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Good morning! Today is Monday, the second of March, 2026 and this is the Monday Morning Edition of GEORGE.
U.S. President Donald Trump along with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu initiated a major war with a nation of 93 million people, 2,500 years of history, significant retaliatory capabilities, and no clear opposition within the country. Mr. Trump had drawn a red line when he warned the Iranian regime not to kill protesters this past January. The clerics ignored Mr. Trump’s warning and went ahead massacred tens of thousands of their own people, consequences be damned.
Mr. Trump did not go to Congress to obtain permission to wage war. In the United States, only Congress can declare war, However, members of Congress have not voted on a declaration of war or passed a new authorization related to Iran. Instead, the president ordered the strikes under his powers as commander in chief, calling them “major combat operations” aimed at stopping what he described as immediate threats, although that claim is dubious.
In the European Union, Hungary’s miniszterelnöke, or prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is holding up approval on Russian sanctions and a crucial €90 billion loan to Ukraine. GEORGE has the details as to why this is taking place.
Meanwhile, GEORGE has the latest updates on Iran’s attacks on its neighbors and news of the first U.S. fatalities.
In addition, GEORGE has other exclusive news about the total lunar eclipse taking place early tomorrow morning (set your alarm clocks) and a special @ADAM SMITH report on why the Citrini research memo positing the near-term outlook for artificial intelligence’s impact on the economy is on shaky ground, all in today’s edition so don’t touch that dial. Simply scroll down and read more GEORGE, starting with today’s editorial cartoon in The Sketch. GEORGE will be back on Tuesday with a brand-new editorial cartoon, even more news, and stories won’t find elsewhere.
Until then, remain curious!
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A stack of newspapers in Vienna’s Café Prúckel, each in an Original Wiener Zeitungshalter
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VOLUME VI… № 1,672
WELCOME (above)
@THE SKETCH (above) “Trump’s Claude Secret”
@INTERMEZZO I “On Frozen Pond”
@IN BRIEF ON THE WEEKEND
@INTERMEZZO II The Daytime Moon
@ADAM SMiTH ON THE ECONOMY Citrini’s Research Memo Rests on Shaky Economic Ground
@NICKERSON ON FOOD Barbetta Closes After 120 Years
@INTERMEZZO III The Moon from Hell’s Kitchen
@RECENT DISPATCHES OF NOTE
@ABOUT GEORGE
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A frozen pond in the foreground confirms it is still winter, fronting a luxury high-rise condominium in N.Y.
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Iran has been using its Shahed-136 kamikaze drone to inflict damage to its neighbors in retaliation against attacks by the United States and Israel. Videos posted online show the Shahed-136 slamming into buildings in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. The Shahed-136 drones proved their effectiveness on the Ukrainian battlefield and Iran’s indiscriminate use of the drones against its neighbors could lead to a much greater conflict in the Middle East than currently exists.
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Three U.S. servicemen were killed and an additional were five seriously wounded, U.S. Central Command said, and Mr. Trump warned on Sunday that there would likely be more American casualties as the U.S. and Israeli militaries continued to strike Iran.
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Israel said it had gained aerial freedom over Tehran and would be able to conduct intensive and frequent operations with control of the airspace from West Iran to the capital city, this after having destroyed much of Iran’s air defense systems. Aerial freedom refers to a military’s ability to operate aircraft within foreign airspace without encountering effective interference or resistance. It signifies that a nation’s air force can freely fly missions and strike targets in contested areas.
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Jerusalem. Dome of the Rock
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The U.S. military reportedly used Anthropic’s Claude, a family of advanced, large language models, or LLMs, and a conversational AI assistant in Iran strikes despite the ban Mr. Trump placed on the company on Friday. He called Anthropic a “radical left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World [sic] is all about.”
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Protesters tried to storm the U.S. Consulate in Karachi as thousands across Pakistan gathered to protest U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. At least 22 people were killed in the protests on Sunday including at least ten in Karachi in the attempt to breach the embassy, officials reported.
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The European Union was trying to finalize two programs – a critical €90 billion ($105.9 billion) loan for Ukraine, and the other the EU’s 20th package of sanctions meant to increase pressure on Russia – when Hungary’s miniszterelnöke, or prime minister, Viktor Orbán, raised an objection to the loan and the sanctions and torpedoed what was to have been a show of European solidarity, thereby enraging other EU leaders. Upon closer examination, it turns out that Mr. Orbán is unusually vulnerable in the 12 April parliamentary election thanks to the country’s economic stagnation and deteriorating public services and Péter Magyar’s center-right Tisza party has emerged as a major challenger to Mr. Orbán’s Fidesz party. “Using the European agenda to wage domestic political battles, and doing so after having turned one’s own society – through propaganda – against a fighting Ukraine, is, in my view, a violation of European solidarity,” Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, told reporters on last week.
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The Moon on 1 November 2025 was a waxing gibbous. It was 90.9% illuminated and continued to get fuller, with the next full moon scheduled for 5 November 2025.
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The Green Party won a by-election for a British parliamentary seat in northern England. Hannah Spencer, a member of the local council who is a plumber by trade, won with 41% of the vote, marking the first time the Greens have ever won a parliamentary by-election. Ms. Spencer’s and her party’s victory signaled the frustration left-leaning votes have with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
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At least 20 people are dead and dozens more injured after a military cargo plane carrying banknotes skidded off the runway after a crash landing and veered onto a highway on Friday, leaving about a dozen damaged vehicles in its wake as well as a fair quantity of paper money. The C-130 Hercules skidded off the runway as it landed at El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Bolivia. Video footage posted by local media show people attempting to collect the banknotes while police attempted to disperse them. using teargas. Later in the day, officials set the money alight in a bon fire at the scene of the accident. El Alto is the seventh highest airport in the world, and the highest outside of China.
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Amateur astronomers and sky watchers take note: The Moon will turn blood red when a total lunar eclipse graces the sky for 58 minutes, the last such celestial occurrence until 2028. The event will be visible Tuesday morning in North America, Central America and the western part of South America, and Australia. Eastern Asia will see it Tuesday night. The lunar eclipse will not be visible from Europe or Africa. For those on the east coast of North America, the celestial spectacle will be followed by another rare scene, a selenelion, which is when both the sun and eclipsed moon are simultaneously visible. The most recent eclipse was several weeks ago, a “ring of fire’” solar eclipse that dazzled people and penguins in Antarctica but was not visible elsewhere. An eclipse happens when one planetary body blocks sunlight from reaching another. Lunar eclipses happen when the Earth passes between the sun and the full Moon and refracted sunlight gives the Moon a reddish tint for the same reason sunrises and sunsets as red; when light shines through Earth’s atmosphere at an angle, shorter wavelengths scatter and only longer wavelengths, i.e. red, can penetrate the atmosphere at that point. Eclipse partiality begins at 4:50 a.m. (4:50) EST, or 1:50 a.m. (1:50) PST, while totality will start at 6:04 a.m. (6:04) EST or 3:50 a.m. (3:50) PST.
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The moon, photographed during the daytime hours, with a cloud-free sky background
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The arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022, placing artificial intelligence and a tool that could transform a query in plain English – no coding required – into a somewhat useable app or a detailed report (albeit, especially in 2022, with some imagined quotes and sources) placed within arm’s reach of knowledge workers has had knowledge workers all abuzz – and fearing a loss of jobs – and managers licking their chops over the perceived savings that would come from it all. Last week, Block, a financial technology company which owns Square and Cash App, announced the elimination of 40% of its workforce thanks to AI and a research note by Citrini, a firm of equity analysts, imagined – in a work of business fiction – the knowledge workforce in 2028 having been substantially reduced, at the same time, rendering a wide range of companies from American Express to Door Dash obsolete.
As volatility gripped financial markets last week, some pointed to the Citrini research memo. It didn’t help the matter that Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Money Fund, warned that AI is “hitting the labor market like a tsunami,” or that Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, has forecast that his employer would soon need fewer employees. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic and who does not shy away from controversy, has predicted that the technology his company is a market leader in could wipe out “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.”
The Citrini note is not without its warts, to put it mildly. As entertaining as it may be to some, its economics rest on shaky ground.
Entitled the “CitriniResearch Macro Memo from June 2028, detailing the progression and fallout of the Global Intelligence Crisis,” it is near-future business fiction that explores an imagined future detailing how companies, industries, and business models might function in 2028 after there have been major advances in AI, and deals with the intersection of technology and the business world. It wasn’t a prediction, the authors cautioned, but that didn’t prevent real-world consequences in the present, with shares of Blackstone, DoorDash, Mastercard, ServiceNow, and Visa – all mentioned in the memo – falling sharply when markets opened on Monday.
Citrini envisioned a world in which AI’s capabilities to clone a competitor’s offering without violating intellectual property rights were virtually unlimited. What would today take software engineers thousands of hours to code could be done in just several hours using AI tools. This, incidentally, largely erased whatever product differentiation was left at the time.
In Citrini’s near future, output keeps growing, “driven by ai agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance”, while consumer spending collapses: workers have no jobs and no incomes to spend. “Economic pundits popularized the phrase ‘Ghost GDP’: output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy.”
The problem is this in that Citrini ignores a basic economic principle, namely that production generates income and economic history, namely that productivity booms historically fuel growth. If output keeps growing, as Citrini’s narrative of the future read, “driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days, or require insurance,” consumer spending would clearly not have collapsed. In other words, the research memo ignores a time-proven economic principle: Say’s Law, coined by Jean-Baptiste Say in 1803. Say’s Law is the classical economic principle that “supply creates its own demand.” It suggests that the act of producing goods generates the necessary income via wages and profits for workers and producers to buy other products, meaning a general overproduction or glut of goods is impossible.
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The main dining room at Barbetta
Barbetta, the oldest Italian restaurant in New York City, served its final meal on Friday, closing its doors a little over one month after the death of its owner, Laura Maioglio, the second-generation New York City restauranteur who died on January 17. The restaurant was at the forefront of true Italian cuisine, the antithesis of establishments with red-checkered tablecloths and straw-covered Chianti bottles that had been the hallmarks of trattorias across America for decades.
Barbetta’s garden patio, designed by Ms. Maioglio, who studied art history at Bryn Mawr and had planned to become an architect, became one of the city’s most sought-after summer dining locations under her aegis.
In 1993, the Italian cultural association Locali Storici d’Italia designated the restaurant’s interior a landmark and, in 1996, the Italian government awarded Barbetta the Insegna del Ristorante Italiano, in recognition for serving the best authentic Italian food outside Italy. Barbetta was founded in 1906 by Ms. Maioglio’s father, Sebastiano, and her uncle, Vincenzo, under the name the Maioglio Brothers. It was originally located on West 39th Street, and became a favorite of patrons of the old Metropolitan Opera house, which was located down the street at 1411 Broadway. In the 1920s, after her uncle’s death, her father moved the eatery to its current location on 46th Street. There it was renamed Barbetta, where the restaurant was spread across four adjoining 19th-century brownstones which had been purchased from the Astor family.
Under Ms. Maioglio, the restaurant’s focus became that of Piedmont, her parents’ birthplace.
On a recent visit to Barbetta well before the closing was announced, Ms. Maioglio was in the dining room, her watchful eye seemingly everywhere. The meal started with a thick, chunky minestrone, followed by a risotto Piedmontese – a dish the staff tends to frequently recommend – and the creamy rice mixture is heady with its slivers of mushrooms and liver. The beef braised in red wine with pearl onions and fried polenta was perfectly braised and tender making for an extremely satisfying entrée. On an earlier visit, the baby chicken – split and flattened, heavily peppered and grilled – is accompanied by luscious sauteed potatoes and is a perennial favorite. This meal ended with a panna cotta, a delightful eggless custard of thickened cream coated with caramelized sugar, that sends the diner back onto the hustle and bustle of the theater district, revitalized with newfound energy.
Barbetta, a bulwark on restaurant row with its massive blade sign is one of the last if not the very last opal glass signs left in the Big Apple, will be missed after a successful run of 120 years made it the longest-running production in the theater district.
Barbetta
Shuttered – Served its last meal on 27 February 2026
321 West 46th Street
New York, N.Y. 10036
Tel. +1 (212) 246-9171
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The moon as seen from the Hell’s Kitchen district in New York City
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The new security policy promulgated by Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that allows air passengers to proceed through the security checkpoint with their shoes on created “significant” security risks, a classified report by the inspector general at the DHS maintained. The report states that the Transportation Security Administration’s full-body scanners are incapable of scanning shoes, it is understood. The IG’s report held that Ms. Noem’s reversal of the decades-old policy had “inadvertently created a new security vulnerability in the system.” Upon receipt of the report, instead of taking the required action, Ms. Noem’s office prohibited the report from being published and increased its level of classification, sources told the Wall Street Journal, which reviewed the report. The IG then wrote a letter to chairmen and ranking members of Congressional committees with primary jurisdiction over the Transportation Security Agency advising that there remained “an unresolved oversight matter with significant safety and security implications for the traveling public.”
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In the 1960s, a chimpanzee named Washoe electrified the world by demonstrating how she could communicate using American Sign Language. Washoe was the first of a cohort of chimps to be studied by researchers who sought to challenge the prevailing view that the use of language was a prerogative of humans. A video of Washoe sitting down at a luncheonette counter and using sign language to order an ice cream cone is a sight to behold. Now only two “talking” chimps remain: Tatu, who knows 215 signs and Loulis, who was taught by Washoe to sign without human intervention. Loulis knows 78 signs. Because these pampered chimps – Washoe was brought up in the manner of a human child by R. Allen Gardner, a professor at the University of Nevada, and his wife, Beatrix – were removed from their native environment to spend their lives in captivity, they cannot be returned to the wild as they lack the survival skills for that life. Tatu and Loulis now live at the Fauna Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing sanctuary to nonhuman primates, where they both continue to talk about food and activities using sign language.
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George presents important news and events of the day clearly and concisely in a format better suited to the modern reader’s limited time and focus, without forsaking the founders’ traditional commitment to fact-driven news, commentary, and dispatches – all prepared by curious thinkers, for curious thinkers.
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Jonathan Spira, Alexander Khusid, Tim Perry, Christian Stampfer, Kurt Stolz, Anna Breuer, and Paul Riegler contributed to this issue of George.
The mark “George,” the tagline “A daily newspaper…,” and all of the newspaper’s content, images, photographs, and associated material are subject to copyright law.
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