Hi, everyone. Welcome to Smarter News. Hope you're heading into a great Labor Day weekend for you and your family. I decided to jump on real quick today because I wanted to put a few news items on your radar. And I also wanted to share with you one of the most

important answers to a question that I've asked as a journalist. And that's related to our big

news story of the week, this school shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Most of the facts about

this particular story, and by facts, I just mean some of the basics,

you likely already know about the shooting that took place on Wednesday during the first

week of school in Minneapolis for anunciation, a Catholic school there, and the shooting took

place during a mass that was celebrating the first week of school. And obviously these stories

are extremely heartbreaking. They also spark a lot of debate, social and political debate.

I'm sure you've seen some of that, maybe even participated in it amongst friends or family

in your own household. And although all of that is part of covering

a story like this, there also seems to be sometimes a lack of attention, and this is in my

editorial judgment, on what we can do immediately while everyone else is having those debates

and conversations to make ourselves a little

bit safer. So that's why I wanted to share this particular soundbite with you today. I'm going to play it at the end and I'll set it up. It also deserves a little bit more context than what we're able to do on social media. So thank you for being part of our podcast and broadcast audience. I appreciate having a little bit more time to talk to you about some of these stories. So we'll get there in a second. In the meantime, though, because this was such a big news item, there are a few news stories that I thought it would again, just put on your radar before, hopefully you're able to check out a little bit before the weekend. Labor Day has a really interesting history, as most of our national holidays do. It really sort of popped up around the country, really coast to coast, in different states as a lot of our national holidays do, it really sort of popped up around the country, really

coast to coast in different states as a lot of our national holidays started states first

and then became federal holidays. And this was all related to, just as it sounds, just honoring

those that are fueling the American economy. This took place in the 1880s that we started to see Labor Day celebrations in different states.

And it was in the 1890s that it officially became a national holiday.

But it is exactly as it sounds.

We were experiencing the gilded age in America, work conditions were not great, and there was

a thought, and there's some dispute as who came up with it first. One says it was a carpenter,

another story says it was a machinist. Either way, they came to the same conclusion that there

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