News Vérité

Talk about trying to buy votes, that’s what our president blatantly tried to do today at the GOP Midterm Convention, that in itself being a first for any party. To confess, I didn’t see or hear all of Donald Trump’s near two-hour speech, but according to The Wall Street Journal, he offered — without details of how he was going to pay for it — $5,000 for every adult American if the Republicans retain control of the House and Senate. As the Journal calculates, that could amount to 200 million Americans, with checks totaling about $1 trillion. Trump didn’t say where the money, honey would come from, but he hinted at tariff revenues. Last I looked, we were actually paying back billions in collected tariffs after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump lacked the authority for most of his “Liberation Day” tariffs. There is some precedent for doling out citizen dividends. During the pandemic, two sets of checks were issued, but they were keyed into the income levels of the potential recipients. If your income was too high, no dividend. Trump said during his speech: “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of

A quarter of a century after nineteen hijackers commandeered four commercial airliners and carried out the deadliest foreign attack on American soil, the question of foreign state complicity remains one of the most thoroughly scrutinized and politically sensitive chapters in modern geopolitical history. At the center of that inquiry sits the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. From the earliest hours following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and the strike on the Pentagon, the demographic footprint of the plot pointed toward Riyadh: fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens. Furthermore, the architect of the attacks and leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was born into one of the Kingdom’s wealthiest and most prominent construction dynasties, though his Saudi citizenship had been officially revoked in 1994 after his public calls to overthrow the monarchy. Yet, twenty-five years later, unpacking the “Saudi connection” requires navigating a complex evidentiary landscape. The historical record does not point to a single, monolithic narrative of a foreign government orchestrating an attack against the United States. Instead, it presents an intricate web of documented private financial networks, state-exported religious doctrine, intelligence leads, newly declassified federal records, and contested questions regarding the actions of lower-level officials

To many modern Americans, Labor Day signals little more than the unofficial end of summer—a welcome three-day weekend marked by backyard barbecues, retail sales, and trips to the beach. Beneath its tranquil contemporary surface, however, lies a history forged in the intense social conflicts of the late nineteenth century. Conceived and organized by radical labor activists with deep socialist ties, the holiday was initially designed to demonstrate working-class solidarity and demand fundamental workplace reforms. Yet when the federal government formally adopted the holiday in 1894, it did so with a very different objective: to absorb labor unrest into a state-sanctioned framework and deliberately steer the American working class away from revolutionary socialism. The Road to Federal Recognition The roots of Labor Day trace back to September 5, 1882, when the Central Labor Union (CLU) of New York organized the nation’s first major Labor Day demonstration. On that morning, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s wages to march from City Hall to Union Square. The parade was followed by speeches, concerts, and picnics, creating a vibrant public spectacle centered on urgent working-class demands, particularly the call for an eight-hour workday and safer working conditions. The concept rapidly gained momentum across

Love it or despise it, but AI — aka artificial intelligence — is all the rage. Wall Street loves it. Students cheat with it, and they adore it. Businesses are flourishing with newfound automation and a near-seamless means of customer support with AI. On the negative front, homeowners and local and state governments are freaking out over the proliferation of data centers being built to further expand the capabilities and reach of AI. Workers are being displaced by AI chatbots and AI project engines. Sometimes tragically, individuals are even becoming addicted to their favorite AI chatbot, to whom they assign personal names as if they’re close friends. Now entering the fray is Roman Catholic convert and U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who has proclaimed AI to be satanic when it’s used selfishly or fetishistically. “I think that’s kind of satanic,” Vance told an interviewer when the discussion turned to how chatbots often agree with — and even flatter — their users, too often leading to detrimental results. This has been labeled AI sycophancy. Some commentators have even labeled the onset of AI as ushering in “the end of times,” as predicted in the Book of Revelation, in that it can