News Vérité

After greenlighting efforts by VP JD Vance to negotiate directly with Iranian hardliners to strike a peace deal, President Trump has once again changed his mind. He now says no deal is necessary. On Truth Social, he refocused his vice president, to wit: “I have asked Vice President Vance to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S. We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!” His depiction of “having” Iran is at least partially correct. We still have their frozen assets, their shipping lanes have been sealed off, and the Strait of Hormuz is actually fairly functional. Some reports even indicate that more oil is now flowing through the narrow passageway than before hostilities began in February. If economic pressures alone will lead to either regime or policy change in Iran, then Trump can play his waiting game and possibly win. However, his original dream of quickly finding a Delcy Rodriguez clone to run the country in his stead is clearly not going to happen.

United Nations Secretary-General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres is warning that unless “fossil fuels go the way of dinosaurs,” the world is on the path to extinction, or thereabouts. Yeah, right, and according to Al Gore, Santa Monica, California, was supposed to be underwater six years ago because of global warming and melting ice caps. Doomsday predictions are a global sport. Most of the early predictions were tied into religious beliefs, but a 1960 doomsday warning — based on population growth — predicted that the world would end this Friday, November 13, 2026. The “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026” paper was a famous, provocative scientific study published in the journal Science on November 4, 1960. Co-authored by Austrian-American physicist and cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster alongside researchers Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot, it gained lasting fame by calculating a precise, mathematically derived date for the end of humanity — this Friday. And it used science, not religion, to reach its conclusion. That prediction, which saw humanity squeezing itself to death, eventually died the death of all doomsday events. Reality caught up with it. It seems that some eight billion people can now happily live together without squeezing the

After his election drubbing a week ago, President Trump initially softened his Iran rhetoric to the point of saying that resumption of strikes on the country is “highly unlikely.” Today, he even met with Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani to discuss diplomatic avenues to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.  After the meeting, the president confirmed that he would rather see a peaceful solution with Iran, but warned that the US is “ready to go ‌anytime we want” with strikes. Iran says it’s impossible to move towards peace unless the U.S. lifts its naval blockade, releases seized assets, and lifts sanctions. Of course, so long as Trump insists that Iran give up its nuclear ambitions, a deal seems far off, if not downright impossible. In addition, the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) claims the Strait belongs to Iran. The group says that, since the strategic environment has changed due to the war, it will not give up its sovereignty over the Strait – neither during the negotiations with the United States nor after the war. Iran is also rapidly rebuilding its weapons stockpile, hiding most of it underground. Senior IRGC officials