Alicia Hobson says her daughter Azlyn came home from a middle school dance in Laketown, Utah, excited that she got to dance with a boy she liked. But she was also upset that she had to dance with a boy she hates. Azlyn, 11, tried to politely turn the boy she doesn’t like down, but her mother says the principal came over and reminded the girl that school policy is to dance with anyone who asks. Principal Kip Motta told a TV station that no one is forced to dance with anyone they don’t want to, but he said the school requests that students dance with anyone who asks. In an email to Hobson, Motta said Azlyn should tell him before a dance whom she does not want to dance with and he’ll try to stop any embarrassing situations or, he added, Azlyn could just stay home on dance days. School officials say the policy is aimed at making sure everyone feels included at a dance.
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Alicia Hobson says her daughter Azlyn came home from a middle school dance in Laketown, Utah, excited that she got to dance with a boy she liked. But she was also upset that she had to dance with a boy she hates. Azlyn, 11, tried to politely turn the boy she doesn’t like down, but her mother says the principal came over and reminded the girl that school policy is to dance with anyone who asks. Principal Kip Motta told a TV station that no one is forced to dance with anyone they don’t want to, but he said the school requests that students dance with anyone who asks. In an email to Hobson, Motta said Azlyn should tell him before a dance whom she does not want to dance with and he’ll try to stop any embarrassing situations or, he added, Azlyn could just stay home on dance days. School officials say the policy is aimed at making sure everyone feels included at a dance.
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A video shows a man alleged to be a human trafficker bragging about how he has ‘filled Europe with immigrants’ and how he is making thousands of euros after Turkey opened its borders.
The man said he had been trafficking people for 20 years and that he receives 500-600 euros per head for each migrant he successfully exports.
Despite serving 6 years in jail for the crime, he brags about how he is back in business following President Erdogan’s announcement that Turkey would be re-opening its border and encouraging millions of migrants to invade Europe.
“I have filled half of Europe with immigrants,” he declares.
Turkish trafficker: i’m doing this job for 20 years, i live by it, i passing bumans from the borders, i get 500-600 euro each head, i was 6 years in prison for this reason, now Erdogan opened the border and i came out to make money, i have filled the half Europe with immigrants. pic.twitter.com/YNuOxjDtB5
Erdogan opened the floodgates in response to an airstrike in Syria which killed 30 Turkish soldiers. He is demanding NATO support in Turkey’s fight against the Russian-backed Syrian army.
“I told them it’s done. It’s finished. The doors are now open. Now, you will have to take your share of the burden,” he said in a televised speech.
“Hundreds of thousands have crossed, soon we will it will reach millions,” Erdogan warned.
As we highlighted earlier, a Syrian migrant was reportedly killed during clashes with Greek border police.
Another video shows Greek coastguards beating a dinghy full of migrants with a long poll and shooting warning shots into the water in an attempt to get them to head back to Turkey.
The Greek Coast Guard is acting with much more aggression & confidence than I have seen in them before
They are taking the migration challenge seriously
This vid was recorded this morning. In it, the Coast Guard shoots warning shots at the migrants & blocks their way to #Greecepic.twitter.com/f3dcECt07g
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Tesla Registrations Plunge In Two Crucial European Countries
If Tesla was truly a story about actual economics – you know, things like demand and production – we might expect the fact that registrations are plunging to have an effect on the company’s stock price.
But, as it goes, the company’s stock is and has been wholly disconnected from reality, which is why at the stock sits currently with a $700 handle, we’re certain it won’t be phased by the fact that registrations have plunged in top European markets.
For instance, Tesla recorded only 83 new cars in Norway last month, comparing to 1,016 vehicles last year. In the Netherlands, registrations also plunged, down 68% to 155 units, according to Bloomberg.
It is not a good look for Tesla, as these are two of the only four countries that Tesla breaks out revenue for on a quarterly basis. For the first two months of the year (and first 66% of the first quarter), registrations were down 77% and 42% in Norway and the Netherlands – and that was against easy comps. The Model 3 was only just starting to get underway with sales in early 2019.
Norway began to saturate last year and the Netherlands saw a favorable tax provision for EV buyers disappear. Revenue from the Netherlands and Norway was up 65% and 48% in 2019, respectively, which helped offset a 15% drop in the U.S. With these key Europeans countries not absorbing the blow any further, what could Tesla’s Q1 2020 revenue look like?
Of course, the Tesla “carrot on the string” now turns to Germany. In addition to Tesla building its next Gigafactory there, the country has unveiled a landmark climate related stimulus package. It is offering subsidies to boost EV sales and is expected to overtake Norway as the regional EV leader.
But the falling sales in Europe will make it tough to cushion any blow not only in the U.S., but in China, where coronavirus has ravaged the country and auto sales, in general, are down between 80% and 90% for February. This hasn’t stopped Tesla’s stock from holding a bid in the $600 to $700 range, even despite the market’s recent sell off on coronavirus fears.
For now, the $120 billion cash incinerating company remains in tact.
We can’t help but wonder if a further plunge in the markets could reveal any “interesting” information about Tesla and/or its financials going forward.
It’s been a dramatic few days in Syria. The Syrian Army pushed across Idlib Province to retake major strongholds of Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists who have controlled the region for years thanks to support from Turkey.
This provoked a major escalation from Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Major offensives by the jihadists, backed by Turkish armor and air power, pushed back the Syrian army from the outskirts of Idlib city and took back the town of Saraqib at the confluence of the M4 and M5 highways which are of major strategic importance.
That counterattack occurred while the Syrian Army had moved south to claim vast territory northeast of the Russian air base at Latakia.
Erdogan has been threatening for weeks for the Syrian army to halt its advance or face the brunt of the Turkish Army. He made good on those threats, but only after taking advantage of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s temperance.
Over 30 Turkish soldiers were killed in an airstrike on a convoy in southern Idlib who, by all accounts, were embedded with, to Russia, legitimate targets, i.e. members of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly al-Nusra and really just al-Qaeda.
According to the latest from Elijah Magnier, Putin unilaterally stood his air force down to de-escalate the situation and Erdogan used that opening to attack east of Idlib and south against the Kurds at Afrin towards Aleppo.
According to the sources, Russia was surprised by the number of Turkish soldiers killed and declared a unilateral ceasefire to calm down the front and de-escalate. Moscow ordered its military operational room in Syria to stop the military push and halt the attack on rural Idlib. Engaging in a war against Turkey is not part of President Putin’s plans in Syria. Russia thought it the right time to quieten the front and allow Erdogan to lick his wounds.
Two possibilities exist here.
Either Putin entirely miscalculated Erdogan’s intentions in Idlib expecting to him to be reasonable knowing that the bombing was unintentional.
Or, Putin stood his forces down to finally find out what Erdogan was willing to do to retain Idlib.
It’s clear that Erdogan believes something that is simply not true, that the Sochi agreement between Russia and Turkey which established the demilitarized zones and Turkish observation posts was a de facto ceding that territory to Turkey.
Putin has made it clear that the territorial integrity of Syria is to be re-established and from there a political solution determined by Syrians occurs.
Erdogan’s betrayal goes far beyond just the counter-attack at Saraqib. He also ignored entreaties from Iran to stop attacking and sent drones in to attack an Iranian base and military hospital south of Aleppo.
Again from Magnier:
Turkey, which maintains over 2000 officers and soldiers in 14 observation locations that are today under Syrian Army control, ignored the Iranian request and bombed Iranian HQ and that of its allies, including a military field hospital killing 30 (9 Hezbollah and 21 Fatimiyoun) and tens of the Syrian army officers. The Turkish attack wounded more than 150 soldiers of the Syrian Army and their allies.
And this is the big problem for Erdogan. Because he has now decided that because Russia doesn’t want a war with a member of NATO, he feels that gives him the room to enforce his edicts in Syria.
But in doing this he has also greatly over-extended himself because the U.S., under Trump, wants nothing to do with what he’s doing in Idlib directly. The proxy war is fine. Harrassing Assad is fine. Forcing Putin to commit more while the world economy shudders is fine.
But there’s nothing Trump will do materially to get involved in Idlib. The usual suspects in the U.S. are crying for a U.S. maintained “No Fly Zone” over Idlib but that is simply the Israeli lobby talking.
Multiple times Erdogan has gone to the U.S. and NATO asking for assistance and multiple times he’s been sent back with nothing except, “Go for it!”
But at the same time, Putin’s political instincts may have betrayed him here. Russia’s position in Syria is tenuous if Erdogan wants to play all of his cards. It would be insane for him to do this, but this is not someone I believe at this point is a rational actor.
By all accounts the Kremlin was slow to respond to the ferocity of Turkey’s attacks over the weekend and it resulted in a lot of battle-hardened Syrian troops and commanders getting killed along with a lot of armor (and possibly air defense systems) destroyed.
And now, Putin will have to resupply the Syrians while regaining their trust that he has the situation in hand. It is hard to fault Putin’s handling of the situation in Syria, overall. He’s made deft move after deft move, operating at an incredibly high rate of competence over the past four-plus years.
At some point he was going to make a serious mistake, and this unilateral cease fire over Idlib may have been it. Trusting a duplicitous snake like Erdogan to not seize the opportunity Putin’s humanity afforded him has, at a minimum, extended the timetable for a resolution of Idlib.
We don’t know as of yet what extent the damage Turkey has inflicted on the Syrians to hold their gains and/or counter-attack. The Turks are obviously lying about the number of tanks destroyed and Syrian troops killed.
The numbers are laughably large.
The SAA has re-taken Saraqib and the M4/M5 crossing, but they had to abandon gains made in the south to do so. That ended their campaign to retake the M4 highway and cut off Turkey’s resupply routes to Idlib.
The question is whether or not Erdogan is listening. Because to this point he hasn’t been.
There are other reports of Russia moving large numbers of troops and airlifting in personnel and weaponry into Latakia air base and the naval base at Tartus and turn the tables on Erdogan.
Mass transfer: 8 Il-76 arrived in Khmeimim, as well as a group of air defense officers🇷🇺🇸🇾
3 Il-76 transport aircraft of RuAF arrived in Khmeimim in Syrian province of Latakia on night of March 1 to 2. In general, over past 72 hours, 8 aircraft of this type have landed at AFB. pic.twitter.com/2aSNZPeNDi
For more than a year Erdogan has used his troops as shields in those observation posts to allow HTS and al-Nusra terrorists to attack across the agreed upon DMZ, especially south towards the suburbs of Damascus.
Those observation posts and the troops are now in the hands of the SAA and are effectively hostages. This is also part of the reason why Erdogan has escalated things here.
This is deeply embarrassing to the would-be Sultan.
All of this is backdrop for the upcoming meeting between Putin and Erdogan in Moscow later this week. Make no mistake, the Sultan has been summoned not the other way around. Erdogan will try and wheedle a deal out of Putin which gives him some of what he wants.
However, I don’t think that will fly. Despite his missteps here, I think Putin still has this situation under control. In fact, if I know Putin at all, I’d say that Erdogan will leave Moscow with nothing, even though Erdogan has cards he thinks he can play.
And it is the silence coming from major NATO players that is his biggest issue. Trump cannot get involved in Idlib in an election year.
Without NATO backing him up, what is he going to offer Putin?
Having ticked off all of his benefactors to this point, trying to use access to the Bosporus and NATO Article 5 as leverage for his aggressions in Syria have their limits.
But, at the same time, Putin has to recognize now, with these moves by Erdogan, that he is dealing with a person with delusions of grandeur at a Hitlerian level. And I don’t say that lightly.
It’s clear his neo-Ottoman Empire dreams blind him and all he sees is the U.S.’s pullback from the region as his opportunity to press his military advantage regionally.
If Putin doesn’t recognize this and put a stop to him now, Idlib will deteriorate and his troops will be there far longer and under much worse conditions than even he has the political capital to expend.
Erdogan’s moves here betray a solipsism which infects all men who have held power for too long and through their success, believe themselves infallible.
He’s managed to bring Turkey to this point where NATO is exasperated with him and the SCO states see Turkey as a prize to advance their agenda to stare down the unipolar power, the U.S., in the West. Whether this was skill or blind luck is anyone’s guess.
I expect it’s a bit of both, since I don’t like to underestimate my enemies.
And I honestly think he thought he would be able to turn the tables on Russia and China here, getting concessions from them while blackmailing NATO with refugees.
But with Erdogan’s drones now falling out of the sky at the Syrian border and his army now potentially facing thousands of Iranian-made precision missiles and Hezbollah likely rejoining the fight in real numbers thanks to his betrayal of them, it is likely his misjudgment is far greater than anything Putin is guilty of.
It looks like this is that moment where someone finally tells tells him that while Turkey may be important, he isn’t.
And if he wants to stay in power, the time for him to leave NATO for real is now.
Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million in his bid for a Super Tuesday blitz.
He came away with…American Samoa.
Not all the results are reported yet, but the former New York City mayor appears on track to finish first in exactly zero of the 14 states that held primaries and caucuses on Tuesday night. He did win the caucuses in American Samoa (getting four delegates), and he appears to have picked up a few delegates in Colorado (and he may get a few more in California or Texas). Still, it is impossible to view Tuesday’s results as anything other than a major disappointment for the billionaire who dumped nine figures of his personal fortune into the race.
He saturated the airwaves with his ads. He hired more than 2,500 people to work on his campaign. He skipped the first few states of the nominating process, apparently believing that his air support would do what other candidates’ ground troops could not.
For a little while, it looked like it might have been working. But his debate performances partially deflated his rise, and Tuesday’s expensive failure may force Bloomberg out of the race.
NBC News: Mike Bloomberg to reasses his campaign tomorrow
Oh, and the other billionaire in the Democratic primary? That would be Tom Steyer, the guy dropped out three days ago after spending more than $250 million and winning exactly zero delegates.
Indeed, there is a lot of money in American politics, as the ongoing Democratic primary (and every election in recent memory) makes clear. But after Super Tuesday, it seems clear that candidates cannot buy their way into the White House.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears to have been the big winner on Tuesday, had fundraising issues during the primary campaign. He was outspent not only by Bloomberg and Steyer, but by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Biden won Tuesday’s primaries in Minnesota and Massachusetts while spending hardly any money in either place.
“We believe in old-fashioned democracy: one person, one vote, not billionaires buying elections,” Sanders said at a rally in mid-February.
Well, good news for Sanders. Billionaires aren’t buying this election.
Money, at best, buys you a ticket to the dance. It cannot make you the prom king.
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The day before Attorney General William Barr complained about disrespect for the police, Harris County, Texas, District Attorney Kim Ogg announced that her office had identified 69 more convicted drug offenders who may have been framed by a veteran Houston narcotics officer. The skepticism that Barr decries cannot be understood without taking into account the sort of corruption that Ogg is investigating.
Speaking to police officers in Miami last Friday, Barr condemned “a deeply troubling attitude” toward police. “Far from respecting the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect us,” he said, overzealous critics “scapegoat and disrespect police officers and disparage the vital role you play in society.”
While Barr may prefer to believe that attitude has no basis in fact, every day brings news of police officers who foster such disrespect by lying, using excessive force, and abusing their power for personal gain. Although it is unfair to portray those cases as an indictment of the entire profession, the way police officials respond to such revelations often invites that conclusion.
The former officer at the center of Ogg’s inquiry, Gerald Goines, was employed by the Houston Police Department (HPD) for 34 years. He faces state murder charges and federal civil rights charges because he invented a heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant to obtain a no-knock warrant for a 2019 raid that killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, in their home on Harding Street.
As a result of that disastrous operation, which discovered no evidence of drug dealing, Ogg’s office is reviewing thousands of cases handled by Goines and his colleagues in the HPD’s Narcotics Division. So far prosecutors have dismissed dozens of pending cases and backed the claims of two men arrested by Goines in 2008 who were recently declared innocent.
“We need to clear people convicted solely on the word of a police officer whom we can no longer trust,” Ogg said last week. But the HPD’s problems clearly go beyond the crimes of one rogue cop.
Another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, faces state and federal charges in connection with the deadly Harding Street raid because he backed up Goines’ fictional story. If Goines falsely implicated people in drug crimes for a dozen years or more, it seems likely that other officers actively helped him or looked the other way, which would make their testimony suspect as well.
Goines’ supervisors also deserve a share of the blame for failing to properly monitor his use of warrants, informants, and department money. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who initially hailed Goines as a hero while posthumously tarring Tuttle and Nicholas as dangerous heroin dealers, has announced several belated reforms, including limits on no-knock warrants, using body cameras during drug raids, and a new commitment to the oversight that HPD supervisors were supposed to provide.
Acevedo nevertheless insists that Goines’ crimes did not reveal a “systemic” problem, and he wants credit for not sweeping them under the rug. “What would have been more tragic for this community, and for this department, than the incident itself is for the department to have failed to investigate it to the extent that we did,” he said in a recent Texas Monthlyinterview.
At the same time, Acevedo wants the public to accept the inevitability of outrages such as the senseless deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas. “I don’t think there’s a policy or a process that can guarantee 100 percent that something like this would not happen,” he said. That’s the message Acevedo is sending Houstonians looking for reassurance that they can trust police to respect their constitutional rights.
After three interview questions about the biggest scandal to hit his department in decades, Acevedo lost his patience. “This is the last I want to talk about it,” he said. “We need to move on to something else.” That attitude is at least as troubling as the one that bothers Barr.
Joe Biden is the comeback kid tonight, winning at least 8 of the 14 states that were in play tonight on Super Tuesday. That’s a major rebound for a campaign that until just a few days ago seemed to be sliding into irrelevance.
The former vice president capitalized on his strengths in the South to win outright majorities in Alabama and Virginia, as well as commanding pluralities in North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. He also scored surprise victories in Minnesota and Massachusetts, where his main rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) was favored to win.
“We were told when we got to Super Tuesday it would be over. Well it may be over for the other guy,” said Biden in a victory speech in Los Angeles, making a veiled swipe at Sanders. “People are talking about a revolution. We started a movement. We increased turnout. We increased turnout for us!”
Sanders, the presumptive frontrunner coming into tonight, picked up his home state of Vermont as well as Colorado and Utah. The Associated Press called California (which awards 415 of the 1,357 delegates up for grabs tonight) just before midnight for Sanders, but it will be a while before we have final vote and delegate counts from the Golden State.
With under 50 percent of the vote in, Biden is expected to win Texas too, according to Cook Political Report.
I've seen enough. Projection: Joe Biden wins the Texas primary.
Even without California, Biden is expected to come out of tonight with as much as a 90 delegate lead.
Kornacki predicts that Biden will have an 80-90 delegate lead over Bernie when all the non-California ballots are counted. "Biden can get out tonight ahead in delegates."
I cautioned earlier on air that it's very hard to be definitive about how the night went, delegate-wise, without knowing what happened in California. Still seems likely Biden comes out tonight with a delegate lead, but the size of that *really* depends.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who is still running for president, won no states, not even the one she represents in the U.S. Senate. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also won no states, and only one territory (American Samoa).
After months of turmoil, the race is back to where it started: Biden in the lead with Sanders in a strong second.
After this wild and crazy totally unpredictable topsy-turvy week in politics, it looks like Joe Biden is the front-runner and he’s facing a very strong challenge from Bernie Sanders — exactly the situation that’s prevailed for most of the campaign.
Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million in his bid for a Super Tuesday blitz.
He came away with…American Samoa.
Not all the results are reported yet, but the former New York City mayor appears on track to finish first in exactly zero of the 14 states that held primaries and caucuses on Tuesday night. He did win the caucuses in American Samoa (getting four delegates), and he appears to have picked up a few delegates in Colorado (and he may get a few more in California or Texas). Still, it is impossible to view Tuesday’s results as anything other than a major disappointment for the billionaire who dumped nine figures of his personal fortune into the race.
He saturated the airwaves with his ads. He hired more than 2,500 people to work on his campaign. He skipped the first few states of the nominating process, apparently believing that his air support would do what other candidates’ ground troops could not.
For a little while, it looked like it might have been working. But his debate performances partially deflated his rise, and Tuesday’s expensive failure may force Bloomberg out of the race.
NBC News: Mike Bloomberg to reasses his campaign tomorrow
Oh, and the other billionaire in the Democratic primary? That would be Tom Steyer, the guy dropped out three days ago after spending more than $250 million and winning exactly zero delegates.
Indeed, there is a lot of money in American politics, as the ongoing Democratic primary (and every election in recent memory) makes clear. But after Super Tuesday, it seems clear that candidates cannot buy their way into the White House.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears to have been the big winner on Tuesday, had fundraising issues during the primary campaign. He was outspent not only by Bloomberg and Steyer, but by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Biden won Tuesday’s primaries in Minnesota and Massachusetts while spending hardly any money in either place.
“We believe in old-fashioned democracy: one person, one vote, not billionaires buying elections,” Sanders said at a rally in mid-February.
Well, good news for Sanders. Billionaires aren’t buying this election.
Money, at best, buys you a ticket to the dance. It cannot make you the prom king.
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The day before Attorney General William Barr complained about disrespect for the police, Harris County, Texas, District Attorney Kim Ogg announced that her office had identified 69 more convicted drug offenders who may have been framed by a veteran Houston narcotics officer. The skepticism that Barr decries cannot be understood without taking into account the sort of corruption that Ogg is investigating.
Speaking to police officers in Miami last Friday, Barr condemned “a deeply troubling attitude” toward police. “Far from respecting the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect us,” he said, overzealous critics “scapegoat and disrespect police officers and disparage the vital role you play in society.”
While Barr may prefer to believe that attitude has no basis in fact, every day brings news of police officers who foster such disrespect by lying, using excessive force, and abusing their power for personal gain. Although it is unfair to portray those cases as an indictment of the entire profession, the way police officials respond to such revelations often invites that conclusion.
The former officer at the center of Ogg’s inquiry, Gerald Goines, was employed by the Houston Police Department (HPD) for 34 years. He faces state murder charges and federal civil rights charges because he invented a heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant to obtain a no-knock warrant for a 2019 raid that killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, in their home on Harding Street.
As a result of that disastrous operation, which discovered no evidence of drug dealing, Ogg’s office is reviewing thousands of cases handled by Goines and his colleagues in the HPD’s Narcotics Division. So far prosecutors have dismissed dozens of pending cases and backed the claims of two men arrested by Goines in 2008 who were recently declared innocent.
“We need to clear people convicted solely on the word of a police officer whom we can no longer trust,” Ogg said last week. But the HPD’s problems clearly go beyond the crimes of one rogue cop.
Another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, faces state and federal charges in connection with the deadly Harding Street raid because he backed up Goines’ fictional story. If Goines falsely implicated people in drug crimes for a dozen years or more, it seems likely that other officers actively helped him or looked the other way, which would make their testimony suspect as well.
Goines’ supervisors also deserve a share of the blame for failing to properly monitor his use of warrants, informants, and department money. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who initially hailed Goines as a hero while posthumously tarring Tuttle and Nicholas as dangerous heroin dealers, has announced several belated reforms, including limits on no-knock warrants, using body cameras during drug raids, and a new commitment to the oversight that HPD supervisors were supposed to provide.
Acevedo nevertheless insists that Goines’ crimes did not reveal a “systemic” problem, and he wants credit for not sweeping them under the rug. “What would have been more tragic for this community, and for this department, than the incident itself is for the department to have failed to investigate it to the extent that we did,” he said in a recent Texas Monthlyinterview.
At the same time, Acevedo wants the public to accept the inevitability of outrages such as the senseless deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas. “I don’t think there’s a policy or a process that can guarantee 100 percent that something like this would not happen,” he said. That’s the message Acevedo is sending Houstonians looking for reassurance that they can trust police to respect their constitutional rights.
After three interview questions about the biggest scandal to hit his department in decades, Acevedo lost his patience. “This is the last I want to talk about it,” he said. “We need to move on to something else.” That attitude is at least as troubling as the one that bothers Barr.
