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Riverside area reps split on need for congressional vote over US commitment to war By Paul J. Young, City News Service
Threat in your medicine cabinet: The FDA’s gamble on America’s drugs By Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
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s the Israel-Iran war escalates, members of Congress weighed Thursday whether to back a resolution mandating a vote on whether to approve or deny U.S. military action in the conflict — which at least one Inland Empire representative believes warrants a vote, while another doesn’t. “As Trump muses about starting another war in the Middle East, I am committed to supporting a War Powers Resolution vote in Congress,” Rep. Mark Takano, D-Riverside, told City News Service. “I do not believe any president should be able to launch such a war — especially not with Iran — without Congress.” Takano signaled his position following introduction Tuesday of a War Powers Resolution jointly introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California. The resolution, which would require votes in both the House of Representatives and Senate, emphasizes that “Congress has the sole power to declare war under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution,” and it directs the president to “terminate the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran” without congressional authorization. Massie said he wants
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to “prevent the U.S. from entering the war between Israel and Iran” because it’s not America’s fight. Missile, drone and aircraft strikes were initiated by the Israeli Defense Forces against Iran on June 12, and the latter’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to justify “Operation Rising Lion” by declaring the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear development goals. “I look forward to the president’s decision and how Congress can support
our shared goal of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Norco, told CNS, without acknowledging the proposed War Powers Resolution. “The United States will stand with Israel. Any attacks on the U.S. military or our interests in the region must be met with a swift response.” Others asked to comment were Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Temecula, Young Kim, R-West Corona, Raul Ruiz, D-Indio, and Norma Torres, D-Eastvale. None responded. See Israel-Iran war Page 28
Trump told reporters during a White House briefing Wednesday that “the next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week,” suggesting he had already decided on a strategy of engagement in the war. He posted to social media earlier this week, stating “unconditional surrender.” According to published reports, two U.S. carrier strike groups were steaming toward the Arabian Sea. An Echelon Insights poll, published by Newsweek,
Reporting Highlights • Risky Medications: The FDA has given more than 20 foreign factories a special pass to continue sending drugs to the U.S. even though they were made at plants that the agency had banned. • Troubled Factories: The medications came mostly from plants in India where inspectors found contaminated drugs, filthy labs and falsified records. • FDA Secrecy: The agency did not proactively inform the public when drugs were exempted from import bans, and it did not routinely test the medications to ensure they were safe. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. On a sweltering morning in western India in 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and demanded to be let inside. For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers at the tablet presses, mixers and filling machines that produce dozens of generic drugs for
Americans. Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records that showed vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs. Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States. But the agency, worried about medication shortages, immediately undercut its mission to ensure the safety of America’s drug supply. A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and
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