"Watching President Trump slice and dice the United Nations Tuesday morning, I couldn't help but think that the gods have a sense of humor -- and excellent timing.

"The fact that neither the building's escalator nor its teleprompter was working gave Trump fresh ammunition for his broad onslaught, which was well designed and extremely effective.

"He saw the malfunctions as a metaphor for a blob of bureaucrats failing at their core reason for being.

"He didn't skimp on offering abundant evidence that the world body is a bust at making peace and keeping it.

"Indeed, he argued that, beyond being useless, its weakness is actually making some big problems worse.

"'What is the purpose of the United Nations?' he asked before answering his own question: 'For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It's empty words, and empty words don't solve wars.'"

Read the entire article here.

"Al Jazeera, the virulently anti-Israel news outlet controlled by Qatar, is one of the two top sources used by leading artificial intelligence chatbots -- OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity AI -- to answer questions and write news summaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a Washington Free Beacon analysis has found.

"ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity -- as well as X's Grok -- list Al Jazeera as one of their most reliable sources on the topic. In response to queries from the Free Beacon, the chatbots praised Al Jazeera for its reliability, 'on-the-ground detail,' 'academic credibility,' and 'global visibility.' ...

"The ubiquity of Al Jazeera as a primary source for AI-generated news searches raises questions about the capacity (or willingness) of American AI giants to deliver accurate news about Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. This comes as AI-generated summaries are increasingly replacing traditional news publications as a primary source for news. ...

"The reliance of the AI tools on Al Jazeera is already raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill. 'Al Jazeera is not a news organization, it is a mouthpiece for terrorists like Hamas,' Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who had a recent run-in with an Al Jazeera correspondent, told the Free Beacon. 'American AI companies should not rely on terrorist-sympathizing networks for anything, much less news about the Middle East.'"

Read the entire article here.

"If Kamala Harris ever does want to run for public office again, her ambush of fellow Democrats will add to her complications.

Typically buttoned up, Harris used her new memoir to speak her mind. Now, leaders of her own party are baffled and angry.

Not even officially released, Harris' account '107 Days' was immediately met with pushback from several likely 2028 contenders, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

And that was just the start. From Washington to Los Angeles, according to interviews with more than 15 Democratic operatives across the country, the tome landed with a thud among a political class struggling to make sense of the former vice president's account, which is peppered with digs at fellow party members and frustrations with how her warp-speed campaign played out.

'If there's a political strategy here, it's a bad one. There's an awful lot of grievances and finger-pointing that really doesn't serve a political agenda,' said David Axelrod, the longtime senior adviser to former President Barack Obama."

Read the entire article here.

"Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid seems to be playing dumb about her district's directive to destroy student identification records. As I previously reported in IW Features, Fairfax County Public Schools issued new guidance to school registrars this summer, telling them to purge copies and digital uploads of students' personal identification documents from school records.

On July 1, Dave Anderson, Fairfax County Public Schools' senior district manager for student registration, sent an email to school-based registrars -- labeled as confidential -- that states: 'Based on recent Division Counsel guidance reflective of FCPS Policy and the Code of Virginia, FCPS will no longer retain copies of identification documents, including the student birth certificate, in the student's cumulative file... For clarification purposes, identification documents refer to copies of a parent's photo ID, such as a driver's license, passport, etc.'"

Read the entire article here.

"Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia.

"Written in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, scored a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning scoops in 2017 by repeating false and inflammatory leaks during President Trump's first term.

"Much of their reporting has been debunked -- and shown to be part of a smear campaign by high-ranking officials to undermine Trump, but the identities of those leakers have remained hidden because of the government's apparent unwillingness to expose its own and the refusal of reporters to identify the people who misled them and the nation."

Read the entire article here.

"As Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson push for more community violence intervention funding from the federal government, two anti-violence workers have made news for alleged criminal actions.

"Prosecutors say seven men are charged with murder after a crash-and-grab burglary led to a crash and killed a motorist on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago last week.

"CWB Chicago reported that one of the men charged works as an anti-violence peacekeeper. Keller McMillan, 35, also has three out-of-state fugitive warrants and an in-state warrant.

"CWB said another anti-violence worker was sentenced to 22 years in prison for carjacking three vehicles and shooting one of the victims in the leg. Jamari Edwards, 22, received the sentence last week."

Read the entire article here.

"All last year, we were treated to a steady stream of stories about the 'huge' and 'baffling' gap between the public's negative views about the economy and its 'actual performance.'

"Our favorite 'economist' Paul Krugman was apoplectic. 'Why are so many Americans still telling pollsters that the economy is in bad shape' when 'it's hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been.'

"Last week, the government issued two reports that explain why. And the reason is simple. The experts were wrong. The public was right.

"On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after a string of glaring mistakes in its jobs report, announced the mother of all screw-ups.

"In its preliminary 'benchmark' revision, the BLS admitted that almost 1 million jobs that it claimed to have been created from April 2024 through March 2025 didn't actually exist."

Read the entire article here.

"A group of independent nuclear proliferation experts assessed that Iran no longer has a pathway to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, confirming a major setback for the Islamic Republic following the joint U.S.-Israeli action to eliminate its nuclear program earlier this year.

"The independent analysis of the evidence gathered by the International Atomic Energy Agency since the attack confirms what U.S. President Donald Trump said in the wake of the strikes.

"The assessment from the Institute for Science and International Security, based on evidence from the International Atomic Energy Agency, found that the military strikes had 'destroyed' the Iranian regime's gas centrifuge enrichment program, hampering its ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, the key component of a nuclear bomb."

Read the entire article here.

"The writing's on the wall -- if you can read it.

Sobering national test results show more high school seniors are struggling with math and reading than at any point in recent decades, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon calling out a 'devastating trend' Tuesday.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- commonly referred to as the Nation's Report Card -- showed just 35% of high school seniors were proficient in reading, the lowest score since the assessment began in 1992.

The math score for 12th-graders was even worse, with just 22% achieving proficiency, the lowest point since the current test began in 2005."

Read the entire article here.

"Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) on Tuesday petitioned the Department of Education to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for running 'possibly illegal' anti-Israel educational initiatives inside the country's public schools.

"CAIR, whose leaders celebrated Hamas's Oct. 7 terror spree, announced late last month its Philadelphia office is partnering with K-12 schools across Pennsylvania and Delaware 'to make sure every student feels seen, safe, and supported.' While the advocacy group says it wants to make public schools 'more inclusive,' its lesson plans actually 'perpetuate pro-terrorist, anti-Israel rhetoric,' Cotton wrote in his letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.

"These lesson plans include a handbook for teaching a course titled, 'Teaching September 11, 2001 in Diverse Classrooms' -- which instructs educators to avoid using 'inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as "Islamic terrorists," "jihadists," or "radical Islamic terrorists"' when discussing the al Qaeda attack -- and a class that focuses on 'American Jews and Political Power.'

"'Such an organization should never have access to our nation's children,' Cotton wrote. 'The U.S. Department of Education must ensure that CAIR is not given an opportunity to push its radical, pro-terrorist, anti-Israel ideology on American schoolchildren.'"

Read the entire article here.