News Vérité

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is keeping a campaign pledge to open government-owned-and-operated grocery stores to help the food affordability crisis. His Economic Development Corporation (EDC) says the five planned locations might not be as complete as the major chains, lacking hot food counters or butchers, but prices on many popular items will be 30 percent lower than elsewhere. “It may not have all the items, but it’s going to be like a typical grocery store,” insisted Jeanny Pak, interim CEO of the EDC. Whatever that means. Fulfilling this Mamdani campaign promise will cost taxpayers $70 million just to open the doors, and after that, who knows? If they’re undercutting other stores by 30 percent, there may not be any profits to fund future operations. Grocery stores operate at paper-thin profit margins to begin with, and if Mamdani Grocery Inc. isn’t going to feature the hot-button stations that rake in the bucks, it’s going to fulfill Margaret Thatcher’s comment about socialism, “Pretty soon you run out of other people’s money.” Hizzoner has that all figured out too. He’s already raising taxes on people who own secondary homes known as Pied-à-Terres, hoping to haul in another $500 million annually. By the

At this point in his presidency, polling only 24 percent approval, Richard Nixon was only days away from boarding Air Force One and returning to his home in San Clemente as an ex-president. He resigned over the Watergate scandal and imminent impeachment, the only president ever to quit his job. Donald Trump, who wouldn’t resign if his polling numbers were minus-24, now averages out at the mid-30s in recent polling, though he attributes all of this to the Fake News media. On Truth Social, he wrote (caps all his):  “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN.” Trump has the support of just 34 percent of Americans in CNN’s latest poll, matching his lowest point just after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He has the approval of just 33 percent in a new AP-NORC survey, tying his lowest since 2017, and 32 percent in Quinnipiac University data, falling to an all-time low in that poll. At year two in their second term, Bill Clinton stood at 64 percent, Ronald Reagan at 61, Dwight Eisenhower at 58, Barack Obama at 43, Harry Truman at 39, and George W. Bush at 37. Both Truman and Bush

Biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has announced the birth of genetically engineered dire wolf puppies, while pushing forward with an ambitious plan to resurrect Ice Age giants by 2028. The announcement came with all the fanfare of a Hollywood premiere: three wolf puppies, born to domestic dog surrogates, representing the first attempt to bring back an extinct predator that vanished from North America over 10,000 years ago. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based biotechnology company behind the project, declared it a milestone in de-extinction science. But as the initial excitement fades, a more nuanced picture emerges—one that reveals both the remarkable capabilities of modern genetic engineering and the significant gap between what’s scientifically possible and what constitutes true biological resurrection. The dire wolf, immortalized in popular culture and known from thousands of fossil specimens recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits, has long captured public imagination. Now, Colossal claims to have brought it back. Yet understanding what the company has actually achieved requires looking beyond the headlines and into the intricate details of genetic proxy engineering. Engineering an Echo of Extinction The three puppies—named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi—were not cloned from intact dire wolf DNA, nor do they represent a simple resurrection of