (we hope you have if you’re subscribed to this newsletter!), you might feel that the U.S. has been inundated by a wave of foodborne illnesses this summer. According to the data, you might be right – the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tracking more than 12,800 illnesses related to foodborne outbreaks in 2026. That’s the highest number of cases tracked by the agency since 2020, and far outstrips the 895 foodborne outbreaks the U.S. saw in 2025.

  • According to experts, the spike in illnesses is linked to the chronic underfunding of food safety programs and recent budget cuts to federal public health programs. “What is happening this summer just demonstrates to me the vulnerabilities in the system—and what happens when you stress the system,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition. 

  • In 2025, Trump slashed the budgets of food safety programs across the nation by terminating $12 billion in grant programs set aside for state health departments, which are generally the nation’s first line of defense against foodborne illnesses. The federal government has also been slow to offer up qualified candidates to lead its health agencies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) operated without a dedicated leader for almost a year, and the FDA has been head-less since May. Additionally, federal health agencies have had their staffing numbers slashed under the Trump administration, with the CDC losing 3,000 workers (a quarter of its workforce) since Trump took office. The worst part is that the summer isn’t even the biggest season for foodborne illnesses: “A lot of our foodborne illness cases peak in August, September, even early October,” said Kowalcyk. “So we're just in the beginning.”

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