Speaking to the Black Church PAC Presidential Forum in Atlanta two weeks after a gunman opened fire in an El Paso Walmart with the goal of killing Mexicans, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday said his administration will “go to war against white nationalism and racism” if he is elected president in 2020.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, speaks onstage at the Georgia International Convention Center on August 17, 2019 in College Park, Georgia. (Photo by Paras Griffin/WireImage)
“I’m Jewish, my family came from Poland, my father’s whole family was wiped out by Hitler and his white nationalism,” said Sanders.
“Too many people have fought over the years, too many people have died against racism to allow it to resurface and flourish in America. We will go to war against white nationalism and racism in every aspect of our lives.”
Sanders vowed to “throw the full force of the law” against those in the U.S. who harm or kill people on the basis of skin color, which the Vermont senator described as “domestic terrorism.”
In addition to fighting the white nationalist terrorism that is on the rise in the United States, Sanders said the U.S. must combat systemic inequities in healthcare, housing, and other facets of American society.
“When we combat white nationalism and when we combat racism,” said Sanders, “we are gonna use all of the laws in our power, including executive orders in every area, to make certain that we end the discrimination which now exists in healthcare, where black women are dying three times the rate of white women when they give birth.”
“We will end the redlining that exists in housing discrimination,” Sanders said. “We will end the absurdity of black kids leaving school much more deeply in debt than do white kids.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TO7c3W Tyler Durden
Employees at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center where convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein reportedly took his own life last week are not cooperating with the Justice Department investigators according to Fox News.
Two senior DOJ officials sent by Attorney General William Barr have been on-site at MCC while the agency’s Inspector General investigates the situation. According to a senior DOJ official, Barr said that “serious irregularities” had been uncovered at the jail.
The night of Epstein’s death, correctional officers did not check on the extremely high-profile prisoner for “several hours” before he died, despite being required to look in on him every 30 minutes. Moreover, guards are suspected of falsifying log entries to show that they were checking as required, according to the Associated Press.
In response, officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been on-site at MCC to assist with the investigation.
BOP officials from various regional offices have also been sent to the Manhattan facility to lend their expertise and insight. In addition, a separate BOP “After Action Team” went to MCC earlier this week in an effort to examine what happened the night Epstein died. The use of the “After Action Team” is part of BOP protocol whenever a “significant event takes place at a prison.
Epstein was found dead in his cell on Aug. 10. Earlier Friday, New York City’s medical examiner officially ruled the 66-year-old’s death a suicide by hanging.
Fox News has also learned that 20 of 21 prison staff posts were filled between the hours of 4 p.m. and 12 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 9, the day before Epstein was found. Of those prison workers, six of them were working voluntary overtime. Between 12 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 10, 18 of 19 staff posts were filled. Of those 18 staffers, 10 were working overtime and all but one of those were doing so voluntarily. –Fox News
Two staffers have been placed on administrative leave, while MCC’s warden was reassigned pending the investigation.
“It is indisputable that the authorities violated their own protocols,” said Epstein’s attorneys, Martin Weinberg, Reid Weingarten and Michael Miller. “The defense team fully intends to conduct its own independent and complete investigation into the circumstances and cause of Mr. Epstein’s death including if necessary legal action to view the pivotal videos – if they exist as they should – of the area proximate to Mr. Epstein’s cell during the time period leading to his death.”
Epstein’s attorneys also addressed the deceased pedophile’s controversial autopsy, which concluded that he hanged himself using bed-sheets, breaking his hyoid bone near the Adam’s apple. This is typically only broken during strangulation victims, however they can also be broken via hanging – particularly if the person is older.
“We are not satisfied with the conclusions of the medical examiner,” they said, adding “We will have a more complete response in the coming days” (and will bill Epstein’s estate accordingly, we’re sure).
Meanwhile, several women are suing Epstein’s estate, claiming he sexually abused them.
The suit, filed Thursday in a federal court in New York, claims the women were working as hostesses at a popular Manhattan restaurant in 2004 when they were recruited to give Epstein massages. One was 18 at the time. The other was 20.
The lawsuit says an unidentified female recruiter offered the hostesses hundreds of dollars to provide massages to Epstein, saying he ‘liked young, pretty girls to massage him,’ and wouldn’t engage in any unwanted touching. The women say Epstein groped them anyway.
One plaintiff now lives in Japan, the other in Baltimore. They seek $100 million in damages, citing depression, anxiety, anger and flashbacks.
Other lawsuits, filed over many years by other women, accused him of hiring girls as young as 14 or 15 to give him massages, then subjecting them to sex acts. –Daily Mail
Epstein had faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty of exploiting dozens of underage girls at his residences in Manhattan and Florida between 2002 and 2005.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NetVVC Tyler Durden
Markets are subject to a giant con game. The game of CONfidence. Confidence must be maintained under all circumstances or we’re heading into a global recession first and then a US recession to follow.
Consider the macro context here: Nine major economiesare either in recession or on the verge of it. This includes Germany, UK, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, South Korea, Russia. Everything else is slowing down hard. Yields are plummeting for a reason and once again the world is looking to central banks to bail everyone out and for stimulus programs to be launched to rescue a global economy that hasn’t been able to do without in 10 years. US consumers are holding the US economy up is the consensus as they keep spending for now, but already we saw a dip in confidence. Why? Trade tensions, political tensions, and yes, concerns that the longest business cycle may come to an end. Add scary stock market headlines and before you know it the consumer is holding back.
And hence confidence must be maintained under all circumstances. This has been the game for 10 years and hence any market drops that would add pressure to confidence must be averted. You really think it’s an accident we see intervention always at the point of serious trouble?
Retail sales dropped hard in December as markets plummeted. It’s no coincidence. Hence any prolonged malaise must averted.
As Mohamed El-Erian pointed out so clearly this week:
“We may end up in a situation where people read these alarmist headlines, they get concerned, they stop spending. As they stop spending, companies stop investing. And then we get a major slowdown:”
Alarmist headlines? How about headlines that point out reality? But the larger point is clear: Lose the consumer and a recession is unfolding perhaps more quickly than anyone can imagine. After all nobody on the planet called for a 1.5% US 10 year yield in 2019 or a German 10 year bund at -0.72%.
And nobody in 2018 called for a renewed global easing cycle to go in full swing in 2019. But these are now reality. And this reality reveals a larger truth:
Without intervention, without stimulus, without artificial help markets fall apart. If the Fed doesn’t cut rates in September markets plunge. Plain fact. If the ECB doesn’t cut rates and outline a new QE program Europe is heading full into recession. If China or Switzerland or others don’t interfere in their currency markets things fall apart. These actions are taken out of desperation and make for an unspoken admission:
Markets can’t be left on their own. Economies can’t be left on their own. We must always intervene. Our market system no longer functions without intervention, be it central bank or fiscally driven.
It is no accident that Blackrock is lobbying for the ECB to buy stocks directly, it is no accident that they are lobbying for “helicopter” money to bail out the system in the full recognition that the central bank intervention gig is reaching a point of no return, a loss of efficacy.
2019 should be known as the year when central banks began to choke at the absurdity of the market structure they have imposed on the world. 10 years of intervention with little growth to show for except rampant debt expansion, ever expanding wealth inequality and absolutely no admission of failure. The Fed’s spectacular policy error and failure to recognize the impending shift in the global economy that was well advertised in advance makes them just as guilty as everyone else that failed to see what was happening. Again. Always chasing reality. Never admitting mistakes. Why? Because CONfidence must be maintained. If the supposed stewards of the economy don’t know what they’re doing why should anyone have confidence in their ability to prevent what the bond market signaling? Best keep pretending we know what we’re doing.
And it is precisely because of deteriorating confidence and data that President Trump spectacularly choked this week. Having threatened to raise tariffs further on China with markets all time highs in July it suddenly blew up in his face as markets sold off hard and recession risk exploded to the upside with yield curves inverting. Quick to try to repair the damage he suddenly announced a delay in tariffs only to see the resulting rally falter and the $DJIA drop 800 points in one day. No wonder he called the big bank CEOs. Not the kind of headlines you want to see if you’re running for re-election. Hence the after market close tweets to suddenly say nice things about President Xi and to sheepishly suggest a face to face meeting, all are a classic attempts at jawboning and this weekend’s announcement to give Huawei reprieve is part of the same strategy.
Bring trade hope back, bring optimism back. How long markets will fall for this remains to be seen. Strategically this public capitulation however gives the Chinese the upper hand in the trade war negotiations. They sense weakness, the weakness that’s obvious to everyone. Trump can’t afford a recession in 2020 nor deteriorating economic sentiment. How will the Chinese take advantage of this? This remains to be seen, but the longer there is no resolution the higher the risk of a global recession.
Don’t expect Trump to be beneath agreeing to a shoddy marketing deal, as long as it’s serves the larger purpose, and there in lies the risk for bears: Get a surprise truce, or even a shoddy deal and a massive relief rally, spurring confidence back up, can certainly ensue into Q4 and push the global recession another year or 2 further into the future.
See massive rate cuts and stimulus announcements and asset prices can once again race to the upside at least in the short term. That is the bull case. Intervention. Because this is what it takes.
And it is absolutely necessary here as the 2019 up trend has been broken:
and as markets have once again rejected new highs and dropped below previous highs:
And here’s the problem in all this. When central banks have normalized and have plenty of ammunition they have efficacy. But they haven’t normalized and when the business cycle turns in earnest a couple of rate cuts are not enough. Far from it. In 2000 and 2007 it took 500bp+in rate cuts to stop the bleeding. And Blackrock I suspect knows this, hence the call for helicopter money.
How do you introduce helicopter money with the US already running a trillion dollar deficit? With a political system that’s entirely broken at this point? Beats me.
And so the parade to maintain confidence continues. The daily headlines, the jawboning, the ever more dovish central bankers. Next week we get to hear from them all at Jackson Hole, and in September we get showered with more announcements of rate cuts and stimulus.
For the Fed the choice is clear: Blow the market valuation wall beyond its historic limits or risk a massive sell-off by disappointing and ruin confidence. For the ECB the choice is also clear: Cut rates from negative to more negative and re-introduce more QE or risk immediate recession. Happy retirement Mario Draghi. The central banker who never raised rates and never did anything but print money. Congrats.
For Donald Trump the choice is also clear: Insist on the trade war with no real solution in sight and risk blowing his re-election chances or cave. That he is willing to cave and bow to market pressure he has already shown this week.
For bulls there is no choice but hope intervention works again, because without intervention natural price equilibrium is much lower. And so the bull case is once again dependent on central bank intervention to bring about multiple expansion. No intervention, no bull case. That’s the state of markets.
And so the next few weeks are an important journey of price discovery in context of markets that have just broken their 2019 up trend and face lots of overhead resistance. Last week gave us short term oversold readings, but no true fear bottom.
Welcome to the battle for CONfidence.
For a run down of the technicals please see the video below:
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Njrb9v Tyler Durden
My ending comment was “There is little chance Corbyn’s ‘Make Me PM Pretty Please’ motion does anything but fall flat on its face. But if by some miracle it passed, I expect Johnson would refuse to resign until October 31. Happy Halloween.”
Corbyn’s hopes of forming a unity government were fading on Friday as a number of prominent Conservatives working to stop no-deal Brexit ruled out any mechanism to put the Labour leader in No 10.
Dominic Grieve, who has previously suggested he could vote against the government in a confidence vote, said he would not go as far as facilitating a Corbyn government. “Jeremy Corbyn is unfortunately a deeply divisive figure and in trying to stop a no-deal Brexit it is not my purpose to help him into Downing Street,” he said.
Swinson dismissed Corbyn’s offer on Wednesday but has since said she is open to discussions, while warning that Labour would be unable to get enough Conservative votes – or votes from former Labour MPs sitting as independents – to make the plan viable even with Lib Dem support.
Conservative MPs came under heavy pressure on Friday to distance themselves from Corbyn’s proposal. The former justice secretary David Gauke tweeted: “If anyone thinks the answer is Jeremy Corbyn, I think they’re probably asking the wrong question.”
Other independent MPs also came out swinging against the Labour leader. Anna Soubry, the former Tory MP who now leads the Independent Group for Change, said her five MPs “will not support nor facilitate any government led by Jeremy Corbyn.
“He cannot command unity of support amongst his own MPs but now Jeremy Corbyn calls on the rest of us to back him as ‘unity’ prime minister,” she said. “And we won’t even get a people’s vote but instead a general election which as we know will solve nothing.”
Extremely Difficult Math
The default legal position is No Deal Brexit happens unless something stops it.
There is insufficient support for anything that can stop it. There is no majority for Remain or for anything else.
Any Tory who supported any opposition leader would quickly find themselves out of a job. They would be ousted from the party then lose their seat in the next election. There could be a couple MPs willing to fall on their sword, but that seems insufficient.
Although the Tories have a majority of precisely one, it would take a couple of Tories and the entire opposition to unite behind a caretaker government.
The independent MPs alone are sufficient to stop such an alliance. Add in a few Liberal Democrats and one or two Labour Party MPs even assuming those parties would back a caretaker government and it’s easy to see where this is headed: nowhere.
Theoretically Possible, Politically Impossible
It is not impossible for an alliance to form, but clearly it cannot involve Corbyn.
Would Corbyn stand down? Nope.
Irreconcilable Differences
Corbyn wants a customs union while the Liberal Democrats want to remain.
Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson wants to become PM and if not that, then the leader of the opposition. Why would she do anything to strengthen Corbyn?
That’s at the heart of the matter. Even if those difference were magically resolved, the math still does not quite make it.
This is why the Tories quickly (in one day flat) had second thoughts and backed away from Corbyn’s Pretty Please Offer.
Happy Halloween
Although there is a sufficient number of MPs who want to stop No Deal, there is no way for them to unite in a meaningful way.
And even if the opposition did magically unite, it is highly likely Boris Johnson would refuse to stand down allowing the caretaker government to take over.
Instead, Johnson would call for election on October 31 while running on a Brexit platform.
In that scenario, I believe Johnson would win in a landslide given the splintered opposition, each wanting a different thing.
Corbyn probably understands the math even as he hopes for something else. Thus, he may not call for a motion of no confidence unless his plan gets backing (which as described above won’t happen).
Checkmate!
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TGEcuN Tyler Durden
Few people know that sitting across from the reactor that suffered a partial meltdown on Three Mile Island in 1979 – is another unit that still remains one of the region’s largest power sources. In fact, the second unit has provided power for 45 years without incident. Now, according to Bloomberg, that unit is finally slated to shut down.
Plant owner Exelon says that it will shutter the entire Three Mile Island facility 15 years before its license expires. While the first reactor was brought down by human error, the second is being brought down by the economics of the utility industry.
The original meltdown that occurred in 1979 was a result of steam generators that were unable to draw heat out of a reactor and a stuck valve that let coolant escape from the reactor core.
The unit that melted down originally has stood dormant and quiet since the incident.
Compared to Chernobyl, which resulted in 4,000 deaths, Three Mile Island is considered minor. It was determined that about 2 million people in the surrounding area “were exposed to less radiation than they would have received from a chest X-ray.”
But naturally, the immediate reaction to the event was fear and confusion. Schools closed, people stayed indoors and officials told children and pregnant women to evacuate the area. Public support for nuclear power predictably waned after the incident.
The U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas, thanks to the “shale revolution”. This has caused a glut of the fossil fuel, dragging down its price and making it the largest source of the country’s electricity. Wind and solar have also been contributing to the nation’s energy glut. As a result, seven U.S. nuclear plants have shut down since 2013, with additional plants slated to close, despite states like New York and Pennsylvania offering subsidies for nuclear power.
Hollywood is also taking some of the blame, as there continues to be renewed interest in the Chernobyl story, spawning an HBO series that detailed the 1986 explosion at the plant. The series was criticized as playing it fast and loose with some technical details, but more importantly was praised for enlightening people about the dangers of radiation poisoning and showing the impact of the disaster.
Nuclear remains at the middle of debate in the U.S., with President Trump taking steps to support unprofitable nuclear and coal plants, citing national securities issues. Federal energy regulators have rejected some of his efforts. Also predictably, environmental groups are divided on the issue: some have expressed concerns about treatment of nuclear waste and the potential for future mishaps, while others note that nuclear is much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
Regardless of its shut down, Three Mile Island is likely to remain a crucial talking point in an ongoing debate that won’t subside anytime soon.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YYM80u Tyler Durden
Though distance-wise Hong Kong and Kashmir may be about 4,000km (2,485 miles) apart, they have in common a history of being scarred by the crimes of British colonialism.
This history and those scars cannot be abstracted when it comes to grasping the nettle of the crises that have engulfed both places now because, without factoring this in, no serious analysis can be undertaken and no salutary lessons will be learned.
Starting with Hong Kong, when senior Conservative Party MP and former British Army officer Tom Tugendhat recently suggested that the people of Hong Kong should be granted UK citizenship (regardless of whether they want it or not) as a form of protection from Beijing, he provided the world with an insight into the colonial mind of the British establishment.
In making this ludicrous suggestion, amounting to an outrageous imposition of British sovereignty over the city, Mr Tugendhat revealed that to him China should know its rightful place as a lesser power. In this he has been joined by the UK’s former governor of Hong Kong, Lord Patten of Barnes (I promise you, I’m not making this up), who with astonishing arrogance has called for a British commission of inquiry to be established to look into the unrest, with particular emphasis on the actions of the Hong Kong police.
Both Tom Tugendhat and Lore Patten could, to all intents, have been standing on the shoulders of Lord George Macartney, the man who led Britain’s first ever trade delegation to China in 1792 on the orders of King George III.
Macartney and his 700-strong trade delegation were spurned in this, Britain’s first attempt at opening up China to British trade and diplomatic relations. However, as China expert Martin Jacques reveals in his classic work, When China Rules the World, the British diplomat believed that “it was futile for China to resist the British demands because it was ‘in vain to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge.’”
While Macartney’s first attempt to open up China to the tender mercies of British ‘progress’ was meeting with failure, the British East India Company was having more success, having just begun to export opium from India to the country. When Beijing banned this trade in drugs in 1839, on the basis that it was ravaging its people with addiction, London launched the first of the two Opium Wars it would wage against China in the 19th century, dispatching its navy to the region to bombard the Chinese into submission.
As part of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing at war’s end, China was forced to pay London a large indemnity, cede Hong Kong to British control, and continue to allow the importation of opium. It was an act of foul international brigandage, dressed up in the pomp and ceremony of British exceptionalism. What’s more, it marked the start of China’s ‘century of humiliation’, during which the country was mercilessly exploited, mistreated, and invaded by a clutch of imperialist powers, among them the US, UK, France, and Japan.
British exceptionalism was, by the time of the Treaty of Nanjing, deeply entrenched and in operation across the Indian subcontinent. From 1846 to 1947 Kashmir was ruled as a princely state by the British Raj in India, reducing it to the status of British vassal under a local ruler.
At the time of Britain’s withdrawal from India in 1947, after acceding to and organizing its partition into the Muslim majority state of Pakistan and Hindu dominated India, Labour’s Clement Attlee was prime minister. In words that do much to discredit his legacy, he served up a speech in the House of Commons which included the following:
“Looking back today over the years, we may well be proud of the work which our fellow citizens have done in India. There have, of course, been mistakes, there have been failures, but we can assert that our rule in India will stand comparison with that of any other nation which has been charged with the ruling of a people so different from themselves.”
We can only surmise that Attlee must have suffered an acute case of historical amnesia during this speech, allowing him to glide over the brutal British response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, one that involved tying captured rebels to the ends of cannons and blasting them into smithereens.
But if this grim episode could be said to be one which at the time of Attlee’s speech was lost in the mists of time, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, when British troops murdered at least 400 people protesting against British colonial rule, could not. And if Amritsar wasn’t enough to stir any residual guilt in the breast of Mr Attlee, on behalf of the British State, what about the Bengal Famine of 1943, just four years earlier, during which three million died due to the actions of Attlee’s predecessor, Winston Churchill?
The partition of India by the British in 1947 was a disaster, leading directly to appalling communal violence slaughter and entrenching the decades of enmity that has existed between India and Pakistan ever since, with Kashmir a major factor in this enmity.
At least when he was prime minister in 2011, David Cameron had the decency to apologize for Britain’s egregious legacy in India and its role in the intractable dispute over Kashmir. This he did during an official visit to Pakistan upon being asked what should be done about the Indian administered region. “I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”
It’s just a pity that Cameron didn’t hold on to that thought when it came to his push for Western military intervention in Libya in the same year. But that’s another story.
The crises which have engulfed Hong Kong and Kashmir make a strong case not for British interference but for British reparations. This in compensation for London’s role in laying the historical ground for the strife and unrest now taking place.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HbZWK4 Tyler Durden
It looks like we finally have a cure for Ebola, according to Wired.
Scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat an Ebola outbreak that has lasted more than a year. At the World Health Organization on Monday, the trial’s co-sponsors announced that two of these experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates. Formerly, a vaccine had been shown to shield people from catching Ebola, but the new treatments are now effective on people that have already been infected.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale in the DRC said:
“From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable.”
Patients in four treatment centers in the country’s east, where the outbreak is the worst, have been randomly assigned to receive one of four investigational therapies. One drug is an antiviral called remdesivir, while the others use monoclonal antibodies. Scientists put together these large Y-shaped proteins to recognize specific shapes of invading bacteria and viruses and then recruit immune cells to attack the pathogens.
One of these drugs is called ZMapp, which was in the news consistently back in 2014 and is currently considered the standard of care during Ebola outbreaks. It has a mortality rate of 49%, according to according to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The goal of the trial, which started in November, was to see if any of these drugs could outpace ZMapp’s mortality rate. Ebola mortality rates without treatment are in excess of 75%. The results were exceptionally promising:
The monoclonal antibody cocktail produced by a company called Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had the biggest impact on lowering death rates, down to 29 percent, while NIAID’s monoclonal antibody, called mAb114, had a mortality rate of 34 percent. The results were most striking for patients who received treatments soon after becoming sick, when their viral loads were still low—death rates dropped to 11 percent with mAb114 and just 6 percent with Regeneron’s drug, compared with 24 percent with ZMapp and 33 percent with Remdesivir.
Drugs based off of monoclonal antibodies have become popular in modern medicine, helping fight off diseases like cancer and lupus.
On the negative side, it takes years of reverse engineering to create these types of drugs. ZMapp, for example, was created by infecting mice with Ebola and then collecting the antibodies that the mice produced against the virus. From there, those antibodies had to be engineered to look more like human ones, so as not to provoke an immune reaction.
Since Ebola infiltrates victims cells using spiky proteins on the virus’s outer shell, researchers look for antibodies that do a good job of binding to these proteins. From there, if access is blocked, the virus can’t replicate and spread. Ebola is especially difficult because it is large and has the ability to change shape, making it difficult for any one antibody to block its infection. This is why a drug cocktail approach is in favor, like the Regeneron product, which is a combination of three monoclonal antibodies first generated in mice.
Others have also suggested that mining the serum of Ebola survivors and harvesting that DNA to make antibodies could work. This could at least yield a set of genetic instructions for making antibodies with a proven track record against a virus. That’s what the NIH’s mAb114 does: it uses the antibody isolated from the blood of a survivor from a 1995 outbreak.
Since the announcement, a new trial is slated to kick off directly comparing Regeneron’s drug to mAb114, which is being produced by a Florida-based company called Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. All Ebola treatment units in the outbreak zone will only administer the two most effective monoclonal antibody drugs from now on.
WHO director Mike Ryan said: “Today’s news puts us one more step to saving more lives. The success is clear. But there’s also a tragedy linked to the success. The tragedy is that not enough people are being treated. We are still seeing too many people staying away from treatment centers, people not being found in time to benefit from these therapies.”
Since the outbreak began last August in the DRC, more than 2,800 people have become infected and 1,794 have died.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NcjJwI Tyler Durden
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender.”
Clinton’s unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for “humanitarian” warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Oba-ma’s bombing of Libya, and Donald Trump’s bombing of Syria.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard. A commentator in the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses.
In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the US bombing campaign.
Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999,
“I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?”
A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president began bombing within 24 hours. Alexander Cockburn observed in the Los Angeles Times,
It’s scarcely surprising that Hillary would have urged President Clinton to drop cluster bombs on the Serbs to defend “our way of life.” The first lady is a social engineer. She believes in therapeutic policing and the duty of the state to impose such policing. War is more social engineering, “fixitry” via high explosive, social therapy via cruise missile…. As a tough therapeutic cop, she does not shy away from the most abrupt expression of the therapy: the death penalty.
I followed the war closely from the start, but selling articles to editors bashing the bombing was as easy as pitching paeans to Scientology. Instead of breaking into newsprint, my venting occurred instead in my journal:
April 7, 1999: Much of the media and most of the American public are evaluating Clinton’s Serbian policy based on the pictures of the bomb damage — rather than by asking whether there is any coherent purpose or justification for bombing. The ultimate triumph of photo opportunities…. What a travesty and national disgrace for this country.
April 17: My bottom line on the Kosovo conflict: I hate holy wars. And this is a holy war for American good deeds — or for America’s saintly self-image? Sen. John McCain said the war is necessary to “uphold American values.” Make me barf! Just another … Hitler-of-the-month attack.
May 13: This damn Serbian war… is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world… and to problems within this nation.
The KLA
The Kosovo Liberation Army’s savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them “freedom fighters” in 1999. The previous year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many congressmen eager to portray US bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.”
In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain’s Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.
In a speech to American troops in a Thanksgiving 1999 visit, Clinton declared that the Kosovar children “love the United States … because we gave them their freedom back.” Perhaps Clinton saw freedom as nothing more than being tyrannized by people of the same ethnicity. As the Serbs were driven out of Kosovo, Kosovar Albanians became increasingly oppressed by the KLA, which ignored its commitment to disarm. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 20, 1999,
As a postwar power struggle heats up in Kosovo Albanian politics, extremists are trying to silence moderate leaders with a terror campaign of kidnappings, beatings, bombings, and at least one killing. The intensified attacks against members of the moderate Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, have raised concerns that radical ethnic Albanians are turning against their own out of fear of losing power in a democratic Kosovo.
American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serbian civilians, bombing Serbian churches, and oppressing non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton promised to protect them. In March 2000 renewed fighting broke out when the KLA launched attacks into Serbia, trying to seize territory that it claimed historically belonged to ethnic Albanians. UN Human Rights Envoy Jiri Dienstbier reported that “the [NATO] bombing hasn’t solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones. The Yugoslav economy was destroyed. Kosovo is destroyed. There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed now.”
US complicity in atrocities
Prior to the NATO bombing, American citizens had no responsibility for atrocities committed by either Serbs or ethnic Albanians. However, after American planes bombed much of Serbia into rubble to drive the Serbian military out of Kosovo, Clinton effectively made the United States responsible for the safety of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. That was equivalent to forcibly disarming a group of people, and then standing by, whistling and looking at the ground, while they are slaughtered. Since the United States promised to bring peace to Kosovo, Clinton bears some responsibility for every burnt church, every murdered Serbian grandmother, every new refugee column streaming north out of Kosovo. Despite those problems, Clinton bragged at a December 8, 1999, press conference that he was “very, very proud” of what the United States had done in Kosovo.
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
I had a chapter on the Serbian bombing campaign titled “Moralizing with Cluster Bombs” in Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton–Gore Years (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), which sufficed to spur at least one or two reviewers to attack the book. Norman Provizer, the director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, scoffed in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, “Bovard chastises Clinton for an illegal, undeclared war in Kosovo without ever bothering to mention that, during the entire run of American history, there have been but four official declarations of war by Congress.”
As the chaotic situation in post-war Kosovo became stark, it was easier to work in jibes against the debacle. In an October 2002 USA Today article (“Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield“) bashing the Bush administration’s push for war against Iraq, I pointed out, “A desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill…. Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag, ethnic cleansing continued — with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians.”
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, “After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO’s ‘peace’ produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees.”
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: “Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses’ fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government.” American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as “the George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton’s war on Serbia opened a Pandora’s box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray US bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z5Jjdd Tyler Durden
Secret talks have been ongoing between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, focused on sharing intelligence against Iran and possibly military cooperation. The talks have progressed to the point that the US is now joining the talks too.
Israel and the UAE have some security ties, but don’t have public relations. That they’re discussing Iran reflects Israel’s long-standing hostility toward Iran, and the UAE’s close proximity to Iran.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards drive speedboats at the port of Bandar Abbas. Image source: AFP
The UAE seems to be trying to balance multiple interests, as they’ve tried to talk to Iran about maritime security in recent days, and seem not to be looking to pick fights with them. That’s in stark contrast to Israel, for whom picking fights with Iran is the centerpiece of decades of foreign policy.
It’s clear that the UAE has an interest in keeping the US happy, and that probably requires keeping Israel at lease sort of placated in this regard. So while they aren’t trying to start anything against Iran they’re trying to walk the tightrope of balancing both sides to keep everyone satisfied.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2z5pjbZ Tyler Durden
Hong Kong might not be able to avoid a financial crisis this year or next despite possible stimulus packages to shore up its faltering economy amid violent protests across the city. This has led to a rapid decline in tourism, forcing major hotel chains in the city to substantially slash room prices.
Yiu Si-wing, a Hong Kong lawmaker representing the tourism industry, told Bloomberg that hotel revenue is expected to crash 50% this month thanks to escalating protests. She said visits from mainland China account for 80% of arrivals are significantly lower due to social unrest.
Yiu said hotel occupancy rates averaged 90% in 1H19, could drop by as much as 33% or more in 2H19. Arrivals from the mainland to Hong Kong, a significant source of consumption for the city, could grind to a halt.
“The impact on tourism is huge,” Yiu told Bloomberg. She said at least half of the mainland visitors due in August had canceled their plans. Yiu said top-trending topics on Chinese social media platform Weibo this week included several incidents of where violent protestors attacked government forces.
Some mainland Chinese are shunning Hong Kong because of the risks associated with its airport being closed down for an extended period of time.
Grace Huang, a 20-year-old Wuhan University student, told Bloomberg her layover at Hong Kong International Airport was horrifying earlier this week. “I fear I’m going to be beaten,” she told Bloomberg, as thousands of protestors successfully locked down the airport for several days.
Beijing resident Jasmine Ji, 23, delayed her trip to Hong Kong because she feels protestors would target her for being a Chinese citizen.
“I feel like my personal safety could be severely threatened if they find out I speak Mandarin or am a Chinese citizen,” she said. “I won’t fly to Hong Kong airport until the situation and protests are settled there.”
Chinese officials and state-run media outlets launched an information war against the protestors, describing them as violent extremists.
Hong Kong officials have suggested a recession could be imminent due to social unrest.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po on Thursday announced a $2.43 billion stimulus package to shore up the economy during the social and economic turmoil.
Paul warned that a possible recession could be imminent: “The situation we are in now is like the typhoon No 3 signal has been hoisted and the typhoon is heading towards us,” he said. “We need to get prepared before it gets worse.”
Paul downgraded Hong Kong’s GDP growth forecast for the year to 0 to 1%, from 2 to 3% previously.
He said the city could slide into a technical recession in the current quarter.
InterContinental Hotels Group Plc, a British multinational hospitality company that owns Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn chains, said the protests in the last several months have contributed to a slowdown in business travel in the region.
Other hospitality companies with exposure to Hong Kong are also feeling the pinch: Sun Hung Kai Properties, owner of Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, and New World Development Co., which operates the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, have seen their stocks enter bear markets in the last month.
Yiu said the downturn in Hong Kong hospitality industry had forced many hotels to slash their room rates by substantial amounts.
A typical room at Conrad Hotel, owned by Hilton Worldwide, is $159 per night this weekend, that’s a 40% discount versus two months ago.
Marriott International Inc. and Shangri-La Asia Ltd. have also cut room rates for their Hong Kong hotels.
Hong Kong could be the first domino to fall that kicks off the next global recession.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2H9jf6v Tyler Durden
