Category: zerohedge

Iranian state TV on Friday afternoon (local time) reported “unprecedented chaos” at train stations across the country, leading to cancelations, immense delays and confusion impacting hundreds of lines after what’s being reported as a potential cyber attack.

Reuters reports as evidence of a hack that a phone number for the Ayatollah’s office was posed in place of a national train services hotline: “Train services in Iran were delayed by apparent cyberattacks on Friday, with hackers posting the phone number of the country’s supreme leader as the number to call for information, state-affiliated news outlets reported.”

Fars News reports that hundreds of trains in #Iran have suddenly been cancelled today, speculating about a cyber attack on railway computer systems. pic.twitter.com/6eSiWTpfgu

— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) July 9, 2021

State-run Fars News initially reported “Long delays due to cyberattacks,” but provided little in the way of further confirmation.

Further details are being reported in Bloomberg as follows:

Departure notice boards showed blanket cancellations and carried the message “long delay following cyber attack,” the national broadcaster said, adding that the disruption to Islamic Republic of Iran Railways’ computer systems also affected station entrances and exits as well as ticket booths.

The national rail company’s website, www.rai.ir, wasn’t loading as of 7.50 p.m. in Tehran. Iranian state TV didn’t say where it got the information.

#Iran; hundreds of trains have been delayed or cancelled, the websites of the Iranian Railways Compony, ticket sale agents, luggage control systems are down. The arrival-departure board says the disruptions are the result of cyberattacks. #Israel ?? pic.twitter.com/hcwyy4dTAy

— Fereshteh Sadeghi فرشته صادقی (@fresh_sadegh) July 9, 2021

Iranian officials have in the recent past blamed Israel and the United States for frequent cyberattacks on national infrastructure, in addition to the latest ‘sabotage’ incidents on nuclear and oil sites, often blamed on Israeli intelligence. 

The Islamic Republic’s national transportation network has further struggled over the past years of Trump-era sanctions against multiple major industries, leading to decaying infrastructure.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Large numbers of birds are dropping dead from a “mystery disease” throughout much of the eastern half of the country, and scientists still have absolutely no idea why this is happening.  They have tested the dead birds for a whole host of known illnesses, but those tests have not revealed the cause of this plague.  We are being told that a lot of the affected birds appear to develop neurological problems, and many of them go completely blind before they finally die.  The “mystery disease” has spread to more states since I first wrote about this plague, and at this point the list of affected areas includes Washington D.C., Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.  If authorities are unable to find a solution, will this plague eventually spread across the entire nation?

I don’t know why the mainstream media is not giving this story more coverage, because this is quickly turning into a major crisis.

The following comes directly from a statement that was posted late last week on the official website of the USGS…

In late May, wildlife managers in Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky began receiving reports of sick and dying birds with eye swelling and crusty discharge, as well as neurological signs. More recently, additional reports have been received from Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. While the majority of affected birds are reported to be fledgling common grackles, blue jays, European starlings and American robins, other species of songbirds have been reported as well. No definitive cause(s) of illness or death have been determined at this time. No human health or domestic livestock and poultry issues have been reported.

The natural resource management agencies in the affected states and the District of Columbia, along with the National Park Service, are continuing to work with diagnostic laboratories to investigate the cause(s) of this event. Those laboratories include the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, the University of Georgia Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, the University of Pennsylvania Wildlife Futures Program and the Indiana Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory.

With each passing day, more birds are going blind and more birds are dying.

In Virginia, an animal control professional named Jennifer Toussaint will never forget the first time that she encountered baby blue jays that had been afflicted by this mysterious illness…

Jennifer Toussaint, chief of animal control in Arlington, Virginia, can’t forget the four baby blue jays. In late May, worried residents had delivered the fledglings to her clinic just outside of Washington, D.C., within just a few hours. Each was plump, indicating “their parents had done a great job caring for them,” Toussaint says. But the birds were lethargic, unable to keep their balance, and blinded by crusty, oozing patches that had grown over their eyes.

Toussaint and her staff soon reached a gloomy diagnosis: the jays were the latest victims of a mysterious deadly disease that had emerged in their area just a few weeks earlier and had already killed countless wild birds. There was no known treatment, so they euthanized the jays. “It was difficult to feel so helpless,” Toussaint recalls.

Experts have never seen anything like this before, and they are in a race to try to find some answers.

Whatever is causing this, it appears to be affecting a wide range of species…

Several species of birds have been affected by the mystery illness, according to the University of Pennsylvania: blue jay, European starling, common grackle, American robin, northern cardinal, house finch, house sparrow, Eastern bluebird, red-bellied woodpecker, Carolina chickadee, and Carolina wren.

And at this point, the “mystery disease” appears to have spread very widely.

For example, in the state of Virginia there have been confirmed reports “in the counties and cities of Alexandria, Arlington, Clarke, Fairfax, Falls Church, Fauquier, Frederick, Loudoun, Manassas, Prince William, Shenandoah, Warren, and Winchester.”

In Indiana, cases have now been identified in 53 different counties.

So if this is something that is spreading from bird to bird, it is spreading very easily and it is spreading very rapidly.

But at this point we don’t know for sure that it is some sort of a disease, because so far all of the tests that have been done haven’t come up with much of anything….

Natural resource management agencies in all of the affected states and D.C. are working with the National Park Service to investigate this event.

So far, several infectious agents have not been detected in any of the birds that have been tested, including Salmonella and Chlamydia, avian influenza, West Nile virus and other flaviviruses, Newcastle disease virus and other paramyxoviruses, herpesviruses and poxviruses, and Trichomonas parasites.

Something other than a disease could potentially be causing this plague.

We just don’t know.

At one point it was being theorized that eating cicadas was causing these birds to become ill, but scientists appear to have ruled this theory out…

But the cicadas appear to be blameless. Birds tend to avoid eating fungus-ridden cicadas, and sick birds have been observed in areas where cicadas were rare. “It does not look like it’s a match,” says Brian Evans, a migratory bird ecologist with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

So many strange things have been happening in 2021.

As I discussed yesterday, right now we are witnessing a horrifying plague of grasshoppers in the western half of the country, and at the same time we have a nightmarish plague of dead birds in the eastern half of the country.

On top of everything else, we are right in the midst of a “megadrought” which may end up becoming the worst in the entire history of our nation.

Many believe that it is just a “coincidence” that so many bad things are happening to us all at once, and perhaps they are correct.

But nobody can deny that our world has gotten a whole lot crazier over the last couple of years, and I expect quite a bit more craziness during the second half of 2021.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the nightmare of the meme stock short squeeze haunted Melvin Capital throughout the first half. Gabe Plotkin’s hedge fund, which infamously suffered billions in losses during the initial Gamestop short squeeze at the start of the year orchestrated by a handful of wily hedge funds such as Senvest, which remains the best performing hedge fund of the year according to the weekly HSBC ranking…

… and facilitated by the WallStreetBets reddit board, continued to suffer throughout the first half which it ended down a whopping 46% as the hedge fund struggled – and failed- to bounce back from a vicious attack by Reddit traders on its short positions. This means that contrary to previous speculation that the fund had successfully dug itself out of the hole it dug for itself in the first month of the year, its results remained dismal through the end of June. In fact, as Bloomberg adds, Melvin now calculates its loss in the first month of the year at almost 55%, compared with a preliminary estimate of 53%.

A breakdown of its monthly performance reveals that after posting a strong rebound of 22% in February, performance has been inconsistent: Melvin dipped again in March, then gained 5.4% in the second quarter. In total, the fund returned about 18% from Feb. 1 through the end of June.

As Bloomberg snarkily comments, “some hedge fund observers question whether Plotkin — who has changed the way he makes short bets in the wake of the fiasco — can still produce blockbuster returns without taking aggressive positions against companies.”

So far the answer appears to be no.

But the staggering losses (and lack of recovery) also means that the late-January capital infusion into the fund by Plotkin’s former bosses, billionaires Steve Cohen and Ken Griffin, has been a losing one. Just how much money have they lost? For the answer we go to a Friday update by Bloomberg, according to which the long-term investment by Steve Cohen’s Point72 in Melvin lost roughly $500 million this year through June.

That’s also the reason why the iconic $22 billion hedge fund barely made money in the first half of 2021, returning just 1.2% in the first six months of the year, lagging behind other large multi-strategy hedge funds such as Citadel (which also invested in Plotkin), which was up 4.4%, and Millennium Management, which gained 6.5%.

Yet even with this year’s losses, Plotkin has been a profitable trade for Cohen: Point72 invested $200 million in Melvin when he started in 2014, and that sum grew to about $1 billion by the end of 2020 as Plotkin posted multiple years of double-digit returns, according to Bloomberg which adds that Point72 had other issues this year beyond Melvin’s struggles. The firm, like many generalist equity funds, got whipped around as value stocks surged on the back of the post-pandemic recovery, only to be overtaken yet again by technology shares and other growth companies that have dominated the market for years.

Other multi-strats had an even more painful first half, even without bailing out Melvin: among them was David Einhorn, who has been insisting that beaten down shares were set to soar. His Greenlight Capital plunged 7.6% in June, for a first-half loss of 3%. The fund is down a cumulative 32% since the end of 2014.

Finally, as Bloomberg wraps, some other hedge-fund managers had similar struggles in 2021. Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors returned just 1% this year. Dan Sundheim’s D1 Capital Partners, which also got whiplashed by moves in meme stocks, notably the meltup in AMC, is up about 4%, compared with a gain of more than 50% in 2020.

Authored by Isabel Van Brugen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Pentagon offered National Guard troops two days before the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol building, but that proposal was rejected, former chief of staff Kash Patel has confirmed.

In an episode of EpochTV’s “Kash’s Corner,” Patel, who served as chief of staff to the Acting United States Secretary of Defense under former President Donald Trump, explained why the Capitol breach could have been prevented. 

Patel, who also served as a government official in the United States National Security Council and the United States House of Representatives, said that he believes that the offer from the Trump administration was blocked for “political reasons.”

“You have to ask yourself, what happened on Jan. 6? I was chief of staff on the Department of Defense on Jan. 6,” said Patel. “We had offered the Capitol Police and Mayor Bowser of Washington D.C. thousands of National Guardsmen and women two days before Jan. 6, and they turned us down. So it could have been prevented.”

The breach took place during a joint session of Congress when lawmakers met to certify electoral votes submitted by states. The Capitol grounds and building were breached by protestors and some rioters, some of whom wanted to voice their stance against then-Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to intervene in the certification process. Thousands of peaceful protesters remained outside.

Protesters have said they believe widespread fraud occurred in the election and did not like how officials in some states dramatically altered voting rules amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were many “mistakes” that led to the events that unfolded on that day, Patel said.

“Why on Jan. 6—when it has now been publicly admitted by the FBI that they had information that there could possibly be a situation like that at the United States Capitol—why weren’t the cabinet secretaries under [then] President Trump briefed? Why didn’t the FBI put a thousand uniformed agents around the U.S. Capitol? Where was the fence?” asked Patel.

“These are the mistakes, intentional or otherwise, that led to Jan. 6,” Patel continued. “If you look at the videos from Jan. 6, an entire side of the Capitol—and I believe it’s outside—was totally unmanned. No police officers whatsoever, and that’s where the crowd first came in through.”

He charged that the Pentagon’s offer was rejected for political reasons.

“I think people now are starting to realize that the protecting of the U.S. Capitol on a day like Jan. 6 is a law enforcement function,” Patel explained. “You cannot have the United States military descend and occupy the area around the U.S. Capitol, it’s literally illegal. But they can assist their law enforcement partners through a request from the mayor or the governor or the Capitol Police.”

“That’s what should’ve happened, and that’s what we told them they might want to consider, but they flat out rejected it for political reasons I believe.”

The U.S. Capitol Police, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office, and the Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.

More than 535 defendants across nearly 50 states have been charged in the six months since the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol Building, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said this week. The majority of the cases are related to entering a restricted building, obstruction of an official proceeding, and civil disorder.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told an oversight hearing held by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee last month that the law enforcement agency considered the events that unfolded on Jan. 6 to be an act of “domestic terrorism.” When asked by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) whether the events could be considered an “insurrection,” Wray said it would be inappropriate to describe the breach as such.

“In my role as FBI director, because that’s a term that has legal meaning, I really have to be careful about using words like that,” Wray said, noting that what he says could affect ongoing criminal cases.

Democratic lawmakers have pushed the narrative that the Jan. 6 breach was an “insurrection,” largely during the January impeachment effort against Trump. No one who participated in the breach has been charged with insurrection.

On June 23, Indiana woman Anna Morgan-Lloyd, 49, was put on probation in the first sentencing stemming from the Jan. 6 breach.

Separately, reports of harsh conditions for pre-trial defendants have emerged in recent days. Two attorneys told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” that more than 50 such defendants are being held pretrial in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, in conditions that are “unconstitutional” and violate “every single basic human right.”

The FBI on Jan. 6 appealed to the public for additional information to assist in identifying 300 people who allegedly committed violent acts at the U.S. Capitol, including more than 200 who assaulted law enforcement officers.

Thursday’s mini rout, which started with one of the ugliest market opens in history in the form of the 4th lowest NYSE TICK print in history…

… as traders freaked out over fresh covid pandemic fears due to the soaring number of delta cases around the globe…

… was completely forgotten come Friday, when spoos rose to a new all time high…

… and the 9th in the past 11 days…

… as a buying program hit shortly before midnight and lifted stocks to a new record high.

A big reason for the surge in stocks was the rebound in 10Y yields, which after tumbling sharply earlier in the week to right on top of their 200 DMA, has since moved some 10bps higher to 1.3561%, closing the week where they were just after the OPEC+ nondeal news.

The culprit behind the move in 10Y: breakevens, breakevens, which jumped tracking oil almost tick for tick as they normally do.

The move in stocks was also helped by China’s dovish capitulation with Beijing announcing early on Friday morning that the PBOC would cut RRR by 0.50bps, injecting 1 trillion yuan into the system, which while not nearly enough to push Chinese stocks sharply higher was enough to offset fears of continued deleveraging.

The backstop from China’s central bank eased volatility concerns, and the VIX tumbled back to 16 after briefly topping 21 on Thursday.

Virtually all vol indicators dropped today, tracking the VIX’s sharp slide.

Also thanks to China’s RRR cut – the first since Jan 2020 – shares of Chinese firms listed in the U.S. rebounded strongly on Friday after the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index, the benchmark for these ADRs, fell for six straight days.

Even the posterchild of China’s latest crackdown on tech giga-caps, Didi, was up 8% after falling for four days

After an ugly start to the week, when oil tumbled after the UAE refused to join the rest of OPEC+ in agreeing on gradual output hikes which prompted the market to freak out over another imminent OPEC cartel collapse, oil has manged to recover much of its losses and is now where it was before the fireworks started on Monday.

After failing to break above $1800 on three tries earlier in the week, Gold finally rose above the key resistance level, although it remains questionable if it will be able to sustain this advance.

Meanwhile, in the land of digital gold, cryptos recovered some of their recent losses, but remains well below level hit earlier this week, not to mention around 50% below their May highs.

Could the holy grail of turning salt water to drinkable water finally be upon us?

A new report from Interesting Engineering seems to suggest that could be the case – detailing a new nanofiber membrane, developed by Yunchul Woo and his team at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, that appears to be “stable in the long term” for desalinization. And it can be done “in minutes”, the report says.

Membranes had been used in the past, but there is often a challenge in keeping them dry for long periods of time. When they become wet, their filtration characteristics become ineffective and large amounts of salt can pass through. 

Woo’s team has created a membrane “made of nanofibres that have been fabricated into a three-dimensional hierarchical structure” by using a technology called “electrospinning”. This new membrane is said to be highly water repellant. 

Water from one side is heated and allows water vapor to pass through the membrane, which is then condensed on the other side. The process is called membrane distillation. 

“Since the salt particles are not converted to the gaseous state, they are left out on one side of the membrane, giving highly purified water on the other side,” the report says. 

It also notes that the researchers used silica aerogel in their membrane fabrication process.

Upon testing the technology for 30 days continuously, they found the membrane filtered out 99.9% of salt without wetting problems. 

Desalinization is the obvious answer to the global issue of over 785 million people lacking clean drinking water. Up until now, scientists have been unable to figure out a quick, cost-efficient and effective way to turn salt water into drinkable water.

Fresh water only accounts for 2.5% of the total water available on Earth, the report notes. 

Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds

All debt-fueled speculative bubbles pop, even as cheerleaders claim otherwise.

The expansion of Housing Bubble #2 is clearly visible in these two charts of house valuations, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve database (FRED). The first is the Case-Shiller Index, which as you recall tracks the price of homes on an “apples to apples” basis, i.e. it tracks price movements for the same house over time.

Note that this is an index chart where the index is set at 100 as of January 2000. It is not a chart of median housing prices.

The second chart is also a housing price index chart courtesy of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency. (Shoutout to the USFHFA, never came across your work before.)

The red line marks where house prices would be if they had tracked the Consumer Price Index (CPI), i.e. inflation as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You’ll notice that the last time the Case-Shiller Index touched this baseline was 1998, almost a quarter-century ago. On the FHFA index, it hasn’t touched it since the mid-1970s, 45 years ago.

You’ll notice that housing would have to drop by 40% to touch the baseline. Yes, this is officially “impossible,” because the Fed has our back in every bubble and housing never goes down because the demand is forever rising.

Nice, but when you turn an asset class into a casino of speculators and financiers playing with Fed-spewed “free money,” you’re not dealing with shelter, you’re dealing with gambling chips. You’ll notice that the Federal Reserve’s massive manipulation–oops, sorry, intervention— in response to the Asian-Contagion of 1997-1998 began inflating an unprecedented bubble in housing that rose to spectacular heights on the back of Fed policies (lowering interest rates, etc.) and institutionalized fraud on a global scale in the casino’s subprime mortgage table.

You may recall that $300 billion of designed-to-default subprime mortgage pools almost took down America’s entire financial system and with that teetering, the entire global financial system ($100 trillion at the time).

I’ve often pointed out the remarkable symmetry of speculative bubbles popping. Housing Bubble #1 took about four years to reach absurd valuations and about four years to plummet towards the baseline–a decline that the Federal Reserve stopped by effectively socializing the mortgage market and manipulating mortgage rates into a steady slide lower.

This manipulation has inflated Housing Bubble #2 as mortgage rates fell beneath the rate of inflation (as measured by any quasi-realistic metric). In other words, lenders are losing money on every mortgage, every month, as their yield is less than zero once adjusted for inflation.

The idea that issuing mortgages that lose money is perfectly sound and sustainable is, well, financial madness. It may be fun to originate mortgages that lose money from Day One and sell them to a Norwegian pension fund or other bagholder, but over time people will catch on that losing money is not a winning strategy in the long term.

Housing Bubble #2 has naturally blown a bubble in rents, as the third chart shows. If I just paid 100% more for a rental than it was worth a few years ago, of course the rent should double, too, to cover my higher costs.

To touch the baseline, rents would also have to drop 40%. yes, I know, that’s “impossible” because the Fed has our back, population is growing, and so on.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a reliable feature of every debt-funded speculative bubble and Housing Bubble #2 has a palpable FOMO frenzy feel.

But housing has an interesting feature: if the number of people occupying a dwelling increases, the population can grow by millions without needing even one additional house. Interestingly, The number of people in the average U.S. household is going up for the first time in over 160 years (Pew Research).

There are 331 million U.S. residents and about 126 million occupied dwellings, so that’s about 2.6 people per housing unit.

A consequential number of the 82.5 million owner-occupied homes in America are currently occupied by one or two people. If the number of people living in those homes rose, the demand for additional housing would slacken considerably.

There are a consequential number of unoccupied homes in the U.S. as detailed on Page 4 of Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, Q1 2021 (Census.gov)

Many of these may be in places few people want to live, others may be abandoned and in need of renovation, but nonetheless it seems there are at least 5 million unoccupied dwellings in the U.S. that are “held off the market” for various reasons (3.8 million units) or only in “occasional use” (2 million dwellings that are not vacation “seasonal” homes or short-term rentals, as those are separate categories).

New York City has 3.5 million housing units and Los Angeles has 1.5 million housing units, so 5 million unoccupied dwellings is a large number. With more work being done remotely, and the price of housing at absurd levels in many urban areas, it’s not difficult to imagine an increase in the number of residents per dwelling and a slow migration to housing sitting empty.

I built a micro-house back in 1978, and the trend is accelerating. A great many young people cannot afford a McMansion and will never be able to afford one, and many have no interest in debt-serfdom. Micro-houses in low-cost rural areas are a solution that adds housing units but not in the conventional high-cost manner.

All debt-fueled speculative bubbles pop, even as cheerleaders claim otherwise. There are a great many people with vested interests in Housing Bubble #2 expanding forever, but history suggests a return to the baseline is more likely than a speculative bubble expanding forever. Demand is contingent, mortgage rates are contingent, demographic flows are contingent, the number of occupants per dwelling is contingent, and the rise of cheap alternatives to conventional housing is an under-appreciated trend.

And that’s how “impossible” reverses to “inevitable.”

While Wells Fargo is scrapping credit lines for ordinary middle-class Americans, the biggest banks in the US are still doling out mega-mortgages to their pals like it’s nothing.

Accoridng to Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs banker Michael Daffey just obtained a $30.6MM loan from Citigroup to buy one of the most infamous pieces of real estate in the US: the Manhattan townhouse formerly owned by Jeffrey Epstein. Daffey, who was recently named chairman of crypto investment bank Galaxy Digital (run by his old friend and former Goldman colleague Mike Novogratz), received the 30-year mega-mortgage back in May, two months after he bought the townhouse located at East 71st Street. He got the mortgage a few months after he purchased the townhouse for a deeply discounted $51MM (the property was marked down 40% from its original asking price of $88MM).

Dalley was previously chairman of Goldman’s Global Markets Division before he left the company.

The limestone mansion, built in the 1930s on the Upper East Side, was first listed for sale about a year after Epstein’s August 2019 death. During the days after the billionaire pedophile’s arrest, onlookers crowded the house and took photos as camera crews surrounded the home.

The entrance is famously adorned with Epstein’s initials: “J.E.” (we imagine Dalley will want to have those removed). According to BBG, crowbar marks and other signs of how authorities Its heavy wood doors bore crowbar marks — evidence of how authorities forced their way in.Before Epstein, the home belonged to L Brands founder Les Wexner, Epstein’s most important client for years. In 2011, the home’s deed was transferred to an Epstein company in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

As BBG points out, the transaction offers “a glimpse at how the rich leverage assets for liquidity.” Bankers, of course, have been keen, if not overeager, to make super-sized mortgages backed by valuable collateral.

Meanwhile, as credit demand by average Joe’s starts roaring back…

…lenders are starting to cut down on their exposure.

The Taliban on Friday says it’s now taken control of a whopping 85% of all territory in Afghanistan, however, this excludes the capital of Kabul and other high-population dense areas.

Reuters is already citing “international concern” which has “mounted over problems getting medicines and supplies into the country” as the terror group which American forces have spent 20 years fighting is poised to take back the whole central Asian nation again for the first time since 2001.

But the national US-backed government in Kabul is dismissing the latest Taliban statement as “propaganda” aimed at Western retreating forces. It was only yesterday that Biden hailed to completion of US objectives in the war-torn country which the US invaded quickly after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Propaganda or not, it’s certainly not looking good given even US intelligence estimates recently projected some six months before Kabul could fall. Many military analysts chimed in to say six months is far too optimistic an assessment. Consider too the rapid advances just this week, as Reuters details of a mere few of the latest examples:

• The Taliban “emboldened by the withdrawal, had captured an important district in Herat province, home to tens of thousands of minority Shi’ite Hazaras.”
• “Torghundi, a northern town on the border with Turkmenistan, had also been captured by the Taliban overnight, Afghan and Taliban officials said.”
• “Hundreds of Afghan security personnel and refugees continued to flee across the border into neighboring Iran and Tajikistan, causing concern in Moscow and other foreign capitals.”

The humanitarian situation looks to grow worse by the day as the WHO has recently estimated more than 18 million Afghan civilians are in dire need of assistance, including over three million children who could suffer acute malnutrition.

(2) KANDAHAR CITY (Pajhwok): The Taliban insurgents have taken control of the Shorawak district of southern Kandahar province. #Taliban Kabul #kabul #Afghanistan #LifeUndrControlOfTaliban pic.twitter.com/julBlelIMd

— world peace and conflicts center (@WorldBreakingN9) July 9, 2021

On Friday the Pentagon’s reaction to the Taliban claim of 85% of territory taken strongly suggested the Taliban might not be exaggerating after all…

Asked about how much territory the Taliban held, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby declined direct comment.

“Claiming territory or claiming ground doesn’t mean you can sustain that or keep it over time” he said in an interview with CNN. “And so I think it’s really time for the Afghan forces to get into the field – and they are in the field – and to defend their country, their people.”

As we detailed earlier, the consistent pattern has witnessed Afghan military personnel abandoning their posts in droves amid the advancing Taliban, also as they saw their American trainers and allies sneak off “in the middle of the night” – as they did at Bagram days ago.

Shares of Biogen sank to their lowest levels of the session, weighing on the broader biotech sector following reports that the head of the FDA has called for a wide-ranging federal probe into how the company’s controversial Alzheimer’s drug, STAT News reported.

In a letter published Friday, Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock asked the independent Office of the Inspector General to investigate how staff from the agency interacted with Biogen in the run-up to the June 7 approval of Aduhelm. The complaint cited reporting that the agency worked uncomfortably closely with Biogen executives to get the drug to market. Most suspiciously, this included an off-the-books meeting and an unprecedented decision to approve Aduhelm through a regulatory shortcut.

“There continue to be concerns raised. . .regarding contacts between representatives from Biogen and FDA during the review process, including some that may have occurred outside of the formal correspondence process,” Woodcock wrote in a letter to acting Inspector General Christi Grimm. To the extent these concerns could undermine the public’s confidence in FDA’s decision, I believe it is critical that the events at issue be reviewed by an independent body such as the Office of Inspector General in order to determine whether any interactions that occurred between Biogen and FDA review staff were inconsistent with FDA policies and procedures.”

As we reported last month, not one member of the FDA Advisory Committee voted to approve Aduhelm, the agency decided to approve the therapy anyway. Since the decision, multiple members of the advisory committee have quit. And now Dr. Woodcock is demanding that a government watchdog investigate exactly how this travesty of medicinal regulation was allowed to move forward.

Shares of Biogen were off more than 3% in recent trade.

It’s just the latest reminder that sometimes, “the science” isn’t the top priority at the FDA.