With traders focused squarely on events in Wyoming this morning – the Jackson Hole day’s agenda can be found here, it notably lacks the presence of either Draghi or Kuroda, as if the old central bank guard is quietly being carted away – moments ago China gave markets a reminder that Beijing still has to disclose how it will retaliate to the upcoming $300BN in US tariffs on Chinese imports (which were delayed from Sept 1 to Dec 15).
This happened when China’s most famous twitter troll, Global Times editor in chief, Hu Xijin tweeted just after 6:30am that “China will take further countermeasures in response to US tariffs on $300 billion Chinese goods. Beijing will soon unveil a plan of imposing retaliatory tariffs on certain US products. China has ammunition to fight back. The US side will feel the pain.”
Based on what I know, China will take further countermeasures in response to US tariffs on $300 billion Chinese goods. Beijing will soon unveil a plan of imposing retaliatory tariffs on certain US products. China has ammunition to fight back. The US side will feel the pain.
US equity futures, levitating merrily overnight without a care in the world, and certainly not concerned about a hawkish surprise from Powell in just over 3 hours when he delivers his J-Hole speech, were hit, giving up about a third of their gains in response amid a burst in trading volume.
So far Trump has resisted the temptation to tweet @ Hu, although we doubt this will last, and are eagerly looking forward to the quant chaos as algos try to make sense of the tweeter war between the world’s two most important twitter trolls in real time.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/33MAEvA Tyler Durden
More than any other company, Cathay Pacific Airlines has gotten caught up in anti-extradition bill protests that have rocked Hong Kong all summer, with the company’s CEO leaving last week under pressure from Beijing.
And now, one equity analyst at a Chinese banking giant admitted to Bloombergthat he faced “heavy pressure” to cut his rating of Cathay to a “strong sell” – making him the only analyst tracked by Bloomberg who has a ‘sell’ rating on Cathay.
Zhao Dongchen
Zhao Dongchen, one of the top equity analysts at ICBC, advised clients to dump shares of Hong Kong-traded Cathay before they hit their lowest levels since the late 1990s. But he says never before in his career did he face such intense pressure to cut a rating on a stock.
“Never before in my 12 years of investment analyst career have I received this much pressure on a particular stock rating,” Zhao Dongchen, who last week issued his inaugural report on Cathay with a “strong sell,” said in an emailed response to Bloomberg queries. “Never before in my 36 years of life am I under such heavy pressure.”
Another analyst and former UBS banker said it’s hardly surprising that the “interests of Chinese state banks…and the government are closely aligned.”
“We have one of China’s biggest state banks issuing an especially bearish and unusual sell recommendation on a private company in H.K. that is already the target of the Chinese state,” said George Magnus, a former UBS Group AG chief economist and author of “Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy.” “You don’t have to try hard to conclude that the interests of Chinese state banking institutions and the government are closely aligned.”
Zhao, who forecast that Cathay’s shares would tumble to just HK$6, more than 40% below their current price, based most of his criticism on the “irreversible damage” to the company’s brand caused by its employees involvement in the protests.
In his report, entitled “Less Deserved to Fly,” Zhao criticized the Hong Kong carrier for potentially causing “irreversible damage” to the company’s brand because of “poor crisis management” in relation to the protests. The report said that a large-scale management reshuffle would be an “upside risk” for the company.
“My strong sell rating is based on the difference between Cathay’s stock price and our target price,” he said. “Simple as that.” He said he won’t shy away from a “shock rating” as he believes contrarian reports to be more helpful to investors.
Though Cathay currently trades at a premium to other Asian airlines, Zhao said in his report that this would “evaporate” because of the unrest in HK and the company’s management team (the report was issued before Cathay’s now-former CEO left the company a week ago).
Zhao said Cathay currently trades at a premium to other airlines in Asia, which he believes will “evaporate” because of factors ranging from the unrest in Hong Kong to the effects of the U.S.-China trade war on global commerce.
Also, the airline’s management team has shown a “severe lack of composure” in dealing with crises, including a recent data breach and problems with the Chinese regulator, Zhao said.
Another analyst said he sees no justification for a ‘strong sell’ rating on Cathay at this time. But when BBG asked Zhao why he only seems to give sell ratings to foreign companies, he argued that Cathay isn’t a foreign company because it’s incorporated in Hong Kong.
Yet Zhao stands alone among his peers in his bearish view of Cathay. Of the 19 analysts tracked by Bloomberg, 13 have the equivalent of a buy rating and 5 have holds.
“Strong sell is the wrong rating on the stock at the moment,” said Mark Webb, an analyst at GMT Research in London who previously covered the stock for 18 years at HSBC Holdings Plc. “Only a significant deterioration in the situation in Hong Kong would make it go significantly lower from here.”
Asked why Zhao appears to only assign his harshest ratings to foreign companies such as Rio Tinto Plc, Vale SA and BHP Group Ltd, while only giving buy ratings for Chinese companies such as Shandong Gold Mining Co., Zhao said:
“I did just issue a strong sell rating on Cathay Pacific, didn’t I? That’s a Hong Kong-incorporated company, not a foreign one.”
Well, sure – but that’s kind of missing the point.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MvwliV Tyler Durden
Now even one of the biggest banks in the entire country is openly admitting that a “slowdown” is upon us.
Over the past week or so, the mainstream media has been filled with chatter about the possibility of a recession and what that would mean for the Trump campaign in 2020, and we continue to get more evidence on a daily basis that economic activity really is decelerating. All of the numbers are pointing in the same direction, and I am going to share some brand new figures with you in this article. But first, I want to address what Morgan Stanley just released to the public. In a note that was just published, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist unequivocally stated that “the wheels for a slowdown are in motion”…
The downtrend in some global economies is becoming contagious as weakness in the manufacturing sector begins to spread, according to Morgan Stanley, which warned clients that “the wheels for a slowdown are in motion.”
“Even as we have been revising our growth projections lower, we continue to highlight that the risks remain decidedly skewed to the downside,” Chetan Ahya, the bank’s chief economist, warned in a note published Tuesday. “We expect that if trade tensions escalate further … we will enter into a global recession(i.e., global growth below 2.5%Y) in three quarters.”
When “too big to fail” banks throw in the towel and start warning of “a global recession”, that is a really bad sign.
But let’s give Morgan Stanley some credit for at least trying to be honest. The economic numbers have progressively gotten worse, and we just learned that domestic shipments of RVs are down a whopping 20 percent so far in 2019. The following comes from Zero Hedge…
The Wall Street Journal reports that Elkhart, Indiana, is the industrial hub of American RV manufacturing, has been used by analysts and economist as a leading indicator of consumer demand for luxury items.
Domestic shipments of RVs to dealers have plummeted 20% so far this year, compared to the same period last year, after dropping 4% in 2018, according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association.
Meanwhile, more bad news continues to come out of the real estate sector, and it turns out that even wealthy people are now “pulling back” from buying homes…
Wealthy buyers are pulling back from some of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S., the latest sign that sky-high prices and fears of a recession are weighing on a key sector of the economy.
Toll Brothers Inc., the nation’s largest publicly traded luxury-home builder, said late Tuesday that purchase agreements fell 3% from a year earlier, worse than a decline of less than 1% that was expected by a Bloomberg survey of six analysts. The company’s orders in California, home to some of the priciest markets in the country, tumbled 36% from a year earlier.
Of course whenever I start bringing up numbers like these, some skeptics point to the employment statistics as “proof” that things really aren’t so bad.
Well, it turns out that those employment numbers were wildly inaccurate.
In fact, the Labor Department just admitted that the U.S. actually has 501,000 less jobs than they previously thought…
The labor market seemed to defy gravity last year, generating more than 200,000 jobs a month despite a historically low unemployment rate that made it harder for employers to find workers.
Turns out job growth wasn’t as robust as it appeared.
The Labor Department revised down total job gains from April 2018 to March 2019 by 501,000, the agency said Wednesday, the largest downward revision in a decade.
An error of more than half a million jobs is colossal, and it is going to make it more difficult for us to have faith in the “official numbers” that they give us in the future.
In the end, it turns out that all of those glowing headlines about U.S. employment in 2018 were grossly overstated. If these revised numbers are accurate, then job growth was just barely keeping up with population growth in 2018, and of course we have started to see the employment numbers begin to deteriorate in recent months.
But if you listen to some of the pundits, you would be tempted to think that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. For example, consider what Brian Moynihan just told CNBC…
“I’d love to say that the optimistic universe is most likely to prevail, but the talking heads talk endlessly about how a recession is inevitable,” he said. “This kind of talk sows fear, which erodes confidence, and without confidence business pauses its new hires and its investments, which then leads to a downturn in consumer spending, which then leads to a recession.”
“If the president were to simply calm down the rhetoric on China, rather than taking them on like some kind of trash-talking wide receiver, the bears would lose their biggest crutch,” said the “Mad Money” host, who blamed fears about the bond market on “angry rhetoric and frightening jeremiads from supposed experts” who should listen to conference calls.
No, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be just fine is not going to solve anything.
The U.S. economy has defied the laws of economics for an extended period of time, but now all of our mistakes are catching up with us, and the crisis that is ahead is going to be very painful.
Unfortunately, a lot of the so-called “experts” will continue to deny the obvious even when it is staring them in the face, and this is going to result in a tremendous amount of confusion among ordinary Americans as our nation spirals into a terrifying economic nightmare.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NobL3w Tyler Durden
Amid Brexit, the unpredictability of Trump’s presidency ongoing conflicts in Yemen and Syria and countless other factors, the world is becoming less stable and increasingly fragile. Given the situation in 2019, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that the results of The Fund For Peace’s Fragile State Index is particularly interesting this year.
Yemen has been named the most fragile state, ahead of South Sudan and Syria.
Considering the political situation in both three countries their place at the top of the index is hardly surprising.
What is particularly interesting this time around is the list of the countries who saw their score increase the most. This includes Venezuela which is struggling with an economic and leadership crisis of unprecedented dimensions. Brazil’s score worsened by the same margin after it elected a new controversial president known for his harsh right-wing rhetoric.
The UK, which is mired in a complicated divorce process with the EU, had the fourth highest increase in the index. Finland was named the least fragile country worldwide in 2019, ahead of Norway and Switzerland.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HmF03b Tyler Durden
UK renewable energy supplier Solarplicity says it is ceasing to trade, blaming the harsh regulations in the energy market and increased competition, and becoming the 13th energy supplier in the UK to have gone out of business since the beginning of 2018.
“Solarplicity Supply Limited is ceasing to trade and Ofgem, the energy regulator, will appoint a new supplier to look after its customers,” the company said in advice to customers posted on its website.
“The large number of small energy suppliers and the harsh way the market is regulated make it difficult for companies like Solarplicity to survive. Ofgem’s recent actions stopped it from raising the funding it needed, unfortunately leaving it no option but to cease trading,” the company said, adding that the rest of the Solarplicity Group is not affected and would continue to provide renewable technology.
Solarplicity’s CEO David Elbourne said in a statement, as carried by Stock-on-Trent Live:
“Its experience since the acquisition of the retail energy supply business LoCO2 in May 2017, has convinced the Solarplicity Board there is no viable future as a small-scale energy supplier in today’s overcrowded, highly regulated market – which, as others are finding-out, is simply not sustainable at this scale.”
The collapse of the 13th small energy supplier in Britain since the start of last year comes amid a row with the regulator Ofgem, which has chastised Solarplicity several times this year alone. Earlier this month, the regulator called out Solarplicity for failing to make the feed-in-tariff (FIT) payments to FIT generators, and told the company it was required to provide reports to the authority showing that those payments have been made.
In February this year, Ofgem temporarily banned Solarplicity from taking on new customers for three months due to poor customer service and switching process. The authority threatened to revoke Solarplicity’s license to operate on the energy market unless it improved its service.
In the wake of Solarplicity’s collapse, Ofgem said that it would protect the company’s around 7,500 domestic customers and less than 500 business customers and urged them not to rush to switch to another energy supplier until the authority chooses a new one.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZlvXFQ Tyler Durden
Roughly a week to the day that pressure from Beijing forced out the CEO Of Cathay Pacific airlines and one of his deputies (both “quit” under pressure from Beijing’s airline regulator and mainland companies aligned with the CPC), the Washington Post published a long-winded story based off of interviews with more than a dozen employees of the iconic airline, which has for so long been closely associated with Hong Kong and its culture.
In its report, WaPo confirms that employees of the airline feel trapped in a “climate of fear and mistrust” as Communist functionaries increasingly subject flight crews to searches and seizure to root out anybody who has openly, or privately, expressed support for the #antiELAB protests that began nearly three months ago.
Crews have resorted to stashing their smartphones in service carts and other ploys to avoid being searched and having the contents of their phones downloaded.
Already, several employees and at least three pilots have left the airline over their purported support for the protests (a sign that Beijing isn’t only interested in purging upper management).
Indeed, Cathay employees suspect they are being ‘singled out’ because of their company’s status.
As the Chinese state zeroes in on individuals suspected of supporting ongoing protests against Beijing’s influence in Hong Kong, it has singled out Cathay Pacific, the flagship Hong Kong airline that is among the city’s biggest employers and most globally recognized brands, subjecting its staff to unprecedented scrutiny.
“We are panicked,” said one flight attendant who has worked for the airline for seven years.
[…]
“I feel so scared, like we have lost our ability to voice our opinions, our concerns and our hopes without feeling the authority of China,” said another flight attendant, age 26.
The impact that the protests have had on Cathay, ostensibly a developed, multinational corporation, has raised questions about whether HK can maintain any sort of autonomy long-term under the “one country, two systems” doctrine that had allowed it a fair amount of autonomy until not that long ago. The first inklings came during the umbrella movement in 2014. Now, the extradition bill protests – which have morphed into a broader pro-democracy movement – have become the system’s first major test.
If it fails, HK’s economy could be in serious jeopardy, as Kyle Bass explained might happen in a research report from earlier this year.
In a series of tweets sent Thursday morning, Bass warned that pro-Beijing lawmakers had been subtly hinting that a massive crackdown would result if the protests lasted another week and a half.
china daily @ChinaDaily shows a video of the ccp thugs staging violence in a Hong Kong train station. Fascinating how the “police” are absent and the thugs were whisked away on the train. Pooh and piglet are scheming to bring in the PAP and the PLA from Shenzhen before Oct 1st. https://t.co/K1ln4xAIdy
We saw a senior pro-beijing lawmaker in Hong Kong give the protestors “10 days” yesterday. He then said that these protests cannot last going into the 70th anniversary of the communist party in china….which is October 1st. #antiELAB#HKexit
And he’s probably got a point: Under no circumstances will Beijing allow this movement to endure through the 70th anniversary of Communist Party rule on Oct. 1.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zo6mfa Tyler Durden
Bradford has one of the highest Muslim populations out of any town in the UK.
According to the 2011 census, over 20% of the population is Pakistani, although that figure is now likely to be significantly higher.
The town suffered race riots in 2001 when its white majority population faced off with the Pakistani community, leading to 297 arrests.
Bradford’s white population shrunk from 76% in 2001 to 63% in 2011.
* * *
There is a war on free speech. Without your support, my voice will be silenced. Please sign up for the free newsletter here. Donate to me on SubscribeStar here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30rVRsD Tyler Durden
If the neoliberal ruling classes expect to keep the American masses worked up into a white-eyed hysteria over “fascism” until November 2020, they’re going to need to get some better Nazis. The current Nazis are just not going to cut it. They are neither scary nor Nazi enough. OK, the militia ones look kind of scary, and that “Based Spartan” guy looks kind of … uh, weird, but most of them just look like regular old rednecks. How hard would it be to get them some brown shirts, or those khaki pants like they wore in Charlottesville, or some other type of Nazi-like uniform?
And some jackboots. People love those jackboots.
Seriously, the Resistance need to get their official narrative optics in order, and they need to do it without delay. Millions of liberals are standing by to be brainwashed into a year-long frenzy of manufactured mass “fascism” hysteria, but they are going to need some halfway convincing Nazis to spastically freak out over. A few hundred bozos in MAGA hats parading around with American flags does not exactly a Sturmabteilung make.
I’m referring, of course, to the latest “fascist invasion” of Portland that took place last Saturday, which, according to the corporate media, and Antifa, and local fascism experts, was supposed to be a veritable bloodbath. Heavily-armed white supremacist terrorists were flying in from around the country to indiscriminately murder as many “Black, Asian, Latino, indigenous, immigrant, Pacific islander, disabled, houseless, and LGBTQ persons” as possible. This white supremacist terrorist kill-fest was going to be revenge for the preventively self-defensive beating of Andy Ngo, “the most dangerous fascist grifter in America,” by Antifa militants earlier this month.
Ngo (who most people had never heard of until Antifa militants beat him senseless), although he poses as a legitimate journalist by writing for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Quillette, and so on, is allegedly a fascist intelligence asset in charge of compiling fascist “kill lists” consisting of the names of assorted well-known Portland anti-fascist figures (who most people had also never heard of until they claimed that Ngo had put them on his “kill list”).
Alexander Reid Ross, for example, an extremely influential “fascism expert,” outreach specialist, and geography teacher, who is hot on the trail of the Putin-Nazi plot to form a syncretic alliance of Assad-loving, Duginist, LaRouchian Nazis led by Max Blumenthal and Vanessa Beeley, or possibly Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson … or something more or less along those lines (see Ross’ seminal paranoid ravings, which the SPLC was forced to retract by Blumenthal’s fascist legal counsel.) Ross reportedly remains in hiding in a safehouse in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, presumably protected by the FBI, while he continues his important work.
And then there are the notorious Proud Boys, a gang of self-described “Western chauvinists” who apparently haven’t been laid in years. According to the SPLC (which has designated them an official “hate group”):
There are three degrees of membership within the Proud Boys, and
to become a first degree in the “pro-West fraternal organization” a prospective member simply has to declare “I am a western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”
To enter the second degree, a Proud Boy has to endure a beating until they can yell out the names of five breakfast cereals (in order to demonstrate “adrenaline control”) and give up masturbation because, in theory, it will leave them more inclined to go out and meet women.
Those who enter the third degree have demonstrated their commitment by getting a Proud Boys tattoo. Any man — no matter his race or sexual-orientation — can join the fraternal organization as long as they “recognize that white men are not the problem.”
Such is the caliber of the cast the Resistance are featuring in their “fascism” fantasy. As you can see, it’s not exactly the A-list. If they’re going to stick with the “fascism” hysteria from now until November 2020 (which is really the only option they have left, what with “Russiagate” having blown up in their faces), the least they can do is get some real Nazis, and some semi-respectable Nazi hunters, and cut out this pathetic Portlandia nonsense.
The Resistance owes liberals at least that much, especially after making them look like fools by leading them on for three years with their ridiculous “Russiagate” hysteria. Sure, the “fascism” hysteria is an easier sell, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to sell it. It’s not like they can just abruptly switch from the “Russiagate” narrative to the “fascism” narrative (as if their Russiagate hoax had not just been exposed) and expect liberals to go along with it like the members of some enormous cult.
Or, I don’t know … maybe they can. The New York Times certainly appears to think so. Check out this exchange between executive editor Dean Baquet and an anonymous staffer at an emergency in-house “town hall” meeting convened after The Times changed a page one headline because it didn’t paint Trump as racist enough. (The transcript is Slate’s; emphasis is mine.)
Staffer: I’m wondering what is the overall strategy here for getting us through this administration and the way we cover it … people don’t understand. I think they get confused as to what we’re trying to do.
Baquet: OK. I mean, let me go back a little bit for one second to just repeat what I said in my in my short preamble about coverage. Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice?That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed.A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?
I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of [racist] remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.
For anyone not entirely fluent in Pulitzer-winning Professional Journalism Speak, that translates roughly as “OK, no more Russia stuff. We’re switching to the fascism and racism stuff, and we’ll be hammering on it until Trump is history.”
Which is fine with me. I don’t like Donald Trump. And Americans are certainly racists … uh, working class Americans, that is. Sorry, white working class Americans, not Black people, or the staff of The New York Times, or the neoliberal ruling classes. Unless they’re disabled, or houseless, or Latino, or indigenous, or LGBTQ (i.e., the white working class Americans, not the ruling classes). In which case, they get a pass on the racism. But the rest of us are all white supremacists, and homophobic anti-Semites, and xenophobic racist transphobes, and … well, basically, a bunch of Nazis.
What? You don’t believe that most white Americans are Hitler-loving, Sieg-heiling Nazis who want to mass murder all the Jews and the Mexicans and re-enslave all the African Americans? How do you think Donald Trump got elected? Somebody stole the presidency from Clinton. If it wasn’t the Russians, it had to be the fascists! I mean, after all, who else is there?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZmcmoL Tyler Durden
The Hong Kong consulate employee who vanished two weeks ago after attending a conference across the border in Shenzen was reportedly detained after visiting a prostitute, according to a report in a Chinese newspaper that was cited by Bloomberg.
Simon Cheng, the 28-year-old employee at the UK consulate in Hong Kong, mysteriously vanished after alerting his girlfriend via text that he was having issues re-entering Hong Kong following the conference. “Pray for me,” was purportedly the last thing he sent her before going silent.
Now, those 15 days are nearly up (Friday marks day 15), and police in Shenzen, who apprehended Cheng are offering more details about his detention.
Cheng “violated the 66 article of China’s law on administrative penalties for public security, which states that people who engage in prostitution or visit prostitutes shall be detained for no less than 10 days but no more than 15 days,” the Global Times newspaper said. The paper also insisted that Cheng asked police not to notify his family about his detention. It’s still not clear whether Cheng is a native of Hong Kong or if he was born and raised elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, BBG reported that the CPC has often used charges of visiting prostitutes as a catch-all to detain Hong Kongers traveling in mainland China.
Allegations of visiting prostitutes have later proved false in other instances where Hong Kong residents have been detained in China. A Hong Kong lawmaker apologized after accusing bookseller and Communist Party critic Lee Bo of visiting prostitutes, the South China Morning Post reported in 2016.
Separately, allegations of sexual impropriety have appeared alongside political corruption charges in the trials of senior Chinese politicians Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang and Sun Zhengcai.
Meanwhile, GT editor-in-chief Hu Xijin accused the western media of politicizing Cheng’s case, claiming that the media have now “ruined” him, and that the understanding local party functionaries had been willing to try and limit damage to his reputation…
According to police, Simon Cheng, an employee of the British consulate in HK, was detained in Shenzhen for visiting prostitute. Police didn’t contact his family requested by Cheng. Police are willing to help reduce damage to his reputation, UK diplomats and media ruined him.
…But this account, which makes little sense, was widely mocked in the replies to Hu’s tweet.
Chinese police wanted to keep info secret to be able to blackmail him for the rest of his life but nasty UK diplomats put an end to the brilliant Chinese plan. Now undercover Chinese policewoman who played role of prostitute will be forced to take desk job.
Cheng’s girlfriend and his family reportedly filed a missing persons report with the Hong Kong police after Cheng disappeared on his way back from a trade fair in Shenzen.
Looks like he’s going to have some explaining to do when he finally gets back to Hong Kong (assuming he isn’t held indefinitely on espionage charges like a former Canadian diplomat and a China-based Canadian businessman).
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KNSnLN Tyler Durden
Convicted felons in San Francisco may have broken the law, but they’ll get to keep their dignity after the city’s Board of Supervisors adopted new, sanitized language describing them as ‘justice-involved persons’ or ‘formerly incarcerated.’
Under the city’s new “person first” language guidelines, the words “felon,” “convict,” “addict,” “offender,” and “juvenile delinquent” are no-no’s. Instead, those who have paid their debt to society will be referred to as a “returning resident.” Those on parole will be known as ‘persons under supervision.’
And a juvenile “delinquent” will now be known as a “young person with justice system involvement,” or a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Drug addicts are now “a person with a history of substance abuse.”
“We don’t want people to be forever labeled for the worst things that they have done,” according to Supervisor Matt Haney.
Haney was one of 10 supervisors (Gordon Mar was absent) who voted for the new guidelines, which Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer proposed.
According to the resolution, 1 of 5 California residents has a criminal record, and words like “prisoner,” “convict,” “inmate” or “felon” “only serve to obstruct and separate people from society and make the institutionalization of racism and supremacy appear normal,” the resolution states.
“Inaccurate information, unfounded assumptions, generalizations and other negative predispositions associated with justice-involved individuals create societal stigmas, attitudinal barriers and continued negative stereotypes,” it continues.
“We want them ultimately to become contributing citizens, and referring to them as felons is like a scarlet letter that they can never get away from,” Haney said. –San Francisco Chronicle
Police spokesman David Stevenson says the department has “made our members aware of the resolution and are researching possible impacts on operations and communications,” while the DA’s office is on board with the plan.
The language resolution makes no mention of terms for victims of crime, but using the new terminology someone whose car has been broken into could well be: “A person who has come in contact with a returning resident who was involved with the justice system and who is currently under supervision with a history of substance use.”
In other words, someone whose car was broken into by a recently released offender, on parole with a drug problem. –San Francisco Chronicle
SF Mayor London Breed hasn’t signed off on the new language proposal, as she “doesn’t implement policies based on nonbinding resolutions, but she is always happy to work with the board on issues around equity and criminal justice reform,” according to her spokesman.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZgiT4o Tyler Durden
