Author: nick

[ad_1] We’ve all seen the memes: “You do not earn a billion dollars. You steal it. Nobody works a billion times harder than a nurse, a teacher or a farmer. That wealth comes from underpaying the people who actually did the work.” The other end of the spectrum is the slogan: “None of your problems are because someone else is a billionaire.” Or now, trillionaire. Both are equally untrue and just as economically ignorant. But perhaps the latter is even more strategically damaging to the future of a genuine free market. Elon Musk has taken in at least $38 billion…

[ad_1] Image by Koshu Kunii. Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change. So who’s to blame for…

[ad_1] Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations Fact checkers should maintain high standards of accountability because they hold unique positions in society by verifying content that can influence political practices and society as a whole. To maintain these professional standards, fact-checking network organizations such as the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) have established codes of standards, and fact-checking organizations should comply with them in a substantive way. Analysis of published corrections to their original fact checks showed that many EFCSN member organizations ensured procedural compliance but did not meet substantive standards, given their unique role in knowledge…

[ad_1] Image by James Lewis. As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250  “Celebrations”, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with multiple levels of security checkpoints, and the sky full of military flyovers, including a seven-hour schedule of flyovers on July 4th. Military flyovers come at a devastating cost–economically, psychologically and environmentally. The most recent ones came in the middle of a heatwave where even Trump’s…

[ad_1] Bereft of air conditioning, Americans in Paris last week cursed the locals for their antediluvian ways. Parisians did not exactly take it with a wry Gallic smile. Stomach-churning entitlement and sheer effrontery, they answered I was in the City of Light on my way to the Alps, and read most of this stuff in the newspapers. Yes, it was hot, very hot, but walking down the Seine and along the quais, in the small park at the head of the Île de la Cité, or passing Notre Dame glistening in the sunshine, I forgot the heat and thought back…

[ad_1] Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations Social media platforms are increasingly using community-based verification systems, such as Community Notes, and AI systems to flag and contextualize potentially misleading content at scale. While these approaches promise speed and broad coverage, concerns about accuracy, bias, and transparency persist. Drawing on interviews with 29 fact checkers, we find that practitioners see community-based verification and AI Note Writers as complementary tools that can support, but not replace, professional fact-checking. Our findings suggest that hybrid approaches, in which community contributors, AI tools, and expert fact checkers perform distinct but complementary roles, may offer a promising path toward scalable and…

[ad_1] President Trump was reportedly “shocked” to see many thousands of Iranians in the street mourning at the funeral of the country’s late leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the weekend. Khamenei was assassinated by the United States at the beginning of the February US surprise attack on Iran. The US attack on Iran was sold to Trump by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US neocons as an easy “cake walk” that would lead the Iranian government to fall and be replaced with a US-friendly regime. “I thought they hated him,” Trump said of the murdered religious leader of Iran. Not…

[ad_1] Israel’s recent decision to formally recognize the World War I-era Armenian genocide deserves a skeptical eye. After decades of silence, the Netanyahu government’s vote to recognize the Ottoman Empire’s atrocities is less a belated act of moral clarity and more a calculated move to isolate Turkey by weaponizing a historical tragedy. (The resolution still needs to be ratified by the Knesset.) Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar framed the gesture in lofty terms: “It’s never too late to do the right thing… Thus, Israel joins 32 countries that have fulfilled a moral duty by recognizing the historical truth, and rejecting attempts…

[ad_1] Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a plan by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to announce sweeping troop cuts in Europe had been blocked. Per the WSJ: The U.S., [Hegseth] planned to say, was preparing additional cuts to its forces in Europe that would go beyond the canceled deployment of an armored brigade to Poland and the earlier withdrawal of an infantry brigade from Romania… But Hegseth’s proposal was nixed after it was shared with Marco Rubio—President Trump’s national-security adviser—and other senior officials. To the European leaders now gathered in Ankara, Turkey for the annual NATO summit,…

[ad_1] Platner To 'Reflect on the Best Path Forward' in Maine Race [ad_2] Source link