By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Germany’s car manufacturing giant BMW is warning that an EU ban on the sale of gasoline and diesel cars from 2035 is “no longer realistic” amid slow EV sales as the European auto industry will see a “massive shrinking” with such a ban.

European carmakers are already struggling with their EV sales as subsidies in many countries are coming to an end and Chinese low-cost vehicle makers are gaining market share.

Last year, the EU member states approved an emissions regulation under which the bloc will end sales of new carbon dioxide-emitting cars and vans in 2035. 

The rules target 55% CO2 emission reductions for new cars and 50% for new vans from 2030 to 2034 compared to 2021 levels, as well as 100% CO2 emission reductions for both new cars and vans from 2035. 

Under the regulation, the European Commission will assess in 2026 the progress the EU has made in achieving the target. The Commission will decide whether the targets need to be reviewed.

But BMW’s chief executive Oliver Zipse said on Tuesday at the Paris Automotive Summit that the ban “could also threaten the European automotive industry in its heart.”

The current regulations will “with today’s assumptions, lead to a massive shrinking of the industry as a whole,” Zipse added, as carried by Bloomberg.

Electric vehicle sales in Europe have been suffering this year. Sales in Germany, for example, are plummeting as Berlin ended subsidies at the end of 2023.

Amid slowing sales of EVs, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, ACEA, last month called for urgent action to reverse this year’s trend of declining EV sales.

The European auto manufacturers united in ACEA, called on the EU institutions “to come forward with urgent relief measures before new CO2 targets for cars and vans come into effect in 2025.”

Europe’s automakers “are playing our part in this transition, but unfortunately, the other necessary elements for this systemic shift are not in place,” ACEA said.

By Brian McGlinchey at Stark Realities

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm. While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared Covid-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses — including, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.

As previously detailed here at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments — with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.

While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long Covid.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from Covid.

That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent Covid-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the US.”

Indeed: Why is the family of someone who dies from Covid more deserving of a government-paid funeral than the family of someone who dies from cancer, cardiac arrest or a car accident? It bears emphasis that this question was every bit as relevant in 2020 as it is today.

The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.

This isn’t FEMA’s first funereal foray, but it’s the largest by orders of magnitude. In the 10 years before the pandemic, FEMA received about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance for various natural disasters. As of Jan. 1, 2024, FEMA had approved more than 300,000 for Covid-19, shelling out $3.15 billion to cover an expense that, whether caused by a pandemic or something else, is universally inevitable.

Of course, the magnitude of that inevitable expense isn’t fixed, and the mere presence of a government subsidy reliably results in higher costs. Knowing they can spend up to of $9,000 of other people’s money on their Covid-19 funeral, it’s safe to assume many affected families have made more expensive choices than they otherwise would — bolstering the profits of funeral homes, casket producers and other associated businesses.

Unsurprisingly, the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), a trade group and principal lobbyist for the industry, hailed the passage of the COVID 19 Relief Package/Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020. The legislation not only funded Covid funeral reimbursements, NFDA enthused, but also funeral payments “for any subsequent major disaster declared by the President,” an expansion the group had been lobbying for.

To qualify for reimbursement under the funeral assistance program, the death certificate must either indicate the death was caused by Covid-19 — or that it merely may have been caused by Covid-19 or “Covid-19-like symptoms.”

As is increasingly the case with government handouts, there’s no requirement of US citizenship, for either the decedent or the person paying the funeral expenses. A family’s ability to pay for the funeral is likewise irrelevant — there are no income or wealth criteria.

There’s more to the cost of this program than the reimbursements themselves — there’s also significant overhead. Pressed to implement the program as soon as possible, FEMA opted against creating a website to receive applications for reimbursement, choosing to instead require that all claims be submitted via 20-minute phone conversations, necessitating the creation of a huge call center operation staffed by 5,000 phone agents, all of whom would require training and support.

While you might think word-of-mouth would be sufficient to encourage widespread use of a handout program, still more money was spent on advertising. In a 2022 report lamenting that many eligible people hadn’t cashed in yet, NPR’s Blake Farmer — blissfully oblivious to the federal government’s relentless march to insolvency — cheerfully said “FEMA is launching an outreach campaign to promote the program, since there’s plenty of money left.”

Fittingly, NPR found the national leader in funeral reimbursement claims at the time was Washington DC, with applications amounting to 77% of Covid-19 fatalities.

Whether a government handout program takes the form of cash reimbursement, tax credit or subsidy, it inevitably has another cost dimension: so-called “improper payments,” a term encompassing both fraud and errors made by applicants and administrators.

On that score, FEMA’s Covid-19 funeral-funding program has come under repeated criticism from government watchdogs. In 2022, the General Accountability Office (GAO) identified “several gaps in FEMA’s internal controls meant to prevent improper or fraudulent payments” — such as double-payments when two different parties applied for reimbursement for the same funeral, or payments made to applicants who didn’t meet program requirements.

That same year, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) sent an “urgent” alert to FEMA, saying its audit found the agency “regularly reimburses applicants for expenses expressly excluded from funeral assistance” by the agency’s own policy guide that serves as its interpretation of regulations.

Reimbursable expenses include funeral services, cremation, caskets, urns burial plots, ceremony costs, headstones and clergy compensation. Among the unauthorized expenses are catering, gratuities, flowers and transportation. The OIG learned that, rather than directing claims processors to scrutinize claims to ferret out unauthorized expenses, FEMA told them to “accept for reimbursement all verifiable funeral expenses…listed on expense documents from a funeral home.” Thus, if flowers, for example, were listed on a funeral home bill, reimbursement was approved regardless of FEMA’s standing rule against covering that cost.

The OIG found that 59% of approved applications included ineligible expenses. In one case, FEMA’s loose approach led to an improper reimbursement for $3,760 for transportation that included “two lead escort vehicles, a limousine, and a horse and carriage.”

FEMA admitted its lawyers hadn’t even reviewed its Covid operating procedures. Worse, FEMA resisted the OIG’s post-inquiry recommendations, exasperatingly arguing that if the agency started applying the rules correctly, it “would create inequalities to the detriment of future applicants, who would qualify for less assistance for fewer eligible expenses.” GAO rightly countered that FEMA was itself creating inequalities — by reimbursing funeral expenses that it hadn’t reimbursed for previous disasters and shouldn’t reimburse for future ones.

While it serves as a vivid illustration of irrational, wasteful and persistent spending that accompanies both bona fide and contrived crises, the funeral reimbursement program represents just a small share of ongoing Covid-related government outlays: In the fiscal year that ended September 30, FEMA tallied $15 billion in Covid-19 commitments, accounting for a startling 39% of all FEMA disaster relief obligations.

Not coincidentally, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is repeatedly running on empty, prompting additional, multi-billion-dollar infusions from Congress. Seeking still more money Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this month told reporters that “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through [hurricane] season.”

His warning prompted a false narrative to erupt along the American right — specifically, that the Disaster Relief Fund has been depleted by $650 million spent on migrants in the 2024 fiscal year. While one can challenge the propriety and constitutionality of that spending, the $650 million didn’t come from the Disaster Relief Fund, but from a separate, congressionally-appropriated program and account.

Rather than parroting false narratives, conservatives should be asking why the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is still being hammered by Covid payouts to state, local and tribal governments, hospitals, non-profits and others. At least one federal legislator is already on the case — on Friday, Texas Rep. Chip Roy sent a letter to FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, spotlighting the troubling state of affairs:

“The depletion of the DRF is of particular concern considering the sheer amount of funding that has gone to COVID-19 projects nearly a year and a half after the COVID-19 emergency – which should have been terminated much earlier – was terminated.

According to a FEMA document, as of October 4, 2024, nearly $4 billion – or 45% – of the DRF funding that was delayed … was for COVID-19 projects. About $1.2 billion of that COVID-19 funding would go to the state of California alone.”

In addition to requesting a full accounting of Covid and non-Covid spending, Roy asked Criswell to explain how her agency would prevent Covid-19 projects from continuing to “jeopardize FEMA’s ability to use the DRF in the future to respond to disasters, absent a massive increase in congressional appropriations.”

Barring an extension, FEMA will finally stop accepting Covid-funeral reimbursement applications on September 30, 2025. However, as of now, the agency plans on tapping its disaster fund for other Covid-19 outlays for four more years —to the tune of another $22.2 billion between now and September 2028.

That’s assuming FEMA’s estimate is accurate, but cost estimations are another recurring weakness of the organization. Indeed, FEMA originally estimated $17.6 billion in total Covid-19 outlays over the duration of the emergency. By March of this year, its estimate had soared to $171.6 billion.

* * *

Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. Read more and subscribe at starkrealities.substack.com  

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

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Israel has been at war on several fronts for more than a year at this point, and is rapidly expending ammo and missiles, especially as it tries to shoot down what are now dozens of projectiles daily sent from Hezbollah positions in Lebanon.

Hezbollah is estimated to have an arsenal of hundreds of thousands of rockets and drones of various sizes. Israel’s formidable anti-air defense systems have been regularly engaging inbound threats, sometimes expending hundreds of interceptors a day – and this was particularly true during the Oct.1st Iranian ballistic missile attack.

Israel has long heavily relied on the United States to supply it with heavy artillery, bombs, and missiles – but now appears to be running low on interceptors amid the daily firefights. 

A new Financial Times report warns that Israel’s missile defense shield is being stretched thin, and that the country is more heavily relying on Washington to fill the gaps.

“Israel faces a looming shortage of interceptor missiles as it shores up air defenses to protect the country from attacks by Iran and its proxies, according to industry executives, former military officials and analysts,” FT writes.

“The US is racing to help close gaps in Israel’s protective shield, announcing on Sunday the deployment of a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) antimissile battery, ahead of an expected retaliatory strike from Israel on Iran that risks further regional escalation.”

One analyst and former US senior defense official, Dana Stroul, stated that “Israel’s munitions issue is serious. Stroul, a pro-Israel and anti-Iran hawk, has described that “If Iran responds to an Israel attack [with a massive air strike campaign], and Hizbollah joins in too, Israel air defenses will be stretched.”

She underscored the limitations in such a scenario for the Pentagon’s stockpiles: “The US can’t continue supplying Ukraine and Israel at the same pace. We are reaching a tipping point.”

We’ve highlighted before that Israel likely cannot sustain wars on multiple fronts without steady support and weapons shipments from the US. As conflict – and Washington involvement – from Eastern Europe to the Middle East escalates, it remains that the only ‘winners’ are the major US defense firms:

Boaz Levy, CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries which produces missile interceptors, adds: “Some of our lines are working 24 hours, seven days a week. Our goal is to meet all our obligations.”

Palestinian media has meanwhile taken note…

“Supply constraints” and the demands of war have left the Israeli military “relying on the US to fill the gaps in protective shields”.

In recent days, the US announced it is deploying the anti-missile system THAAD to Israel as it continues to provide “ironclad” support for its… pic.twitter.com/Ngt2iGXKPG

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) October 15, 2024

During two separate rounds of Iranian missile attacks on Israel of the past year, the US has deployed warships and fighter jets to assist Israel in shooting down inbound projectiles. But systems like the Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling remain vital to Israel’s daily defense, especially given Hezbollah’s ramped-up attacks on the north of late. The US has now sent the Army’s THAAD missile defense system.

Will the US ever cut off Israel? It is unlikely, given that both sides of the aisle tend to be led by “Israel firsters” – and sadly the presidential race is no different.

Authored by Jack Phllips via The Epoch Times,

Mask mandates will be returning to several counties in California’s San Francisco Bay Area starting next month.

The orders, which were handed down by individual counties, apply mainly to health care workers, although at least two Bay Area counties have extended the requirement to visitors and patients.

A similar mandate was handed down broadly across the Bay Area for the 2023–2024 fall-through-spring period.

Health officials in counties who have issued upcoming mask mandates say that the face coverings are designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19, influenza, and other respiratory viruses, harking back to the COVID-19 pandemic when mandates were widespread across much of the United States.

Where the Mandates Are Going Into Effect

Alameda County, which encompasses the city of Oakland, issued an order last month that mandates staff at health care facilities to wear masks between Nov. 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025.

“The fall and winter of 2023-2024 saw substantial waves of RSV, flu and COVID19, and a similar pattern is expected this year,” the health order said, adding that such viruses “typically circulate and peak in Alameda County during the late fall and winter months.”

It warned that any violation of the order’s provision in Alameda County “constitutes an imminent threat and menace to public health, constitutes a public nuisance, and is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”

The mandate only applies to staff and not patients or visitors.

Authorities in Contra Costa County issued a similar health order on Sept. 26 requiring health care staff to wear masks for the same time period with similar penalties. It also applies only to staff and not patients.

“The masking of personnel in these facilities is necessary to provide a layer of protection to patients during the respiratory season when risk of exposure is highest,” the county said.

Napa County issued an Oct. 1 health order that mandates health care workers in health care facilities wear masks. It doesn’t apply to visitors and patients.

“This Order requires each of these facilities implement and enforce a program requiring healthcare workers, regardless of vaccination status, to mask while in patient care areas. This order supersedes prior standing masking orders directed at healthcare workers,” the county wrote.

Going a step further, Santa Clara County—which includes San Jose—will require all people inside health care facilities, including visitors and patients, to wear masks from Nov. 1 to March 31, 2025. Exceptions are made for children under age 2 and people with medical issues in which a mask could interfere with the individual’s breathing or cannot remove a mask without assistance.

“Preventive measures like wearing a mask in crowded indoor places and staying home when you are sick continue to add layers of protection against respiratory viruses,” the county said in a news release issued last month. “Just like last year, the April 2023 health order will continue to require masks in all patient care areas of health care facilities starting November 1 and continuing through the winter respiratory virus period.”

Not Every Bay Area County Has Them

Sonoma, Solano, Marin, and San Francisco counties have not indicated whether mask mandates will go into effect at health care facilities, according to an Epoch Times review of recent orders from the counties.

Outside California

Aside from the Bay Area, it appears no other counties anywhere else in the United States will issue similar mandates at health care facilities.

However, if data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show cases of COVID-19 rising again, other areas may reintroduce mask mandates. Last winter, New York City reimposed a mask mandate at its hospitals as officials cited a rise in cases of the virus.

Over the summer, mask mandates were implemented for a period of time by at least two U.S. health care providers. The Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation in Arizona said in early August that it would reinstate mask mandates at its facilities in the state for at least two weeks, while the Baystate Health in Massachusetts also implemented one in late August.

What the CDC’s Data Shows

As of Oct. 10, the CDC’s wastewater tracking tool shows that COVID-19 levels across the United States are currently at “low” levels, down from the “very high” amounts reported in mid-August. In August, COVID-19-related deaths in the United States were near all-time lows, according to the CDC’s historical data on the virus.

COVID-19 is now the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, according to a CDC report released over the summer. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus was the nation’s third leading cause of death. It dropped to fourth in 2022.