Lyft Surges 20% From IPO Price On Market Debut After “Lightning Start”

That “other” ride-hailing company, Lyft, surged 20% as it broke for trading just before noon on Friday.

A quarter of the float, or some 6.1 million shares changed hands when the stock began trading on the Nasdaq in New York, opening at a price of $87.24 per share. This followed the company’s initial public offering which raised $2.3 billion late on Thursday at a price of $72 a share, valuing the company at $24 billion.

Lyft’s IPO price was one of the highest ever, and was the largest US tech IPO since Snap in 2017, boosting hopes for a wave of listings by the most highly valued private companies including Pinterest, Slack, Airbnb, and the biggest so-called unicorn of all, Uber. It has also prompted concerns that with nearly three-quarters of a trillion in IPOs coming on deck, companies are rushing to come to market in what some have said is a top tick of the market

Addressing the question of why Lyft came to market now, co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer said the decision to take the company public had been driven by the company’s internal readiness, not Wall Street enthusiasm.

Confirming that there is no scarcity of greater fools out there, investors rushed to buy Lyft shares despite massive, and increasing losses since it was founded in 2012 as a spin-off of Green and Zimmer’s first venture, a Facebook app for long-distance carpooling. In its marketing roadshow over the past two weeks, the company pitched its rapid growth in revenue and market share, as well as the expansion of the overall ride-hailing market, as a can’t-miss investment opportunity; it did not dwell too much on the company’s chronic and relentless losses.

While Lyft came to market ahead of its arch-rival, Uber, the latter is also preparing to unveil its own IPO as soon as next month, and some say it could be valued at more than $100 billion in one of the biggest public offerings in US corporate history.

“We thought the moment to do it was when we could go public without changing the day-to-day way we ran the company,” Mr Zimmer, Lyft’s president, told the Financial Times in an interview. “It happened to be that this a good moment in the market to do so.”

“Investors were excited to be part of this story because they saw there is a massive shift coming from owned vehicles to transportation as a service,” he said. “We’ve seen this play out in entertainment with Netflix and Spotify. They agree with us that there’s never been a market this large make that shift.”

On Thursday, Lyft sold 32.5 million shares at $72 each, the top end of its targeted range. The offering was “meaningfully oversubscribed”, leading the company to increase both its price range and number of shares on sale. JPMorgan Chase led the listing with Credit Suisse and Jefferies.

Commenting on the blistering IPO, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, who has a neutral rating on the stock, said that the $87 break price is “a lightning start for Lyft’s stock as investors are salivating owning a piece of the $1 trillion ride- sharing market. The robust start to trading is also a clear positive for other tech names that are watching Lyft to gauge investor demand and Street reaction on this transformational consumer tech name.”

”Lyft is popping the Dom Perignon today, but how the stock trades over the coming months and especially once Uber comes out and goes public will be the real test in our opinion.”

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Huawei Profits Soar in 2018; Chairman Tells Washington To “Drop Its Loser Attitude”

When it first launched its global lobbying campaign to shut Chinese telecoms giant Huawei out of the West, Washington was probably, in retrospect, feeling a little overconfident. After a ban on selling American-made components to ZTE (another Chinese telecoms giant) nearly precipitated the company’s collapse, a coordinated smear campaign – including the arrest of one of the company’s top executives, a pair of criminal indictments, and a ban on selling its products in the US – designed to weaken Huawei’s 5G leadership should at least have curbed the company’s torrid revenue and profit growth.

Huawei

Unfortunately for rival US telecoms giants, America couldn’t have been more wrong, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out.

Though Huawei is a privately held company, it has made a habit of releasing earnings figures. And the numbers from 2018 are simply staggering. Despite being effectively shut out of the US and several of its allies in the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance (Australia and New Zealand), Huawe’s revenue for 2018 rose 20% to 721.2 billion yuan ($107 billion) from 603.6 billion yuan a year earlier. Meanwhile, net income for 2018 rose 25% to 59.3 billion yuan.

Huawei

Heaping more embarrassment on the US, the EU, one of Washington’s staunchest “allies”, earlier this week refused to call for a ban or any restrictions on Huawei’s products. This after the UK and Germany had declared Huawei’s telecoms equipment suitable to be used in the country’s soon-to-be-built 5G infrastructure.

Although Huawei saw a slight dip (1.3%) in its carrier business, Huawei rotating chairman Guo Ping said this dip was expected, as company’s hold off on repairs and upkeep before breaking ground on their new 5G networks. The company recorded rapid growth in its consumer business, which includes smartphones, and its enterprise cloud-computing business.  In a major milestone for the company, its smartphone shipments rose 35% last year to 206 million units, making Huawei the world’s second largest supplier of handsets.

Despite Washington’s ‘national security threat’ warnings, Huawei won 30 new 5G contracts from carriers in 2018. The company recently won contracts from customers in South Korea and the UAE.

Guo, who has never shied away from mocking the US, celebrated the company’s numbers by lobbing yet another insult Washington’s way, as Reuters reported, Guo said he hoped the US government would drop its “loser’s attitude” and drop its smear camapign.

“The U.S. government has a loser’s attitude. It wants to smear Huawei because it cannot compete against Huawei,” Guo Ping said. President Trump is going to love hearing that.

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Trump Threatens To Close Southern Border Next Week 

In the past, when President Trump threatened to close the southern border over Mexico’s unwillingness to crack down on illegal immigrants crossing through its territory, many took his words with a grain of salt. But after the president twice tried to dictate federal policy via tweet over the past week, there’s cause to believe this might be more than just frustrated presidential bluster.

For the second time in as many days, President Trump has threatened to close the southern border if Mexico doesn’t take action to “stop illegals from entering the US”. The tweets follows reports that “the mother of all caravans” has been forming in Honduras, with as many as 20,000 people hoping to eventually cross into US territory.

Meanwhile, another caravan of 2,500 Central Americans and Cubans has been slowly making its way through Mexico, though they have encountered a cooler response from locals and authorities than what greeted previous caravans.

Can Trump’s advisors dissuade him from taking such a drastic step, which would have a serious impact on trade and tourism across the border?

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Privacy-Minded Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Stop NSA from Collecting Your Phone Records

National Security AgencyFour lawmakers with a strong record of opposing secret domestic surveillance are teaming up to try to kill the federal government’s authority to collect our phone records.

Reps. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) and Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.), joined by Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), have introduced the Ending Mass Collection of Americans’ Phone Records Act in both the House and the Senate.

The bill would do exactly what the name says: It would snip out a section of law that has been used to justify and authorize mass collection of Americans’ phone records—the metadata (who we’re calling and when), not the conversations themselves.

This all follows reports earlier this month that after years of fighting over how much domestic surveillance power the National Security Agency (NSA) should have, it has quietly stopped trying to collect and access all of these phone records.

The change came as a bit of a surprise, as this was the surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden, and he fled to Russia and remains there to avoid criminal prosecution for disclosing this secret snooping. That the NSA might have stopped attempting to access all this metadata suggests that critics were right that it not only violated Americans’ privacy but was not a particularly useful tool against terrorism.

But we don’t really know for certain that NSA requests for phone metadata have actually stopped. And if they have, that doesn’t mean the agency can’t fire it back up. This bill is intended to ensure that the spies can’t change their minds.

“After falsely insisting to Congress that this illegal surveillance program is carefully overseen and critical to national security, the government admitted last year that it had to delete years of records due to legal violations, and now it’s been reported that the program has actually been shuttered for six months,” Amash said in a prepared statement. “Getting rid of this program will vindicate Americans’ rights and begin the process of making the broader Patriot Act reforms that are going to be necessary to address the law’s serious constitutional flaws.”

Following Snowden’s revelations, these lawmakers successfully managed to force the sunset of part of the PATRIOT Act—Section 215—that had been used to justify this mass metadata collection. It was ultimately replaced with the USA Freedom Act, which allowed the collection, but in a more limited way and with additional oversight. The USA Freedom Act is going to sunset this year unless it’s renewed, and this move is clearly meant to signal that lawmakers aren’t going to just sit back and let it happen without a fight. Given now that there’s evidence that the NSA has deliberately abandoned the powers provided by the USA Freedom Act and stopped accessing phone records, supporters of the surveillance state are going to have a harder time making the case that the law is even needed.

Bonus link: Before Snowden, way back in 1992, the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Adminstration embarked on a massive collection of Americans’ phone records without warrants or judicial oversight—that time as part of the drug war. The man in charge: our current attorney general, William Barr.

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More University Corruption

Authored by Walter Williams, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Last week’s column discussed the highly publicized university corruption scheme wherein wealthy parents bought admission at prestigious universities for their children. That is dishonest and gives an unfair advantage to those young people but won’t destroy the missions of the universities. There is little or no attention given by the mainstream media to the true cancer eating away at most of our institutions of higher learning. Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, explains that cancer in a Minding the Campus article, titled “What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University.”

Professor Salzman argues that for most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education and law, this is no longer the case.

Leftist political ideology has emerged. The most important thing to today’s university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.

Students are taught that all cultural values are morally equivalent. That’s ludicrous. Here are a few questions for those who make such a claim. Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is currently practiced in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan; is it morally equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limitations placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment and education. Under Islamic law in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning. Thieves face the punishment of having their hands severed. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in some countries. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to Western values?

Social justice theory holds the vision that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. The theory holds that by their toxic masculinity, heterosexual white males are oppressors. Among their victims are females, people of color and male and female homosexuals. The world’s Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims.

Increasingly, the classics of Western civilization are being ignored. Why? Because they represent the work, almost exclusively, of, “dead white men.” Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors are seen as virtuous. The same is true with political history. The U.S. Constitution should be less respected because its writers were white slaveholders. The academics who teach this nonsense to students are grossly ignorant of the struggle over the slavery issue at our 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Professor Salzman concludes his article with the observation that, “Marxist social justice offers all the answers anyone needs, so no inquiry or serious research is required. Be confident that at university your children will learn ‘the right side’ to be on, if little else.” As a result of leftist indoctrination, many college students graduate illiterate, innumerate and resistant to understanding. A survey of employers showed that over 70 percent found college graduates were not well-prepared in skills such as “written communication,” “working with numbers/statistics,” “critical/analytical thinking” and second-language proficiency.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. One report found that nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s Judge Judy, is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. Such ignorance might explain why these young people are the supporters of today’s presidential candidates calling for America to become a socialist nation.

By the way, one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. One just has to accept the sanctity of the individual above all else.

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Oops! Construction of Overbudget, Overdue Light Rail Project Accidentally Destroys Historical Site

Sydney’s light rail line is millions of dollars overbudget and a year behind schedule. It has ruined small businesses in its path. It accidently tore up a valuable public art installation. And now it has managed to destroy a piece of Australian history too.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the people building the line, which is supposed to carry passengers on a 7.5-mile route from the city’s central business district to its eastern suburbs, managed to dig up and destroy a tool-making site once used by the indigenous peoples of the area. The site served as an “epicenter” of trade between aboriginal people’s and early British colonists, historical consultant Scott Franks tells the Morning Herald.

Some 22,000 stone and glass artifacts were discovered at a site along the planned route back in 2016, prompting Aboriginal groups to call for construction pause until the historical significance of what was found could be determined. The New South Wales (NSW) government ignored the request. A study of the initial findings, first reported by the Morning Herald yesterday, suggests that decision has come at the cost of a valuable historical resource.

The revelation is just the latest is the series of black eyes for the project.

In October 2018, Australia’s ABC News reported that construction work on the light rail line had managed to destroy a AU$500,000 public art installation.

In August of that year, 60 small businesses filed in a class action lawsuit against the Transport for NSW—the state transportation ministry—claiming $40 million in damages and lost business as a result of light rail construction-induced road closures, noise, and other disruption. An additional 50 businesses have since signed on to the suit.

This, mind you, is just the collateral damage from a project that should never have gone through in the first place.

In 2012, staff at Transport for NSW produced an analysis of 26 different possible light rail routes, finding that at most, a project would produce $880 million in value compared to $1.1 billion in costs.

The 2012 report was buried, and a new one released in early 2013 concluded that the benefits of light rail did exceed the costs once “non-conventional benefits” (such as the joy people will get from knowing future generations will have access to light rail) were included.

Since then, costs have only escalated. The project is now said to cost $2.1 billion. The full line will not be operational until March 2020, a full year behind schedule.

Acciona, the contractor tasked with building the light rail line, is now locked in a vicious legal battle with the NSW government, with Acciona claiming crucial information about the project’s scope was hidden until after the papers had all been signed. NSW officials have said the delays and cost overruns are the result of Acciona’s incompetence, although that has not stopped the state government from giving the company millions in new contracts.

There are a lot of good reasons to be wary even of light rail projects that are based on realistic assumptions and managed impeccably. But Sydney’s light rail has benefitted from neither decent management nor plausible assumptions about its costs and benefits. The results that sloppiness are still being felt.

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‘Mother Of All Caravans’ Forming In Honduras – Up To 20,000 Hope To Cross US Border: Report

Mexico is bracing for the “mother of all caravans,” after Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero warned on Wednesday “We have information that a new caravan is forming in Honduras, that they’re calling ‘the mother of all caravans,’ and they are thinking it could have more than 20,000 people.”

The figure has been disputed by activists such as Irineo Mujica of group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, who has accompanied several caravans in Mexico and said in a statement that “there has never been a caravan of the size that Sanchez Cordero mentioned.”

Olga Sánchez Cordero

According to AP, past caravans have hit “very serious logistical hurdles at 7,000 – strong.” 

Honduran activist Bartolo Fuentes, who accompanied a large caravan last year, dismissed the new reports as “part of the U.S. government’s plans, something made up to justify their actions.”

Later Thursday, Honduras’ deputy foreign minister, Nelly Jerez, denied that a “mother of all caravans” was forming in her country.

“There is no indication of such a caravan,” Jerez said. “This type of information promotes that people leave the country.” –AP

Sánchez Cordero made the comments alongside US Secretary of Homeland Security earlier this week in Miami, Florida. 

Meanwhile, around 2,500 Central Americans and Cubans are currently making their way through Mexico’s southern state of Chipas right now in yet another caravan. Last year’s caravans contained up to 10,000 people at some points. 

Mexico’s tolerance for the caravans is wearing thin it seems, as they have stopped giving migrants humanitarian visas at the border, while some previously hospitable towns along the well-traveled route are have stopped allowing caravans to spend the night. 

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday that Mexico is doing its part to fight immigrant smuggling.

“We are going to do everything we can to help. We don’t in any way want a confrontation with the U.S. government,” he said. “It is legitimate that they are displeased and they voice these concerns.”

Sanchez Cordero has pledged to form a police line of “containment” around Mexico’s narrow Tehuantepec Isthmus to stop migrants from continuing north to the U.S. border.

The containment belt would consist of federal police and immigration agents, but such highway blockades and checkpoints have not stopped large and determined groups of migrants in the past. –AP

System-wide meltdown

In a Thursday letter to the House and Senate, Homeland Secretary Nielsen made an “urgent request” for assistance to stop what she described as a tide of migrants overwhelming the border, according to CBS News.  

“DHS facilities are overflowing, agents and officers are stretched too thin, and the magnitude of arriving and detained aliens has increased the risk of life-threatening incidents,” wrote Nielsen – citing the increasing number of migrants arriving each month in large groups. 

Nielsen wrote that her “greatest concern was for the children,” as Customs and Border Protection currently has over 1,200 unaccompanied children in custody. The Trump administration has been widely criticized for earlier policies towards migrant children, such as separating families and keeping minors in poorly equipped detention facilities.

Nielsen also asked for more detention facilities in her letter, a point of disagreement which nearly led to a second shutdown this year. Democrats have reasoned that capping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention beds would force the administration to narrow its ramped-up deportation efforts.

Nielsen said that the Department of Health and Human Services would require more emergency resources such as medical and legal assistance to handle the influx of children. She also asked that Congress grant more authority to DHS to return unaccompanied migrant children from Central America to their countries, saying that putting these minors in the custody of sponsors in the U.S. becomes a “pull” factor for more migrants to make the trip north. –CBS News

“Let me be clear: the journey of any migrant — especially at the hands of a smuggler or trafficker — is not a safe one,” reads the letter. “We must be able to come together on a bipartisan basis to take action.”

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Arkansas Legislature Saves Residents From Accidentially Eating Rice Made From Cauliflower

Cauliflower rice is not rice—as the presence of the word “cauliflower” in the name would strongly suggest.

But lawmakers in Arkansas apparently don’t trust that their constituents have a firm grasp on the English language, because this week the state became the first to ban the use of the term “cauliflower rice” to describe a product that does not contain actual rice. Manufacturers selling “cauliflower rice” in Arkansas will be subject to a $1,000 fine for each supposedly mislabeled product.

“This law only affects people who want to deceive the public about how their food originated,” state Rep. David Hillman (R–Almyra) tells the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “And if you’re not trying to deceive the public, this will not affect you or any of the outlets who sell these products.”

One wonders when the legislature will get around to protecting the public from the scourge of pineapples—which, shockingly, are neither pine nor apple—or peanut butter, which is not a butter and is derived from legumes, not nuts. And what are hamburgers if not an obvious attempt by the beef industry to deceive consumers into thinking they are eating patties made of salted, cured pork?

It’s almost as if the Arkansas legislation isn’t really about protecting consumers at all.

Indeed, the real impetus here comes from American rice growers, who are unhappy about the rising popularity of cauliflower rice as a low-carb alternative to rice made from grains. Big Rice is taking a page from the playbook of dairy farmers, who have been lobbying the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to outlaw products that dare to put the words “soy” and “milk” next to one another.

Cauliflower rice is “a bit malicious and maybe nefarious,” a spokesman for USA Rice, an industry group, told Taste magazine in 2018. The previous year, USA Rice asked the FDA to do something about the malicious and nefarious threat posed to the public by the unwitting consumption of cauliflower that’s been riced.

The FDA, thankfully, has not acted on that request (although it is currently investigating soy milk and almond milk). But lawmakers in Arkansas—the state where, coincidentally, about 40 percent of all American rice is grown—seem to have been a bit more susceptible to Big Rice’s protectionist pleas.

Similar laws in other states have run into legal trouble. A law passed last year in Missouri made it illegal to identify non-meat products as meat (think veggie burgers or Tofurky); now it’s facing a First Amendment lawsuit. Missouri’s law might reasonably be called a violation of the Eighth Amendment too, since it allows violators to be punished with up to a year in prison merely for describing a meat substitute as a substitute for meat.

Such laws are obvious government overreach. Consumers should be allowed to make their own decisions about what to purchase, and they certainly should be trusted to read the government-mandated ingredients labels if they are confused about the distinction between cauliflower and rice. The only people here who are attempting to deceive the public are the lawmakers, like Hillman, who claim that cauliflower rice is a problem requiring government action.

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Illinois’ Top Legal Officer Turns His Back On Jesse Smollett Issues

Authored by Mark Glennon via WirePoints.com,

It’s a legal fiasco earning headlines across the world, but the Illinois Attorney General has nothing to say about the growing list of legal questions surrounding dismissal of the case against Jussie Smollett. It’s inexcusable.

Let’s be clear. Attorney General Kwame Raoul had no involvement, we hope and assume, in the decision by the Cook County States Attorney’s office to drop the case. That’s what he said on Twitter Tuesday, and it’s all he has offered on the matter:

The Cook County State’s Attorney has primary criminal jurisdiction over criminal matters in Cook County and has discretion in how it handles criminal cases.

Cook County chose to exercise its jurisdiction in this case and as a result, the Attorney General’s office had no role in this prosecution. The Attorney General’s office investigates matters of public integrity based on specific and credible allegations.

That’s it? Hiding behind such a narrow view of an Attorney General’s role is monumentally hypocritical for Raoul.

From the start, he claimed vast responsibilities.

In his victory speech on election night, he said he and other attorneys general had to collaborate “because of the direction Donald Trump is taking us,” and he needs to “defend the decency of this country as we know it.”

Since then, he has attempted to assert influence over a broad range of matters. For example, he said on Twitter that he “must continue to advocate for critical climate action and hold the Trump administration accountable when it disregards the plain text of the law in its quest to dismantle environmental protections.” Most recently, he issued a statement on the Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, saying Mueller should be forced to testify before Congress.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul

At a bare minimum, Raoul should be condemning the rank injustice that was done, just as Mayor Emanuel and other officeholders have.

More importantly, he should be pressing for answers and providing direction on at least some of the myriad, open issues in this affair, or making sure somebody else is doing so.

For example, the judge in Cook County ordered the case file sealed, but they can be unsealed. Who would do so? Who is looking at whether that can be done here? We certainly can’t count on the Cook County State’s Attorney. Could Raoul commence that process, or at least take a position on who should make a determination of whether it should be done?

Who if anybody is providing support and assistance to federal authorities who are still considering bringing their own charges? Somebody should be ensuring that all evidence earlier collected by the Chicago Police gets to the Feds, and Raoul could be assuring that is happening.

What about the serious ethical questions raised about Kim Foxx, the Cook County State’s Attorney who corresponded with Smollett’s allies about having her office duck out of the case entirely?

Most importantly, what about voiding the dismissal entirely because of Foxx’s botched “recusal” from the case? See our separate article why that should mean that her office had no authority to continue to handle the case, rendering the dismissal voidable. Clearly that’s something Raoul should be spearheading.

Then there’s the complaint by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which they sent to the United States Justice Department, claiming Foxx interfered with their investigation. Surely that’s a matter for the state’s Attorney General to take an interest in.

Finally, there are questions about possible political interference. They are vague but growing. It was Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen, who emailed Foxx to say she was reaching out on behalf of Jussie’s family to express “concerns” they had with how the investigation was being handled. And Foxx said she would “not be where he is today” without Kamala Harris, the presidential candidate. If concrete allegations on political interference materialize, where do they get asserted?

Some of these matters may not be formally within the attorney general’s enforcement authority, but surely the state’s top legal officer has some responsibility for helping sort this mess out.

Why has Raoul turned his back on the case? Mark Konkol, writing in The Patch, probably has the answer:

Foxx has strong ties to the state’s top prosecutor charged with investigating elected officials accused of violating state law, rookie Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. Foxx, the political protégé of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, served on Raoul’s transition team after the 2018 election. Raoul spokeswoman Vanessa James declined to comment Tuesday.

Greg Hinz at Crain’s recently summarized the consequences of the Smollett calamity perfectly:

[T]he next time police are reluctant to prosecute a case of gay-bashing . . . the next time people are afraid to testify against someone with clout . . . the next time average citizens let gang bangers go free because they’re scared to cooperate . . . the next time police just don’t want to put in extra effort because they think it’s not worth it . . . the next time people laugh when you say you’re from Chicago . . . remember this case.

Are those not matters worthy of the state’s top legal officer’s attention? Then again, given his close political ties to so many involved, maybe we’re better off if he stays in hiding.

*  *  *

UPDATE: State Rep. David McSweeney, a Republican from the Chicago suburb of Barrington Hills, filed a resolution Wednesday asking Democratic Attorney General Kwame Raoul to “conduct a full, prompt, and comprehensive examination” of the case.

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Pound Tumbles As Brexit Deal Defeated By 58 Votes

Despite a last-minute round of defections from some Labour MPs and Tory Brexiteers, what reporters jokingly referred to as “meaningful vote 2.5”, the third vote on May’s withdrawal agreement, has been defeated 344-286, a margin of about 60 votes.

In a speech after the result, May raised the possibility of new elections. The pound tumbled on the results.

GBP

Cable started weakening ahead of the vote on speculation that the group of Brexiteer Tories voting against the bill would be large enough to hand May a third defeat. Reports attributed to SNP MPs about a “sizable” group of Tories massing in the ‘no’ lobby pushed the currency even lower. Early reports estimated that the vote would fail by roughly 50 votes.

May ended the debate on Friday with an impassioned speech, telling MPs that she was “prepared to leave this job earlier than I intended to secure the right outcome for our country.” She also said there would need to be a “greater involvement of Parliament” during the next phase of talks with the EU, when the two sides will hash out the details of their future relationship.

While Friday’s defeat is yet another major setback for the prime minister, who will now presumably push for a much longer Article 50 extension that could last for months or even years, the margin was better than the last two votes, indicating that May has made progress – just not enough to finally deliver Brexit.

Brexit

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