Author: admin

Authored by Daniel Horowitz via ConservativeReview.com,

What happens when our government takes down its interior checkpoints north of the border in New Mexico? Well, the cartels, with the drug and human smuggling, are “kicking our butts,” according to one local official.

In an interview with CR, Couy Griffin, the chairman of the Otero County, New Mexico, county commission, explained how our government has exposed his county, and by extension, the rest of the nation, to unprecedented criminal activity from the Mexican cartels. In his view, by taking down the two secondary Border Patrol checkpoints in his county in order to focus on more processing of illegal immigrants, the federal government is missing the point.

“The cartel is winning and winning big; they are kicking our butts,” complained the commissioner of this sparsely populated but large county bordering Texas, near El Paso.

“We get so tied up and focused on the asylum seekers or the illegal immigrant aspect of what’s going on at our southern border, but the reality of it is that it’s nothing but a mere smoke screen for the cartel. They’re using these large groups of migrants as nothing more than a smoke screen to smuggle their drugs across the southern border. Meanwhile, as soon as those agents are exhausted, those critical spots, they’re sending boatloads of drugs across the border in unsecured areas. The shutting down of the checkpoints on the major drug smuggling corridors is a recipe for disaster. Now they have a green light to shuttle drugs through our counties and through our rural areas, with no security in place.”

Otero County, while itself not on the international border, has two highways originating from the two main border towns where the illegal immigrants are coming in and the cartels are operating – U.S. Highway 70 and U.S. Highway 54. For years, there has been a checkpoint on each highway on the way to Alamogordo, the foremost town in this county. Griffin noted that while the cartels used to relegate their activity to remote parts of the southeast corner of the county, “Now, with our checkpoints being shut down, there’s no need to take it out to the middle of nowhere when they can just run it right up to main road.”

Otero County Sheriff David Black told me that his tiny three-man narcotics team and other deputies now have to deal with the cartels all on their own without any help from Border Patrol: “We have rerouted all of our overtime money to interdictions on the highway.” Black noted that his informants tell him the large stash houses in El Paso and even in source cities in Mexico like Juarez are now empty because the cartels “are taking advantage of the unprecedented open borders because nothing is stopping them.”

Obviously, his three-man narcotics team catches only a small amount of the drugs, but what they’ve seen demonstrates the relationship between the surge in the border migration distracting agents, the taking down of checkpoints, and the increased drug traffic.

“In February, before the closing of the checkpoints, we seized $3,500 worth of drugs, including meth, heroin, and marijuana. In March we seized $23,000, and in April we seized $61,790. For our county, that’s a lot.”

In total, there are six checkpoints in the El Paso Border Patrol sector: one in El Paso County, Texas, two in Otero County, N.M., and three in Doña Ana County, N.M. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed with CR that all six remain shut down. Thus, there is not a single checkpoint operating in New Mexico. While the politics of Doña Ana County and the central state government in the urban areas of Albuquerque and Santa Fe have rolled out the welcome mat to illegal immigration and cartel activity, officials in the more conservative and rural counties, such as Otero and its neighboring county to the north, Lincoln, resent the secondary effects and fear that more is coming.

“I’ve never seen all these checkpoints closed in my life, and I’ve been in Lincoln and Otero Counties for 30 years,” said Lincoln County Sheriff Robert Shepperd in an interview with CR.

“I have friends who are out on ranches who now have to lock their doors and do things they shouldn’t have to do. It’s eerie watching these checkpoints look like ghost towns.”

Sheriff Black in Otero believes that in the greater El Paso area, the cartel operatives are picking up those who sneak in while Border Patrol is tied down. “I guarantee you they are picking them up in truckloads and driving them north with nothing stopping them in our county.” Black feels a responsibility not only for his county but as a gatekeeper for the entire country. But he has only the resources of a 65,000-person county to deal with the largest transnational criminal organizations at a volatile international border.

The El Paso-Juarez region is a hotbed for transnational cartel and gang activity. Kyle Williamson, the special agent in charge (SAC) for the DEA’s operations in the El Paso sector, explained to me in an interview last week that three major cartels are operating in the region: Sinaloa, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), and La Linea (Juarez Cartel). They are all served by three major transnational gangs operating in the Juarez-El Paso region, including the violent Barrio Aztecas, which were just elevated to a Tier 1 threat by Texas DPS’ gang threat assessment. According to Williamson, Sinaloa is still the dominant cartel in the region, but Cartel Jalisco New Generacion is “coming on strong and pushing a lot of meth.”

Williamson echoed the concerns of the local officials about the lack of checkpoints – with a federal perspective of particular concern to the DEA. “When they catch drugs at the checkpoints, unlike at the points of entry, we as DEA actually respond to those. At the points of entry, it’s Homeland Security Investigations that responds. Border Patrol catches a lot of drugs at those checkpoints, then we go out there and take the prisoners and drugs, continue to develop the investigation and get them into court.”

Thus, when the Border Patrol is diverted in order to process the influx of illegal aliens, it hampers the DEA’s core mission. “These checkpoints are a very effective and important second line of defense, absolutely vital and necessary.”

And while most of the politicians and the media are focused on opioids, Williamson believes there needs to be more attention paid to meth.

“My biggest threat in New Mexico and West Texas is methamphetamine without a doubt. When you talk about Mexican cartels, the transnational criminal groups, and drugs, you can’t do so in the same breath as the opioid crisis.”

On top of the diverted federal resources, the more conservative rural counties in New Mexico must deal with the open-border policies of the governor, who doesn’t seem concerned about the empowerment of the cartels or the drugs coming into her state. Earlier this year, Governor Michelle Grisham scoffed at the notion that there even was an emergency and initially rebuffed requests for help from Hidalgo County when it was slammed with thousands of migrants. She even removed the National Guard troops from the border, who could have been used to free up more border agents, so they could return to the checkpoints.

Three weeks ago, Couy Griffin and his fellow commission members declared an emergency in Otero Countybecause of the closure of the checkpoints. “If Governor Grisham really had a heart for the people, she would redeploy the National Guard to our border, which would relieve those agents from the border to come back to our checkpoints, but she won’t do that,” said Griffin in our interview.

Couy believes it all boils down to politics.

“The politics of our state is what’s killing our state. It all just boils down to politics.”

Meanwhile, as American leaders fight over politics, cartel leaders fight over turf, drugs, and human smuggling routes made possible by these policies. Those with years of experience in law enforcement seem certain that things will only get worse from here. “About six months down the road is when we are going to start seeing a spike in property crimes and a spike in overdoses,” predicted Sheriff Black ominously. “We have not seen the worst of it yet; it’s still coming.”

Sheriff Shepperd sees the same picture just one county north. “It’s like the calm before the storm.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Jogdyl Tyler Durden

Investigators say last Sunday’s mysterious “sabotage” attack on four tankers which included two Saudi ships off Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates was “highly likely” the work of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) deploying underwater attack drones. 

Specifically an IRGC surface vessel is believed to have launched the underwater drones packed with between 30 and 50kg of explosives which detonated on impact, according to a new report issued this week by the Norwegian Shipowners’ Mutual War Risks Insurance Association, known as DNK. Among the vessels hit were a Norwegian-flagged vessel as well as a UAE ship. 

A new report by Reuters summarized the Norwegian insurance investigators’ preliminary findings as based on analyzing shrapnel from the attacks which was “similar” to shrapnel recovered from surface drones used off Yemen by Iran-backed Houthi militia.

However, the insurance assessment seen by Reuters is “confidential” with an investigation still ongoing, and thus must be treated with skepticism.

Further, the evidence appears largely circumstantial at this point, with Iran’s guilt appearing to hinge on the assumption that shrapnel from Houthi operations and remnant material found at the port of Fujairah are from the same source. 

Reuters lists the following summary points and “evidence” from the DNK assessment which allege the IRGC’s inolvement as follows:

• A high likelihood that the IRGC had previously supplied its allies, the Houthi militia fighting a Saudi-backed government in Yemen, with explosive-laden surface drone boats capable of homing in on GPS navigational positions for accuracy.

• The similarity of shrapnel found on the Norwegian tanker to shrapnel from drone boats used off Yemen by Houthis, even though the craft previously used by the Houthis were surface boats rather than the underwater drones likely to have been deployed in Fujairah.

• The fact that Iran and particularly the IRGC had recently threatened to use military force and that, against a militarily stronger foe, they were highly likely to choose “asymmetric measures with plausible deniability”. DNK noted that the Fujairah attack had caused “relatively limited damage” and had been carried out at a time when U.S. Navy ships were still en route to the Gulf.

The attack location, so close to the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz – which the IRGC has previously threatened to close in order to strangle global oil shipping – was also a key factor in pointing to Iran’s guilt, according to the report. 

The DNK noted the sabotage attacks occurred between six and 10 nautical miles off Fujairah, just off the vital and narrow strait. No boat was sunk, but the Saudi-flagged crude oil tanker Amjad and the UAE-flagged bunker vessel A.Michel had damage to their engine rooms. 

The insurance assessment lines up with Saudi and US accusations which came quickly on the heels of the bizarrely timed incident (following Bolton’s previously announced heightened “Iran threat” against US troops and allies in the region) that Iran orchestrated it to show its military has the power to disrupt global oil markets. 

The WSJ had reported just a day after the alleged attack that according to an initial U.S. assessment, “Iran was likely behind the attack” on the four vessels, according to an anonymous US official. Iran for its part dismissed these and other accusations as part of “psychological warfare” – according to one top Iranian parliamentarian and spokesman. 

Meanwhile, we could actually be headed toward rapid de-escalation even as US warships continue to enter the Persian Gulf late this week, as multiple headlines Friday noted “Trump doesn’t want war” and appears to be clamping down on hawks in his own administration. 

With all of the Fake and Made Up News out there, Iran can have no idea what is actually going on!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2019

And perhaps most interesting is that Trump tweeted something which actually lends credibility to Iran’s dismissing both the “sabotage” accusation and heightened bluster out of Washington over the past two weeks as a continuing Psyop, part of Bolton and Pompeo’s broader “maximum pressure” campaign. 

Trump tweeted the following astounding statement on Friday: “With all of the Fake and Made Up News out there, Iran can have no idea what is actually going on!”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WT7MhA Tyler Durden

Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,

American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the debate. Now everyone is for regime change…

The United States has just suspended flights to Venezuela. Per the New York Times:

CARACAS — The United States banned all air transport with Venezuela on Wednesday over security concerns, further isolating the troubled South American nation…

A disinterested historian — Herodotus raised from the dead — would see this as just the latest volley in a siege tale. America has been trying for ages to topple the regime of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying for years to do the same to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.

The new play in the Trump era involves recognizing Juan Guaidó as president and starving and sanctioning the country. Maduro, encircled, has been resisting.

The American commercial news landscape, in schism on domestic issues, is in lockstep here.

Every article is seen from one angle: Venezuelans under the heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the only hope a “humanitarian” intervention by the United States.

There is no other perspective. Media watchdog FAIR just released results of a study of three months of American opinion pieces. Out of 76 editorials in the New York Times, Washington Post, the “big three Sunday morning talk shows” or PBS News Hour, zero came out against the removal of Maduro. They wrote:

“Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change.”

Allowable opinion on Venezuela ranges from support for military invasion to the extreme pacifist end of the spectrum, as expressed in a February op-ed by Dr. Francisco Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sachs called “An Urgent Call for Compromise in Venezuela”:

“We strongly urge… a peaceful and negotiated transition of power rather than a winner-take-all game of chicken…”

So we should either remove Maduro by force, or he should leave peaceably, via negotiation. These are the options.

After the disaster of Vietnam eons ago, American thought leaders became convinced we “lost” in Indochina because of — get this — bad PR.

The real lesson in Vietnam should have been that people would pay any price to overthrow a hated occupying force. American think-tankers and analysts however somehow became convinced (andamazingly still are) that the problem was Walter Cronkite and the networks giving up on the war effort.

Quietly then, over the course of decades, lobbyists pushed for changes. In the next big war, there would be no gruesome pictures of soldiers dying, no photos of coffins coming home, no pictures of civilian massacres (enforced more easily with new embedding rules), and no Cronkite-ian defeatism.

They got all of that by the time we went into Iraq. The TV landscape by then was almost completely sterilized. Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue were pulled from MSNBC because they opposed invasion. Networks agreed not to film coffins or death scenes.

Yet the invasion of Iraq was a failure for the same reason Vietnam was a failure, and Libya was a failure, and Afghanistan is a failure, and Venezuela or Syria or Iran will be failures, if we get around to toppling regimes in those countries: America is incapable of understanding or respecting foreigners’ instinct for self-rule.

The pattern in American interventions has been the same for ages. We are for self-determination everywhere, until such self-determination clashes with a commercial or security objective.

A common triggering event for American-backed overthrows is a leader trying to nationalize the country’s resources. This is why we ended up replacing democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadeq with the Shah in Iran, for instance.

Disrupting trade is also a frequent theme in these ploys, with a late-Fifties coup attempt in Indonesia or our various Cuban embargoes key examples. The plan often involves stimulating economic and political unrest in target nations as a precursor for American intervention.

We inevitably end up propping up dictators of our own, and the too-frequent pattern now — vividly demonstrated in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan — is puppet states collapsing and giving way to power vacuums and cycles of sectarian violence. Thanks, America!

Opposing such policies used to be a central goal of American liberalism. No more. Since 2016, it’s been stunning to watch the purging and/or conversion of what used to be antiwar voices, to the point where Orwellian flip-flops are now routine.

Earlier this month, onetime fierce Iraq war opponent Rachel Maddow went on TV to embrace John Bolton in a diatribe about how the poor National Security Adviser has been thwarted by Trump in efforts to topple Maduro.

“Regardless of what you thought about John Bolton before this, his career, his track record,” Maddow said.

“Just think about John Bolton as a human being.”

The telecast was surreal. It was like watching Dick Cheney sing “Give Peace a Chance.”

Bolton stood out as a bomb-humping nut even among the Bush-era functionaries who pushed us into Iraq. He’s the living embodiment of “benevolent hegemony,” an imperial plan first articulated in the nineties by neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.

It involves forcefully overturning any regime that resisted us, to spread the wonders of the American way to, as Norman Podhoretz once put it, “as many others as have the will and the ability to enjoy them.”

When Bush gave his famed “Axis of Evil” speech about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Bolton — prophetically, it seemed — gave a speech called “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” adding Cuba, Syria and Libya to the list.

Bolton, of course, is also on board with regime change in Venezuela, saying “this is our hemisphere.” Echoing the sentiment, Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones said Maduro, and his allies in Russia, need to vacate “our part of the world.”

This has all been cast as opposition to Russian support of Maduro. Maddow was ostensibly reacting to triggering news that Trump was stepping back on Venezuelan action after a chat with Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t about Russia, however. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post were open cheering sections even when it came to endorsing Trump’s original decision to recognize Guaidó. It’s been much the same script with Syria, too, where even the faintest hint of discomfort with the idea of regime change has been excised from public view.

The social media era has made it much easier to keep pundits in line. Propaganda is effective when it’s relentless, personal, attacking, and one-sided. The idea isn’t to debate people, but to create an “ick” factor around certain ideas, so debate is pre-empted.

Don’t want to invade Syria? Get ready to be denounced as an Assadist. Feel ambivalent about regime change in Venezuela? You must love Putin and Maduro.

People end up either reflexively believing these things, or afraid to deal with vitriol they’ll get if they say something off-narrative. In the media world, it’s understood that stepping out of line on Venezuela or Syria will result in being removed from TV guest lists, loss of speaking income, and other problems.

This has effectively made intellectual objections to regime change obsolete. In the Trump era, things that not long ago aroused widespread horror — from torture to drone assassination to “rendition” to illegal surveillance to extrajudicial detention in brutal secret prisons around the world — inspire crickets now.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an exposé about Guantanamo Bay that should have been a devastating piece of journalism. It showed site officials building a hospice, because prisoners are expected to grow old and die rather than ever sniff release. One prisoner was depicted sitting gingerly in court because of “chronic rectal pain” from being routinely sodomized in CIA prisons.

Ten years ago, Americans would have been deeply ashamed of such stories. Now, even liberals don’t care. The cause of empire has been cleverly re-packaged as part of #Resistance to Trump, when in fact it’s just the same old arrogance, destined to lead to the same catastrophes. Bad policy doesn’t get better just because you don’t let people talk about it.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VzEGSS Tyler Durden

The deepening trade war between the US and China has roiled complex global supply chains and America’s Heartland. The latest breakdown in negotiations comes at a time when soybean exports to China have crashed, and huge stockpiles are building, have resulted in many farmers teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Mounting financial stress in the Midwest has allowed a public health crisis, where suicide rates among farmers have hit record highs, according to one trade organization’s interview with the South China Morning Post.

Bill Gordon, a fourth-generation farmer in Worthington, Minnesota, who is also vice-president of the American Soybean Association, warned that spot prices for agriculture products have dropped so low, many in the Midwest can’t even service their debts or also pay their bills. Farmers are losing their land to creditors daily. This has triggered the suicide rate among farmers to jump in the last several years.

“The markets are so low, we cannot even break even to pay our bills. Farmers are losing their farms every day. The suicide rate among farmers is at an all-time high,” Gordon said.

“It is not up to us to tell the president how to negotiate, but a handout from the government is not how I want to run my business,” Gordon explained while talking about President Trump’s bailout of farmers and the possible use of the Commodity Credit Corp., a federal agency given authority during the Great Depression, to buy $15 billion worth of agricultural product from farmers.

“It took us 40 years to build these markets … and while no trade deal is perfect, for the most part the agriculture trade with China was on the up and up, or mutually beneficial,” he said.

Agricultural economist Scott Irwin, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told the Post that farmers right now are losing $50 to $100 on corn and soybeans per acre. This excludes the government bailout, he said.

Irwin believes the Trump administration will hand out checks to farmers rather than using the Commodity Credit Corp. to buy physical crops.

“They are likely going to roll out that Market Facilitation Programme and probably expand it because Trump believes he has plenty of money to cover any checks he is going to write the farmers,” Irwin said.

“Every developed country in the world subsidizes its ag sector,” he said. “We have an over 80-year history of doing that here in the US. If it is socialism, it is not new socialism.”

Soybean futures fell 25% in 50 weeks since the inception of President Trump’s trade war early last summer.

CBOT Soybeans futures plunged to their lowest level in a decade as China on Monday said it would raise tariffs on $60 billion in US goods in retaliation for Trump’s decision last Friday to raise duties on $200 billion in Chinese products to 25% from 10%.

Gordon emphasized that farmers are looking to compete on a fair and level playing field, and don’t want government bailouts during a time when spot prices drop.

“What we want people to understand is that we don’t want people to think we are complaining because we are not becoming super profitable,” he said.

“Today, If I plant soybeans, I’m guaranteed to lose $65,000 on this planting. I have to find somewhere else that money just to get me back to zero.”

The trajectory on spot prices for soybeans is down despite several years of bumper crops in the Americas.

The 2019/20 farm crisis is a repeat of the 1980s crisis; farmers back then had heavy debt loads with high stockpiles. Once the US slapped the Soviet Union with trade embargos, crop exports to the country collapsed and triggered an agriculture recession in the Midwest. Very similar to today, Trump administration’s trade war forced China to respond with retaliatory tariffs on American soybeans, thus collapsing soybean exports to China by 80%. With the trade war deepening, financial stress in America’s Heartland will only increase, leading to a continuation of farmer suicides. The moral of the story: get government out of markets. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2w3VPtD Tyler Durden

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Normalizing and institutionalizing fraud undermines the foundations of the economy and the financial system.

I am indebted to Manoj Samanta (twitter: @flation_debate) for the insightful concept the commoditization of fraud. The first step in the commoditization of fraud is to normalize fraud as Business as Usual (BAU) to the point that it’s no longer viewed as “wrong,” destructive or an aberration of evil-doers but as an accepted way to maximize gain and offload risk onto others.

The last step in the process is to institutionalize fraud within central banking and government policies.

How is selling shares in a money-losing corporation at outlandish valuations not the commoditization of fraud? The fraud has been normalized into a game of hoping that greater fools will be so enamored of the normalized fraud that they’ll take the IPO shares off your hands at ever-higher valuations until the fraud breaks down.

But by then, the instigators of the fraud–the IPO–have escaped with billions in gains and zero liability.

How is private equity loading companies up with debt as a means of paying outlandish dividends to themselves not commoditized fraud? How is paying dividends with debt rather than earnings not fraud? The net result of this fraud is the debt-burdened company eventually defaults on its debt, defrauding the investors who were suckered into the scam.

But once again, the instigators of the fraud–private equity–have escaped with billions in gains and zero liability.

How is understating inflation so Social Security retirees get near-zero cost of living adjustments as real-world inflation pushes 7% not normalized, institutionalized fraud? We all understand the motivation for this institutionalized fraud: to limit the increasing cost of Social Security and mask the erosion of household income’s purchasing power.

While the Social Security recipient and the minimum wage worker are getting squeezed, those getting nearly free money from the Federal Reserve to plow into stocks are piling up trillions of dollars in gains. How is the Fed’s fee money for financiers not commoditized, institutionalized fraud? Those who can borrow outlandishly large sums at a discount are in effect being given the tools to defraud the financial system and all the other players who aren’t as close to the money spigot of the central bank.

How is charging 20% interest on a credit card balance while financiers pay 2% not commoditized, institutionalized fraud? The cover for this fraud is particularly rich: the high credit risk of the credit card holder demands a high rate of return, while the “low-risk” financier gets 2% financing to blow up the entire financial system and get bailed out by the taxpayer.

Normalizing and institutionalizing fraud undermines the foundations of the economy and the financial system. Calling these commoditized frauds business as usual doesn’t mean they won’t destroy the system from the inside.

*  *  *

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print, $13.08 audiobook): Read the first section for free in PDF format. My new mystery The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake is a ridiculously affordable $1.29 (Kindle) or $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF). My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. New benefit for subscribers/patrons: a monthly Q&A where I respond to your questions/topics.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VNMAwX Tyler Durden

EV automaker and Tesla-competitor NIO has said that it is now probing another one of its ES8 models that “caught fire” in Shanghai on Thursday. The probe comes after another ES8, in the city of Xi’an, caught fire about three weeks ago. It’s the fifth electric vehicle fire in China this year. 

In the most recent incident, the NIO vehicle “flared up and emitted a choking cloud of smoke yesterday on the startup’s home turf of Anting Town,” according to Yicai Global. The fire was quickly controlled by firefighters and there were no casualties reported. 

NIO took to social media yesterday to say they didn’t know the cause of the fire, but that they had opened an investigation and would notify the public of their findings. 

Fires seem to be the recurring theme for EV makers recently.

Yesterday, Tesla said it would issue a software update while investigating two recent, apparently unprovoked, vehicle fires of its own – one in China and the other in Hong Kong. Tesla said that the update will change battery charge and thermal management settings in Model S sedans and Model X SUVs.

As we reported yesterday, Tesla claimed that the software update was being done out of “an abundance of caution”. The company said it’s supposed to “protect the battery and improve its longevity”. Because we guess it’s bad PR to come out and say: we’re trying to prevent cars from bursting into flames for no apparent reason at all.

Weeks ago, we were one of the first outlets to report  that a NIO ES8 electric car had suffered a similar fate. A self-proclaimed Tesla owner in Shanghai that Tweets under the name @ShanghaiJayIn posted video about three weeks ago of a NIO ES8 vehicle being extinguished.

NIO had said on their microblog that the vehicle was under repair when it caught fire. After an investigation into that fire, NIO concluded: 

Much of the left-rear shell of the traction battery pack and its cooling plate were buckled as the vehicle had been in a bad accident before being sent for repair. The pack’s crushed internal structure shorted out the battery, sparking the fire.

Last month, we first reported that a parked Tesla had appeared to catch fire in a garage before spontaneously combusting. Tesla is still investigating the incident, despite issuing the software update. “We immediately sent a team onsite and we’re supporting local authorities to establish the facts. From what we know now, no one was harmed,” Tesla said after the incident.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WTuFkQ Tyler Durden

Authored by Daniel Payne via The College Fix,

It’s not progress; it’s regression

Several dozen universities now offer graduation ceremonies exclusively for black students. These ceremonies, which are independent of the larger commencement exercises offered at most institutions, are meant to “give extra honors and recognition to black students earning their degrees.” The National Association of Scholars surveyed over 170 schools and found that nearly half of them offer ceremonies such as this.

It is worth asking what, precisely, the point of such events really is.

Why do black students need their own special graduation ceremonies?

Put another way: What is it about being a black American college student that calls for a racially exclusive commencement exercise?

There probably isn’t a good answer for that.

One spokeswoman told The Fix that these exercises “oftentimes incorporate cultural traditions.”

That is a bit of a non sequitur – there is, after all, no single “cultural tradition” that unites all black Americans, any more than there is for white ones. African-Americans throughout the centuries have contributed immense riches to the American cultural tapestry, but those contributions are not monolithic; they are varied and regional and not at all the sort of thing you can cram haphazardly into a seventy-minute ceremony.

In all likelihood these events are little more than sops to campus identity politics. A kind of racial radicalism has gripped many campuses in recent years: demands for racially segregated housing are common in higher education these days, and racial segregation is increasingly common at student centers, workshops and other campus events.

This is not progress; it is regression. The great American political movements of the 19th and 20th century were about bridging the profound and often brutal chasm that has divided the races in this country since its earliest beginnings. Many campuses are now helping to widen that chasm rather than close it further. It’s a terrible thing to witness.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/30vp1I3 Tyler Durden

The Trump administration has officially pulled a $929 million federal grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority after terminating a 2010 agreement. 

In a release, the Federal Railroad Association – a component of the US Department of Transportation – said that California’s rail authority “repeatedly failed to comply with the terms of the FY10 agreement and has failed to make reasonable progress on the project. Additionally, California has abandoned its original vision of a high-speed passenger rail service connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, which was essential to its applications for FRA grant funding,” according to CNBC. 

The FRA added that it “continues to consider all options regarding the return of $2.5 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds awarded to CHSRA.“

President Trump in February called for California to return $3.5 billion in federal funds given to the state for the failed high-speed rail line planned between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The $929 million in grant funds awarded to the state had not yet been paid out. 

Trump’s call for the return of money followed Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom at his first state of the state address on Feb. 12 announcing a reeling in of the state’s high-speed rail project, saying the current plan “would cost too much and take too long.” He added, “There simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA.” –CNBC

In a Thursday statement, Newsom said “The Trump administration’s action is illegal and a direct assault on California, our green infrastructure, and the thousands of Central Valley workers who are building this project,” adding “Just as we have seen from the Trump administration’s attacks on our clean air standards, our immigrant communities and in countless other areas, the Trump administration is trying to exact political retribution on our state. This is California’s money, appropriated by Congress, and we will vigorously defend it in court.”

While California canceled the bulk of the high-speed rail project, the state is continuing construction on a 119-mile section in the Central Valley in order to be able to legally keep federal funds for the project. Over $6 billion has already been spent on the project. 

Back in 2008, California voters approved Proposition 1A, authorizing nearly $10 billion in bond money for the construction of the high-speed rail system. Since the vote, though, the project been plagued by delays and cost overruns. –CNBC

Last October, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison panned the $77 billion project. 

“Trains leave when you don’t want to leave, from a place you don’t want to leave from, and take you to a place you don’t want to go to, at a time you don’t want to get there, and then you have to get into a car and go wherever you’re going. It is a crazy system.” 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/30uy0sE Tyler Durden

A used crack pipe, two DC driver’s licenses, multiple credit cards, a Delaware Attorney General badge and a US Secret Service business card belonging to Hunter Biden were found in a rental car returned to an Arizona Hertz location in the middle of the night, days before the 2016 presidential election, according to Breitbart, which obtained an exclusive copy of the police report.

Hunter, son of former Vice President and 2020 candidate Joe Biden, had rented the vehicle from a California location, intending to return it to the Prescott, Arizona location where iut was discovered after being dropped off with the crack pipe and Hunter Biden’s personal effects. 

Instead of returning the car keys to the drop box where after-hours returns are supposed to go, the car was returned—according to the police report—with the keys left in the gas tank compartment of the vehicle. Also found inside the vehicle, per the police report, were two drivers’ licenses both bearing Hunter Biden’s legal name Robert Biden, as well as “some credit cards with the same name,” “a secret service business card,” and an “Attorney General’s badge” all contained inside a wallet that Hertz rental employees discovered—along with a pipe that Hertz employees thought and police later confirmed was used to smoke illicit drugs, as well as “a white powdery substance in the arm rest of the vehicle.” –Breitbart

Of note, Hunter was discharged from the Navy after he tested positive for cocaine. 

The morning after the car was dropped off, a phone number belonging to a renowned local “Colon Hydrotherapist” called the Hertz. The caller identified himself as “Joseph McGee,” who told the employees that the keys were located in the gas cap as opposed to the drop box. 

“McGee” informed the rental car company employee, according to police, that “his friend was feeling sick so they didn’t know what to do” when the car was returned. Police, according to a supplemental report filed by a Prescott Police Department detective, sought and obtained a subpoena to discover the source of the “Joseph McGee” phone call—and traced it to a phone number owned and operated by a renowned “Colon Hydrotherapist” in the region. –Breitbart

Police were unable to find and interview “Joseph McGee,” as well as contact the younger Biden, however they were unsuccessful at reaching either. The report does say that the Secret Service had located Hunter, and that he was “well.” 

Laboratory analysis by the Arizona Department of Public Safety later determined that the pipe discovered in the vehicle was used to smoke cocaine, not meth, but fingerprints were not found on the device.

The 23 pages of law enforcement and police documents repeatedly refer to the suspect under investigation as Robert Hunter Biden and the report type as a “Narcotics Offense.” Breitbart News is publishing the documents here, with redactions made to remove personally-identifying contact information like addresses and phone numbers as well as the last names of key witnesses. –Breitbart

No prosecution

Despite the overwhelming evidence after an investigation which included two Prescott Police Department officers and a detective, local authorities in both the city and county attorney’s offices declined to prosecute the case. 

A document shows the reason the county attorney declined to prosecute the vice president’s son is because they thought they would only be able to get minor charges to stick, and kicked it down to the city attorney. It is unclear from the documents why the city attorney declined to prosecute.

In addition to local police, FBI and the U.S. Secret Service agents were roped into the case, as well. The FBI dispatched agents to the scene, according to the law enforcement documents, and the Secret Service communicated with the various law enforcement officials investigating and confirmed that Hunter Biden was not in harm’s way. –Breitbart

Read the rest of the report here. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YFt6aN Tyler Durden