An update on Pershing Square USA, Ltd. $PSUS:   Since its IPO on April 29th, PSUS has deployed nearly 85% of its capital in 12 companies including Amazon, Microsoft, UBER, Meta, Brookfield, Restaurant Brands, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at prices we believe to be extremely attractive.   The PSUS portfolio, along with the other Pershing Square funds, also includes four new companies, which we will disclose at the time of our second quarter report.   As a result of our investment activity over the last six weeks, we believe the PSUS portfolio is now invested in a number of the highest quality durable growth companies in the world, which are trading near their all-time lowest valuations.   Furthermore, as of this moment, PSUS is trading at a ~20% discount to the net asset value (NAV) of its underlying holdings so a buyer of the stock at today’s price is acquiring the current portfolio at a double discount. We believe the PSUS discount to NAV has emerged due to short-term technical factors related to the IPO that should moderate over time.   Pershing Square management and affiliates are all-in, having acquired more than ten million shares or $500 million of PSUS in the IPO and in the market thereafter. 
In summary, we believe PSUS and its portfolio holdings represent an extremely attractive bargain at today’s share price and we have put our money where our mouth is.

Ro, you just gave a nice little stump speech. Congrats. I'm talking about how AI can be used to make government more efficient, less expensive and provide an option, where it makes sense , to private enterprise. Enabling more of the revenue you collect from taxpayers to go directly to the people who need it. Ask your GenZ and neediest constituents, if AI could reduce spending in your state and improve the quality of services offered, with some percent of those savings being deposited in their bank accounts annually, would they approve of the government using AI ? You know the answer. By focusing on technology that can allow government to provide better services at a lower cost, which AI will be in a position to enable, only then can you help provide for people who need help and support. AI is new, and not easy to implement. Which is why your state and the federal government should be creating programs to give new grads, who know or can learn AI, jobs to work with existing staff to find ways to decrease costs and improve efficiency. It's an investment that will pay off. And as far as all the things you want to subsidize, from homes to childcare to healthcare , you could take every dollar from every billionaire and trillionaire in your state and probably every state and territory, leave them broke and then eat them, and it wouldn't cover for a year, the cost of what you want to do But Since I know healthcare, let's start there and see how serious you are about Medicare for All ? Who runs it and how do you choose that person? Right now the proposed legislation from jayapal and sanders says ," at the discretion of the Sec of HHS" What do you think would be happening right now if that had been passed ? I'll tell you the same thing I tell Republicans who think removing government and regulation from any market will make that market bigger and more efficient ... Ideology is not a strategy

The "Great Australian Dream" of simply owning a home used to be a reality—now it feels like a cruel joke for so many everyday Aussies. 🏠 How did the government royally screw this up so badly? It didn't just happen by accident, and it's time we talk about the policies that got us here. If you're as frustrated by the housing market, read this eye-opening article here 👇 realestate.propertysharemark… #AusPol #HousingCrisis #RealEstateAus

This may sound counterintuitive, but the best place to start a path to Universal Healthcare is with big companies. Our biggest companies are really bad dealing with the economics of their healthcare benefits. They get ripped off. A lot. They are not functionally set up to address both cost and quality of outcomes. They take on all the cost risk. But. They hire companies affiliated with huge HC conglomerates to manage it all for them. Those conglomerates keep the huge companies as much in the dark about actual costs as they do the 20 person start up I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to companies with tens and hundreds of thousands of lives who had no idea whether the price the company administering their medical benefits paid a hospital for a surgery and in patient stay, was the same price they billed the company. They have no idea at all. In many cases, they only receive a weekly invoice for millions of dollars for their medical and pharmacy benefits and they have no idea if it accurately reflects their contract, or, if they got the best price , or if there is a spread and more Some try to audit, but the claims data doesn’t incorporate the actual amount paid to the care provider. Nor does it have all the fields necessary. Or even worse, sometimes they only get their weekly invoice and don’t have full claims available to them Still, despite this they “ trust” these big conglomerates to act as middlemen and rip them off. Why don’t they switch ? This is the conundrum they find themselves in. They have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and their families they cover. The law of big numbers say a lot of those folks are in very messy situations. They dont want to go through the pain, fear and uncertainty of moving from their current source of care. And the HR department knows the emotional switching cost of moving away from the incumbent is incredibly high. They don’t have enough people working in HR to deal with it. Those same big companies rarely have more than one person acting as a “HealthCare CFO “, responsive for making sure all the pricing is accurate or negotiated. And of course, no big company wants to admit they are getting ripped off. And none will violate their confidentiality clause of their contracts. I literally tell them to put a pdf of their HC contracts into their LLMs and just ask it “where am I getting ripped off “. Not perfect. But the list is always very long and eye opening So what should they do. The word of the week is “Carve Out”. These companies are big enough they can ask to Carve Out anything they want. I tell them to use their Carve Out to direct contract with transparent surgery centers and providers. Maybe just hop or knee replacements to start. Hopefully CostPlusDrugs.com too :) This is the starting point

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

NASA satellites show the Earth is becoming greener. Since the early 1980s, global leaf area has increased about 15%. That equals roughly 2 billion hectares of additional vegetation, an area twice the size of the United States. Vegetation is expanding into semi-arid regions and agricultural productivity is rising. At least 70% of the greening is driven by rising CO2. Higher CO2 allows plants to photosynthesize more efficiently. More CO2 means more plant growth. The planet is not browning, it is greening.

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense. SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world. Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere. SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity. Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help. The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist. Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives. Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation. Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears. Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction. We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.

Hello Senator.... This November it will be 50 years since you were first elected to Congress, so we want to be the first to say . "Happy 50th Anniversary of drawing a taxpayer funded salary." That is quite an achievement. In fact - you are 2nd longest-still serving member in Congress. It has been a long time since you held a private sector job. AND yes 50 years ago - in 1976 (it was America's Bicentennial that year) - people still punched clocks back then. The world has changed a lot. During your 50 years in Congress - you watched as the creators and inventors and producers changed the world, creating trillions in new wealth, millions of new jobs and dramatically raising living standards for everyone rich and poor alike. And for 50 years you have voted to raise taxes and regulate and oversee every move of the private sector. You have never created or invented or produced. Just taxed and regulated and outraged. But thank you for using the platform the "TRILLIONAIRE class" has provided to the entire world for free to tell us all how disgusted you are. We would never know otherwise.

The year is 1949. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain. The year is 1956. Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over. The year is 1966. A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots. The year is 1979. Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005. The year is 1985. Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning. The year is 1992. There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with. So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now. Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one. It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story? You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements. I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff. In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility. I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times. Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention. Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months). His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats. Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

wsj.com/opinion/high-tech-se… As most of you here know, my foundation has sent thousands of men and women to trade schools all over America. Through our work ethic scholarship program, mikeroweWORKS has helped train the next generation of skilled workers, and in the coming months and years, we’ll train thousands more. But the truth is, there aren’t enough trade schools in the country to meet the current need, and a lot of people who might otherwise consider a career in the skilled trades, have been discouraged by the cost of doing so. Happily, a lot of influential CEO's have done the math and concluded that closing the skills gap is nothing less than a matter of national security. Every week, some leader in some consequential industry calls to tell me about a new initiative to reinvigorate the trades, and many have reached out to see if mikeroweWORKS might join their efforts to help train the next generation of skilled workers. Recently, I’ve been really encouraged by companies like @WellsFargo, @BlackRock, @Ford @HomeDepot, @Lowes, and so many others – all looking for better ways to make a more persuasive case for hundreds of thousands of AI-proof, six-figure jobs that don’t require a four-year degree. The most recent initiative to hit my radar comes from Meta. It looks promising, and I’m happy to support it. The attached op-ed appeared in yesterday’s The @WSJ and outlines the details of The American Workforce Academy - a five-week, super-intensive training program that doesn’t cost the workers a dime. In fact, the workers are actually paid as they learn. And then, they’re guaranteed a job on the other side. I co-authored the piece with Dina Powell-McCormick the President of @Meta, and today, Dina and I'll be making the rounds on the usual networks, talking about the pressing need to attract more workers into the skilled trades as soon as possible. The AI economy, like it or not, is upon us, and the infrastructure that’s being proposed to support it will cost upwards of $10 trillion and require hundreds of thousands of skilled workers. Workers that, for the moment anyway, do not exist. I know that data centers are controversial, and I know people are nervous about AI. I’m not downplaying any of that. In fact, I think it’s really important for those in power to make a more persuasive case for a future that has so many unsettled. All I can tell you for sure is that the future is coming at us very quickly. The AI Race is real, the stakes a very high, and the United States cannot afford to lose. On the other hand, we can’t possibly hope to win, without skilled labor. This program, and others like it, are an important step in the right direction. COMMENTARY (U.S.) High-Tech Seeks Skilled Tradesmen Americans have been told a fable about our economic future. Construction and manufacturing were giving way to a digital economy based on knowledge alone. Skilled labor was outdated. Shop class was defunded. Four-year degrees were idolized. Blue-collar job losses and brittle supply chains were the price of progress. This myth assumed that high-tech and the trades were alternatives, even rivals. In fact, they are interdependent. For 250 years, America has claimed the lion’s share of the world’s greatest inventions. But it was generations of American workers who strung the telegraph wire, laid the railroad tracks, and built the interstate highways and buried the fiber. They shared in the prosperity that resulted. The artificial-intelligence revolution shows that America’s technological progress and skilled workforce are still inseparable. To maintain our technological edge, we need to build infrastructure at scale and with great speed. This requires better pathways into high-paying trades for Americans hungry for opportunity. The skilled trades and Silicon Valley need each other—and America’s future needs them both. That’s why Meta and our partners, including the @ABCNational and the The National Urban League are announcing the launch of America’s Workforce Academy, the largest private-sector commitment to the skilled trades in American history, beginning with a $115 million commitment in the first year and committing hundreds of millions over time. AWA will reject the failed approach that asks workers to pay for their own training and hope to be rewarded with a job. The men and women who enroll will be paid for their time. Parents won’t be blocked from learning tomorrow’s skills because they need to put food on the table today. Courses will take weeks and leave graduates with industry-standard certifications in high-demand fields such as electrical work, mechanical systems and plumbing. Every graduate will be guaranteed a job on a @Meta partner’s construction site. AWA, we believe, is the start of a revolution our economy needs. Practically every major industry is desperate to hire more skilled workers. The mikeroweWORKSFoundation has spent years sounding this alarm. At Metaalone, we anticipate needing thousands more workers as we build infrastructure to empower students, families and small-business owners. There is no lack of Americans eager to learn and work. Earlier this year, Meta launched LevelUp, a smaller training program focused on fiber installation. In the first seven days, we received more than 35,000 applications for 1,000 openings. Demand isn’t the problem. What has been missing is a practical bridge linking America’s workers to America’s needs. AWA will be that pathway. Skilled workers electrified rural America one pole at a time. They manned the factories that built the arsenal that won World War II. Now a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American economic strength for a new age. The AI revolution is bringing change and uncertainty, but also historic opportunities. Americans don’t flinch from challenges. When opportunity shows up as a hard hat or a pair of overalls, we put them on and get to work. That’s always been our story. AWA will help us write the next chapter—one where the future is for everyone. @dinapowellMcC is president of Meta. Mr. Rowe is CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation and host of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs.”

To all independent doctors. What percentage of your patients are in their deductible phase ? And what percent of those are getting care for less than their deductible? Ins carriers know you take all the risk of payment. Time for that to stop

A Civil War doctor watched more men die of dysentery than of bullets and decided the problem was the bread. James Salisbury was a Union surgeon in a war where disease killed more than half of the 600,000 dead. He blamed the starchy biscuit ration for the camps' endless dysentery and put his sick soldiers on chopped lean beef, broiled, with almost nothing else, letting other food back to a quarter of the plate only once they recovered. He set it all down in 1888 in a book called The Relation of Alimentation and Disease, one of the earliest American diet books and a meat-first elimination protocol a full century before anyone coined the word carnivore. Salisbury never named the dish after himself. He only ever called it muscle pulp of beef. What survives under his name today is a tray. A grey patty of mechanically separated beef, soy protein, caramel colour and gravy reconstituted from powder, sealed under a film lid and microwaved. The doctor prescribed lean beef and a knife. The food industry handed it back as a frozen dinner with a cartoon on the box. The recipe: - 500g good ground chuck, the fattier the better. - 1 egg yolk to bind. - Salt, black pepper, a dash of Worcestershire. - 1 large onion, sliced. - 200g mushrooms. - A splash of beef stock. - Beef tallow or butter to fry. Mix the beef with the yolk and seasoning. Form into thick ovals. Sear hard in tallow until a crust forms. Lift out. Soften the onions and mushrooms in the same fat. Add the stock, scrape the pan, reduce to a gravy. Return the steaks, spoon the gravy over, finish together for two minutes. He thought he was treating dysentery. He was, almost by accident, writing the first carnivore protocol, and a hundred and forty years later people keep arriving at the same conclusion the same way he did, by watching what happens when the starch comes off the plate.

The next crypto cycle will be very different It will emphasize businesses with real revenue and growth trajectories $portals is the epitome of this trading for basically free It will be repriced

After being fired from CBS, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday said that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.” Those are remarkable claims for which Pelley presented no evidence. Indeed, it would be extraordinary for CBS to demand such things of a correspondent, either verbally or in writing, given the reputational risk to the network. A more likely explanation is that Pelley disagreed with someone at CBS and then declared a difference of opinion to be a demand to lie. Support for this interpretation comes from the fact that he claimed Tuesday that CBS’s new management, led by Bari Weiss, was trying to kill “60 Minutes,” something for which he also did not provide evidence. Moreover, the accusation makes no sense. CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss took the job to rebuild CBS News, not to wreck it, and a ruined “60 Minutes” would hurt her. Paramount’s owners did not pay billions for the network to burn its best asset for spite. So the simpler reading is that Pelley is the one stretching the truth. Doing so appears to be a habit for Pelley. He told The New York Times, “I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq,” but being in a combat zone as a journalist is not the same as being “in combat.” The remark is yet more evidence of Pelley’s propensity to exaggerate to the point of lying. For decades, mainstream liberal journalists have displayed remarkable levels of arrogance, even as they get major stories wrong. Consider the case of CBS News’ former anchor Dan Rather. In the fall of 2004, two months before the election, Rather presented documents purporting to show favoritism in George W. Bush’s National Guard service. Experts called them forgeries. CBS apologized: “We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,” Rather said. On air, he added, “I want to say, personally and directly, I’m sorry.” But then, a decade later, Rather told Variety he still stands “100 percent” behind the report and reframed the apology. Or consider NBC’s Katie Couric. In her 2016 documentary “Under the Gun,” editors inserted roughly eight to nine seconds of silence after she asked Virginia gun owners how to keep guns from felons and terrorists without background checks, making them look stumped. The raw audio revealed that they answered immediately. Couric’s first instinct was to defend what she did, saying she was “very proud of the film.” Only after sustained backlash did she apologize. In her 2021 memoir “Going There,” Couric admitted she cut Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s harshest anthem-kneeling comments from her 2016 interview. Ginsburg had said kneeling players showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life, which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from.” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in the spring of 2020, aired a clip of Attorney General Bill Barr that omitted part of his answer, misleading the public. When Catherine Herridge interviewed Barr for CBS Evening News, she asked what history would say about his decision to drop the case against a former National Security Advisor to President Trump, Michael Flynn. The Obama administration’s FBI had illegally targeted Flynn for entrapment and prosecution. Barr replied that ”history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.” "Meet the Press'" anchor at the time, Chuck Todd, said on air that Barr “didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.’” But “Meet the Press” had left out the second part of Barr’s answer to Herridge, in which he said, “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.” The safeguards the journalism profession built against error did not work when it mattered. The corrections, the editors, the fact-checkers, and the standards desks all sat in place while the press got the border, trans medicine, climate, the sixth extinction, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, Covid and much else wrong. Gerth described how reporters sought to “shoot the messenger” rather than grapple with evidence contradicting the Russia collusion narrative... x.com/shellenberger/status/2… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism and to read the full article!

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Since the 1980s, the Sahara has shrunk by roughly 8%. Satellite data show widespread greening, a pattern that is playing out across the planet. Around 50% of Earth's vegetated land has become significantly greener, an area roughly three times the size of the United States. The dominant driver is not rainfall or land use change, it is rising atmospheric CO2. Higher CO2 lets plants photosynthesize more efficiently, they lose less water, they tolerate heat and dryness better. The effect is strongest along desert margins, across the Sahel, the Middle East, Australia's interior and the southern edge of the Sahara. Rising CO2 is making the deserts, and the planet as a whole, greener.

84 years ago today, the most important Japanese admiral in the Pacific sailed into a fog bank he could not see out of, carrying secret orders he believed were known to no one on earth. The Americans had read them three weeks ago. In May 1942, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had a plan to end the war in the Pacific in 30 days. He would draw the surviving US Navy carriers into a trap near a tiny atoll called Midway, 1,300 miles northwest of Hawaii, and destroy them with the largest naval force ever assembled. 200 ships. 700 aircraft. 100,000 men. Four heavy carriers under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo would lead the strike. The American fleet, which had only three serviceable carriers left after the Coral Sea, would be annihilated. Then Hawaii would fall. Then the US would sue for peace. The plan was perfect. It was also compromised. In a basement in Pearl Harbor, a small team of cryptanalysts under Commander Joseph Rochefort had broken the Japanese naval cipher JN-25 in the spring of 1942. They were reading roughly 20 percent of every Japanese signal in real time, and educated guesswork filled in the rest. By mid-May they knew the target was somewhere referred to only as "AF." But where was AF? Rochefort had a hunch. He sent a signal in the clear from Midway saying their water distillation plant had broken down. Two days later, Japanese intercepts mentioned that "AF" was running short of fresh water. Bingo. By May 27 Admiral Chester Nimitz knew the date of the Japanese attack, the composition of the Japanese force, the route Nagumo would take, and roughly the time he would launch his first strike. He pulled every American carrier to a point northeast of Midway called "Point Luck" and waited. The trap had been set for him. He set a trap inside the trap. On June 2, Nagumo's four carriers approached Midway through the worst fog any of them had ever seen. Visibility dropped below 600 yards. His ships could barely see each other. He held radio silence to protect his approach. He believed he had complete surprise. He believed the American carriers were thousands of miles away in the South Pacific. He believed he was about to win the war. Yamamoto, on the battleship Yamato 600 miles behind him, had intelligence that the American carriers might in fact be at sea. He chose not to break radio silence to warn Nagumo. He assumed Nagumo had the same intelligence. Nagumo did not. At 4:30 AM on June 4, Nagumo launched 108 aircraft against Midway from a position the Americans had been waiting for him to reach. By sunset, three of his four carriers were burning hulks. The fourth would sink the next morning. Japan lost 3,057 men, 248 aircraft, and the four best carriers of the Pacific War in a single day. Japanese naval aviation never recovered. The war was decided in six minutes between 10:22 and 10:28 AM on June 4. The whole disaster traced back to one decision on June 2: a Japanese admiral sailing into fog, trusting that nobody knew where he was going.

"LAST NIGHT: George Clooney attacked Dolly Parton — and received a brutal “lesson” he won’t soon forget.-BN George Clooney thought he could easily score public points by attacking Dolly Parton over her views on patriotism, traditional values, and the direction of American culture. But this time, he picked the wrong opponent. Known as one of America’s most beloved entertainment icons, Dolly Parton didn’t just respond — she delivered a powerful message about freedom of thought, personal responsibility, and respect for everyday Americans. “George Clooney says I’m dividing people with my opinions,” Dolly Parton began in a calm but firm tone. “But what truly divides this country is mocking anyone who thinks differently and pretending only one side deserves to be heard.” And she didn’t stop there. “You know what’s even more dangerous?” Parton continued. “Using fame and influence to shame ordinary people simply because they refuse to follow Hollywood’s political script.” Then Dolly Parton went even further, speaking as someone who has spent decades in the entertainment industry watching public debate become increasingly toxic and hostile toward opposing viewpoints. “It’s not different opinions that weaken a nation,” Parton said. “What weakens it is fear, intolerance, and teaching people to hate one another because of politics.” At that point, this was no longer just another celebrity feud — it became a larger conversation about free speech, division, and the future of public discourse in America. Instead of backing down, Dolly Parton turned the confrontation into a broader debate about the values the country should defend. “I’m not perfect,” Parton admitted. “I’ve made mistakes. But I will always believe that a strong country is one where people can speak freely, disagree openly, and still respect each other as fellow Americans.” And then came the line that many fans said they would never forget: “America was not built on fear or hatred between citizens. It was built on courage, freedom, and the belief that people with different views could still move forward together. So ask yourselves — who is really trying to unite this country?” What began as a celebrity attack quickly turned into something much bigger: a message about unity, responsibility, and the future of America. George Clooney thought he could attack Dolly Parton… but what she said next shocked the nation. Don’t miss her jaw-dropping response—click to see history being made:

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