Month: June 2022

US Officials Doubt Ukraine Can Take Back Territory, White House “Losing Confidence”

US Officials Doubt Ukraine Can Take Back Territory, White House “Losing Confidence”

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

According to a report from CNN, White House officials are “losing confidence” that Ukraine will be able to retake all the territory Russia has captured since it invaded on February 24 as Russian forces continue to make gains in the eastern Donbas region.

Unnamed US officials told CNN that President Biden’s advisors have started debating if and how the US should start convincing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should change his definition of what “victory” will look like.

Russian military in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, via TASS/DW

Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Ukraine’s goal is to drive Russia out of all territory it has captured since it invaded. He also has said he wants to expel Russian forces from Crimea, a territory Moscow has controlled since 2014.

But even as the US and NATO are sending more and more heavy weapons to Kyiv, the prospect of Ukraine being able to launch a sufficient counter-offensive does not seem realistic. Ukraine is taking heavy casualties, with officials admitting they are losing between 100 and 200 troops each day.

The fact that Russia would have the upper hand in the Donbas was obvious from the start of the war. But after Russian forces withdrew from areas in the north near Kyiv and Chernihiv in early April, Western officials began pushing the narrative that Ukraine can win. But over the past month, the narrative has collapsed as Ukraine is clearly outgunned.

Both US and Ukrainian officials believe that how Ukraine does on the battlefield moving forward is entirely dependent on Western military aid.

“Whether Ukraine can take back these territories is in large part, if not entirely, a function of how much support we give them,” a congressional aide told CNN.

US officials told CNN that even though they have a more pessimistic assessment, the Biden administration is not pushing Ukraine to make territorial concessions to end the fighting.

Since Russia invaded, the Biden administration has shown no interest in diplomacy as a potential solution, and the US’s allies have actively discouraged Ukraine from negotiating.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/29/2022 – 10:00

via ZeroHedge News https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-officials-doubt-ukraine-can-take-back-territory-white-house-losing-confidence Tyler Durden

Should Women Delete Their Period Tracker Apps in the Wake of Dobbs?


Illustration of someone holding a smartphone with a red eye watching them

In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling handed down by the Supreme Court on Friday, overturning nearly 50 years of abortion precedent established by Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), people took to the internet to voice concerns about ways the state may crack down on women who seek abortions and suggest preemptive steps women of childbearing age ought to take to ensure they won’t become prosecutorial targets.

Some women who live in safely blue states shared posts on social media indicating they’d host abortion seekers coming from red states on their couches or mail people abortion pills. People concerned about liability due to snitch laws like those established in Texas (and possibly soon mimicked by GOP copycats in Arizona) quickly reminded those women that this could theoretically allow prosecutors to go after them for aiding and abetting abortions. Instagram and Facebook began removing posts that explicitly offered illicit abortion pills. And many people spread word that period tracking apps are no longer safe for women to use if they’re living in one of the 26 states that either have outlawed or will soon be outlawing abortion:

Though understandable, these calls to action have been poorly thought through. If you’re concerned about a surveillance state newly empowered to snoop through your personal information to possibly prosecute you for procuring an illegal abortion, privacy measures must be much more thorough than merely deleting a period tracking app.

For one, the dangers posed by the data kept by period tracking apps may be overstated. These apps function based on the user proactively logging the days they menstruate and predicting fertile windows accordingly. Though they do provide information about a woman’s cycle, a woman who has encountered a missed period, fearing she may be pregnant, could always log a fake period as a security mechanism to give herself cover.

But beyond that, it’s really not period tracker app data that prosecutors would theoretically seek if attempting to throw people in jail or prison for illegal abortion procurement. Unencrypted messages detailing plans to seek an abortion or confirmation that one is pregnant; phone calls to abortion clinics; search history; purchasing history; location data confirming a person’s physical location at a surreptitiously operating clinic—these are the pieces of a person’s digital footprint that prosecutors are most likely to look for.

“My hope is that people will shoot for something other than maximum cruelty” when enforcing abortion laws, Andrew Fleischman, a criminal appeals attorney, tells Reason.

“[State prosecutors] could get a search warrant for a suspected abortion and check what’s in your phone, but it won’t be the period app at that point, probably text messages, calls to clinics, social media, that stuff,” he confirms.

“I don’t think states have the resources to like, check your app,” yet, though Fleischman adds that period tracker apps could always voluntarily choose to turn over data when faced with legal scrutiny. He notes that the competence of such prosecutors is perhaps overstated, adding that “state prosecutors can’t even get Facebook DMs half the time.”

In the wake of such concerns that some tracker apps will cooperate with prosecutors and hand over data, some activists have suggested ostensibly more secure apps, like Stardust and Clue, which have committed to data privacy measures. But, if more-secure apps are based in the U.S., they could still theoretically be forced to hand over data through subpoenas. (Clue is based in Europe and is likely more secure than astrology-focused Stardust, which is vague about how cooperative it will be if government entities attempt to forcibly collect users’ health information.)

“In addition to facilitating prosecutions of pregnant people for intentionally terminating their pregnancies, technology will also enhance the government’s ability to surveille [sic], investigate, and prosecute pregnant people who did not seek to terminate but whom the state seeks control over by virtue of their pregnancy status,” writes civil rights attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook in a 2020 University of Baltimore Law Review article. “For example, pregnant people’s decisions—to self-medicate, to not medicate, to seek substance abuse treatment, to drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes—are all decisions that could be criminalized and potentially surveilled digitally.” This is all too true in an era where prosecutors may be more frequently looking into pregnancies, seeking evidence of chemical endangerment or suspected abortion.

“Many criminal prosecutions that would have stalled without digital evidence resulted in convictions either at trial or in plea bargaining because the digital evidence completed the picture of the accused’s involvement, state of mind, or intent,” adds Conti-Cook.

It’s not that a pregnant woman’s digital footprint can’t or won’t be used against her; the problem is instead that some activists have rushed to focus on less likely culprits when women concerned about surveillance should actually be taking a much more expansive approach to hiding their digital footprints from agents of the state.

The post Should Women Delete Their Period Tracker Apps in the Wake of <i>Dobbs</i>? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Should Women Delete Their Period Tracker Apps in the Wake of Dobbs?


Illustration of someone holding a smartphone with a red eye watching them

In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling handed down by the Supreme Court on Friday, overturning nearly 50 years of abortion precedent established by Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), people took to the internet to voice concerns about ways the state may crack down on women who seek abortions and suggest preemptive steps women of childbearing age ought to take to ensure they won’t become prosecutorial targets.

Some women who live in safely blue states shared posts on social media indicating they’d host abortion seekers coming from red states on their couches or mail people abortion pills. People concerned about liability due to snitch laws like those established in Texas (and possibly soon mimicked by GOP copycats in Arizona) quickly reminded those women that this could theoretically allow prosecutors to go after them for aiding and abetting abortions. Instagram and Facebook began removing posts that explicitly offered illicit abortion pills. And many people spread word that period tracking apps are no longer safe for women to use if they’re living in one of the 26 states that either have outlawed or will soon be outlawing abortion:

Though understandable, these calls to action have been poorly thought through. If you’re concerned about a surveillance state newly empowered to snoop through your personal information to possibly prosecute you for procuring an illegal abortion, privacy measures must be much more thorough than merely deleting a period tracking app.

For one, the dangers posed by the data kept by period tracking apps may be overstated. These apps function based on the user proactively logging the days they menstruate and predicting fertile windows accordingly. Though they do provide information about a woman’s cycle, a woman who has encountered a missed period, fearing she may be pregnant, could always log a fake period as a security mechanism to give herself cover.

But beyond that, it’s really not period tracker app data that prosecutors would theoretically seek if attempting to throw people in jail or prison for illegal abortion procurement. Unencrypted messages detailing plans to seek an abortion or confirmation that one is pregnant; phone calls to abortion clinics; search history; purchasing history; location data confirming a person’s physical location at a surreptitiously operating clinic—these are the pieces of a person’s digital footprint that prosecutors are most likely to look for.

“My hope is that people will shoot for something other than maximum cruelty” when enforcing abortion laws, Andrew Fleischman, a criminal appeals attorney, tells Reason.

“[State prosecutors] could get a search warrant for a suspected abortion and check what’s in your phone, but it won’t be the period app at that point, probably text messages, calls to clinics, social media, that stuff,” he confirms.

“I don’t think states have the resources to like, check your app,” yet, though Fleischman adds that period tracker apps could always voluntarily choose to turn over data when faced with legal scrutiny. He notes that the competence of such prosecutors is perhaps overstated, adding that “state prosecutors can’t even get Facebook DMs half the time.”

In the wake of such concerns that some tracker apps will cooperate with prosecutors and hand over data, some activists have suggested ostensibly more secure apps, like Stardust and Clue, which have committed to data privacy measures. But, if more-secure apps are based in the U.S., they could still theoretically be forced to hand over data through subpoenas. (Clue is based in Europe and is likely more secure than astrology-focused Stardust, which is vague about how cooperative it will be if government entities attempt to forcibly collect users’ health information.)

“In addition to facilitating prosecutions of pregnant people for intentionally terminating their pregnancies, technology will also enhance the government’s ability to surveille [sic], investigate, and prosecute pregnant people who did not seek to terminate but whom the state seeks control over by virtue of their pregnancy status,” writes civil rights attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook in a 2020 University of Baltimore Law Review article. “For example, pregnant people’s decisions—to self-medicate, to not medicate, to seek substance abuse treatment, to drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes—are all decisions that could be criminalized and potentially surveilled digitally.” This is all too true in an era where prosecutors may be more frequently looking into pregnancies, seeking evidence of chemical endangerment or suspected abortion.

“Many criminal prosecutions that would have stalled without digital evidence resulted in convictions either at trial or in plea bargaining because the digital evidence completed the picture of the accused’s involvement, state of mind, or intent,” adds Conti-Cook.

It’s not that a pregnant woman’s digital footprint can’t or won’t be used against her; the problem is instead that some activists have rushed to focus on less likely culprits when women concerned about surveillance should actually be taking a much more expansive approach to hiding their digital footprints from agents of the state.

The post Should Women Delete Their Period Tracker Apps in the Wake of <i>Dobbs</i>? appeared first on Reason.com.

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January 6 Hearings Reveal More Trump Misconduct, but Was It Incitement?


dpaphotosfive873955

As a mob of angry supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, former President Donald Trump demanded that Secret Service agents take him to the riot. He even tried to grab the wheel of the car in which he was riding. That’s according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who worked for Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff. Hutchinson made a surprise appearance at the January 6 committee hearings on Tuesday and described the former’s president’s allegedly agitated and irresponsible behavior before, during, and after the attack on the Capitol.

Hutchinson told the committee that Trump threw his lunch at a wall when he learned that former Attorney General William Barr had publicly declined to endorse any stolen election claims. “There was ketchup dripping down the wall,” she said.

Before giving his speech on January 6, Trump told his aides not to bother checking members of the crowd for weapons, saying “they are not here to hurt me,” according to Hutchinson.

Meadows and other senior officials were well aware that mayhem could ensue, according to the Associated Press:

In one gripping scene Hutchinson recalled walking Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani out of the White House when he asked if she was “excited about the 6th.”

“We’re going to the Capitol, it’s going to be great, the president’s going to be there, he’s going to look powerful,” she recalled Giuliani saying.

When she returned inside and told Meadows of that conversation, he told her a lot was going on.

“Things might get real, real bad,” Meadows told her, she recalled.

Mick Mulvaney, former acting chief of staff for Trump, described the president’s awareness that the protesters were armed as “very, very bad,” though it was not a crime for the protesters to carry weapons outside the Capitol; protesting while armed is just the First Amendment plus the Second Amendment.

The Dispatch‘s David French thinks Hutchinson’s testimony raises the possibility that Trump could actually be prosecuted for incitement:

First, Trump summoned the mob to Washington. While Trump is hardly the only organizer of the January 6 rally, he did explicitly call his supporters to Washington, and he did so in a way that implied mayhem. On December 19, 2020, he tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.

Second, he knew the mob was armed and dangerous. This is Hutchinson’s key testimony. If her claims are true, he was so confident that the mob intended him no harm that he wanted to remove the “mags,” a key element of presidential security. He didn’t just know the mob was armed, he wanted it to be armed.

Third, he not only exhorted the mob to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, he reportedly attempted to lead it himself.

As French concedes, however, Trump also exhorted his followers to march “peacefully and patriotically.” French describes that comment as “pro forma ass-covering,” but the “fight like hell” comment did not actually accompany a command to enter the Capitol—Trump merely instructed his followers to march to the Capitol, which was not a crime, even if Trump knew members of his mob were armed.

Other aspects of Trump’s behavior are also under scrutiny. When he learned about the attack on the Capitol, he demanded to be driven to the building. Secret Service refused, prompting Trump to reach for the wheel of the vehicle, according to Hutchinson.

Debates broke out on social media as to whether this detail is actually possible, with some Trumpian figures—including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.)—alleging that it isn’t. On the other hand, Trump apparently left the January 6 rally in his SUV, rather than the presidential limo, and was plausibly seated within striking distance of the wheel.

According to NBC News, the Secret Service is prepared to rebut the charge:

The January 6 hearings do not constitute a trial, of course: Trump will not be made available to argue his side of the story, or to contradict claims made about him. It is easy for witness testimony to seem damning in the absence of cross-examination. In lieu of that, the public must make do with Trump’s response on his social media platform Truth Social, where he blasted Hutchinson as “very negative” and also “bad news,” while simultaneously asserting that he hardly knew her.

CNN analyst Chris Cillizza described the revelations as “utterly devastating” for Trump. It has, of course, already been well-established that Trump’s false statements about the validity of the 2020 election stoked the mob, and his failure to swiftly condemn the violence was inexcusable. It was so bad that many of his most prominent supporters tried desperately to contact him about it while it was happening. His own family members were aghast.

But the reality of the matter is that there’s no middle ground when it comes to Trump. His detractors have overwhelming evidence to support the view that he is one of the most irresponsible public figures in the country’s history. His supporters, on the other hand, are pleased with his record—social conservatives just scored their biggest victory in half a century, thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court appointments—and won’t change their minds just because January 6 is being re-litigated yet again.

FREE MINDS

A spokesperson for Facebook said some posts detailing how to obtain abortion pills were incorrectly taken down. An earlier report by Vice had discovered that Facebook would remove posts containing the phrase “abortion pills can be mailed.” When the word abortion was swapped for guns or marijuana, the posts survived, according to the Associated Press.

While that may sound suspicious, Facebook has a broad policy against using the platform to sell or send pharmaceuticals.

FREE MARKETS

Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr called on Apple and Google to ban TikTok from their app stores due to concerns that the Chinese-owned company could be sharing users’ information with its authoritarian government. “It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data,” wrote Carr in an open letter to Google and Apple.

Carr is right that TikTok’s massive popularity—it is now the world’s most visited website—raises some legitimate national security concerns, given the Chinese government’s control over it. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for Slow Boring, China’s ability to control the political narrative on TikTok is significant: Government censors can prohibit discussions of certain topics and besiege users with pro-Chinese propaganda. There’s already evidence that when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform did just that.

Of course, the U.S. government is not without its hypocrisies. The Biden administration, as well as members of Congress from both parties, have frequently urged social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to make specific content moderation decisions. The White House repeatedly pressed Facebook, for instance, to take down so-called “misinformation” relating to COVID-19 even though many of the government’s talking points on the efficacy of masks and the origins of the disease have proven to be untrue, or more complicated than previously admitted.

It’s appropriate to warn the public about the unique challenges posed by Chinese control of a major social media company. At the same time, the U.S. has handled its social media companies in increasingly illiberal ways.

QUICK HITS

  • Authorities have charged two Mexican nationals in connection with the deaths of 51 migrants who perished from extreme heat inside a tractor-trailer in San Antonio.
  • Turkey is okay with adding Finland and Sweden to NATO.
  • A judge has sentenced Ghislaine Maxwell to 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually assault underage women.
  • Some Medieval Times employees want to unionize the company.
  • A Boston Globe article claims that there’s an epidemic of “roofied” drinks at Boston bars—which is almost certainly false.

The post January 6 Hearings Reveal More Trump Misconduct, but Was It Incitement? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Morning Wood: ARKK Founder Admits She Got Inflation Wrong, Says She’ll Continue Her Strategy Anyway

Morning Wood: ARKK Founder Admits She Got Inflation Wrong, Says She’ll Continue Her Strategy Anyway

Cathie Wood finally offered up somewhat of a mea culpa – at least for her previous calls on inflation, though not quite so much for the underperformance of her flagship fund and her previous call that the market had bottomed back in January – on Tuesday of this week. 

After being bludgeoned in the face with data that was perpetually proving her prognostications incorrect, Wood told CNBC on Tuesday: “We were wrong on one thing, and that was inflation being as sustained as it has been.”

But what would that mea culpa be without immediately falling back on her greatest hits, including once again predicting deflation?

According to Bloomberg, Wood then added: “Supply chain — I can’t believe it’s taken more than two years, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, of course we couldn’t have seen that. So inflation has been a bigger problem. But I think that it has set us up for deflation.”

Wood also did a decent job pointing out the state of both the high end and the low end consumer in the U.S., stating: “The consumer is railing against these price increases,” Wood said. “Many people think, ‘oh, the heavy spenders will keep this thing going.’ Consumer sentiment in the highest-income groups is lower than in the lowest-income groups, and the latter group is being tormented by food and energy prices, which are really a regressive tax increase.”

Wood also continued to defend her strategy of picking “innovation” stocks, despite the fact that her ARKK fund has been decimated so far in 2022, falling about 53%. She said: “The most important thing we need to do is stick to our knitting. The worst thing that could happen is style drift.”

“When people invest in Ark, they know they’re getting truly disruptive transformative innovation. That’s what we offer, and we don’t pretend to offer anything else,” she continued. Because why let the facts change your investing outlook, right?

As Bloomberg dryly noted on Tuesday, “Wood joins Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in admitting incorrect inflation projections.”

If the two of them didn’t make up 12 hours of a 13 hour day of financial news programming, it almost wouldn’t be an issue, right?

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/29/2022 – 09:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/4ZpUfjQ Tyler Durden

January 6 Hearings Reveal More Trump Misconduct, but Was It Incitement?


dpaphotosfive873955

As a mob of angry supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, former President Donald Trump demanded that Secret Service agents take him to the riot. He even tried to grab the wheel of the car in which he was riding. That’s according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who worked for Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff. Hutchinson made a surprise appearance at the January 6 committee hearings on Tuesday and described the former’s president’s allegedly agitated and irresponsible behavior before, during, and after the attack on the Capitol.

Hutchinson told the committee that Trump threw his lunch at a wall when he learned that former Attorney General William Barr had publicly declined to endorse any stolen election claims. “There was ketchup dripping down the wall,” she said.

Before giving his speech on January 6, Trump told his aides not to bother checking members of the crowd for weapons, saying “they are not here to hurt me,” according to Hutchinson.

Meadows and other senior officials were well aware that mayhem could ensue, according to the Associated Press:

In one gripping scene Hutchinson recalled walking Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani out of the White House when he asked if she was “excited about the 6th.”

“We’re going to the Capitol, it’s going to be great, the president’s going to be there, he’s going to look powerful,” she recalled Giuliani saying.

When she returned inside and told Meadows of that conversation, he told her a lot was going on.

“Things might get real, real bad,” Meadows told her, she recalled.

Mick Mulvaney, former acting chief of staff for Trump, described the president’s awareness that the protesters were armed as “very, very bad,” though it was not a crime for the protesters to carry weapons outside the Capitol; protesting while armed is just the First Amendment plus the Second Amendment.

The Dispatch‘s David French thinks Hutchinson’s testimony raises the possibility that Trump could actually be prosecuted for incitement:

First, Trump summoned the mob to Washington. While Trump is hardly the only organizer of the January 6 rally, he did explicitly call his supporters to Washington, and he did so in a way that implied mayhem. On December 19, 2020, he tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.

Second, he knew the mob was armed and dangerous. This is Hutchinson’s key testimony. If her claims are true, he was so confident that the mob intended him no harm that he wanted to remove the “mags,” a key element of presidential security. He didn’t just know the mob was armed, he wanted it to be armed.

Third, he not only exhorted the mob to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, he reportedly attempted to lead it himself.

As French concedes, however, Trump also exhorted his followers to march “peacefully and patriotically.” French describes that comment as “pro forma ass-covering,” but the “fight like hell” comment did not actually accompany a command to enter the Capitol—Trump merely instructed his followers to march to the Capitol, which was not a crime, even if Trump knew members of his mob were armed.

Other aspects of Trump’s behavior are also under scrutiny. When he learned about the attack on the Capitol, he demanded to be driven to the building. Secret Service refused, prompting Trump to reach for the wheel of the vehicle, according to Hutchinson.

Debates broke out on social media as to whether this detail is actually possible, with some Trumpian figures—including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.)—alleging that it isn’t. On the other hand, Trump apparently left the January 6 rally in his SUV, rather than the presidential limo, and was plausibly seated within striking distance of the wheel.

According to NBC News, the Secret Service is prepared to rebut the charge:

The January 6 hearings do not constitute a trial, of course: Trump will not be made available to argue his side of the story, or to contradict claims made about him. It is easy for witness testimony to seem damning in the absence of cross-examination. In lieu of that, the public must make do with Trump’s response on his social media platform Truth Social, where he blasted Hutchinson as “very negative” and also “bad news,” while simultaneously asserting that he hardly knew her.

CNN analyst Chris Cillizza described the revelations as “utterly devastating” for Trump. It has, of course, already been well-established that Trump’s false statements about the validity of the 2020 election stoked the mob, and his failure to swiftly condemn the violence was inexcusable. It was so bad that many of his most prominent supporters tried desperately to contact him about it while it was happening. His own family members were aghast.

But the reality of the matter is that there’s no middle ground when it comes to Trump. His detractors have overwhelming evidence to support the view that he is one of the most irresponsible public figures in the country’s history. His supporters, on the other hand, are pleased with his record—social conservatives just scored their biggest victory in half a century, thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court appointments—and won’t change their minds just because January 6 is being re-litigated yet again.

FREE MINDS

A spokesperson for Facebook said some posts detailing how to obtain abortion pills were incorrectly taken down. An earlier report by Vice had discovered that Facebook would remove posts containing the phrase “abortion pills can be mailed.” When the word abortion was swapped for guns or marijuana, the posts survived, according to the Associated Press.

While that may sound suspicious, Facebook has a broad policy against using the platform to sell or send pharmaceuticals.

FREE MARKETS

Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr called on Apple and Google to ban TikTok from their app stores due to concerns that the Chinese-owned company could be sharing users’ information with its authoritarian government. “It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data,” wrote Carr in an open letter to Google and Apple.

Carr is right that TikTok’s massive popularity—it is now the world’s most visited website—raises some legitimate national security concerns, given the Chinese government’s control over it. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for Slow Boring, China’s ability to control the political narrative on TikTok is significant: Government censors can prohibit discussions of certain topics and besiege users with pro-Chinese propaganda. There’s already evidence that when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform did just that.

Of course, the U.S. government is not without its hypocrisies. The Biden administration, as well as members of Congress from both parties, have frequently urged social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to make specific content moderation decisions. The White House repeatedly pressed Facebook, for instance, to take down so-called “misinformation” relating to COVID-19 even though many of the government’s talking points on the efficacy of masks and the origins of the disease have proven to be untrue, or more complicated than previously admitted.

It’s appropriate to warn the public about the unique challenges posed by Chinese control of a major social media company. At the same time, the U.S. has handled its social media companies in increasingly illiberal ways.

QUICK HITS

  • Authorities have charged two Mexican nationals in connection with the deaths of 51 migrants who perished from extreme heat inside a tractor-trailer in San Antonio.
  • Turkey is okay with adding Finland and Sweden to NATO.
  • A judge has sentenced Ghislaine Maxwell to 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually assault underage women.
  • Some Medieval Times employees want to unionize the company.
  • A Boston Globe article claims that there’s an epidemic of “roofied” drinks at Boston bars—which is almost certainly false.

The post January 6 Hearings Reveal More Trump Misconduct, but Was It Incitement? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Optimism Among US Business Leaders Drops To New Low Amid Rising Inflation, Supply Issues, Labor Shortages

Optimism Among US Business Leaders Drops To New Low Amid Rising Inflation, Supply Issues, Labor Shortages

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)

Optimism among business leaders regarding the outlook of the U.S. economy has drastically declined in the past year, according to JPMorgan’s 2022 Business Leaders Outlook Pulse, released Monday.

A man shops at a Safeway grocery store in Annapolis, Maryland, on May 16, 2022. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

More than 1,500 midsize business leaders participated in the survey (pdf), which was conducted between May 25 and June 10 across executives of midsize companies in the United States that have annual revenues from $20 million to $500 million.

It found that just one in five business leaders, or 19 percent, said they were optimistic about the national economy for the year ahead, representing the lowest percentage recorded in the 12 years that the survey has been conducted by JPMorgan. That figure is also down significantly from 75 percent one year ago.

Amid the decline in optimism, the survey showed that pessimism around the national economy jumped to 51 percent from 10 percent a year ago amid soaring inflation and interest rates and ongoing supply chain issues and labor shortages.

Meanwhile, just 9 percent of business leaders expressed optimism over the global economy.

Among those surveyed, 99 percent reported that their costs of doing business have increased in the past year, with 71 percent stating that their top challenge is rising costs, including inflation.

Labor issues, including recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees and labor shortages, came in at 70 percent, while 86 percent of respondents said that they believe inflation is worse than it was six months ago, along with interest rates at 65 percent.

Passing Costs Onto Customers

Inflation is currently sitting at a 40-year high in the United States, which has forced many businesses to pass those higher costs onto customers.

Of those surveyed by JPMorgan, more than three-quarters of businesses (76 percent) said they are raising prices, with 42 percent stating they have passed at least half of their increased costs to consumers via increased prices.

That trend is unlikely to disappear any time soon, according to the survey, which found that 81 percent of respondents are likely to keep raising prices in an effort to offset higher costs.

Despite the gloomy outlook, 73 percent of those surveyed said they expect increased revenue or sales for the year ahead, while 71 percent are optimistic about their company’s performance.

The survey comes shortly after a poll by Morning Consult found that optimism about the future of the United States is waning among adults.

Read the rest here…

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/29/2022 – 09:21

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/twsQacN Tyler Durden

Central Bankers Galore: Watch Powell, Lagarde, And Bailey Live From ECB Forum

Central Bankers Galore: Watch Powell, Lagarde, And Bailey Live From ECB Forum

Today’s main event, the ECB Forum panel featuring Fed Chair Powell, ECB President Lagarde, BoE Governor Bailey as well as BIS head Agustin Carstens, has started in Sintra Portugal.

As Academy Securites’ strategist Peter Tchir writes, he will be looking closely at Powell “to see whether he reverts to super hawk, or lets his nervousness on the economy and dovishness out? Given the political rhetoric seemed to change last week, and he was front in center, I am taking his comments as far more seriously than any other Fed Speakers (for now).”

Watch it live below.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/29/2022 – 09:11

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/pj4eflq Tyler Durden

German Inflation Unexpectedly Eases In June, But…

German Inflation Unexpectedly Eases In June, But…

German inflation unexpectedly slowed in June, with harmonized CPI slowing from +8.7% YoY to +8.2% YoY, dramatically below expectations of a rise to +8.8% YoY. Notably, we have seen these ‘dips’ in inflation before on this surge, so let’s not get too excited…

Source: Bloomberg

As Bloomberg reports, the easing of inflationary pressures is largely due to temporary government relief measures – lower fuel taxes and discounted public-transport costs.

Germany’s slowdown could extend into next month, when a renewable-energy charge on electricity prices is abolished, but underlying price pressures are likely to stay elevated, according to Berenberg economist Salomon Fiedler.

However, inflation-fighters and transitory-supporters should not celebrate yet as Bloomberg notes that Governing Council member Pierre Wunsch warned Wednesday in an interview that the ECB may need to raise rates by more than it wants if inflation prompts governments to spend ever-increasing amounts on shielding households.

Additionally, The ECB is unlikely to back off its tightening plans as inflation pressure remains intense elsewhere in the 19-member euro zone: Spain earlier reported a surprise jump to an all-time high of 10%, defying politicians’ efforts to curb it.

Of course, there is the question of whether The ECB is easing at all…

Smoke and Mirrors it is…

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/29/2022 – 08:59

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/iDnqXg0 Tyler Durden

Oil Extends Gains After Indirect US-Iran Nuclear Talks Fail In Qatar

Oil Extends Gains After Indirect US-Iran Nuclear Talks Fail In Qatar

High hopes had been placed on the indirect talks set to be held in Qatar starting Tuesday between Iran and the United States, which involved the European Union mediating between the two; however after the second day the Iranian side is reporting that talks have already ended without an agreement or any breakthrough. 

“Indirect talks between the United States and Iran to revive a 2015 nuclear agreement have ended in Qatar without a result, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Wednesday,” Reuters reports.

Underscoring the importance of the Qatar-hosted talks as a restored nuclear deal still hangs from a thread, and is looking more unlikely than ever at this point, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell traveled to Doha to help mediate, after days prior meeting with Iranian officials in Tehran.

Most crucially from the viewpoint of the West, lack of progress in these last ditch efforts further means there’s no full-scale return of Iranian oil to international markets on the horizon…

Crude prices rose steadily throughout the morning, after edging higher since the start of the week and the G7 summit’s pledge of ‘tougher’ action against Russia and Vladimir Putin, also as they continue mulling plans for imposing a price cap on Russian energy as part of exploring ways to ensure the Kremlin’s war machine doesn’t benefit from soaring energy prices.

The Biden administration has been scrambling to tap heretofore inaccessible supplies of crude, including from Venezuela, also as the Saudis appear cool on Washington efforts to get them to pump more. Al Jazeera reviews of where things stand in the indefinitely stalled efforts at a restored JCPOA, which earlier centered on the Vienna process:

  • After several rounds of talks interspersed with pauses, negotiators seemed to be on the verge of an agreement in March, but it never came about.
  • Since then, Iran and the US have been exchanging messages, but have failed to clinch an agreement.
  • How far the US will go in lifting the sanctions has been the major point of disagreement between the two – the status of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a major stumbling block, with the US unwilling to remove the military branch from its foreign terrorist organisation list.

Meanwhile, the Iranians have remained insistent that it is only the US side holding things up, and that essentially the ball is still in Washington’s court, and it is for the Biden administration to act, perhaps also with an understanding that Russia-Ukraine events add pressure to the White House stance vis-a-vis Iran.

Via Reuters

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said Tueday: “I believe that if the American side is in possession of serious resolve and acts realistically, an agreement is within reach at this stage and at this round of the negotiations.” He added: “We are serious and would, under no circumstances, cross our redlines,” which have been drawn in line with the objective of “meeting the country’s national interests to the maximum,” state media quoted him as saying. “The agenda is clear.”

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/29/2022 – 08:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/bxXQ6sc Tyler Durden