DENIAL: Making climate change denial a part of policy,  Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced yesterday that the EPA is repealing the 2009 determination that planet-warming gases including carbon dioxide are a threat to public health.

  The formal announcement was made yesterday at a truck dealership in Indianapolis. Zeldin had previously said in a podcast that, “The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

  The repeal is based in part on a report written by five researchers who have spent years sowing doubt about the severity of climate change. 

  Zeldin is one of those climate deniers who claims carbon dioxide is “necessary for life.” He has said, “You have many on the left who will say ‘carbon dioxide is a pollutant’ and they won’t talk about all of the many reasons why carbon dioxide is actually necessary for life here on our planet.”

  While it is true that plants feed off carbon dioxide, it is also proven science that excess Co2 from burning of fossil fuels has put a lid on the global environment, warming the world … what’s called “the greenhouse effect.”

BRAIN DEAD: The gunman who killed a New York police officer and three other people was headed to the offices of the National Football League but took the wrong elevator to the building’s management company, according to New York Mayor Eric Adams.

  The note found with the body of Shane Tamura, 27, who killed himself following the murders, indicated that he believed he had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) … brain damage … from playing high school football. Tamura never played in the National Football League.

  CTE can be diagnosed only with an autopsy. Tamura’s final note said, “Study my brain please.” 

  Among the dead were Julia Hyman, a 2020 graduate of Cornell who worked for Rudin Management. The police officer killed was Didarul Islam, 36, who was working in uniform at the time as paid security under a special NYPD program. An immigrant from Bangladesh, he left a pregnant wife and two young sons.

THE EPSTEIN AFFAIRS: Keeping the Jeffrey Epstein scandal alive even while he tries to bury it, President Trump admitted that his rift with Epstein was because the sex trafficker had “poached” two young women from his employment at his Mar-a-Lago club. “The answer is yes, they were,” Trump said, returning from Scotland.

  Everything Trump says, or doesn’t say, keeps critics and the press from wanting to know more. His answer yesterday suggests he knew there was something amiss about Epstein. 

  The lawyer for the late Epstein’s criminal partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, told Congress in a letter that she will testify only if she is given immunity and President Trump shortens her 20-year sentence. 

  Maxwell is presumed to know the names of the wealthy men who had sex with underage girls fed to them by herself and Epstein. She was convicted of recruiting the girls.

REGIME NEWS: 

—The Senate yesterday confirmed Emil Bove III, a former Trump lawyer and MAGA loyalist to be a federal appeals court judge despite whistleblower complaints about Bove’s ethics.

— Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is requiring nominees for four-star-general positions to0 meet with President Trump before their nominations are made final, raising fears about politicization of the military.

— The Trump administration froze $108 million in federal funding for Duke Health, a part of Duke University and its healthcare system after announcing an investigation of “systemic racial discrimination” in the university’s healthcare system. That means they have a Diversity, Equity program that President Trump is trying to eradicate.

HUNGER GAMES: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that his government  will recognize the state of Palestine in September if Israel does not agree to a cease-fire with Hamas in the war that has Gaza on the brink of famine.  He added, though, that Hamas must release its remaining hostages, agree to the cease-fire, and accept that it will have no role in governing Gaza.

  “The situation is simply intolerable,” Starner said as world opinion and sympathy increasingly turns away from Israel. Starmer said that the Israeli government must agree not to annex the occupied West Bank and commit to a process that would result in a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

  The number of deaths in Israel’s war on Gaza has surpassed 60,000, according to Palestinian health authorities.

  Here in the US, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is as MAGA as they get, became the first Republican in Congress to call the killings of civilians in Gaza a genocide. “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned,” she wrote on social media, “but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.” 

  It was a rebuke in part to Florida Rep. Randy Fine, who posted last week that pictures of starving children in Gaza were a campaign of “Muslim terror propaganda.”  He said, “Release the hostages, until then, starve away.”

THE SPIN RACK:  Tsunami waves of three to six feet swept across the Pacific and hit the West Coast overnight following an earthquake in eastern Russia. — Two meteor showers, the Alpha Capricornids and Southern Delta Aquariids, are predicted to reach their peak this week. Unfortunately, the Alpha Capricornids are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere. 

BELOW THE FOLD:  Naked came the strangers. The French resort town of Les Sables d’Olonne on the Atlantic coast has begun to fine tourists who walk into town in bathing suits or … sacré bleu … topless. That goes for both men and women. The fine is about $150. Mayor Yannick Moreau,  posted on Facebook that, “It’s a question of respect for locals who don’t want people wandering around their town half naked.” 

  The town says that if you want to be naked or nearly so, keep it to the 11 miles of beaches.

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