China's Politburo meeting on economic policy took place today, and as SocGen's Wei Yao reports, the most important takeaway from the meeting is that policymakers are shifting their attention to housing destocking, as they pledged to 'study measures'.
As usual about 3 years behind the curve, Beijing policymakers - who burst China's housing bubble sparking unprecedented wealth destruction across the country once the world's largest asset class (as the chart from Goldman shows)...
... went into freefall 3 years ago, have been alarmed by the drop in housing sales and home prices in recent months, and finally sense the urgency to provide more measures to avoid a sustained downturn, which can be harmful for household wealth and confidence, not to mention can lead to sporadic revolutions which overthrow the ruling "communist" kleptocracy made up of billionaire oligarchs.
According to the SocGen strategist, "this change of attitude is important and with sufficient measures could help put a floor on housing. This may be THE catalyst to extend the recovery in confidence and equity markets, at least cyclically."
Below we excerpt several more key points from the SocGen report:
Growth has improved but it's not the time to reduce support. Policymakers acknowledged that the economy has improved, but demand remains insufficient and external uncertainty has risen notably. That is probably related to recent complaints from various countries on China's overcapacities and the upcoming US election. Hence, economic policies need to avoid tightening too quickly. So we shouldn't be concerned that policies will be less accommodative even with the improvement in 1Q GDP.
The focus is on faster implementation of announced policies. Policymakers pledge to frontload and effectively implement macro policies that have been announced. That is in line with our expectations that no fresh stimulus will be added. These involve speeding up the utilisation of special CGBs and special LGBs, flexibly using interest rates and RRR cuts to lower financing costs, as well implementing the replacement of consumer goods and equipment. Therefore, we should see a continued recovery in infrastructure investments, while the strength of replacement policies is more uncertain as it depends on local policies. We also expect the PBoC to cut the the RRR and the 5y LPR further.
Government to help on housing destocking? Beside countercyclical policies, the most important change is on the property sector. Policymakers pledge to study policies to support housing destocking, with no details announced. This is mentioned by policymakers for the first time, and follows more easing measures at a local level recently (e.g. relaxing purchase restrictions in Chengdu and promoting new home sales by tasking local SOEs to purchase existing homes from potential buyers). While it remains to be seen how the policies will be funded with local governments under fiscal pressure, this change of attitude is important, and can help reduce the chance of a sustained decline in house prices.
The statement also mentioned other key policy goals, such as resolving local government debt risks (good luck). The government is focusing on reducing debt in high risk provinces, but it also stresses on growth stability, which means it will not push too hard since all growth in China is debt-funded.
It is also interesting to note that the tasks to support low-income groups and to build a social safety net are mentioned, but without concrete details. Other tasks include promoting new productivity, resolving smaller banks' risks, promoting capital market development and implementing measures to reach peak carbon.
Separately, it was also announced that the Third Plenum, which had been delayed, will take place in July and will discuss reform directions to promote "modernization of the economy." The confirmation of the date in itself is likely to be viewed as a positive sign, even though we do not have high expectations from the plenum yet.
Authroed by Kevin Bardosh & Jay Bhattarcharya via RealClearPolicy,
The World Health Organization is urging the U.S. and 193 other governments to commit next month to a new global treaty to prevent and manage future pandemics. Current estimates suggest over $31 billion per year will be needed to fund its obligations, a cost most lower income countries cannot afford. But that isn’t the only reason to oppose it. Validating this treaty is a vote for the disastrous policies of the Covid years. Rather than taking time for deep reflection and serious reform, those pushing the pandemic treaty are set on ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes.
From the Spring of 2020, many experts warned that the panic begun in Wuhan’s unprecedented lockdown would cause wide-ranging damage—and indeed they did. School closures deprived a generation of children—especially poor children—of access to basic education. Businesses were shuttered. Vaccine and mask mandates made public health an authoritarian exercise of power devoid of science. Border quarantines promulgated the idea that the rest of the world is unclean.
But few experts care to seriously dissect these errors. How many schools of public health—in America or Europe—held serious debates during the Covid response, or since? Very few.
Opposing the treaty is a signal to the WHO and global health community that they cannot whitewash these mistakes. Next time, we need to ensure a better balance between trade-offs, evidence-based policies, and democratic rights. Such a view seeks to restore the WHO’s own definition of health into pandemic response: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Yet the governing philosophy of the WHO emergency program is the exact opposite. Its leaders chastise the world to “move faster’ and “do more.” Bill Gates, the agency’s single largest private donor, is convinced lockdown benefits vastly outweighed their harms. He’s wrong.
Read through the current draft of the treaty itself and you will find a whole section dedicated to “fighting misinformation.” There is no section focused on preventing harm. Those speaking out about these dangers have been subjected to harsh censorship. Once esteemed professionals were summarily fired for describing the reality of what was happening. The authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration—professors at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford—were subject to a “devastating takedown” at the hands of Dr. Fauci and top scientific bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health and the WHO.
Public health came to resemble the police, and those pushing the new WHO treaty want to go further. It calls for more mandates, more vaccine passports, and more censorship—our new global health “Lockdown Doctrine.”
Proponents of the treaty would have you believe that it is merely a tool that countries can use to guide future pandemic response efforts, that it cannot trump national sovereignty or be used to force failed policies on entire populations. But the lifeblood of international treaties is not in the dried ink. Treaties are constantly ignored. Nonetheless, they do one thing very well: they create an illusion of consensus, signaling to those with power and influence. These priorities are then filtered down into national laws and plans where they can do tremendous damage.
How can national governments seriously endorse an international agreement when their own domestic Covid evaluations are ongoing? The UK Covid Inquiry is set to end in 2026. Australia’s commission is ongoing. Italy and Ireland have only recently announced them. Most have none planned.
The rush needs to slow down. The U.S. should avoid signing until a thorough, bipartisan review of WHO’s Covid pandemic management is accomplished. Until then, a vote for a pandemic treaty is a vote against real, positive change.
Kevin Bardosh is Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global. Jay Battacharya is a Professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
A neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, was transformed into a warzone on Monday afternoon when a lifelong felon, illegally owning firearms, ambushed a US Marshals Fugitive Task Force and police officers as they were serving a warrant.
Three US Marshals and an officer from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department were killed in the shootout. Additionally, four police officers and one Marshal were injured.
During a Monday evening press conference, police identified lifelong felon 39-year-old Terry Clark Hughes, Jr., who was also killed in the shootout.
Meet the deceased Charlotte shooting suspect: Terry Clark Hughes, Jr. pic.twitter.com/UjOjVZ33Si
— Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) April 30, 2024Has leftist corporate media identified the felon? Maybe not, because it doesn't fit the narrative.
CNN has not. Fox News has.
According to police, US Marshals attempted to serve Hughes a warrant for firearm possession. He was also wanted for two counts of felony flee to elude out of the Charlotte area.
Police believe there were two other shooters in the home. A 17-year-old and a woman, both of them, were taken into police custody.
"We have two people of interest at the police station that are being questioned right now," Police Chief Johnny Jennings told reporters.
Jennings said, "And we have confirmed that the individual that was set up that we were serving the warrant on was the individual who fired the initial shots and was deceased in the front yard at the end of all of this."
America needs to restore law and order, and leftist corporate media outlets must report the news fairly. Perhaps this is why their ratings are imploding, as everyday Americans begin to see through their narrative control of misinformation and disinformation.
Authored by Noé Chartier via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Canada’s drug regulator asked Pfizer to provide data on the size of DNA fragments in its COVID-19 vaccine, due to genomic integration concerns, shortly after learning the pharma giant withheld information on DNA sequences contained in its product.
“Concerning the residual plasmid DNA in the drug substance, provide data/information characterizing [...] the size distribution of the residual DNA fragments [and] residual intact circular plasmid,” says a request for clarification Health Canada issued to Pfizer on Aug. 4, 2023.
A sign is displayed in front of Health Canada headquarters in Ottawa in a file photo. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
The information was released as part of records obtained through an access-to-information request. It shows, in part, that a Health Canada official was keeping the department’s counterparts in the United States and Europe apprised of the department’s interactions with Pfizer, in a bid to harmonize the regulators’ approaches regarding the recently discovered DNA fragment impurities.
“As you are aware, the fragment size is related to the probability of integration, and the WHO guidance assumes a fragment size of generally less than 200 bp,” Dr. Dean Smith, a senior scientific evaluator in Health Canada’s Vaccine Quality Division, wrote in an October 2023 email to counterparts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
DNA plasmids are used in the manufacturing process of mRNA vaccines and residual elements are supposed to be cleaned out below a certain threshold. Pfizer said DNA in its products is below the 10ng/dose guideline established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and followed by Health Canada, according to the official records.
This assertion has been challenged by independent scientists, who found quantities of DNA in the vaccines to be above the threshold. They have also found the DNA fragments are larger than 200 base pairs (bp).
Virologist Dr. David Speicher, who has studied Canadian mRNA vials, told The Epoch Times the average size of fragments his study found is 214 base pairs (bp), with some as large as 3.5 kilobase (kb).
While small fragments frequently integrate spontaneously into the genome, these mutations are stopped through either DNA repair mechanisms or cellular death, Dr. Speicher said.
“Larger fragments are much more problematic, especially if attached to an SV40 enhancer, because they can integrate into the genome where they can get transcribed and then translated into proteins,” he added. Independent scientists like Dr. Speicher found the undisclosed SV40 enhancer in Pfizer shots, a piece of biotechnology used to drive gene expression.
Depending on the DNA fragment size, it can produce functional or aberrant proteins, Dr. Speicher explains. “These proteins can affect cellular metabolism, an immune response, as well as an increased risk for cancer. The risk of integration and associated health problems increases with the number of shots.”
The Florida State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo has called for a halt of mRNA shots, citing concern about these risks. Dr. Philip Buckhaults, professor of cancer genomics and director of the Cancer Genetics Lab at the University of South Carolina, has initiated a study to investigate the risks.
Health Canada has not studied those risks, but told The Epoch Times last summer “the presence of residual plasmid DNA in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines does not change the safety assessment of these vaccines.”
Despite providing this answer to media in the summer of 2023, Health Canada scientists were privately discussing working with international partners to have Pfizer remove DNA fragments and SV40 sequences from its vaccines and they prepared several requests for clarification to the company.
In an August 2023 email to a colleague providing information to relay to Pfizer, Health Canada senior biologist evaluator Dr. Michael Wall said his department would “continue to work with international regulatory partners to achieve harmonization regarding removal of these sequence elements from the plasmid for future strain changes.”
Records show Health Canada was blindsided by the presence of undisclosed genetic substances in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, almost four years after the initial emergency authorization.
After Pfizer filed its submission for the authorization of its updated Omicron XBB.1.5 shot on July 21, 2023, Health Canada sent the company several Quality Clarifax—requests for additional information if deficiencies are identified in drug submissions—with the first one dated Aug. 4, 2023.
Regarding the residual plasmid DNA in the COVID-19 vaccines, Health Canada asked Pfizer to provide data on the size distribution of the DNA fragments and on residual intact circular plasmid.
Pfizer said this data was “not readily available and will require time to generate,” in a response on Aug. 11, 2023. The pharma giant added that Pfizer, the drug sponsor, and BioNTech, the manufacturer, had not been previously requested to provide this data across global markets.
Pfizer committed to provide the data by Dec. 1, but the response is not captured in the information package released under the access-to-information regime.
In a subsequent request for information sent on Aug. 22, 2023, Health Canada noted Pfizer’s commitment to provide the information and added a request by asking Pfizer to address “whether the residual DNA plasmid is capable of replication in bacteria.”
Virologist Dr. Speicher, commenting on the agency’s request, noted that plasmids need to be circular to be replicated in a bacterial host, and that fragments can’t do so.
“So if they were intact circular plasmids and injected, they could be taken up by our host bacteria, especially in the gut,” he said. “If the plasmid could propagate in bacteria into our body it could lead to a bacterial spike factory and drive kanamycin/neomycin resistance.”
“This would cause an increase in antibiotic resistance of the bacteria including pathogens and increase spike production, and we know that spike is toxic on so many levels,” he said.
Dr. Speicher added that Pfizer should have tested for this before putting its products to market. The fact that it did not have the data indicates it did not test for it, he said.
The request for information that Health Canada sent to Pfizer mainly focused on the presence of the Simian Virus 40 (SV40) enhancer-promoter in the Pfizer-BioNTech shots.
Health Canada and other regulators like the FDA and EMA were not aware of its presence, since Pfizer “chose not to” disclose it, according to a separate email from Health Canada scientist Dr. Smith.
Many sections of the Clarifax are redacted under the Access to Information Act, with reasons such as content containing proprietary information or which could lead to a material gain or loss for a third party, in this case Pfizer and BioNTech.
The information disclosed shows that Health Canada challenged Pfizer on SV40 and asked for a “justification for the SV40 regulatory elements in the plasmid.”
Pfizer responded that the “SV40 regulatory region sequences [redacted] in the submission since this [redacted] is relevant neither for plasmid production in E. coli nor for production of mRNA.”
This is the position that has been adopted by Health Canada. In response to questions by the media and parliamentarians, the regulator has stated the SV40 enhancer-promoter is “inactive” and has “no functional role.”
But Pfizer and Health Canada have not addressed why the SV40 enhancer-promoter is present in the vaccine if it is not used in the production of mRNA and has no functional role. Genomics expert Kevin McKernan has questioned this when faced with responses from regulators.
Mr. McKernan made the initial DNA and SV40 fragments discovery and published his study in April 2023. His pre-print paper on the matter appears twice in the Health Canada information package released via access-to-information.
Mr. McKernan has pointed out that regulators could have discovered the SV40 sequences themselves had they run the plasmid through a computer annotation tool.
“If you ever used plasmid annotation tools, they annotate everything on the map and they don’t leave anything unannotated,” he told the International Covid Summit in February.
He provided his assessment to the summit of why Pfizer went this route. “They’re hiding the fact that this tool [SV40 enhancer] is used as a gene therapy tool and would classify their system as a gene therapy,” he said. “Because it’s a nuclear targeting sequence it moves DNA directly to the nucleus within hours in all cell lines.”
The American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) classifies the mRNA injections as gene therapy, whereas Health Canada does not.
“The mRNA from the vaccines does not enter the cell nucleus or interact with the DNA at all, so it does not constitute gene therapy,” said Health Canada in a response to a parliamentarian on Dec. 13. The ASGCT also says the mRNA doesn’t alter the “recipient’s generic material” and is only present in the body “transiently.” However, because the vaccine introduces “new genetic material into cells for a short period of time to induce antibodies,” the American organization considers it gene therapy.
Pfizer said in a response to the Aug. 4 Health Canada request for information that the “SV40 promotor/enhancer DNA does not contain known oncogenes, infectious agents, or regions that could lead to functional transcripts, the DNA does not present any specific safety concerns.”
Health Canada also said in a document tabled in Parliament in March that “any claims the presence of the SV40 promoter enhancer sequence is linked to an increased risk of cancer are unfounded.” Health Canada itself has not studied the risks.
A senior Health Canada’s scientist’s view on the role of SV40 fragments is captured in an Oct. 26 email written in response to questions from Chief Medical Officer Dr. Supriya Sharma.
Dr. Tong Wu of Health Canada’s Vaccine Quality Division responded that the “SV40 promoter enhancer is widely used to drive gene expression in mammalian cells.” He added, however, that it “serves no purpose in the manufacturing of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.”
Dr. Wu said it was unexpected to find the sequence in the finished product, since “Pfizer did not identify the presence of SV40 promoter enhancer on the plasmid template used to produce mRNA, in their original filing.”
Dr. Wu also said that “to the best of our knowledge,” no other vaccine approved in Canada contains the SV40 sequence.
Pfizer was contacted for comment, but the company hasn’t responded to inquiries.
Matthew Horwood contributed to this report.
Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Biden administration has rolled out a set of new guidelines, under which an employer would be deemed liable for harassment for referring to a worker by an unwanted pronoun or requiring the worker to use a restroom that aligns with his or her biological sex.
Signage identifies the men’s and women’s restrooms at a business in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Jan. 13, 2023. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published the new workplace harassment guidelines on Monday after approving them in a party-line 3–2 vote on Friday. The new document enshrines gender identity as a category protected against harassment, just like sex, race, religion, or disability.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes ... repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new guidelines state.
Joining Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the changes.
“Women’s sex-based rights in the workplace are under attack—and from the EEOC, the very federal agency charged with protecting women from sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination at work,” Ms. Lucas said in a statement on Monday.
“The commission’s guidance effectively eliminates single-sex workplace facilities and impinges on women’s rights to freedom of speech and belief,” she added, accusing her Democrat colleagues of disregarding “biological realities, sex-based privacy and safety needs of women.”
A guideline is not legally binding in the same way as laws passed by Congress or rules issued by government agencies. The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”
However, Monday’s guidance communicates the EEOC’s position on legal issues, meaning an employee could potentially refer to the new guidelines in the event of a restroom or pronoun dispute.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Ms. Burrows in a statement Monday. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
The new federal guidance comes about three years after the EEOC suffered a legal defeat in its attempt to create exceptions for employees identifying as LGBT from workplace policies on restrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes.
In August 2021, a coalition of attorneys general from 20 states sued to have the LGBT exception blocked, arguing that authority over such policies “properly belongs to Congress, the States, and the people.”
“The guidance purports to resolve highly controversial and localized issues such as whether employers ... may maintain sex-separated showers and locker rooms, ... and whether individuals may be compelled to use another person’s preferred pronouns,” the complaint read. “But the agencies have no authority to resolve those sensitive questions, let alone to do so by executive fiat without providing any opportunity for public participation.”
The lawsuit was led by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery. He was joined by attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
In July 2022, a federal judge in Tennessee ruled in favor of the coalition to enjoin the EEOC guidance from going forward. Later that year, a separate federal court in Texas vacated and set aside the proposed guidance, determining that the EEOC misinterpreted the scope of the U.S. Supreme Court landmark 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which concluded that it is unconstitutional for sexual orientation and gender identity to be considered as factors in employment decisions.
The EEOC did not appeal those rulings.
A former Riverside County Sheriff’s deputy, who was apprehended last year as part of an investigation into the Sinaloa cartel, has been found to have been working for "El Chapo" himself.
25 year old Jorge Oceguera-Rocha resigned from his position with the Sheriff after being caught with over 100 pounds of fentanyl pills and a firearm during a traffic stop in Calimesa, in September of last year, KTLA reports.
Authorities did not specify how they discovered his alleged involvement in drug trafficking, but he was identified as a “corrupt Riverside County Correctional Deputy” mentioned in a press release about Operation Hotline Bling.
Operation Hotline Bling "culminated last week with 15 arrests and significant drug seizures, including methamphetamine and quantities of fentanyl that potentially could produce 10 million lethal doses," according to the DEA:
In March 2023, the Drug Enforcement Administration Riverside District Office and the Riverside Police Department, with assistance from the United States Postal Inspection Service, initiated Operation “Hotline Bling.” During the investigation, agents seized a total of approximately 376 pounds of methamphetamine, 37.4 pounds of fentanyl, 600,000 fentanyl tablets, 1.4 kilograms of cocaine, and seven firearms. The drugs seized in this investigation have an estimated “street value” of $16 million.
This operation targeted Sinaloa cartel activities in the Inland Empire, resulting in 15 arrests and the seizure of $16 million worth of narcotics. The Sinaloa cartel, once led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, is renowned for its influence akin to that of Pablo Escobar in the 1980s and early ’90s.
Oceguera-Rocha faces multiple local felony charges and the Sheriff’s Department confirmed his involvement in trafficking narcotics within Riverside County while off duty.
Although federal prosecutors didn't press charges, Riverside County officials charged him with possession and transportation of narcotics, with enhancements for the drug's weight, and possession of a firearm in connection with narcotics.
The initial report on the arrest noted he was being detained at the John Benoit Detention Center with a $5 million bail, justified by the drug's weight and potential flight risk. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in jail.
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Multiple people contracted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) through cosmetic needles after receiving facials at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
An ampule with Botox, with the European name "Vistabel," at a cosmetic treatment center in Berlin in this Jan. 29, 2007, file photo. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
Three women who received platelet-rich plasma (PRP) microneedling facials, also known as vampire facials, at the spa contracted HIV and an investigation pointed to the facials as the method of transmission, a new paper from CDC scientists states.
The spa in question, the since-shuttered VIP Salon, was dubbed spa A in the paper.
“This investigation is the first to associate HIV transmission with nonsterile cosmetic injection services. A common exposure to spa A among clients without behaviors associated with HIV acquisition helped identify a possible cluster association, and analysis of additional data suggested that HIV transmission likely occurred via receipt of PRP with microneedling facial procedures,” said the scientists, who worked with New Mexico health officials.
The source of the contamination remains unknown, they said.
PRP microneedling facials involve taking blood from a person and separating out PRP. Then, a microneedle makes holes in the person’s skin, and the PRP is applied to the holes.
The procedure is said to help treat acne and have other health benefits.
New Mexico authorities announced in 2019 that they were investigating the VIP Spa after people contracted HIV following visits to the spa. Officials were providing free testing of any people who received treatments, including the microneedling facials, at the spa.
An inspection by authorities led to the closure of VIP Spa after the identification of unsafe practices.
Maria de Lourdes Ramos de Ruiz, former owner of the spa, was later hit with felony charges, including practicing medicine without a license. She pleaded guilty in 2022 to five counts.
“This is a warning to those who place profit over the health and safety of New Mexico consumers, and I remain highly concerned that these procedures are not being regulated at the state and federal level,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said at the time.
New Mexico officials described two HIV cases among spa visitors previously. A wider investigation identified additional patients, scientists with the state and the CDC said in the new paper.
Through calls, surveys, and other methods, authorities found five people with HIV, four of whom received microneedling at the spa in 2018. The fifth was in a sexual relationship with a spa client. Analysis of the patients’ blood showed that their cases were all related to the facility.
The cases involving the man and woman in a sexual relationship were stage 3 or chronic HIV, which suggests “that their infections were likely attributed to exposures before receipt of cosmetic injection services,” according to the scientists.
But no alternative explanations for the infections among the other three female patients were discovered.
“The other three patients in this cluster had no known social contact with one another, and no specific mechanism for transmission among these patients was confirmed,” scientists said. “Evidence suggests that contamination from an undetermined source at the spa during spring and summer 2018 resulted in HIV-1 transmission to these three patients.”
HIV is a virus that attacks immune systems and can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) if not treated. Symptoms include sore throat, fatigue, and ulcers in the mouth. Most people who contract the illness are gay or bisexual. While there is no cure for HIV, it can be controlled through available treatments.
Nearly 200 other spa clients and their sexual partners were tested through 2023 as part of the investigation but none tested positive for HIV, hepatitis B, or hepatitis C, according to the paper.
The findings highlight the importance of looking at “novel sources of HIV transmission among persons with no known HIV risk factors,” the scientists said.
They also encouraged facilities to implement practices to control infections to try to prevent the transmission of bloodborne pathogens.
When the spa was inspected in 2018, authorities saw troubling practices.
Lying on a kitchen counter, for instance, were a centrifuge, a heating dry bath, and a rack of unlabeled tubes containing blood.
In a refrigerator, stored with food, authorities found tubes of blood without labels, as well as medical injectables such as Botox.
Unwrapped syringes were located in multiple places, including in drawers.
No steam sterilizer was present and certain items designed to be disposable were cleaned and reused by staffers at the spa, authorities said.
The investigation was hindered by disorganized records, including the lack of a system for scheduling appointments, according to the paper. Such systems usually include contact information for clients. Investigators combed through handwritten records and other documents to identify people who may have undergone the microneedling procedure.
“Incomplete spa client records posed a substantial challenge during this investigation, necessitating a large-scale outreach approach to identify potential cases, as opposed to direct communication with all clients,” researchers said. “Requiring maintenance of sufficient client records to ensure adequate traceback by regulated businesses that provide injection services could ensure adequate capability to conduct traceback.”
James of all men must have understood the perennial problem of the Many and the One, profoundly. The title of his book is manifest evidence of his comprehension of the difficulty: A Pluralistic Universe.
NB: universe.
Here it is: how can an otherwise utterly solipsistic Many, that as an aboriginal Many, with none of them any basic original connection to any One, so that each and every of that Many have no inherent connection to each other – so that, e.g., they have nothing essentially in common as a forecondition of their very being – constitute together a coherent cosmos: a universe? How can an utterly unrelated set of events coordinate and indeed integrate in an intelligible whole – a whole intelligible as such, so that science about it is within it possible? How can a coherent and intelligible universe result from a radically raw polyverse?
Excursus: The raw pluralist ontology amplifies to an infinite degree the problem for Cartesian dualism of the radical ontological incongruence, and thus the inconceivable causal connection, between the utterly different sorts of entities that constitute res mensa and res extensa. For, what is the medium of connection between utterly disparate entities of a Many in which each such entity is radically solipsist? In which, i.e., each eternal and thus absolutely disparate entity, being each itself eternal, and thus nowise contingent upon any other, has nothing to do with any other? Has, i.e., no reason to care about any other, or even to know of any other – let alone, to accommodate itself to any other?
Relation per se of entities – any relation whatever – is the death of raw ontological pluralism, in which each entity is eternal, and thus nowise dependent upon or derivative from some One, or then from any other; for, an eternal cannot anywise continge. It is therefore the inescapable necessity of a transcendent and thus ubiquitously immanent Lógos, upon which all others continge, and are therefore able to interact, and coordinate, so as to procure a cosmos.
Excursus: it should be noted, prominently, that temporal and spatial relations among entities are subject to the same difficulty. If the purely and originally plural ontological entities of the Many have no fundamental relation to each other, that is founded in some prior matrix of relation – which, as logically prior, must be causally prior – then they cannot be temporally or spatially related. As each of them must be thus unrelated temporally (and spatially), they must then also be each atemporal; which is to say, eternal, and so, changeless.
Radical ontological plurality arrives then at Eleatic immobility.
As with mere atheism, mere pluralism can’t cut the necessary ontological ice. From the zero of the Lógos – which is to say, from atheism – there is no way (other than, “That’s just how things are” (which is in itself a Theist Argument)) to get to intelligible concrete actuality, or then to science; to human knowledge of any sort. Likewise, from the zero of the transcendent ultimate One (who is the Lógos) – which is to say, from ontological pluralism (or, as it used to be called, naïve polytheism, aka chaotic theomachy) – it is impossible to obtain a coherent coordinate Many, that can together cobble up an ordered cosmos.
You can’t even get a theomachy, or for that matter a conflict of any sort, except in virtue of a prior context of basic agreement. Conflict per se presupposes a prior general agreement. Any such context implicitly, and necessarily, then ultimately presupposes the One.
By the same token, even ontological creaturely freedom presupposes the One. One cannot be free except in respect to some other. Freedom in respect to what, exactly? Freedom in respect to nothing at all is just chaos, after all.
There’s just no way out from under God. Other than, of course, the Hell of alienation from him.
Sorry. The situation is quite digital: obedience to the Lógos, or … disobedience, with all that such entails.
All talk then of creativity independent of the Lógos is just noise, wishful thinking; is the high wide road to perdition.
Can more therapy lead to worse mental health? This is the central question that Abigail Shrier explores in her new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, which argues that an increased focus on children’s mental well-being appears to have produced the opposite of its intended effect.
Early in the book, Shrier offers some sobering statistics:
The rising generation has received more therapy than any prior generation. Nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional—compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers. Forty-two percent of the rising generation currently has a mental health diagnosis.
Much has been said about the ill effects of technology on mental health, particularly among children and adolescents. Yet Shrier takes a different approach, arguing somewhat counterintuitively that therapists themselves are exacerbating the very problem they’re supposedly here to solve.
Even as we’ve dedicated greater resources to the mental health of young people—most notably by increasing access to therapists both in and out of school—the overall well-being of Gen Z Americans seems to have declined by a number of important markers. “With unprecedented help from mental health experts,” Shrier writes, “we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record. Why?”
The simplest version of Shrier’s answer might be found in this line: “Recasting personality variation as a chiaroscuro of dysfunction, the mental health experts trained kids to regard themselves as disordered.” In other words, parents’ fixation on their kids’ mental health has produced a set of perverse incentives, most notably because it has led to regular interaction with psychology professionals, and to overreliance on school officials who see mental health trouble lurking around every corner. It seems we have molded a generation of kids more inclined to experience psychological problems than if they had been left to their own devices more often than not.
Shrier’s argument relies heavily on the concept of iatrogenesis, the notion that any medical intervention designed to heal also carries the risk of doing harm. Ideally, in any medical intervention the good will outweigh the related harms. Shrier notes that a doctor ought not perform surgery on a healthy person, yet now we subject people to psychological intervention when they don’t really need it. This reality in the field of psychological treatment is particularly problematic when it comes to working with kids. “The power imbalance between child and therapist is too great,” Shrier argues. “Children’s and adolescents’ sense of self is still developing. They cannot correct the interpretations or recommendations of a therapist.”
Meanwhile, unlike other medical professionals, many therapists seem disinclined to acknowledge the risks of what they do. Against this backdrop, it sounds even more disconcerting when Shrier informs us that one in six children in the U.S. between two and eight years old has a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.
There is much to praise about Shrier’s work, but one word of critique: she could have done more to affirm that a greater social recognition of mental health problems has had upsides, in addition to provoking the issues she so ably skewers. While she does offer a brief author’s note clarifying that her argument is not meant to address cases of “profound mental illness,” at no point does she say, for instance, that there might be instances where therapy or accommodations of some kind can be helpful for anyone other than the most troubled individuals. The message that permeates the book is that, for nearly every kid, a simple “pick yourself up and dust yourself off” is the most appropriate way to handle all forms of adversity, no matter the magnitude.
But if we believe that disorders such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression are real, then it’s at least worth mentioning the positive effects of living in a society far more willing to identify and assist kids with these experiences. Shrier makes a compelling case that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. But at the same time, we needn’t ignore that many people are getting much-needed psychological help where once they would’ve been dismissed or outright mistreated.
Consider as one example these hypotheticals Shrier offers up for ridicule in her critique of “gentle parenting”: “Believing their kids may have ‘sensory’ issues, [parents] hunt for cumulous fabrics, snip the tags from every undershirt. When their kids express aural discomfort at the roar of a toilet, the parents search for a school with a quieter flush.”
But one of these things is not like the other, and the distinction is worth noting, because Shrier makes this sort of conflation more than once throughout the book. Seeking a school where your child can escape toilet noise is, to be sure, a fool’s errand. Yet as someone belatedly diagnosed with ADHD, who has always found myself painfully distracted by uncomfortable clothing, I can attest that my parents’ willingness to help me remove pesky tags was a helpful feature of their parenting, not a bug. The “shake it off” parenting model she advocates might well have called for them to laugh off my discomfort and tell me to tough it out, trusting that I’d be okay in the end. Of course, I would have been; struggling with itchy tags doesn’t require medication or therapy. But neither did my parents’ care and attention make me soft and weak; it made it easier for me to focus as I went about my day.
In other words, parents can consider kids’ individual experiences and needs without babying them. But Shrier doesn’t leave much room for that reality because she lumps all sorts of accommodations—reasonable and overzealous alike—under the same umbrella of foolishness. These sorts of omissions don’t undermine her argument. At times, though, she comes across as a bit too reactionary, too un-nuanced, too willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater because the excesses and deficiencies of mental-health culture are simply too troubling.
Nevertheless, the book does contain alarming evidence of malpractice in the therapeutic industry, exposing plenty of experts who create the need for more of their expertise by stoking parental anxieties and preying on suggestible kids. Perhaps the most interesting question we can ask about this state of affairs is: Why are their efforts working?
Shrier points out that, rather than using moral language to describe misbehavior, our society now tends to use primarily therapeutic language. “Suddenly, every shy kid had ‘social anxiety,’ or ‘generalized anxiety disorder.’ Every weird or awkward teen was ‘on the spectrum’ or, at least, ‘spectrumy,’” she writes:
Loners had “depression.” Clumsy kids had “dyspraxia.” Parents ceased to chide “picky eaters” and instead diagnosed and accommodated the “food avoidant.” . . . No telling kids with the blues that it takes time to adjust to a new town or new school (they have “relocation depression”). No reassuring them that it’s normal to miss their friends over the summer (“summer anxiety”).
Not only have we been hasty to cast kids’ most common struggles in terms of a diagnosable mental health issue, Shrier argues, but we have underestimated how this would form children who learn to view themselves through the lens of what they hear from therapists and teachers trained to use “social-emotional learning.”
Shrier shares an interview she had with one teen girl who says her high-school friends struggle with issues such as anxiety, depression, conflict with their parents, self-harm, and anorexia, among other serious concerns. In the course of their conversation, the young woman nervously divulged: “I’ve noticed with a lot of people who’ll use their mental issues—it’s almost like a conversation piece. It’s almost like a trend.”
This admission is even more striking if you consider something Shrier shares later on: “Teens today so profoundly identify with these diagnoses, they display them in social media profiles, alongside a picture and family name.” This is perhaps the most important observation that unifies the argument in Bad Therapy. Kids don’t see their struggles as red flags pointing them in the direction of eventual healing; they’re identifying with their diagnoses, clinging to them because these terms offer an explanation of who they are.
Here we might draw on what Shrier covered in her previous book, Irreversible Damage. There she argued that skyrocketing rates of gender dysphoria among young girls are best understood as a form of social contagion among troubled youth: they are trying to understand who they are at a social moment characterized by deep confusion about sex and gender. It strikes me that she’s chronicling something similar here. Kids unsure about their identity are being offered a fairly simple roadmap for existence—one that explains away all of their troubles by slapping the comforting veneer of a psychological explanation onto whatever issue they might face. Never before have kids been given such a convenient, simple proposition about why growing up feels hard and why they feel like they simply don’t belong. And it comes with a handy solution: a combination of drugs and therapy to ease whatever pain they’re experiencing.
In short, it would be a mistake to target psychological experts as the root of the problem that Shrier outlines. Though she demonstrates that there are plenty of bad actors involved in the therapy industry, this isn’t the whole story, and it’s far less interesting than the story lurking underneath. Experts of all kinds have always clamored to be the ones that we trust enough to put in charge permanently. The more interesting question is why we as a society—and why kids and parents in particular—are interacting with this industry the way we do.
Kids today are especially vulnerable to this type of exploitation; and the most fitting way to account for it, to my mind, is that they have a decreased sense of belonging either to their family or to any particular religion. This leaves them unmoored, responsible for crafting their own meaning.
“The rising generation is strikingly different from those prior, according to academic psychologist and author of several books on Gen Z, Jean Twenge,” Shrier notes. “It isn’t simply the rates of diagnosed mental illness that make them so distinctive. They are far more obedient to authority, agreeable, and tied to Mom.”
That last clause bears particular notice. To what extent might we point to fatherlessness as a culprit, whether in cases where fathers are absent altogether or where they are present but markedly disengaged? Loving, attentive fathers tend to be the primary means by which children develop the confidence and ability to undertake challenges and risks while still knowing that they remain safe. A lack of engaged fatherhood helps to explain both the overreliance on mothers and the increased anxiety that children feel when tackling the challenges inherent in growing up.
More broadly, we seem to be witnessing a society-wide loss of confidence among parents, which has gone hand in hand with too much deference to supposed experts. We’ve seen this mentality emerge when it comes to education more broadly—the notion that experts or public figures have your child’s best interests at heart and know more about your child’s needs than you do. Perhaps some parents are too busy to be bothered, but most are probably uncertain about their own ability to help their kids; or they are anxious about being judged by peers or school leaders for failing to entrust their kids to therapists.
We should keep in mind that parental reluctance to be the primary support for their children—and the accompanying haste to foist them off onto paid experts—is a form of disengagement that might contribute to the issues that make therapists appear necessary in the first place. One has to imagine that, in many cases, it would make a tremendous difference for a child to have Mom or Dad regularly take the time to listen and provide reassurance. A life grounded in familial care and support is what most kids desire, far more than the ear of a stranger paid to listen to their problems, no matter how well-meaning that stranger might be.
Ultimately, Bad Therapy is much more than a critique of the therapy industry. It’s an exhortation to parents to set aside their uncertainty and trust themselves to be the primary support for their children as they learn to navigate an uncertain world.
Image by anaumenko and licensed via Adobe Stock.
Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. secured his spot on the California presidential ballot after receiving a nomination from the American Independent Party (AIP).
Mr. Kennedy said in a video released Tuesday that he and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, are officially qualified to appear on the ballot in California, the most populous state in the United States.
Huge news! Kennedy-Shanahan on the California ballot! Watch the video below to hear how it happened ⬇️ #KennedyShanahan24 pic.twitter.com/wV2R4P9y8Q
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 29, 2024He said that “ironically” the AIP was initially the party of Alabama’s former Gov. George Wallace, known for his segregationist politics in the 1960s, but that the party had undergone “its own rebirth” before he came along.
“It’s been reborn as a party that represents not bigotry and hatred, but rather compassion and unity and idealism and common sense,” Mr. Kennedy said in the video posted on social media platform X.
“When they learned about my candidacy, they had just drafted a new charter for their reborn party where they could use their battle line for good for helping independent candidates to unite America without being blocked by the two-party duopoly,” he added.
The AIP is California’s third-largest qualified political party, with more than 835,000 registered voters in the state, according to the party’s press release.
AIP state chairman Victor Marani said he had filed all the necessary paperwork with the California Secretary of State to put Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Shanahan on the state’s ballot.
“Our party is pleased to provide the opportunity for all 22 million voters in California to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President. Voters crave a real leader who will unite America,” he said in a statement.
Joe Cook, the regional field director-west for the Kennedy Campaign, said the AIP has “redefined its purpose and offers inspirational candidates a pathway to elected office outside the major parties.”
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the perfect candidate to embody this new shift to independent leaders that serve the common good,” he added.
Since announcing last October that he would leave the Democrat Party’s presidential primary and run as an independent, Mr. Kennedy has said multiple times that he would appear on the general election ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
To combat anticipated challenges from Democrats and Republicans regarding the validity of signatures, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign has said they are collecting 60 percent more signatures than required in every state.
Some members of Mr. Kennedy’s family have previously denounced his decision to run for president as an independent candidate, calling it “perilous” and “dangerous to our country.”
During an interview with CNN on March 25, his sister, Rory Kennedy, explained that they viewed his independent bid as dangerous because they believed his campaign was “siphoning” votes from President Joe Biden, potentially bolstering former President Donald Trump’s chances of winning.
2024 presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks with his vice presidential pick Nicole Shanahan in Oakland, Calif., on March 26, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
“I feel strongly that this is the most important election of our lifetime. And there’s so much at stake, and I do think it’s going to come down to a handful of votes and a handful of states,” she told the news outlet.
“And I do worry that Bobby just taking some percentage of votes from Biden could shift the election and lead to Trump’s election,” said Ms. Kennedy, the youngest daughter of late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Back in 2011, around the time gold hits its previous cycle high, South Korea surprised the fiat world when it revealed that it had spent more than a billion dollars in its first gold purchase in more than a decade, as uncertainty about global growth and sovereign debt push central banks around the world to diversify foreign reserves. It then proceeds to buy a lot more gold (relatively speaking) for the next year and a half before halting purchases indefinitely once again in 2013. It now holds 104.4 tonnes of gold in its foreign exchange reserves, or $4.8 billion, accounting for 1.1% of its total $419.3 billion in reserves at the end of March.
That may change soon, however, because with gold hitting a new all time high in recent weeks, South Korea’s central bank may consider buying more gold in the mid- to long-term, even if it is not thinking of immediately buying more after a recent surge in prices of the precious metal, a bank official said on Tuesday.
The bank’s rare comments come after this month’s record high of $2,431.29 an ounce in spot gold as growing Middle East tension drove investors to seek safe-haven assets. The metal has risen 13% this year, building on a gain of 13% in 2023.
“We don’t have any immediate plans to buy gold now,” Kwon Min-soo, head of the Bank of Korea’s reserve management group told Reuters, adding that numerous factors needed to be weighed to ensure the right circumstances for such purchases.
“Foreign exchange reserves must be on a sufficiently increasing trend, and the foreign exchange market must be stable in order to ‘consider’ purchasing additional gold as an asset, which is why we would consider them only in the mid- to long-term,” he said.
Translation: South Korea will buy more gold, but only after spot prices have jumped another several hundred dollars.
In a blog post earlier, the bank’s Reserve Management Group said it needed to be cautious when investing in gold, but advantages offered by the precious metal included its role as a hedge against inflation and an alternative to the US dollar.
Recent gains in gold prices were due mostly to purchases by central banks of countries such as China, Russia and Turkey, which are trying to become less dependent on the US currency or guard against war, the bank said.
The thaw in sentiment toward gold is a reversal from the BOK's June 2023 position when the central bank said it was more desirable to maintain dollar liquidity than boost its gold holdings, after its first inspection of gold holdings at the Bank of England.
Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against two state-level health policies that exclude so-called “gender-affirming” treatments, teeing up potential review by the U.S. Supreme Court...
Judge Roger Gregory, an appointee of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote in his majority opinion that the policies’ exclusion of surgeries such as vaginoplasties for certain diagnoses violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
“The coverage exclusions facially discriminate on the basis of sex and gender identity, and are not substantially related to an important government interest,” he said.
The 8–6 decision affirmed lower court decisions against West Virginia’s Medicaid policy and the North Carolina State Health Plan for Teachers and State Employees. Both aimed to preclude coverage of procedures or treatments pursuant to attempts at changing one’s gender.
During oral arguments in September, at least two judges said it’s likely the case will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judge Gregory’s opinion rejected the idea that the policies didn’t discriminate on the basis of gender identity merely because they focused on diagnoses rather than individuals experiencing that condition.
“Appellants argue that the district courts’ equal-protection analyses were flawed because, they say, the exclusions distinguish on the basis of diagnosis,” he said.
He added that “in this case, discriminating on the basis of diagnosis is discriminating on the basis of gender identity and sex.”
Later in the opinion, Judge Gregory wrote that “gender dysphoria is so intimately related to transgender status as to be virtually indistinguishable from it. The excluded treatments aim at addressing incongruity between sex assigned at birth and gender identity, the very heart of transgender status.”
He later added that in “addition to discriminating on the basis of gender identity, the exclusions discriminate on the basis of sex.”
“Certain gender-affirming surgeries that could be provided to people assigned male at birth and people assigned female at birth are provided to only one group under the policy. Those surgeries include vaginoplasty (for congenital absence of a vagina), breast reconstruction (post-mastectomy), and breast reduction (for gynecomastia).”
Judge Gregory’s opinion encountered three separate dissents, including one in which Judge Harvie Wilkinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, argued “the science behind gender dysphoria care is far from settled.”
He suggested the majority overstepped its authority in encroaching on state decisions about health care.
“Providing the best possible care to adults and youth struggling with gender dysphoria is a challenging task for our States,” he said.
“But it is one that they are entitled to perform without premature judicial interference.”
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project, said in a statement to The Epoch Times that the decision “cries out for reversal from the Supreme Court.”
She warned that Judge Gregory’s reasoning “surely will be cited in attempts to force private insurance plans to do the same.”
Judge Marvin Quattlebaum, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said the majority “improperly” declared statements from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health “to be facts.”
“Individually and combined, these missteps improperly stack the deck, effectively ignoring the fair-minded debate about the medical necessity and efficacy of the treatments the plaintiffs seek,” he added.
Lambda Legal, which challenged both states’ policies, declared victory.
“We are pleased with the Court’s decision, which will save lives. It confirms that discriminating against transgender people by denying critical medical care is not only wrong but unconstitutional,” Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli said in a press release.
“No one should be denied essential health care, but our clients in both cases were denied coverage for medically necessary care prescribed by their doctors just because they’re transgender.”
What is truth? Those were the famous words from Pilate to Jesus Christ. Like Pilate, we seek truth yet while the paths to truth may diverge at times, one thing is sure: they cannot be determined by governmental authorities. Ron Paul Institute Director Daniel McAdams spoke earlier this month at the Mises Institute/Ron Paul Institute Lake Jackson, TX, conference on the topics of the recently-extended Section 702 of the FISA Act allowing the government to spy without a warrant and the recent passage of the “TikTok Ban” legislation, where the government has determined it has the authority to determine what we may read or watch on the Internet.
Watch McAdams blast government’s power grab on spying and the media here:
Apollo Global Management has been entangled in a scandalous lawsuit and accused of acquiring illegal life insurance policies on senior citizens through a complex web of shell trusts.
The company allegedly used an affiliate, Financial Credit Investment, to manage about a $20 billion portfolio of stranger-originated life insurance policies, effectively engaging in what the lawsuit claims:
"In short, Apollo has been carrying out a widespread fraudulent human life wagering conspiracy designed to not only hide its involvement, but to create the false appearance that the policies it owns are somehow legitimate."
The complaint continues:
"Worse still, when Apollo senses a claim is going to be brought, it attempts to dissolve its shell entities to give itself yet another layer of protection."
This scheme was designed to give the policies the illusion of legitimacy. Martha Barotz's estate initiated the legal action filed in Delaware's Chancery Court last Friday. It raises serious questions about Apollo's ethical practices.
"In this way, the senior citizens have no idea who owns a policy on their life, and who wants them dead," the suit said, adding, "Apollo was fraudulently and illegally using these shell entities to perpetuate human life wagers not only on the life of Mrs. Barotz, but on the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of other senior citizens."
Bloomberg first reported on the lawsuit. Responding to BBG's note, Joshua Rosner, a Graham Fisher & Co. managing partner, wrote on X that Apollo's actions are "mind-bending and horrifying."
Even as a co-author of “These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs and Wrecks America”, which details how rapacious Apollo is… this is mind-bending and horrifying! They should be fried. https://t.co/6NxzpaXRSR pic.twitter.com/TPx2GUvnpS
— joshua rosner (@JoshRosner) April 30, 2024"Apollo should have its insurance licenses pulled in every state by the @naic. They predate retirees and pensioners through pension risk transfers and now we find they take out life insurance policies against seniors. @AARP," Rosner said.
#athene #appollo should have its #insurance licenses pulled in every state by the @naic. They predate #retirees and #pensioners through #pension risk transfers and now we find they take out life insurance policies against seniors. @AARP https://t.co/OdthIMcrCo
— joshua rosner (@JoshRosner) April 30, 2024Rosner asks one heck of a question: "With Apollo managing hospitals, nursing & hospice facilities & also the retirement accounts of seniors, are they essentially taking a straddle position on seniors by buying life insurance policies on them?"
One has to ask: with Apollo managing hospitals, nursing & hospice facilities & also the retirement accounts of seniors are they essentially taking a straddle position on seniors by buying life insurance policies on them? @naic @AARP @BenSasse @HawleyMO @GovRonDeSantis… https://t.co/OlTYQop1t4
— joshua rosner (@JoshRosner) April 30, 2024One X user asks: "Did they take out life insurance on Alfred Villalobos and Jeffrey Epstein?"
Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com,
The early crypto investor, often called ‘Bitcoin Jesus,’ faces extradition to the U.S. after being charged with evading nearly $50 million in taxes.
Officials with the United States Department of Justice announced charges against early Bitcoin investor Roger Ver, known by many as ‘Bitcoin Jesus.’
In an April 30 notice, the Justice Department said authorities in Spain had arrested Ver based on criminal charges in the United States, including mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false tax returns.
The U.S. government alleged Ver defrauded the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) out of roughly $48 million with his failure to report capital gains on his sale of Bitcoin and other assets.
According to the indictment filed on Feb. 15 but unsealed on April 29, Ver allegedly took control of roughly 70,000 BTC in June 2017 - before the now famous bull run - and sold many of them for $240 million. U.S. officials said they planned to extradite Ver from Spain to the United States to stand trial.
Reactions to Ver’s arrest on social media were mixed.
However, Bitcoiner Dan Held, the former growth lead at Kraken, claimed Ver “deserves everything that he’s about to get” after he “nearly destroyed Bitcoin.”
“Roger attacked my livelihood by trying to get me fired, called up others to hurt my relationships, and attacked my reputation,” said Held on X.
“He misaligned expectations around Bitcoin so much that it led to a civil war.”
A cryptic message was Ver's most-recent post on X, reading:
Source: Roger Ver
Ver was also a proponent of Bitcoin Cash.
In 2022, he became embroiled in a scandal with crypto investment platform CoinFlex, which claimed he owed them $47 million in USD Coin.
He had not commented on social media regarding the Justice Department charges at the time of publication.
Ver has previously pleaded guilty and served time for selling explosives on eBay.
At the start of April, we penned a lengthy report for premium subs discussing why artificial intelligence data centers, the electrification of the economy, and onshoring trends will result in a major upgrade of the nation's power grid. We followed the note up on Monday with a report titled Everyone Is Piling Into The "Next AI Trade."
Now , BlackRock Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Fink has jumped on the "Next AI Trade" theme at a World Economic Forum event on Monday.
"I do believe to properly um build out AI. We're talking about trillions of dollars of investing. So data centers today could be as much as 200 megahertz - and they're now talking about data centers being one gigawatt. That powers a city," Fink told the audience.
He pointed out that he spoke with the head of one tech company, who said their data centers currently require about 5 gigawatts of power. By 2030, the person told Fink that number could jump to 30 gigawatts.
"The amount of power that's needed to use AI has a huge impact on society," Fink said.
He then asked: "So where's that power going to come from? Are we going to take it off the grid? What does that mean for elevated energy prices?"
Fink then said the surge in power demand because of AI data centers is a "huge investment opportunity."
He warned: "The world is going to be short power - short power - and to power these data companies you cannot have this intermittent power like wind and solar."
"You need dispatchable power because they can't turn off and on these data centers," he continued.
So what kind of clean, reliable energy could Fink be hinting at?
Well, nuclear, as we've explained to readers as early as December 2020: "Buy Uranium: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze."
This week, the nuclear power industry appears to be gaining a major comeback. The federal government is expected to continue restarting shuttered nuclear power plants in the coming years, according to Jigar Shah, director of the US Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, who spoke with Bloomberg on Monday.
In March, Shah's office approved a loan to Holtec International Corp. to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. This was a historical shift, and it was the first nuclear power plant to be reopened in the US, setting a precedent for atomic energy to make a triumphal comeback. The plant could begin producing power as early as the second half of 2025.
Shah said, "A lot of the other players that have a nuclear power plant that has recently shut down and could be turned back on are gaining that confidence to try." He declined to give specifics about which plants were slated to reopen.
Now, the head of the world's largest asset manager, with $10 trillion in assets under management, is a believer in the "Next AI Trade," as everyone is seriously piling in.
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
World reserve status allows for amazing latitude in terms of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve understands that there is constant demand for dollars overseas as a means to more easily import and export goods. The dollar’s petro-status also makes it essential for trading oil globally. This means that the central bank of the US has been able to create fiat currency from thin air to a far higher degree than any other central bank on the planet while avoiding the immediate effects of hyperinflation.
Much of that cash as well as dollar denominated debt (physical and digital) ends up in the coffers of foreign central banks, international banks and investment firms where it is held as a hedge or used to adjust the exchange rates of other currencies for trade advantage. As much as one-half of the value of all U.S. currency is estimated to be circulating abroad.
World reserve status along with various debt instruments allowed the US government and the Fed to create tens of trillions of dollars in new currency after the 2008 credit crash, all while keeping inflation under control (sort of). The problem is that this system of stowing dollars overseas only lasts so long and eventually the consequences of overprinting come home to roost.
The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 established the framework for the rise of the US dollar and while the benefits are obvious, especially for the banks, there are numerous costs involved. Think of world reserve status as a “deal with the devil” – You get the fame, you get the fortune, you get the hot girlfriend and the sweet car, but one day the devil is coming to collect and when he does he’s going to take EVERYTHING, including your soul.
Unfortunately, I suspect the time is coming soon for the US and it may be in the form of a brand new Bretton Woods-like system that removes the dollar as world reserve and replaces it with a new digital basket structure. Global banks are essentially admitting to the plan for a complete overhaul of the dollar-based financial world and the creation of a CBDC-centric system built on “unified ledgers.”
There have been three recent developments all announced in succession that suggest the dollar’s replacement is imminent (before this decade is over).
The IMF’s XC platform was released as a theoretical model in November of 2022 and matches closely with their long discussed concept of a global Special Drawing Rights basket, only in this case it would tie together all CBDCs under one umbrella along with “legacy currencies.”
It’s promoted as a policy structure to make cross-border payments in CBDCs “easier” and this model is focused primarily on currency exchanges between governments and central banks. Of course, it places the IMF as the middle-man in terms of controlling the flow of digital transactions. The IMF suggests that the XC platform would make the transition from legacy currencies to CBDCs less complicated for the various nations involved.
As the IMF noted in a discussion on centralized ledgers in 2023:
“We could end up in a world where we have connected entities to some degree, but some entities and some countries that are excluded. And as a global and multilateral institution, we’re sort of aiming to, you know, provide a basic connectivity, a basic set of rules and governance that is truly multilateral and inclusive. So, I think that is—the ambition is to aim for innovation that is compatible with policy goals and that is inclusive relative to the broad membership of, say, the IMF.”
To translate, decentralized systems are bad. “Inclusivity” (collectivism) is good. And the IMF wants to work in tandem with other globalist institutions to be the facilitators (controllers) of that economic collectivism.
Not more than a day after the IMF announced their XC platform goals, the BIS announced their plans for a unified ledger for all CBDCs called the ‘BIS Universal Ledger.’ The BIS specifically notes that the project is meant to “inspire trust in central bank digital currencies” while “overcoming the fragmentation of current tokenization efforts.”
While the IMF is focused on international policy control, the BIS is pursuing the technical aspects for the globalization of CBDCs. They make it clear in their white papers that a cashless society is in fact the end game and that digital transactions need to be monitored by a centralized entity in order to keep money “secure.” As the BIS argues in their extensive overview of Unified Ledgers:
“Today, the monetary system stands at the cusp of another major leap. Following dematerialisation and digitalisation, the key development is tokenisation – the process of representing claims digitally on a programmable platform. This can be seen as the next logical step in digital recordkeeping and asset transfer.”
“…The blueprint envisages these elements being brought together in a new type of financial market infrastructure (FMI) – a “unified ledger”. The full benefits of tokenisation could be harnessed in a unified ledger due to the settlement finality that comes from central bank money residing in the same venue as other claims. Leveraging trust in the central bank, a shared venue of this kind has great potential to enhance the monetary and financial system.
There are three major assertions made by the BIS in their program – First, the digitization of money is unavoidable and cash is going to disappear primarily because it makes moving money easier. Second, decentralized payment methods are unacceptable because they are “risky” and only central banks are qualified and “trustworthy” enough to mediate the exchange of money. Third, the use of Unified Ledgers is largely designed to track and trace and even investigate all CBDC transactions, for the public good, of course.
The BIS system deals far more in the realm of private transactions than the IMF example. It is the technical foundation for the centralization of all CBDCs, governed in part by the BIS and the IMF, and it is scheduled to go into wider use in the next two years. There are already multiple nations testing the BIS ledger today. It’s important to understand that whoever acts as the middle-man in the process of the global exchange of money is going to have all the power, over governments and over the populace.
If every movement of wealth is monitored, from the shift of billions between governments to the payment of a few dollars from an individual to a retailer, then every aspect of trade can be throttled on the whims of the observer.
As we’ve seen with the attempt to use the SWIFT payment network as a bludgeon against Russia, there is an ulterior motive for globalists to have a high speed large scale monetary transaction hub. Again, this is all about centralization, and whoever controls the hub has the means to control trade…to a point.
Locking Russia out of SWIFT has done minimal damage to their economy exactly because there are alternative methods for transferring money to keep the flow of trade running. However, under a CBDC based global monetary umbrella, it would be impossible for any country to work outside the boundaries. It’s not only about the ease of shutting a nation out of the network, it’s also about having the power to immediately block the transfer of funds on the receiving end of the exchange.
Meaning, any funds from any Russian source could be tracked and cut off before they are allowed to get into the hands of, say, a recipient in China or India. Once all governments are completely under the thumb of a centralized monetary system, a centralized ledger and a centralized exchange hub, they will never be able to rebel and this control will trickle down to the general population.
I would also remind readers that the majority of nations are going right along with this program. China is most eager to join the global currency scheme. Russia is still part of the BIS, but their involvement in CBDCs is still unclear. The point is, don’t expect the BRICS to counteract the new monetary order, it’s not going to happen.
So what do all these globalist projects with CBDCs have to do with the dollar and its venerated position as the world reserve currency? The bottom line is this: A unified CBDC system completely excludes the need or use-case for a world reserve currency. The Unified Ledger model takes all CBDCs and homogenizes them into a puddle of liquidity, each CBDC growing similar in characteristics over a short period of time.
The advantages of using the dollar disappear in this scenario and the value of currencies becomes relative to the middle-man. In other words, the IMF, BIS and other related institutions dictate the properties of CBDCs and thus there is no distinguishing aspect of any CBDC that makes one more valuable than the others.
Sure, some countries might be able to separate their currency to a point with superior production or superior technology, but the old model of having a big military as a way to ensure Forex and trade favors is dead. Eventually the globalists will make two predictable arguments:
1) “A world reserve currency under the control of one nation is unfair and we as global bankers need to make the system “more equal.””
2) “Why have a reserve currency at all when all transactions are moderated under our ledger anyway? The dollar is no longer any more easy to use for international trade than any other CBDC, right?”
Finally, the dollar has to die because it’s an integral part of the “old world” of material exchange. The globalists desire a cashless society because it is an easily controlled society. Think of the covid lockdowns and the attempts at vaccine passports – If they had a cashless system in place at that time, they would have gotten everything they wanted. Refuse to take the experimental vaccine? We’ll just shut off your digital accounts and you will starve.
This was even partially attempted (think Canadian trucker protests), but with physical cash there’s always a way around a digital embargo. Without physical cash you have no other options unless you plan to live completely off the land and barter goods and services (a way of life most people in the first world need a lot of time to get used to).
I believe that a sizable percentage of the American populace will go to war before they accept a cashless society, but in the meantime, there is still the inevitability of a dollar crash to deal with. Globalist organizations are pushing CBDCs to go active VERY quickly, and as this happens along with the centralized ledgers the traditional dollar will swiftly lose favor. This means that those trillions in greenbacks held overseas will start flooding back into America all at once causing an inflationary disaster well beyond what we are witnessing today.
As much as the economy has benefited from world reserve status in the past it will suffer equally as the dollar fades, only to be replaced by a framework even worse than fiat. That is, unless there’s a dramatic upheaval that removes the globalist order from the equation entirely…
* * *
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While hiring rates for those in the bottom-third of US income distribution has been on a tear (and largely going to part time workers, most of whom are illegal immigrants), white collar jobs hiring is stalling out across much of the US, with industries such as finance, technology, media, and professional services such as law and accounting all suffering despite the national unemployment rate hovering near historic lows.
To wit, nearly 120,000 corporate positions have vanished from San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago combined over the past year, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. White-collar payrolls have also declined in various metros such as Phoenix and Seattle, as well as in pandemic boomtowns such as Miami and Austin, which have seen white-collar growth flatline.
Nationally, payrolls for white-collar types of jobs were up just 0.6% from a year ago in March, about a third of the overall pace of job creation, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wage growth for high-paid workers has also largely cooled from its peaks.
Banks, consulting firms and tech companies all went on hiring sprees at the height of the pandemic, when low interest rates, easy access to credit and government support made it easier to expand. Many of those incentives have since faded, paving the way for layoffs. Citigroup, McKinsey and Tesla are among the high-profile employers slashing jobs in recent weeks. -Bloomberg
"We’re not seeing the big post-Covid booms anymore," said Alexandra-Dana Gusita, who heads the New York office of Tiger Recruitment. "Employers are more cautious in hiring."
"Even though the labor market looks strong, there’s a lack of job security, especially in tech," said Jack Benedict, 25, who learned that he and 42 other YouTube Music employees had been laid off in February. "All these massive companies are trying to downsize or replace people with AI," he continued, adding that he worries college degrees are "not enough when companies are asking for 10 years of experience."
According to jobs website Indeed, the number of openings in banking, finance, media / communications, and software development are all running below levels seen in February 2020, as the pandemic was kicking into high gear.
Part-time white collar?
According to the report, part of the white-collar weakness is the result of a large pullback in 'temporary-help employment' according to the BLS. The category, considered something of an economic bellwether, indicates that businesses are shedding part-time positions before full-time ones. Since the sector peaked two years ago, 420,000 of those jobs have vanished.
In March note, Vanguard's chief global economist, Joe Davis, wrote that demand is greatest for workers making under $55,000 per year, as hiring rates for those in the bottom-third of the US income distribution far outpaced that of higher-income workers.
Source: Vanguard, as of October 2023.
"Many higher-income workers accepted slower wage growth as a trade-off for remote work flexibility," wrote Davis. "These dynamics have all contributed to the faster rise in wages for lower-income workers."
Authored by Turner Wright via CoinTelegraph.com,
United States House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry has alleged Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler “knowingly misled Congress” over the regulator’s alleged attempts to classify Ether as a security.
In an April 30 X post, Representative McHenry claimed that Gensler intentionally misled lawmakers in testimony before the Committee.
The U.S. lawmaker referred to claims made in a recent court filing by software development firm Consensys, which filed a lawsuit against the SEC on April 25.
Source: Representative Patrick McHenry
Consensys’s initial complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas highlighted public inconsistencies in the SEC’s approach to digital assets as securities, specifically Ether. Unredacted sections of the filing appeared on the court docket on April 29, suggesting that the SEC launched an investigation into ETH as security in March 2023.
Gensler appeared before the House Financial Services Committee in April 2023, pivoting or ducking direct questions from McHenry on whether Ether fell under the SEC’s or Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) purview. The timing of his testimony suggested that the SEC may have already considered Ether a security.
“Clearly, an asset cannot be both a commodity and a security,” said McHenry in the Committee hearing.
“I’m asking you, sitting in your chair now [...] is Ether a commodity or a security?”
If the SEC is pursuing a path that could put it at odds with the CFTC over Ether, it could have ramifications for approving or denying spot Ether exchange-traded funds on U.S. exchanges. The SEC began approving investment vehicles tied to ETH futures in October 2023, with many experts speculating that the Commission will decide on a spot Ether ETF in May.
McHenry used the opportunity to urge lawmakers to support the passage of the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) to establish clear rules of the road between the CFTC and SEC.
The legislation moved out of Committee in July 2023 and is set for a full floor vote in the House.
The ACLJ’s ongoing fight to uphold the free speech rights of sidewalk counselors is now at the U.S. Supreme Court. Our case, Turco v. City of Englewood, N.J., poses a critical constitutional question: Do buffer zones around abortion clinics infringe on the First Amendment rights of sidewalk counselors?
That’s the very issue we’ve brought to the Court today in our petition for a writ of certiorari. The petition asks the Court to resolve two questions: (1) Whether Englewood’s speech-free buffer zone ordinance violates the First Amendment, and (2) Whether the Court should overrule Hill v. Colorado (an oft-criticized decision of the Supreme Court that upheld floating bubble zones around persons within 100 feet of a healthcare facility).
From the start, the ACLJ has fervently defended pro-life speech, especially the free speech rights of sidewalk counselors. Our client, Jeryl, and counselors like her engage in gentle, personal dialogues with women entering abortion clinics, providing them with alternative options and support. These counselors operate from a place of deep concern for women and the unborn, striving to present information and care that are not available within abortion clinics.
This case began in 2013 when Englewood (“City”) adopted an ordinance regulating speech activities in buffer zones near health care and transitional facilities. The ACLJ challenged the City’s ordinance in 2014, arguing that the law was excessively broad and unconstitutional, drawing on the Supreme Court’s ruling in McCullen v. Coakley, which unanimously struck down a similar law.
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Our case saw an initial win in the trial court, but that decision was overturned by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, leading to a bench trial in February 2022. During the trial, Jeryl highlighted the challenges the buffer zones created for her counseling efforts. The City, however, justified its ordinance on grounds of financial constraints and confidentiality. The district court ruled in favor of the City in August 2022, a decision later upheld by the Third Circuit, citing the Supreme Court’s Hill decision as a basis for its ruling. In affirming the trial court’s decision, the Third Circuit failed to note that the Supreme Court described Hill as a distortion of First Amendment doctrines just a year before.
The Third Circuit also failed to consider another federal court of appeals’ decision involving a similar law. In Sisters for Life v. Louisville-Jefferson County, a case where the ACLJ represents two sidewalk counselors, the Sixth Circuit ordered the district court to enter a preliminary injunction against Louisville’s buffer zone law around all health care facilities.
As we argue in our petition, the Third Circuit’s decision cannot be allowed to stand. The government’s authority to regulate protected speech activities on public sidewalks is sharply circumscribed. Before the government can enforce speech-free zones in public areas, it must first try other ways to address its concerns, such as prosecuting lawbreakers, seeking injunctions against bad actors, and enforcing conduct-based laws already on the books. As the Sixth Circuit said in Sisters for Life, “Solving policy problems by regulating speech is a means of last resort, not first resort.” The Supreme Court in McCullen was also clear: “A painted line on the sidewalk is easy to enforce, but the prime objective of the First Amendment is not efficiency.”
In this case, where Englewood has sacrificed the right to free speech in the name of efficiency, the Supreme Court must intervene. Jeryl is not alone. Other federal courts, in addition to the Third Circuit, have dismissed challenges against speech-free zones outside abortion clinics. The problem is that those courts are hamstrung by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hill. While that decision has been criticized by Justices over the years, including current Justices, the Court has yet to overturn the decision. Our petition argues that now is the time, and this is the case, for the Court to do just that.
The Supreme Court is not required to grant our petition, and the Court rarely grants them. Here, however, considering the conflict among the lower courts and the ongoing mischief Hill continues to create, we believe our petition is more than worthy of Supreme Court review.
The ACLJ has always been committed to protecting the right to free speech, advocating not only for clients like Jeryl but also for all individuals engaged in peaceful expression in public spaces. Should the Court grant our petition, a decision on the merits will have far-reaching implications for how free speech is protected across the country. And that is not all. A positive decision from the Court in this case will allow sidewalk counselors to continue their important mission of supporting women and their unborn children at the very spot where that message can have its greatest power.
Once the City files its opposition to our petition and we file our reply, the Court will decide whether to take the case. We will keep you posted on when that happens.
LifeNews Note: Jordan Sekulow is the Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). Geoffrey Surtees is an attorney with the ACLJ and specializes in religious civil liberties.
The post Pro-Life Group Heads to Supreme Court to Defend Right to Pray Outside Abortion Centers appeared first on LifeNews.com.
WTI ended April on a down-note (closing lower on the month, as opposed to Brent which saw its fourth straight monthly gain) as hopes for cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas dampened fears of a wider conflict that could threaten crude supplies.
The recent declines come as a "relief to both central bankers and consumers alike," Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, told MarketWatch.
There's been a notable decrease in speculation about the possibility of U.S. benchmark WTI surpassing the $100-a-barrel threshold, at least for now, he said. This shift in sentiment can be attributed, in part, to "reduced concerns about disruptions to Iranian production, following Israel's measured response to previous drone attacks."
Meanwhile, "attention should also be directed towards peace talks, as progress in this area could further contribute to a decrease in oil prices," said Innes.
But, after last week's big crude draw, analysts expect another drawdown in stocks this week.
API
Crude +4.91mm (-1.5mm exp)
Cushing +1.48mm
Gasoline -1.48mm (-1.2mm exp)
Distillates -2.19mm (+400k exp)
Crude stocks unexpectedly rose almost 5mm barrels last week while distillates inventories declined notably...
Source: Bloomberg
WTI was hovering around $81.65 ahead of the API print and extended losses modestly after...
Despite the reprieve in oil prices, crude-oil markets are expected to remain volatile, said Innes, partly due to uncertainty surrounding the pace of global oil demand growth, the rise in non-OPEC+ and U.S. oil production, the potential for supply disruptions in regions like Russia and the Middle East and, critically, OPEC+'s future production strategy.
"These dynamics underscore the ongoing challenges and complexities within the oil market landscape," Innes said.
Heading into Amazon's Q1 earnings, we said earlier that the investment thesis is driven by i) ecommerce share, ii) margin expansion and iii) the potential for AWS growth recovery through the year. We also noted that the key bogeys for this extremely popular - among hedge funds - position were the following:
So with that in mind here is what Amazon - whose stock first tumbled then spiked after hours, reported moments ago:
Turning to operating results we get an even stronger tally:
The operating margin has to be seen to be believed: at 10.7%, it appears to be the highest in AMZN history.
As for expenses, these were generally in line with estimates:
Of the above, the most notable highlight was AWS which not only grew revenue by a whopping 17% (ex. FX) and 16% including FX, both of which handily beat estimates of 14.5%, and were the strongest growth in a a year, but whose Q1 operating income of $9.42BN on revenue of $25.04BN, meant that margin surged to 37.6%, which was the highest AWS margin in history!
Sales growth at the cloud unit slowed to a record low last year as businesses cut back on technology spending and sought to curb computing bills that ballooned during the pandemic. Investors have been banking on a rebound this year, particularly after strong results last week from Microsoft and Google, Amazon’s two main rivals in the business of renting computing power and data storage. And, in the case od AMZN, they were right to do so.
The results are the first since Amazon introduced video advertising to the Prime Video streaming service, creating a new revenue source. Advertising revenue rose 24% to $11.8 billion.
Looking ahead, the company's guidance which was soft on the top line but disappointed on earnings:
If accurate, that would mean Q2 revenue will grow at the slowest pace sine Dec 2022.
So turning the abovementioned bogeys, this is how AMZN did:
CEO Andy Jassy has been cutting costs in recent years as he refocused on profitability in Amazon’s central retail business, laying off thousands of people and touting a more efficient warehouse network. At the same time, he’s backed big investments in artificial intelligence services that Amazon expects to generate tens of billions in revenue in the coming years.
"The combination of companies renewing their infrastructure modernization efforts and the appeal of AWS’s AI capabilities is reaccelerating AWS’s growth rate (now at a $100 billion annual revenue run rate),” Jassy said in the statement.
The results are also the first since Amazon introduced video advertising to the Prime Video streaming service, creating a new revenue source. Advertising revenue rose 24% to $11.8 billion.
The stock initially tumbled, only to rebound sharply and then fade, closing roughly unchanged with where it was for much of the day around $180.
In Acts, which we read in Eastertide the missionary journeys of St. Paul are set before us. Unfortunately, in important lines are cut out lectionary that describe why Sts. Paul and Silas were in jail. The whole story serves as a metaphor for the radical nature of true Christianity and explains why it so perturbs many in this world. The Christian faith, its message, and the transformation it can effect can be very unsettling to a world that literally and figuratively “banks on” sin. Let’s consider this lesser-known story of Paul and see what it ought to mean for us if we take the Christian faith seriously and do not try to “tame” it. We pick up the story just after the baptism of Lydia, when Sts. Paul and Silas encounter a possessed slave girl, whom tradition sometimes calls “Pythonissa the Soothsayer.”
Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. This girl followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so troubled that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.
When the owners of the slave girl realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”
The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten. After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. Upon receiving such orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks (Acts 16:16-24).
Note the heart of the problem: St. Paul, in setting the slave girl free of her demon, has deprived her “owners” of the income they were deriving from her sad state. They were banking on her sad condition and profiting from her trouble. In the name and power of Jesus Christ, St. Paul sets her free. His action draws deep anger from the “owners.” He has rocked their world and touched their pocketbooks. They see the Christian message as revolutionary, disconcerting, threatening, and deeply unsettling.
It is a threat not only to profit but to power. In having Paul arrested, they stir up the hatred and fear of others as well, indicating that Paul is not merely preaching some “strange new religion” but is advocating customs forbidden to Romans. The word “customs” here in Greek is ἐθη (ethe) and refers to “religious rites or forms of worship.” Cicero, in De Legibus ii. 8, wrote, “No person shall have any separate gods, or new ones; nor shall he privately worship any strange gods, unless they be publicly allowed.” While the Romans often overlooked the private worship of unapproved gods, they were strictly forbidden from publicly proclaiming new and unapproved deities, as this provided an occasion for dissension and controversy.
And, frankly, the charges against Paul and Silas were true enough. In the healing they brought about, they hindered profit. Further, they were openly proclaiming that Jesus was Lord. To our ears that is a religious proclamation, but to Roman ears it was a provocative and revolutionary statement. It was directly contrary to their proclamation that Caesar was Lord. Yes, Paul, Silas, Luke, and the others were shaking the ground in Philippi. While they were not advocating the overthrow of any government, they were announcing a power greater than Caesar, a higher King who demanded first loyalty: Jesus!
This is not the tame and domesticated proclamation of the faith that is so common today. This is not the faith that is trimmed to fit into worldly categories and to be tucked under political, philosophical, and moral preferences. This is the faith that shakes the world and brings a revolutionary challenge to the world’s priorities. Yes, Paul and Silas were a serious threat.
And what of us today? We have gone through a long period during which the faith could be lived quietly and generally fit quite well into the world in which we lived. Harmony and “getting along” were highly prized. Particularly here in America, Catholics wanted to reassure the general populace that our faith in no way hindered us from being full participants in the American scene and that we could fit right in and be just like everyone else. With the election of the first Catholic president back in 1960, we could say that we had finally made it and had been fully accepted. Finally we fit in.
Of course the culture was not in such disrepair in those days and there was a fairly wide moral consensus rooted in the Judeo-Christian vision. Now that we have finally “made it,” the fire of our distinctively Catholic culture seems to have faded away. At the same time, Western culture has also largely died. (Is it a coincidence?)
In recent years, so-called Catholic universities and other institutions have been caving in to pressure. They are affording marriage benefits to same-sex bedfellows and succumbing to the HHS mandates to provide contraceptives and abortifacients. This is sad, pathetic, wrong, and cowardly—hardly the revolutionary faith that got Paul arrested.
And now we are coming full circle. We must rediscover how revolutionary our Catholic faith truly is to this world gone mad. And as we proclaim healing and profess an allegiance to something other than this world, we will become increasingly repugnant to the world around us.
Let’s consider more thoroughly the two offenses for which Paul and Silas were beaten and imprisoned:
1. They ate into profits. Paul drove a terrible demon out of a slave girl, a demon that afflicted her but profited her “owners.” In this world today there is a lot of trafficking in sin and addiction. Terrible demons afflict many people in the areas of sexuality, drugs, and alcohol. But there’s a lot of money to be made. Sex sells. Hollywood movie producers, pornographers, purveyors of contraceptives, pimps, escort services, abortionists, and even traffickers in the sex-slave industry feed at the trough. Drugs and alcohol are big money-makers as well. Huge numbers of products are sold using the demon of fear that says things like, “You’re not pretty enough,” “You’re not healthy enough,” “You’re getting old,” “You don’t drive the right car,” “You haven’t impressed your friends enough,” “You need to buy our product right away so you’re not so pathetic.” And thus the demon of fear and low self-esteem is exploited along with the demon of greed.
But what would happen if the Church were to start preaching unabridged Christianity effectively? You don’t need to be afraid of your health, your age, or what people think of you. You can find serenity in Christ so that you won’t need all that extra alcohol and those drugs. You can be set free from your enslavement to sex. You can take authority over your passions and discover the beauty of traditional marriage. What if we got back in the business of driving out demons?
Of course the answer is that we, like Paul, would be (and are) under attack. We are especially hated by the sex industry and the abortionists since those are hot-button issues these days. To them we are public enemy number one. We threaten the vision, the addiction, and the despair that fills their coffers. If we are too successful (and for now our successes are meager) their profits may go away. Yes, we must be dealt with.
But we will only be effective if we preach the unabridged faith, not the faith that is tailored and tucked under worldly priorities, not the faith that insists on being “realistic,” not the faith that makes endless apologies to the inevitable objections of the world no matter how much we water things down. The true faith is revolutionary in the freedom it offers from sin and demons.
Paul and Silas didn’t end up in prison by preaching a watered-down, tamed moral vision. They unabashedly drove out a demon that was afflicting a girl and in so doing they engaged in a revolutionary threat to a world that profits from sin.
2. They threatened power. Calling Jesus, “Lord,” was a revolutionary threat to incumbent power, which demands full loyalty. And thus today, many strive to make Catholics fit into neat little political categories. Both Republicans and Democrats want the Church to fit into their narrow little categories and to march in lockstep with their party platform. Even many Catholics want the Church to conform. Many Catholics in fact are more loyal to their party than to the Church and are more passionate about their political views than their faith. If there is a conflict between a Church teaching and the party line, guess which one usually gives way!
But in the end, the Church will not fit into some neat and tidy political category. The true faith is too revolutionary to fit into some worldly box.
And thus there is a lot of hatred and anger directed at the Church. Republicans say we’re too liberal; Democrats say we’re too conservative. More and more we are being kicked to the curb; our very right to religious liberty is being threatened. Religious exemptions to increasingly pernicious laws are slowly being removed and the number of lawsuits against Catholic institutions is increasing. And it will surely get worse as secular systems demand increasing loyalty. The Church must refuse that loyalty.
Jesus is Lord; the government is not. Jesus is not Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. He is God, and the faith He announces cannot be watered down or compromised to fit into a friendship with the world.
Tame, domesticated Christianity will not threaten or change this world. When Paul preached, the people rioted. Modern preaching too often incites only yawns and indifference.
What should we learn from St. Paul’s arrest at Philippi? That the true faith is revolutionary and hits the world right where it hurts: in the profit and power centers. As the world becomes increasingly secular, the revolutionary aspect of the faith will become more evident.
Are you ready?
Photo Credit: The Bible in Pictures
In this video Fr. Barron comments on the movie “The Matrix,” which depicts an interesting Christian motif. The Matrix is a machine from which people need liberation. The solution can only happen when someone from outside the Matrix (Neo) enters in and announces liberty, dies, rises, and defeats the Matrix.
The post What Does the Arrest of St. Paul at Philippi Teach a Sometimes-Timid Church? appeared first on Community in Mission.
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said on April 28 that he believes that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump could fail because prosecutors have charged the former president with fake crimes.
Alan Dershowitz and former President Donald Trump in file photos. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“There is no crime,” Mr. Dershowitz said during an interview on Fox News on April 28, referring to the case in which Mr. Bragg’s office has charged the former president with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide so-called hush money payments that prosecutors allege amounted to a criminal conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Dershowitz argued that making nondisclosure payments is not a crime and that neither is paying for the non-publication of potentially embarrassing stories (the so-called catch-and-kill dimension of the case), both of which prosecutors have alleged were part of a conspiracy to sway voters.
The retired law professor argued that Mr. Bragg’s office is in danger of having the case thrown out on grounds similar to those on which the conviction of Harvey Weinstein was recently overturned, namely that prosecutors prejudiced the case by a number of “egregious” improper rulings, including allowing testimony that was unrelated to what Mr. Weinstein was charged with.
“They ought to be very careful about this because the Supreme Court of the Appellate Court in Albany just reversed Harvey Weinstein’s conviction on the ground that they put in too much information that wasn’t really relevant to the case,” Mr. Dershowitz said, adding that this is “what’s happening” in the trial against President Trump.
“There is no crime in Manhattan. You cannot figure out what the crime is. That’s why they’re putting on all this evidence of non-crimes,” Mr. Dershowitz said.
“Trying to persuade the jury that ‘catch-and-kill’ is a crime—it’s not. Paying hush money is a crime—it’s not. Putting a corporate statement is a misdemeanor barred by the statute of limitations. You can’t suddenly resurrect that and turn that into a crime by invoking a federal statute which the federal government refused to invoke—the Federal Election Commission refused to invoke.”
The former Harvard law professor has repeatedly criticized Mr. Bragg for elevating the charges against President Trump from misdemeanors to felonies on what Mr. Dershowitz has argued was an invalid legal premise because the Manhattan district attorney invoked federal statutes over which New York has no jurisdiction.
Republicans have accused Mr. Bragg of bringing the case against the former president for political reasons.
Mr. Bragg’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Bragg indicted President Trump on 34 counts of allegedly falsifying business records in order to conceal $130,000 in payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in exchange for keeping quiet about her allegations of an affair she had with President Trump.
President Trump has maintained his innocence and has denied the affair.
“There is no case here. This is just a political witch hunt,” the former president said before court in brief comments to reporters on April 25.
Under New York state law, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. However, if the records fraud was used to cover up or commit another crime, the charge could be elevated to a felony, though a number of legal experts—including Mr. Dershowitz—have challenged the way that has been done in this case.
“In order to turn the state statute into a felony, you have to borrow a federal statute,” Mr. Dershowitz told The Epoch Times in March 2023. He said that this combining of laws “seems to raise real serious legal questions.”
“In Bragg’s case, what they’re trying to do is add one and one and come up with 11,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “No rational person would look at these two statutes and say that Trump violated them.”
The prosecution’s first witness in the case was former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. Prosecutors alleged that he participated in a catch-and-kill scheme to suppress unflattering stories about President Trump and help him get elected.
President Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, said in court that the catch-and-kill that the jury heard about from prosecutors was not part of the charges against the former president because it was not illegal and happens regularly.
“The reality is that there is nothing illegal about what happened,” Mr. Blanche argued. He added that testimony would be about things from 2015 to 2017 and asked the jury to “think about whether it rings true and whether what they’re saying is accurate.”
“Use your common sense. We’re New Yorkers; that’s why we’re here. You told the court you would put aside whatever view you have about President Trump, the fact that he’s running,” he said. “If you do that, there will be a very swift non-guilty verdict.”
Mr. Dershowitz has said in the past that he believes that New York prosecutors are violating voters’ rights with the case, alleging that the law is being “abused for partisan political purposes and to constitute election interference.”
The former law professor went further in his remarks on Fox News on April 28, arguing that the case is about whether basic civil liberties are protected or undercut.
“If it’s Donald Trump today, they can go after you tomorrow, and your relatives tomorrow, for something that isn’t a crime,” he said.
“That’s why every American, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, should be opposed to what’s going on in that Manhattan courtroom.
“It’s a scandal and it’s a destruction of America’s rule of law.”
A premature baby boy from Fife has come home for the first time after spending 81 days in hospital.
Stephanie Auchterlonie was first made aware that there might be a problem with her unborn baby at her 20 week scan. Medics identified a right aortic arch, a potential symptom of a genetic disorder called DiGeorge Syndrome.
Following this, doctors discovered at Stephanie’s first growth scan that baby Charlie was not growing properly due to a problem with her placenta.
Shortly afterwards, Stephanie was transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Wishaw due to concerns about baby Charlie’s condition.
“None of us thought he would make it”
Two days after Stephanie arrived in hospital, Charlie was born by emergency caesarean section.
“It was a terrifying time and to be honest none of us thought he would make it”, Stephanie said.
“[Doctors] told me to be prepared for him going on a ventilator and they also told me he wouldn’t cry when he came out”, she went on.
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Charlie was born at 28 weeks gestation, weighing just 1lb 6oz. He was taken immediately to the intensive care unit but brought back to see his mother about half an hour later.
Stephanie said “As crazy as it sounds when I first saw him my first words were ‘oh my god it’s a real baby – it looks like a real baby! I don’t know how to describe what I was expecting because I knew he was going to be so small”.
“Tiny wee thing in this big incubator”
In intensive care, Charlie was attached to a machine to keep his lungs open and had to be tube-fed.
Stephanie remembered “Later after I had spent some time in recovery, I was able to go see Charlie. He was this tiny wee thing in this big incubator”.
Charlie spent his first Christmas in hospital, with Stephanie and her parents visiting him.
“Staff tried to make it extra special for the parents of babies in the intensive care unit”, she said. “One of the local schools had filled a box with gifts for Charlie and we got little presents. These included Christmas tree ornaments with Charlie’s footprints”.
“It was nice having those things to keep and really made it special”, she shared.
Stephanie’s parents also shared their feelings around Charlie’s birth. Her mother Bernadette said “We felt worried and terrified for Charlie – about what might happen to him – and what it would do to Stephanie if he didn’t survive”.
“When Charlie was born we were over the moon that he was breathing on his own, but terrified thinking how could someone with his tiny weight and size survive”, she continued. “Watching him grow with no complications and watching Stephanie and Sandy start to have some hope made us feel better”.
“He is a little fighter”
Charlie was able to go home after his weight hit 4lb 10oz, a few days before his original due date.
Stephanie said, “I was really excited to get Charlie home but it was also a bit daunting because he was still very small. But they were very good at encouraging me to do things myself for him while in the hospital like changing his nappies and feeding him”.
She shared that it felt “surreal” to have Charlie at home.
“Charlie has been on an incredible journey – he is a little fighter”, she said. “It was especially nice to wake up on Mother’s Day this year and seeing Charlie knowing how special it was to finally have him home”.
Her mother Bernadette agreed, saying “Everyday we look at Charlie and see what a little miracle he is to the whole family and how loved he is”.
Over 30 years since the time limit for abortion last updated
Baby Charlie was born at 28 weeks gestation, which was the original abortion limit in the UK. The current time limit of 24 weeks for abortions performed under section 1(1)(a) of the Abortion Act 1967 was introduced in 1990.
Prior to this change, the abortion limit had, de facto, been 28 weeks gestation set by the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “It is amazing to hear about baby Charlie’s tremendous improvements and it is wonderful that he has been able to go home with his mother. Stories like this highlight the resilience of preborn and premature babies and demonstrate their value and humanity”.
LifeNews Note: Republished with permission from Right to Life UK.
To go with story by Deborah Clarke. Fife miracle baby Charlie spent his first Christmas in the Wishaw neonatal unit. Image: Stephanie Auchterlonie Picture shows; Baby Charlie Auchterlonie. Wishaw neonatal unit. Supplied by Stephanie Auchterlonie Date; 05/04/2024
The post Baby Born Prematurely at 28 Weeks and Weighing Just 18 Ounces Heads Home From Hospital appeared first on LifeNews.com.
The final day of April was really ugly: ECI way hotter than expected (spooked markets), Case-Shiller home prices soared far more than expected (spooked markets more), Chicago PMI puked (while prices paid increased), Consumer Confidence crashed, and Dallas Fed Services slumped... all of which left stocks, bonds, gold, crude oil, and bitcoin all languishing into month-end while the dollar rallied.
Stocks puked into the month-end close today ahead of AMZN earnings...
Source: Bloomberg
...with soft survey data collapsing while 'hard' data limped modestly higher...
Source: Bloomberg
...and worse still growth surprises slumped as inflation surprises soared - screaming stagflation so loud no one could ignore it...
Source: Bloomberg
Against the backdrop of US 10Y yields up ~45 bps in the month of April...
Source: Bloomberg
... and the market taking another rate-cut off the board...
Source: Bloomberg
...price action in April is perhaps not overly surprising with Equities broadly lower, albeit, with NDX / Quality / Mag7 continuing to outperform.
Source: Bloomberg
Goldman's Peter Callahan notes that since 2006, the S&P 500 has fallen by an avg of 4% when real yields rose by more than 2 stdev in a month.
April was the first down-month for stocks since The Fed Pivot (Oct 2023). This was the worst month for The Dow since Sept 2022. Nasdaq suffered its worst month since Sept 2023.
Interestingly, while US majors and sectors were red (broadly speaking) in April, Chinese Internet stocks soared back to life (+9.5% vs US MegaCap -2%)...
Source: Bloomberg
Sectors were very mixed in April with Energy and Utilities outperforming (the latter on AI energy use, since its typical relationship to rates decoupled) and Real Estate lagged (along with Tech)...
Source: Bloomberg
The basket of Magnificent 7 stocks saw red in April for its first monthly loss since October and worst monthly loss since September. The last week has been tempestuous to say the least as TSLA (win), META (lose), MSFT and GOOGL (win) all hit...
Source: Bloomberg
Still, stocks have a long way to catch down to the new reality priced into the short-end of the bond market...
Source: Bloomberg
As we noted above, the TSY curve was up relatively uniformly on the month, but perhaps most notably was the 2Y yield which tested 5.00% numerous times and broke out today...
Source: Bloomberg
One more notable event in April was the tightening of financial conditions (admittedly only marginally), but definitely more what The Fed wants relative to the extreme 'easiness' that had been priced in after Powell's pivot...
Source: Bloomberg
The dollar rallied for the fourth month in a row with the big gains coming mid-month....
Source: Bloomberg
Despite taking a battering today, Gold managed solid gains on the month, topping $2400 at its record highs...
Source: Bloomberg
Oil prices ended the month marginally lower, thanks to today's selloff...
Source: Bloomberg
Copper was the outstanding commodity in April, soaring around 14% to two year highs with practically no drawdown as the reflation trade came back to life (on the back of AI demand)...
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin had an ugly month, down 15% after seven straight months of gains...
Source: Bloomberg
As BTC ETF flows started to ebb - Net Flows (including GBTC): April -$183mm, March +$4.62bn, February +$6.03bn, January +1.47bn...
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, the ultimate analog remains in play...
Source: Bloomberg
...with NVDA bouncing back, just like CSCO did.
And bear in mind, as Goldman's Peter Oppenheimer points out, US equity market valuation is currently at an extreme level relative to history...
...also a condition that typically means higher rates weigh more heavily on stocks.
And while April showers are over...
The S&P 500's vol term structure suggests the storm is not over yet.
10,372,100* unborn babies have lost their lives to abortion in England, Wales and Scotland since 1968 when the Abortion Act 1967 came into effect.
Last Saturday, 27 April, marked 56 years since the abortion law came into force.
In 2021, (the last full year for which abortion statistics are available) more than one baby was lost to abortion every two and a half minutes; 26 lives were ended every hour.
The number of abortions in England and Wales has reached a record high with 214,869 taking place in 2021, while in Scotland in 2022, there were a record 16,596 abortions, 2,659 more than in 2021 or a 19.08% increase from 13,937 in the previous year.
This significant rise in abortions in England and Wales has accompanied the introduction of ‘DIY’ home abortion services that have been operating in England and Wales since March 2020. Since ‘DIY’ home abortions were introduced, a number of significant problems have arisen.
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Abortion statistics released by the Department of Health and Social Care show that in England and Wales, there was a total of 214,869 abortions in 2021, an increase of 4,009 abortions from 2020 when there were 210,860 abortions. This is the highest ever number on record.
Opinion polls repeatedly show that the public wants increased protections for unborn babies and more support for mothers facing unplanned pregnancies – rather than the wholesale removal of legal safeguards around abortion.
Only 1% of the population want abortion to be available up to birth and 70% of women want the abortion limit to be reduced to 20 weeks or lower.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “The UK’s abortion law is failing both women and unborn babies. It is a national tragedy that 10,372,100 lives have been lost since the Abortion Act 1967 came into effect, each one a unique and valuable human being who was denied the right to life”.
“Every one of these abortions represents a collective failure of our society to protect the lives of babies in the womb and a failure to offer full support to women with unplanned pregnancies”.
“While we may pause to commemorate this tragedy, this day also serves as a call to action for people around the country to renew their efforts to do everything they can to help ensure more lives are saved from abortion in the future”.
“This includes contacting MPs and asking them to ensure that protections for unborn babies are introduced and safeguards are strengthened to protect both mothers and babies – along with volunteering with pregnancy support centres and undertaking other pro-life activities that support mothers and their children in pregnancy and beyond”.
“By being proactive and taking action, every single one of us can be part of building a pro-life nation where we protect and defend the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death”.
*This figure is a projection for England, Wales and Scotland through to midnight on 27/4/2024 and has been calculated based on the following assumptions:
Please note, we have not included data for abortions that have occurred in Northern Ireland since 2020 because it has not been made clear on which day abortions began being performed in Northern Ireland and it is therefore unreliable to model a projection for the remainder of the year using this.
LifeNews Note: Republished with permission from Right to Life UK.
The post 10,372,100 Babies Killed in Abortions Since UK Legalized Abortion 56 Years Ago appeared first on LifeNews.com.
If Joe Biden thinks he can win Florida in the presidential election by running a campaign for abortions up to birth, he’s got another thing coming.
That’s the message from pro-life Gov. Ron DeSantis, who laughed heartily today when asked if Biden will win his state by pushing more abortions.
Initially when asked, DeSantis gave a non-verbal answer: A snort, a laugh and a shaking head.
Clearly, his answer was “no.”
DeSantis said he would love to see the Biden campaign waste money campaigning in Florida, which is a much more Rpeublican state now than before DeSantis became governor.
“When I became governor, this state had almost 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Today, we have 900,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats. So I mean just in that, just those demographics, I think it’s a very uphill climb,” DeSantis said.
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“We welcome Biden-Harris to spend a lot of money in Florida. Light up the airwaves, do it, light it on fire. We are fine with you doing that here. But I can confidently predict that you’ll see Republican victories not just at the top of the ticket but up and down the ballot and I think that’s a good thing.”
And DeSantis said Biden’s “failed leadership and failed policies” would make it impossible to overcome that difference.
DeSantis suggested the Democrats are focusing on abortion to distract voters from Biden’s horrible record.
“I understand they would try to figure out anything they could to try to, to try to change the dynamic or to try to change the focus from the failed leadership, but they failed on fiscal, they failed on inflation, they failed on interest rates, they failed on the border,” DeSantis said. “And, oh, by the way, is this world more peaceful than it was when (Donald) Trump was president? Not even close.”
The post Ron DeSantis Says Joe Biden Won’t Win Florida by Campaigning for Abortions Up to Birth appeared first on LifeNews.com.
Florida’s Heartbeat Law will take effect on Wednesday, May 1 and will protect unborn children and their mothers at six weeks of pregnancy. The law, titled SB300 – Pregnancy and Parenting Support, makes Florida one of the most pro-life states in the nation.
At midnight, Florida will join Georgia and South Carolina in having an active law with six-week heartbeat protections. The law will increase widespread protections in the Southeast since Florida’s other closest neighbors of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana all have laws that protect unborn babies from the moment of conception.
According to 2023 data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, about one-third of all abortions in the South occurred in Florida. The data showed more than 9,300 of those abortions involved people who traveled from other states.
The law’s implementation follows the Florida Supreme Court which recently ruled 6-1 that there is no right to abortion in the Florida Constitution. The decision upheld the state’s current 15-week abortion law and allowed the Heartbeat Law to go into effect. Both the Heartbeat Law and the state’s 15-week law will be enforced together.
The Heartbeat Law includes exceptions, such as rape, incest, and human trafficking, all of which must be officially documented. The law retains the exceptions from the 15-week law, such as: to preserve the life of the mother, which includes ectopic pregnancies; fatal abnormalities where the unborn baby is unexpected to survive outside the womb; and to “avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment or a major bodily function of the pregnant woman other than a psychological condition.”
In addition, before an abortion is performed under any of the exception categories, Florida abortion laws require giving a pregnant woman an option to view an ultrasound, a 24-hour reflection period unless there is an emergency, and informed consent.
The law also requires doctors to use more than just an ultrasound to determine the gestational age of an unborn child. Doctors are now required to utilize a more objective physical measurement with calipers to measure “crown to rump” length, or top of the head (crown) to the bottom of the buttocks (rump), which can more accurately determine the unborn child’s gestational age.
In Florida, the penalty for health care providers performing an illegal abortion can result in the loss of their licenses to practice medicine.
The Heartbeat Law will also provide $30 million in reoccurring state funding to support pregnant women and their families. This support includes:
Florida also has 167 pregnancy centers across the state where pregnant women and their families can receive aid and support.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “On May 1, Florida will become a sanctuary for life. The Heartbeat Law will save countless lives, some of whom may become world leaders in science, medicine, and technology that will benefit the world. The Heartbeat Law protects the valuable lives of both the unborn child and the mother and provides a wide range of options and support for women. The Heartbeat Law will provide $30 million in public funds to help pregnant women and their children. Florida is now on the side of life.”
The post Florida Heartbeat Law Starts Tomorrow, Saving Babies From Abortion and Helping Pregnant Women appeared first on LifeNews.com.
After the solid results from Microsoft - the world's largest company whose market cap is now flirting with $3 trillion - investors have been incrementally more positive on the Amazon's AWS cloud setup into today's earnings, with the investment thesis driven by ecommerce share, margin expansion and the potential for AWS growth recovery through the year.
Of course, since everyone is well-aware of this thesis, UBS trader Kelsey Perselay notes that "the amount of debate/dialogue has really died down."
Not surprisingly, everyone and their kitchen sink, is long the stock: according to Goldman, client positioning is a 9 on the bank's 1-10 scale, and "most investors feel relaxed/confident into this quarter."
Goldman thinks that people expect a beat and further acceleration on AWS (vs cons ~13% y/y and ~13% y/y last qtr), a slight beat on online sales (vs cons 7%) and a solid beat on EBIT vs cons ~$11bn (for ref, AMZN been beating by $2-4bn last few qtrs). Looking ahead, investors looking for high-end of guide to land near street numbers for Revs (cons ~$150 bn) / OI (~$12.5 bn).
Summarized, here are the top bogeys for the quarter:
Q1 Total Sales: high end of guide $138-$143.5 bn
Q2 Total Sales: $150 bn high end
Q1 AWS Growth: 15%-16%+
Q1 EBIT: $13 bn
Q2 EBIT: $14 bn high end
Key questions for the 1Q call include:
overall EBIT for 2Q as they are expected to show ongoing efficiency this year;
cadence of enterprise cloud optimization efforts and signs of growth acceleration for AWS in 2Q;
pace of retail margin improvement and medium-term targets for retail;
capex outlook for 1Q and for 2024;
impact of Amazon Bedrock and any disclosures around growth contribution from GenAI workloads;
margin improvements from regionalization of fulfilment operations and broader cost control efforts;
the outlook and incremental margins associated with video advertising in Prime content and advertising more generally; and
competitive dynamics from Shein, Temu, TikTok, etc.
Catch-Up or Catch-Down...
Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report highlighted increased activity in the U.S., including 1.05 million patients, 9.13 million services, 2.25 million birth control services, 392,715 abortions, and another 1.7 million appointments booked online. But to the dismay of pro-life activists, what may be the most shocking aspect of the data from the report was not the national impact, but the international effect Planned Parenthood has had — a mission they use taxpayer dollars to fund.
As emphasized by two of Family Research Council’s experts, Arielle Del Turco and Mary Szoch, the abortion organization “has access to the $699,300,000 in U.S. taxpayer dollars that Planned Parenthood received in Fiscal Year 2022.”
On Friday’s episode of “Washington Watch,” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice pointed out, Planned Parenthood is not “using all of that to profit from killing babies here in the United States. … They are also promoting abortion internationally with special attention [given] to infiltrate very poor, vulnerable countries that have legitimate needs.” Specifically, he added, “[T]hey’re going there in order to dismantle all the pro-life protections that many of those countries have.” And Hice noted that the authors of the report are “bragging about all of this.”
Del Turco, who serves as FRC’s director of the Center for Religious Liberty, agreed. “[T]hey’re targeting these poorer countries,” she said, “and they’re going in and … training tens of thousands of [locals] … essentially to be activists for abortion, to change these laws from the inside out and remove pro-life protections.”
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Del Turco continued, “Planned Parenthood, in … its most recent annual report, bragged that they had overturned in the last calendar year 112 pro-life policies in these countries.” Which, as she emphasized, is “112 places across eight different countries where unborn babies had their protections stripped from them, in large part because of the work of Planned Parenthood.” What we should be asking, Del Turco continued, is “[w]hy are we funding an organization that is doing that?” Hice noted that’s not only “a great question,” but it’s one that “demands an answer.”
As stated in the article by Del Turco and Szoch, who is the director of FRC’s Center for Human Dignity, the duo restated that Planned Parenthood “is the perfect picture of ideological colonialism,” the irony of which she commented on to Hice. “The Left supposedly hates colonialism, where the West goes into other countries and imposes its norms,” she observed. “But this is exactly what Planned Parenthood is doing. Planned Parenthood is going into countries where both the law and the culture are very pro-life, where they completely reject abortion, and they are trying to change these countries from the inside out. It’s not organic. It’s coming from the outside, from Planned Parenthood, and from the millions of dollars that they are funneling into these countries.”
Hice posed the question: “[W]hat do we need to do to try to … ensure that no U.S. tax dollars go to fund … organizations … that promote abortions?” Most obviously, Del Turco replied that we need to recognize it’s “common sense” not to use the dimes of Americans to fund a radical leftist ideology — many of whom are pro-life. “No American taxpayer dime should be going to Planned Parenthood,” she insisted. “This should be a priority of Republican politicians completely defunding Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform or support abortion … at home, but especially overseas.” Most Americans, Del Turco emphasized, don’t want their money being used to support abortion.
“And we need to be listening to the American people on that,” Del Turco concluded. “[W]e as Americans should be focused on really funding organizations that do support life and that support life abroad, and investing in pro-lifers who are having to now fight off these pro-abortion attacks from Planned Parenthood.”
LifeNews Note: Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.
The post Planned Parenthood Doesn’t Just Kill Babies in America, It’s Overturning Pro-Life Laws Worldwide appeared first on LifeNews.com.
The Associated Press has learned the US Drug Enforcement Administration is moving to reclassify marijuana to a less dangerous drug category. Shares of cannabis-related companies erupted on the news.
Here's more from AP news:
The DEA's proposal, which still must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, would recognize the medical uses of cannabis and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation's most dangerous drugs. However, it would not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use.
The agency's move, confirmed to the AP on Tuesday by five people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive regulatory review, clears the last significant regulatory hurdle before the agency's biggest policy change in more than 50 years can take effect.
Once OMB signs off, the DEA will take public comment on the plan to move marijuana from its current classification as a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin and LSD. It moves pot to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids, following a recommendation from the federal Health and Human Services Department. After the public-comment period the agency would publish the final rule.
Following the news, Tilray Brands Inc. shares jumped 22%, while Canopy Growth Corp shares are up 26%.
Tilray's float is about 15% short, equivalent to about 118 million shares short.
Canopy's float is 12% short, equivalent to 9 million shares short.
Meanwhile, AdvisorShares Pure US Cannabis ETF and Amplify Alternative Harvest ETF are broadly higher and appear to be rounding a multi-year bottom.
It's an election year, and the Biden administration is getting desperate.
Hamas considers Israeli offer - 40 day ceasefire, release of prisoners in exchange for hostages
Brother Nathaniel promotes white resistance
Global Digital Gulag Imminent, Brought to You by UN & Bill Gates - Alex on Glenn BeckThe Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a state pro-life protection by arguing that a federal law designed to protect the “unborn child” requires doctors to carry out abortions.
In arguments before the Supreme Court, the administration’s top legal advocate asked justices to strike down an Idaho law protecting most children from abortion on the grounds that it conflicts with the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA).
But “EMTALA doesn’t address abortion. EMTALA addresses the issue of whether access to health care is available to people who are indigent, whether hospitals can turn away people who don’t have the means to pay for hospitalization or ER services,” Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador (R) told “Washington Watch” on Thursday. The Biden administration’s argument “turns EMTALA on its head. It turns jurisprudence for the last 40 years on its head.”
The EMTALA law, signed into law by pro-life President Ronald Reagan in 1986, intended to prevent hospitals from refusing to care for sick people who are uninsured or cannot pay for bona fide medical care. The text of EMTALA states four times that doctors must care for a pregnant woman or her “unborn child.” For instance, the law bars physicians from any action that “may pose a threat to the health or safety of the woman or the unborn child.”
“When President Reagan signed EMTALA, he never intended that it would be used as a Trojan horse for mandatory abortion,” stated Blaine Conzatti, president of the Idaho Family Policy Council, which filed two amici briefs in the case. “The language of EMTALA is clear: Emergency room physicians are required to do everything possible to save the lives of both mother and baby.”
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Justices noticed the incongruity during oral arguments in Moyle v. United States, which ran an exceptionally long one hour and 53 minutes on Wednesday, April 24. “Isn’t that an odd phrase to put in a statute that imposes a mandate to perform abortions? Have you ever seen an abortion statute that uses the phrase ‘unborn child?’” asked Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the Dobbs decision.
“It seems that the plain meaning is that the hospital must try to eliminate any immediate threat to the child,” Alito continued. But carrying out an “abortion is antithetical to that duty.”
Protecting life motivated the statute at the heart of the lawsuit. After the Dobbs decision returned abortion to democratic control, Idaho enacted the Defense of Life Act, which would punish abortionists who take the life of an unborn child with two to five years in prison; they could also have their medical license suspended on the first offense and revoked for carrying out any subsequent criminal abortion. But the statute specifically states the law does not apply if an emergency doctor decides in good faith that an “abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” Furthermore, the law does not apply to “[m]edical treatment provided to a pregnant woman by a health care professional” that “results in the accidental death of, or unintentional injury to, the unborn child,” such as treating an ectopic pregnancy or caring for a miscarriage.
Yet the Biden White House took pains to blunt Americans from taking any actions that undermined the abortion industry, which is a major donor to Democratic causes in general and the Biden campaign specifically. “Right after the Dobbs decision, they sent a letter to every hospital in the United States saying that if they receive any federal funding, that they must provide abortions,” said Labrador. “And they make the claim in that letter that that the abortion laws of the various states was actually preempted by EMTALA.” Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a July 2022, guidance claiming that, under EMTALA, “Stabilizing treatment could include medical and/or surgical interventions,” specifically including “abortion … irrespective of any state laws or mandates that apply to specific procedures.”
The Biden administration won a judgment blocking Idaho’s pro-life law from taking effect from U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill — a Clinton appointee with a history of controversial opinions, such as the 2018 Edmo v. Idaho Department of Corrections case, which ordered the state of Idaho to furnish male prison inmate Adree Edmo with a taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. (Winmill opted to move into semi-retirement by taking senior judge status in August 2021 — which allowed President Joe Biden to appoint one of Idaho’s two judges.) The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals put his decision on hold while the case makes its way through the courts.
Critics say the Legal Left is trying to shoehorn abortion into any existing statute and override state lawmakers through presumption. “It’s the other side that is extreme, that they want abortions available at all instances of the stages of pregnancy,” said Labrador. “I think most people are closer to the Idaho position than they are to the more extreme position” — a position borne out by decades of polling data.
To offset an unpopular abortion position in an election year, pro-life advocates state, Democrats portray Republicans as willing to let women die without miscarriage treatment — a revival of its “war on women” rhetoric. “The Biden administration’s attack on Idaho’s Defense of Life law is more of a PR stunt to spread abortion lobby misinformation than it is a valid legal strategy to take down states’ pro-life laws,” said SBA Pro-Life America’s State Public Affairs Director Kelsey Pritchard in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “Pregnant women can receive miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancy care and treatment in a medical emergency in all 50 states. Every pro-life law allows this.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly blamed pro-life laws for compelling pregnant women to have “miscarriages in toilets” — ironically, the outcome produced by chemical abortion, which the Biden-Harris administration promotes. In August 2022, Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that, due to a Texas pro-life law, pregnant women “can now be denied this same life-saving care” and “may die as a result.” Pro-abortion activists held signs outside the High Court during oral arguments alleging, “Abortion saves lives.”
Some in the legacy media have parroted these claims. “Federal law requires emergency rooms to treat or stabilize patients who are in active labor and provide a medical transfer to another hospital if they don’t have the staff or resources to treat them. … The case before the Supreme Court today could weaken those protections,” asserted the Associated Press without proof. Pro-life advocates point out that all state protections have exceptions to preserve the mother’s life and that abortion activists’ claims may be confusing doctors and discouraging women from getting needed care.
Abortion lobbyists say their interest is in using the courts against pro-life doctors, nurses, and institutions that resist carrying out abortions. Molly Duane of the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights told reporters on a press call that the abortion industry wants the federal government to use EMTALA, in Politico’s words, “to go after hospitals in other states.” Pro-abortion activists with the Women’s National Law Center chanted “Whose courts? Our courts!” during oral arguments.
At the Supreme Court Wednesday, the Biden administration raised the link between accepting federal funds and carrying out “emergency” abortions. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds comes with strings attached. “Could the federal government condition the receipt of funds on hospitals that they comply with medical ethics rules provided for by the federal government?” asked Justice Neil Gorsuch, even if such conditions required abortion.
“I think that very likely Congress could make those kinds of judgments and attach conditions to the receipt of federal funds,” replied Prelogar.
“If you’re unclear whether abortion is a federal and state issue, today’s hearing at the Supreme Court should remove all doubt,” said Students for Life Action Government Affairs Coordinator Savanna Deretich outside the court as oral arguments took place. “EMTALA has been twisted by Biden’s abortion radicals to demand that in states with protective laws that embrace the preborn be forced to allow abortions in an ER.”
Inside the courtroom, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, part of the court’s liberal bloc, likened banning abortion to a theoretical state law instructing doctors, “Don’t treat diabetics with insulin. Treat them only with pills, Metformin.”
But forbidding any state regulation would turn the emergency room into a Wild West, argued Josh Turner, who represented the state. “If ER doctors can perform whatever treatment they determine is appropriate, then doctors can ignore not only state abortion laws but also state regulations on opioid use and informed consent requirements,” he told justices. “The answer doesn’t change just because we’re talking about abortion.”
“Nothing in EMTALA requires doctors to ignore the scope of their license and offer medical treatments that violate state law,” said Turner. “Section 1395, the Medicare Act’s opening provision, forbids the federal government from controlling the practice of medicine. That’s the role of state regulation.”
Turner highlighted the fact that leading medical groups do not endorse abortion as emergency treatment for many conditions. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) “doesn’t just knee-jerk say an abortion is the standard of care” in all pregnancy-related complications, he said. “ACOG itself says that expectant management” — medically monitoring a pregnant mother’s health to observe any future changes — “is oftentimes the appropriate standard of care.”
“Idaho does not require that doctors wait until a patient is on the verge of death,” clarified Turner, citing the Idaho Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v. Wasden ruling.
The Biden administration seemed to make one significant, if legally questionable, concession during oral arguments. Under questioning, Prelogar said abortion could not be used as an emergency treatment for mental health conditions, because it “wouldn’t do anything to address the underlying brain chemistry issue that’s causing the mental health emergency in the first place.” A distraught mother demanding an abortion “might not be in a position to give any informed consent. Instead, the way you treat mental health emergency is to address what’s happening in the brain.”
Abortion “is not the accepted standard of practice to treat any mental health emergency,” Prelogar said.
But she may merely be attempting to downplay the impact of folding abortion into EMTALA coverage. The American Psychiatric Association has declared, “Freedom to act to interrupt pregnancy must be considered a mental health imperative with major social and mental health implications” in a 2023 position paper. “That sounds like a necessity to me,” countered Turner.
The APA opposes “all constitutional amendments, legislation, and regulations curtailing family planning and abortion services to any segment of the population.” Such broad language might be cited “if a woman presents at seven months pregnant in an Idaho emergency room and says, ‘I’m experiencing severe depression from this pregnancy, I’m having suicidal ideation from carrying this pregnancy,’” Turner told Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The mother’s psychological care has justified abortion in the past under the broad “health” exception created by Roe v. Wade’s 1973 companion case, Doe v. Bolton. Doe held that “all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age relevant to the well-being of the patient … may relate to health.”
Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton posted her own dubious jurisprudential argument on X, claiming that emergency or non-emergency cases would contradict the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (which is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution). She chided the “MAGA Supreme Court majority,” adding, “This is horrifying, and it is because of Donald Trump.”
Based on arguments and the law, legal experts say, the justices should side with Idaho on the merits. “The Supreme Court should uphold Idaho’s law and ensure that emergency room doctors are not forced to end lives,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand last month.
The EMTALA case is one of two abortion cases the Supreme Court will address this term. The other dealt with FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Justices will likely rule in June or July.
“One thing is certain,” said Conzatti: “Whatever their decision is, it will have a far-reaching impact for pro-life protections across the country.”
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
The post Joe Biden is So Radically Pro-Abortion He Wants to Turn a Pro-Life Law Into an Abortion Mandate appeared first on LifeNews.com.
Read at Choosing-him.blogspot
Bergoglio Promoter of Sodomy
One can listen to, and believe, the government's lies about the miraculous growth of the economy and the stellar job that Bidenomics is doing... or one can listen to the truth straight from the countless small companies that make up the economy. We prefer the latter, which is why we love the monthly responses to the Dallas Fed survey, where unlike the other regional Feds, the respondents actually get a fair forum.
So without further ado, here are all the comments in the April Dallas Fed Service Sector Outlook Survey presented unedited and without commentary. Trust us, none is needed (but the highlights are ours).
Truck transportation
Support activities for transportation
Publishing industries (except internet)
Credit intermediation and related activities
Securities, commodity contracts and other financial investments and related activities
Insurance carriers and related activities
Real estate
Rental and leasing services
Professional, scientific, and technical services
Management of companies and enterprises
Administrative and support services
Texas Retail Outlook Survey
Accommodation
Food services and drinking places
Motor vehicle and parts dealers
Electronics and appliance stores
Dr. John Haas, a professor of moral theology, criticized Bergoglio's-approved Fiducia Supplicans for seeming to be 'entirely removed from the realm of human action' and representing a 'significant endorsement and advancement' of the 'gay agenda.'
Read at LifeSiteNews
Authored by Eric Lundrum via American Greatness,
On Monday, the Chinese government threatened to retaliate against the United States after a $95 billion foreign aid package was signed into law, which included aid for Taiwan and a provision to ban the Chinese social media app TikTok.
As reported by Fox News, the bill signed into law by Biden on Wednesday included $2 billion to restock American weapons provided to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific, in a direct attempt to deter Chinese aggression in the region. Additionally, the law demands that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sell the popular app to another company within nine months, or else the app will be banned from use in the United States.
“China firmly rejects the U.S. passing and signing into law the military aid package containing negative content on China,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian in a briefing.
“We have lodged serious representations to the U.S.”
“This package gravely infringes upon China’s sovereignty. It includes large military aid to Taiwan, which seriously violates the one-China principle, and sends a seriously wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces,” Lin continued.
“The legislation undermines the principles of market economy and fair competition by wantonly going after other countries’ companies in the name of ‘national security,’ which once again reveals the U.S.’s hegemonic and bullying nature.”
The issue of Taiwan has remained a contentious point in U.S.-China relations, with some considering Taiwan to be a free and independent nation, while others believe it to be part of China. The federal government has never taken a clear stance on the question, thus highlighting the significance of the decision to provide direct aid to Taiwan.
TikTok has faced widespread scrutiny from both sides of the political aisle, with Republicans pointing out its threat to national security by virtue of it being a Chinese company preying on American users, while Democrats have raised concerns about users’ private information being easily accessed and sold by the company.
TikTok is most popular among younger Americans such as Generation Z, or “Zoomers,” and the ban being signed into law has sparked outrage against Biden among younger voters.
After years of enriching himself to the tune of billions from his failed company WeWork, co-founder Adam Neumann is finally getting a small dose of karmic payback.
It was reported yesterday by Bloomberg that WeWork and its main backers, including SoftBank, have reached a new agreement to pull the struggling workspace provider out of bankruptcy, rejecting a rival proposal from co-founder Adam Neumann to buy back the company.
Under the deal, senior lenders will provide about $450 million in financing, gaining equity in the reorganized business. Additionally, SoftBank and other creditors may convert their debt into stock post-bankruptcy. This marks a significant step for WeWork, aiming to emerge from court protection with reduced debt and more efficient leases.
And to not be at the behest of, or enriching, Adam Neumann, will really mark a shift in strategy for WeWork...
A lawyer backing the deal told Bloomberg the deal “is some of the best news we’ve had in this case,” and said the company is on a “fast and reliable path out of bankruptcy.”
WeWork aims to exit bankruptcy swiftly due to the high costs and unsustainable administrative expenses of the Chapter 11 proceedings. The proposed restructuring, backed by most senior debt holders and unsecured creditors, sidelines co-founder Adam Neumann's bid to repurchase the company.
Neumann's offer, valued at $650 million, hinges on winning support from senior lenders, who are crucial to the deal's success. However, WeWork's advisors have rebuffed Neumann's attempts to negotiate and have proceeded with the restructuring without public bidding on the company's assets.
Bloomberg reported that US Bankruptcy Judge John K. Sherwood emphasized the lenders' prerogative to decide on negotiations with Neumann based on their economic interests. If executed, the restructuring would result in majority ownership by Yardi's investment arm and involvement from WeWork bondholders.
SoftBank would retain ownership stake, initially at least 16.5%, potentially increasing to 36% depending on the treatment of letters of credit. WeWork must finalize the proposed deal into a contract and seek creditor approval for its broader reorganization plan.
The report notes that Neumann could still contest the deal by petitioning Sherwood to reject the reorganization proposal.
And, normally taking the punchbowl away from someone who has already "earned" billions he didn't deserve shouldn't be of any concern, but we're sure Neumann's ego won't let that be the case. We're certain protest and prolonged litigation from Neumann will come from this, claiming he was "unfairly" snubbed...
*WEWORK CUTS BANKRUPTCY EXIT DEAL THAT LEAVES OUT ADAM NEUMANN
But how will the world's biggest grifter become the world's first trillionaire
As the Biden campaign continues to push abortion as its primary focus ahead of the November elections, the administration made yet another move to ensure that abortion remains front and center by moving to insert the issue into the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act earlier this month — a move that earned a strong rebuke and lawsuit from a group of 17 Republican state attorneys general.
In mid-April, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that it was controversially adding abortion into its draft rules for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, allowing workers to “ask for time off to obtain an abortion and recover from the procedure.” But critics say the legislation was never intended to address abortion and was merely meant to give pregnant women commonsense accommodations in the workplace, including time off for medical appointments, options to sit down and stand up while working, exemptions from heavy lifting, time off for postpartum recovery, bathroom, breastfeeding, food, and water breaks, considerations for morning sickness, and more.
In response, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit last week against the EEOC, claiming that the abortion rule is unconstitutional, among other concerns. “[U]nelected commissioners at the EEOC seek to hijack these new protections for pregnancies by requiring employers to accommodate elective abortions — something the Act clearly did not authorize,” said the AG coalition in a statement. “The EEOC’s rule constitutes an unconstitutional federal overreach that infringes on existing state laws and exceeds the scope of the agency’s authority.”
REACH PRO-LIFE PEOPLE WORLDWIDE! Advertise with LifeNews to reach hundreds of thousands of pro-life readers every week. Contact us today.
State attorneys general who signed onto the lawsuit include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
Last week, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) joined “Washington Watch” to discuss why he joined the lawsuit against the EEOC’s actions.
The original text “is a wonderful, bipartisan supported [bill] — and we don’t say that very often with things that come out of Washington — to make sure that we accommodate pregnant women in the workplace because we want to have healthy pregnancies and children that come to birth,” he noted. “[L]et’s make sure that we fill a gap in federal law to ensure that pregnant women have those accommodations. … And now, the EEOC that was tasked by Congress to come out with some very specific aspects of what that looks like, now want to make sure that states like Alabama would have to violate state law to somehow or another accommodate a woman who wants an abortion. Alabama is not going to stand for that, along with the [16] other states that are a part of this coalition.”
Marshall went on to point out that even pro-abortion Democrats explicitly stated that the bill had nothing to do with abortion when it was passed, which still hasn’t stopped the Biden administration’s actions.
“One of the Democratic sponsors of this bill made it very clear on the floor of the Senate that this bill had nothing to do with abortion [and] assured his colleagues on both sides of the aisle the intention of this bill,” he observed. “And yet, despite its clear language, what we see is [the] Biden administration co-opting a valid, appropriate law to be able to enforce this pro-abortion agenda. I know we shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s one of the reasons why I’m so proud of my colleagues across the country on many pro-life issues, because we’re standing in that gap that we need in this country to make sure that we can push back on an administration that’s just simply gone too far.”
Marshall further made it clear that state attorneys general have a particularly important role to play in pushing back against the Biden administration’s tendency to try unconstitutional tactics to get its policies into place.
“This is an unelected, unaccountable group,” he underscored. “… [W]e’ve seen this on multiple fronts with this administration, whether it be attacking pro-life states like Alabama. We’ve seen it with this radical gender ideology that’s being pushed through multiple federal programs. It’s why, uniquely, attorneys general in this important time in our nation have the opportunity to be able to hold [the administration] in check.”
The Alabama attorney general additionally pointed to how state law will have strong legal footing against the measure in court.
“[W]hat we see also with this particular rule is an effort to impose a federal policy of this administration on a state like Alabama, whose law is abundantly clear that we are a pro-life state in our Constitution,” Marshall explained. “… [T]o somehow or another use an unaccountable body like the EEOC to circumvent valid state law and constitutional provisions, we think we’re on solid legal footing to be able to push back and to win. … The key right now is attempting to get that initial injunctive relief, to be able to hold this rule in abeyance before its full implementation. But we feel very confident about the work of our colleagues, grateful for the efforts of Tennessee and Oklahoma to lead this charge, but do feel strongly that we’re going to prevail.”
LifeNews Note: Dan Hart writes for the Family Research Council. He is the senior editor of The Washington Stand.
The post 17 States Fight Joe Biden’s Plan to Force Employers to Fund Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.
Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Over the last two weeks, the bullish sentiment index has reversed from extreme greed to fear. The composite net bullish sentiment index, comprised of professional and retail investors, fell from 38.15 to 9.9 in two weeks. The previous drop between July and October last year was similar and marked the bottom of the correction.
While the bullish sentiment index can indeed fall further, what is notable is the sharp reversal of market “exuberance” in such a short span. However, as discussed in “Just A Correction,” there was a significant gap between buyers and sellers.
“However, at some point, for whatever reason, this dynamic will change. Buyers will become more scarce as they refuse to pay a higher price. When sellers realize the change, they will rush to sell to a diminishing pool of buyers. Eventually, sellers will begin to “panic sell” as buyers evaporate and prices plunge.”
Like clockwork, that correction came quickly, with the market finding initial support at the 100-DMA. With solid earnings from GOOG and MSFT, the market rallied to initial resistance at the convergence of the 20- and 50-DMA. It would be unsurprising if the market failed this initial resistance test and ultimately retested the 100-DMA soon. Such a pullback would solidify that support and complete the reversal of the bullish sentiment index.
“Whatever trigger causes a reversal in the bullish signals, we will act accordingly to reduce risk and rebalance exposures. But one thing is sure: investor sentiment is extremely bullish, which has almost always been a good “bearish signal” to be more cautious.
While we have warned of a potential correction over the past few weeks, it reminds us much of June and July last year, where similar warnings for a 10% correction went unheeded. We are now seeing many individuals ‘jumping into the pool’ in some of the most speculative areas of the market. Such is usually a sign we are closer to a market peak than not. As such, we want to make adjustments before the correction comes.”
Very quickly, as supported by the bullish sentiment index, those bulls are turning bearish and are now calling for a more profound decline.
While such is possible, I suspect most of this correction is complete for two reasons.
The first reason is that despite higher interest rates, earnings growth continues to remain robust, at least among the “Magnificent 7,” where Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), in particular, exceeded estimates by a wide margin. However, overall, and most importantly, earnings growth has continued since the October lows of 2022. Notably, the support for improving earnings comes from the increased fiscal policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act.
While those policies will eventually fade, making forward estimates subject to downward revisions, the current earnings environment remains relatively robust. Furthermore, forward estimates remain optimistic that the Federal Reserve will cut rates later this year, lowering borrowing costs and supporting economic activity.
Notably, the increase in earnings, at least for now, remains a strong indicator of rising asset prices. The risk of a deeper market correction (greater than 10%) is significantly reduced during previous periods of improving earnings. While such does not mean a deeper correction can not happen, historically, corrections between 5% and 10% in an earnings growth environment tend to be buying opportunities and limit deeper reversal in the bullish sentiment index.
Improving earnings also precedes improving CEO confidence, which has provided pivotal support to financial markets since 2000.
We discussed the most critical reason we expected a market correction in mid-March. To wit:
“Notably, since 2009, and accelerating starting in 2012, the percentage change in buybacks has far outstripped the increase in asset prices. As we will discuss, it is more than just a casual correlation, and the upcoming blackout window may be more critical to the rally than many think.” – March 19, 2024
Furthermore, the “blackout” of corporate buybacks coincided with more extreme readings in the bullish sentiment index. Buybacks are crucial to the market because corporations have accounted for roughly 100% of net equity purchases over the last two decades.
Here is the math of net flows if you don’t believe the chart:
Pensions and Mutual Funds = (-$2.7 Trillion)
Households and Foreign Investors = +$2.4 Trillion
Sub Total = (-$0.3 T)
Corporations (Buybacks) = $5.5T
Net Total = $5.2 Trillion = Or 100% of all equities purchased
Unsurprisingly, that blackout window coincided with a sharp contraction of more than $367 billion in buybacks over the last 4-weeks. Consequently, when you remove a critical “buyer” from the market, the ensuing correction is unsurprising.
However, corporate share buybacks will resume in the next couple of weeks, and with more than $1 trillion slated for 2024, many buybacks remain to complete. Such is particularly the case with Google adding another $70 billion to that total.
As noted above, improving earnings and a decent outlook for the rest of this year also boost CEO confidence. (If you don’t understand why buybacks benefit insiders and not shareholders, read this.)
With robust economic activity supporting earnings growth, that improvement boosts CEO confidence. As CEOs are more confident about their business, they accelerate share buybacks to increase executive compensation.
The liquidity boost from buybacks and stronger earnings will likely provide a floor below the market. This doesn’t mean the current correction doesn’t have more work to do. However, it is unlikely that it will resolve into something more significant.
At least for now.
