Month: July 2022

Authored by Allen Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An investigation by a Utah sheriff into allegations of “ritualistic child sexual abuse” has shocked residents as over 120 victims and those who know victims have come forward.

The local sheriff leading the investigation has solicited help from the FBI, which confirmed it is assisting in the investigation.

The alleged abuse occurred for two decades, from 1990 through 2010. In recent weeks, dozens of witnesses have come forward with information on these incidents.

“I don’t know the exact number, but it is now over 120 people who have contacted us. [Of that number], I am sure. There are likely more than 120 at this point,” Utah County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Cannon told The Epoch Times.

Cannon said the tips are from “a combination of victims or those who know of victims. So, not all tips are from victims.”

On May 31, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced that the investigation had been underway since April 2021 involving reports of “ritualistic child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking” in Utah County, the state’s second-largest county.

The investigation uncovered even more victims in neighboring Juab County and Sanpete County during the same period. In a press release, the sheriff’s office said that local law enforcement confirmed “portions of these allegations.”

The Utah County Sheriff’s Office leads the investigation with other local law enforcement agencies and the FBI.

“It’s common practice for the FBI to offer assistance, when requested, to our law enforcement partners. We are assisting, and so I will defer to the lead agency, which is the Utah County Sheriff’s Office,” said FBI spokeswoman Sandra Barker.

At a press conference, a day after authorities announced the joint investigation in Utah County, then-Utah County attorney David Leavitt identified himself and his wife, an attorney, as potential suspects while vigorously refuting the claims.

Leavitt, who lost a reelection bid on June 28 to his challenger, who won by 73 percent of the vote, said law enforcement “is about trust … it is about being able to say that when the government makes an allegation that there’s substance behind [it] that we can believe in.”

He demanded that the sheriff resign and that the investigation stop.

“We deserve more from our public officials, and we deserve more from the news media to respectfully and responsibly ferret out what is true and what is not,” said Leavitt during his 30-minute briefing.

Leavitt accused Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith of conducting a politically motivated witch hunt in an election year.

County Attorney ‘Named Himself’ as Suspect

In his rebutting press conference, Sheriff Smith said his office released no documents to the public that identified Leavitt as a suspect and denied that the investigation was political.

“Mr. Leavitt named himself,” Cannon said and would neither confirm, deny, or comment about anyone whose names have come up in the case.

“What I will say, however, is that the case Mr. Leavitt referred to is not the case we began investigating in April 2021. He implies otherwise, but he is wrong,” Cannon said.

Smith refused to resign, halt the probe, or reprimand officers involved in the Utah County Sheriff’s Office Special Victim’s Unit investigation.

“We will continue to do our jobs. We won’t be intimidated by [Leavitt’s] attempts to railroad this investigation,” Smith said.

The sheriff’s office would not discuss the case further, absent new developments.

“And when I say new developments, I mean something beyond what we’ve said and the investigation of original information and talking to those reporting information to us as tips,” Cannon said.

“We don’t discuss the [victims’ names] or suspects [while investigating cases]. In most cases, we comment very little, if at all, on active investigations. We have not, and will not at this point, confirm, deny, or name people whose names may or may not have come up in this or any other investigation.”

The recent spate of ritualistic child abuse reports harkens back to the “Satanic Panic” that gripped Western states during the 1980s and ’90s.

A special report in The Daily Herald in Provo, Utah, dated Oct. 30, 1988, described ritualistic child abuse and Satanism as a severe problem in Utah and Utah County.

Beyond the lurid allegations of abuse, however, these cases proved challenging, lacking physical evidence, relying on oral testimony, and triggered memories years after.

“Yes, there are definitely several cases,” the story quoted Robert Parrish, an official in the Utah Attorney General’s office at the time.

“I’m not assuming I know all of them, but there are at least a half dozen that have involved ceremonial—not necessarily satanistic rituals—but most involve aspects that fit like a glove to Satanism.”

Read more here…

Now with the 30 member nations having signed the NATO accession protocols for Sweden and Finland on Tuesday, which brings them a huge step closer to entering the alliance, Russian President Vladimir Putin has reacted by downplaying it:

Russia has “no problem” if Finland and Sweden join NATO, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday. “We don’t have problems with Sweden and Finland like we do with Ukraine,” Putin told a news conference in the Turkmenistan capital of Ashgabat. Finland and Sweden will be formally invited to join the alliance after Turkey dropped its opposition on Tuesday. 

WATCH: On Russian State TV, President Putin (@KremlinRussia_E) stated that Sweden and Finland are free to join NATO because their circumstances differ from Ukraine’s. pic.twitter.com/th4tYmVHQS

— BNN Newsroom (@BNNBreaking) July 5, 2022

However, he was also quoted as saying he couldn’t rule out that new tensions would emerge in Russian relations with Helsinki and Stockholm now that they’ve abandoned their historic neutrality regarding the Western military alliance.

Additionally he suggested a further militarization along the 830-mile Russian-Finnish border, in line with prior comments from top Kremlin officials: “President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia would respond in kind if NATO set up infrastructure in Finland and Sweden after they join the US-led military alliance,” according to AFP, though without explaining further.

The thrust of his comments appeared to focus on the question of Ukraine joining and Sweden-Finland being “two different things”.

Putin explained in the televised remarks, “They began turning Ukraine into an anti-Russia bridgehead for trying to destabilize Russia itself. They began fighting Russian culture and language. They began to persecute individuals who regarded themselves as part of the Russian world,” in reference to the Ukrainian government post-2014, following the forced ouster of Russian-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych.

Two months ago as it emerged that Finland would seriously pursue joining NATO, there were fears this could spark a Russia-NATO war, but now these and other comments of Putin on the question strongly suggest Moscow is willing to de-escalate on the question. 

One more important step forward. ⁰
Today, #NATO Allies signed the Accession Protocols for 🇫🇮 and 🇸🇪. We want to extend a sincere thank you to all Allies.

The next step on the road towards membership is the ratification process in all national parliaments.
#FinlandNATO pic.twitter.com/lUHKBPkncy

— Finland at NATO (@FinMissionNATO) July 5, 2022

It seems for the first time the Russian leader has offered NATO a partial olive branch of sorts, signaling Russia doesn’t wish to stumble into broader conflict with the Western military alliance, particularly over the Scandinavia countries’ accession.

He was also addressing critics who don’t buy the Russian arguments that the Ukraine invasion was fundamentally driven by NATO expansion. This was the most detailed that President Putin has been of late in explaining why the Ukraine matter is “different” – or a unique threat to Russia’s national security – when it comes to NATO expansion.

Authored by Gary Bai via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S.-Mexico border has become the world’s “deadliest” land crossing, according to data recently brought to light by a United Nations study.

A historic high of 728 recorded immigrant deaths and disappearances along the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in 2021 has made the land crossing the deadliest in the world, according to the study conducted by the United Nations agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

These deaths accounted for the majority of the 1,238 immigrant deaths in the Americas in 2021, the IOM said in a press release on July 1, adding that these numbers should be considered an “undercount” due to difficulties in collecting data.

The study attributed the deaths and disappearance of immigrants in the Americas to a “lack of options for safe and regular mobility,” saying that this would drive migrants, presumably those choosing to enter as illegal aliens, to pursue riskier dangerous pathways to their destinations.

The agency also noted how the dangers faced by migrants are highlighted by recent news about what amounted to the deadliest known smuggling incident in American history: the discovery of 53 bodies in a tractor-trailer packed with 67 illegal immigrants in San Antonio on June 27.

The record deaths came as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents reported a record number of apprehensions along the southern border.

According to CBP statistics obtained by The Epoch Times, border patrol agents from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego apprehended 232,628 illegal border crossers in May—the highest monthly total in 23 years.

In the same month, 79 illegal immigrants were found dead or died while crossing the border, according to the CBP data.

“When that many people come across the border, it’s just a matter of math—you increase those that come across the border, you increase those that put themselves into the hands of the criminal cartels—you are certainly going to increase the deaths at the border,” Tom Homan, former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told The Epoch Times in June.

“Very vulnerable people take the risk and pay criminal cartels who don’t give one cent about these people,” Homan said, adding that more migrants have died so far during President Joe Biden’s term in office than “any time [he] can remember in [his] 35-year career.”

Since Biden took office in January 2021, border authorities have apprehended more than 3.2 million illegal border crossers, according to CBP data. An additional 800,000 or so have been detected but evaded capture.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

Charlotte Cuthbertson contributed to this report.

Power-grid operators across the US recently warned about the increasing risks of electricity shortages and the potential need to implement rolling blackouts for grid stability this summer. According to a Reuters report, utilities are sounding the alarm about a transformer shortage. 

Utility operators are stocking up on transformers, distribution lines, and poles, though many have one similar issue: sourcing has become challenging, and this is all happening as hurricane season has begun on the East Coast and heatwaves and fires scorch the West. 

“We’re doing a lot more splicing, putting cables together, instead of laying new cable because we’re trying to maintain our new cable for inventory when we need it,” Nick Akins, chief executive of American Electric Power, a utility company delivering electricity to more than five million customers in 11 states in the eastern half of the US. 

New Jersey-based Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. Chief Executive Ralph Izzo warned inventories are tight for transformers. 

“You don’t want to deplete your inventory because you don’t know when that storm is coming, but you know it’s coming,” Izzo said. The utility serves millions of residential and business customers across New Jersey. 

Utilities across the country are getting dangerously low on overhead distribution transformers. Supply is lacking, and the shortfall could take two years to correct. 

“If we have successive days of 100-degree-heat, those pole-top transformers, they start popping like Rice Krispies, and we would not have the supply stack to replace them,” Izzo said.

If wild weather from coast to coast wreaks havoc on power grids in the coming months, some utilities might find replacing transformers impossible because of limited supplies. 

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Video footage surfaced online that appeared to show a crowd of people at a Somali cultural event in Minneapolis booing “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) over the weekend.

Omar, who came to the United States as a Somali refugee, made an appearance at a concert featuring Somali singer Suldaan Seeraar at the city’s Target Center. As soon as she arrived on stage, the boos began, according to footage posted online.

Ilhan Omar got booed onstage at a concert featuring Somali singer Soldaan Seraar in Minnesota last night.
People in the crowd chanted “Get out!” & shouted “Get the f*ck out of here!”. pic.twitter.com/sggii7h6sO

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) July 3, 2022

Some yelled at her, “Get out!” and “get the [expletive] out of here.”

“It was an honor to welcome you to our incredible city,” the Democratic congresswoman said in a Twitter post alongside a 14-second clip. The clip ended moments after the audience started to boo loudly.

Longer videos suggested that the crowd booed her for about a minute after she and her husband came onto the stage. “OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, we don’t have all night,” Omar said at one point as the crowd kept booing.

Unclear Why

Some people suggested that it’s because of Omar’s support for Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion nationwide, support for LGBT causes, and other left-wing causes. Omar is currently the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

It’s not clear what prompted the response, and neither Omar nor her office has issued a public comment about the matter. The Epoch Times has contacted Omar’s office several times for comment about the boos.

Following last month’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Omar said she would fight to codify it into law. She’s also publicly backed proposals to expand the Supreme Court and end the Senate filibuster to pass abortion laws.

On the 4th of July, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared that, if Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange is convicted in the United States, the Statue of Liberty should be dismantled, reports the Mexico Daily Post. 

Assange is currently imprisoned by the United Kingdom pending an extradition to the United States on charges under the U.S. Espionage Act. Those charges spring from his receipt and publishing of vast troves of classified American government documents. Among many other embarrassing disclosures, the files revealed previously undisclosed civilian casualties of the war in Iraq.  

On Friday, Assange appealed the UK government’s extradition decision to the High Court. PEN International, a global association of writers, condemned the U.S government’s conduct in the case:

“Julian Assange’s prosecution raises profound concerns about freedom of the press. Invoking the Espionage Act for practices that include receiving and publishing classified information sends a dangerous signal to journalists and publishers worldwide.” 

Speaking at a press conference at the National Palace, López Obrador called for the “most important press in the world”—including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Mexico’s El Pais—to “convene a meeting…to exhort, request, call, so that a pardon be granted to Assange.”  

He continued:

“If they don’t do it, they will be tarnished and we will have to start the campaign that, if they take him to the US, and sentence him to the maximum sentence [to] die in prison, they will have to dismantle the Statue of Liberty that the French delivered…because it is no longer a symbol of freedom.”

López Obrador pledged to make his own personal appeal. “I want to state that I am going to ask President Biden to address this matter. I am aware that it goes against the severe hardliners that exist in the United States as in all countries, but humanism must also prevail,” he said. 

He has previously indicated his willingness to grant Assange humanitarian asylum and Mexican citizenship. 

It’s not the first time López Obrador has invoked the Statue of Liberty in criticizing political conditions in the United States.

Referring to social media firms de-platforming then-sitting U.S. president Donald Trump in January 2021, he said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed that since they took these decisions, the Statue of Liberty in New York is turning green with anger, because it doesn’t want to become an empty symbol.”

A consistent Western gadfly, in June López Obrador condemned NATO’s “immoral” proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. “How easy it is to say, ‘Here, I’ll send you this much money for weapons.’ Couldn’t the war in Ukraine have been avoided? Of course it could…’I’ll supply the weapons, and you supply the dead.’ It is immoral.”

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Although many don’t realize it, interest rates are simply the price of money.

And they are the most important prices in all of capitalism.

They have an enormous impact on banks, the real estate market, and the auto industry. It’s hard to think of a business that interest rates don’t affect in some meaningful way.

Today, we are on the cusp of a rare paradigm shift in interest rates. Such changes take decades—or even generations—to occur. But when they do, the financial implications are profound.

Interest rates rise and fall through decades-long cycles, as seen in the chart below.

That makes sense, as debt is naturally cyclical. It allows people to consume more than they produce now. But it also forces them to produce more than they consume later to pay it off.

Interest rates last peaked in 1981 at over 15%. Then, they fell for 39 years and bottomed in July 2020 at around 0.62%.

The red line marks the long-term average of 5.6%.

Since the bottom in 2020, yields have gone up more than 5x. This reflects a significant shift. I think we are now at the very beginning of a new, long-term uptrend in interest rates.

As of writing, the 10-year Treasury is yielding around 3.2%. That’s still far below the long-term historical average of approximately 5.6%. It’s also not even in the ballpark of the US government’s dubious official inflation rate of 8.6%, which is undoubtedly understated.

In other words, interest rates have a lot of room to go up.

I expect interest rates to reach new all-time highs in this new, long-term cycle. That would mean we’d see the 10-year Treasury yield north of 15%.

Interest Rates Are Rigged

Remember, interest rates are the price of money. They are the most important prices in all of capitalism. Yet they’re controlled by a politburo of central planners at the Federal Reserve, not set by the market like any other price.

It’s strange that many people thoughtlessly accept this as “normal.” In reality, the Fed is engaged in a massive price-fixing scam… and nobody seems to care.

While the Fed exercises undue influence over interest rates, other significant factors are at play here. And they all point to higher interest rates.

Together, they’re ushering in a once-in-a-generation shift that is both unstoppable and imminent.

Aside from the Federal Reserve, the US government’s federal budget has enormous influence over interest rates. That’s because when the government spends more than it brings in from taxes, it issues debt (i.e., Treasuries) to make up the difference.

And now that Congress has normalized multi-trillion dollar federal spending deficits, that means an avalanche of new Treasuries to finance them.

Who Will Buy All This Paper?

Historically, there has been a vast foreign appetite for Treasuries. But not anymore.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government has launched its most aggressive sanctions campaign ever.

As part of this, the US government seized the US dollar reserves of the Russian central bank—the accumulated savings of the nation.

It was a stunning illustration of the dollar’s political risk. The US government can seize another sovereign country’s dollar reserves at the flip of a switch.

The Wall Street Journal, in an article titled “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock,” noted:

“Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management and even the international role of the U.S. dollar.”

China is one of the largest holders of US Treasuries, and it indeed took note of what happened to Russia. It’s probably a big reason Beijing cut its Treasury holdings to a 12-year low.

Even US allies, like Japan, have also cut their Treasury holdings.

There are numerous other examples. But it’s clear the world isn’t hungry for US debt right now.

The Russia sanctions episode is a reason foreigners—and other Treasury holders—may start to question the US’ willingness to meet its debt obligations. That would drive demand for higher yields to account for the added risk.

What about the Fed?

Usually, the Federal Reserve would help the federal government finance its deficits by creating trillions of new currency units to buy Treasuries. But with inflation spiraling out of control and the Fed desperately tightening, it is not in a position to come to the rescue this time.

To summarize, here are the five reasons to expect higher interest rates:

1. Inflation is out of control. Even the government’s official inflation statistics—which understate the situation—are far above current interest rates.

2. The federal government must issue a flood of new Treasuries to finance multi-trillion dollar deficits—which are here to stay.

3. Sanctions are eroding confidence in the US financial system.

4. Foreigners aren’t buying as many Treasuries.

5. The Fed is tightening.

When you connect all the dots, I think it’s clear we are starting a new long-term cycle, with rising interest rates and a bear market in bonds. That will have enormous implications for the economy and the stock market.

We will likely see incredible volatility in the financial markets as thousands of businesses that had become accustomed to easy money and artificially low interest rates go bankrupt.

*  *  *

The economic trajectory is troubling. Unfortunately, there’s little any individual can practically do to change the course of these trends in motion. The best you can and should do is to stay informed so that you can protect yourself in the best way possible, and even profit from the situation. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his colleagues just released an urgent new PDF report that explains what could come next and what you can do about it. Click here to download it now.