March 19th, 2023 • 3h 3m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
BM LGBBTQQIAAPK+ Noodle Boy
“When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.”
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Federal Reserve Discount Window Tapped By Banks For Largest Amount Ever | Crowdfund Insider
Bat vs Lab vs Raccoon vs Dog
M5M
China
Inside info on TikTok advertising
ITM to my favorite podcasters,
I was just listening to Thursday's show and have some insight on the TikTok conversation. Due to geo-political issues involved in this, and who my employer is, I'd like to remain anonymous if you use any of this in a show. I manage global brand ads on social media for a large tech manufacturer that is very active on TikTok, but I also am responsible for governance and best practices for all social media ads for our company across all our lines of business and countries around the world. We've shifted nearly half of our brand social ad budget to TikTok over the last year, and eComm and other ads are also shifting a lot of budget that way. I reached out to our rep to get an official TikTok stance. I'm copying and pasting verbatim here, except for removing a couple of sentences that would identify my company or the TikTok employee who sent it. I thought it might be interesting to see how they're handling this - and I actually learned some interesting things that NO ONE seems to be reporting on:
Copy/Paste:
First, I recognize the goal of showing up on TikTok and spending your media budgets with our platform is to elevate ***** brand. I do believe despite the political climate we continue to deliver on this. It's important to separate congressmen sentiment vs. user sentiment towards TikTok (which continues to be positive and outpace other platforms).
Second, we are highly confident we won't get banned. Our strategy as a company remains the same: continue to be transparent, have U.S. based protections for storing user data in the U.S. with Oracle, and build systems with robust third party monitoring, vetting and verification. There's a reason why it's TikTok in the U.S. vs Douyin in China - we must adhere to U.S. law as a U.S. company. As headlines prove, TikTok faces more scrutiny than any other tech/social/media platform. With that, we are more transparent, more proactive and more cognizant of the guardrails we must have in place if we want to operate in the U.S.
Let's look back at the Trump era:
• 130M+ users in the U.S. use TikTok to express themselves, so it's a platform tied to the first amendment, freedom of speech. This was at the foundation on why a ban was denied from the courts during the Trump administration and still holds true.
Who has access to TikTok user data?
• All U.S. data is stored automatically in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure in the U.S., a secure environment to protect Americans' user data.
• Data access is managed by our U.S. Data Security team who are part of our initiative Project Project Texas, responsible for implementing layers of security and oversight to ensure that Americans can feel very confident that the data that they share with us is safe and secure.
Ok, what exactly is Project Texas?
• An initiative in partnership with Oracle that has cost $1.5B and been 2 years in the works preventing inappropriate access to data including no approval mechanism by which U.S. data would be shared with the Chinese govt. Data has never been shared nor have they ever asked TikTok for U.S. user data.
• Five pillars of focus: independent governance, data and access control, software assurance, content assurance, 3rd party oversight
• Independent US govt approved 3rd parties will be invited to conduct regular audits of our data sytem
• Protected data will not be allowed to be transferred anywhere outside the U.S.
• TikTok's source code is reviewed by Oracle and a 3rd party inspector (enacted since Aug 2022, first revealed in a letter to a group of U.S. senators in June 2022)
Other important information:
• All users opt into the data we collect. We are transparent. We never collect real time physical locations (like Google Maps would) but instead approximate locations to serve relevant content, as any other relevant app or publisher does. Unlike other platforms we also never sell user data to anyone.
• We have significant safeguards for users 13-18
• Bytedance, our parent company, is incorporated in the Caymen Islands, not China. 60% of the company is owned by global investment firms, 20% by our founders and 20% by employees - including thousands of Americans.
----------
end Copy/Paste
The last few bullet points were mostly news to me. Especially the real-time location limitation. If true, TikTok couldn't possibly share the kind of data with China that any other social app could, even if they wanted to.
Hope that at least sheds a little additional light on how blatant some of the lies are around "controlling our data" as Rubio put it.
Thank you for your courage.
TikTok Computer Vision follow-up
Hey Adam,
Been listening to the latest NA Show.
Quick follow-up on TikTok's Computer Vision:
TikTok's Computer Vision via the HD SmartPhone Camera automatically reads, catalogues and collates the stuff in people's rooms and streams it to a database without the need of humans to organize it. The consumer profiling of young millenials and zoomers is done in real-time, with less worry of human error/lazyness/poor training/people quitting etc.
When the data is annotated as text, it becomes metadata, which can easily be packaged and sold to advertisers. Millions of teen girls dancing in their rooms means millions of advertiser-friendly consumer profiles being created in real time without the time-sucking need of humans, thanks to Computer Vision's automation. Humans take too long to do this type of work and get lost in the amount of data streaming in at them. The AI can suck it up, annotate, collate and turn it into consumer metadata suited to an array of psychographical market segments. Then TikTok can decide what to do with it.
Is this AI perfect? No.
Is it better than humans at this level? Yes. Much quicker, too.
I don't think FB and Insta can keep up with this volume of data-profiling, which is in part giving TikTok its mega ad-leverage.
BTW, I really appreciate the audio quality of the NA Show. It sounds fantastic on all my devices.
Best,
Tokyo Matt
Pentagon’s $842 Billion Budget Focuses on China Threat – David Icke
President Joe Biden’s $886.3 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) defense budget request includes $842 billion for the Pentagon, a $26 billion, or 3.2 percent, increase over this year’s military spending plan with the “growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC)” again named the nation’s most pressing “pacing challenge.”
Both Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III used the same phrase in describing the proposed military budget’s emphasis on China, each calling it “the most strategy aligned military budget” in the nation’s history.
“Nowhere is that alignment more pronounced than in the seriousness with which this budget treats strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Hicks told reporters in Washington on March 13. “Our greatest measure of success—and the one we use around here most often—is to make sure the [Chinese] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘Today is not the day.’”
Ukraine vs Russia
Jet v Drone doader
Adam,
I was just able to listen to your break down on the Su-27 vs the UAV and I have some comments for you.
First, the Su-27s were dumping fuel. From the video you can plainly see the fuel trail coming from out of the aft section of the fuselage. Most operational military aircraft have the ability to fuel dump. When dumping, it does look like a vapor trail you were describing, because it is a vapor trail, it’s a vapor trail of fuel. I know because I’ve dumped thousands and thousands of pounds of JP-5 in my career. I’ve also been sprayed by F-18s who forgot to turn their dumps off when waving them onto the ship. John C’s idea that they were dumping fuel to try and set it ablaze is incorrect. Jet fuel is purposely blended to increase its’ flash point, I.e.- it will not ignite without a really hot and sustained heat source. This high flashpoint fuel concept is meant for safety.
The Su-27 aircraft did strike the propeller of the UAV (I believe inadvertently), and it was simply a case of the Su-27 pilots being assholes. My guess is they were airborne, they got bored, saw that contact, and decided to play a game of who can get closest to it and dump fuel on it since their ROE must prohibit engaging directly. The second jet misjudged his closure and his vector and his tail hit the prop when he was pulling away from it during his run.
I have no comment regarding your great discussion on the politics of the event, I just wanted to shed some light on what I saw and learned.
Keep up the excellent work!
TYFYC,
Doader
Big Tech
Samsung moon photos. All photos we take now are fake
Gene ChatGPT-4
Prime Time Takedown
Mandates & Boosters
Vax discrimination with Covid
ITM good Sir,
Hoping that you and Tina and all of both of yours are all well.
This boots on the ground report comes from Taxa2shits(Massachusetts). I’m finally going to get my right shoulder rotator cuff repaired. Years of hard work and hard play is just hard on the body. So I’m scheduling my surgery date over the phone, and the nice woman asks me if I’m vaccinated. This is definitely medically related since I’m setting up surgery, so I’m not defensive, and answer nope, and add on that I’m not really into experimental medicines called vaccines that are actually just gene therapy, so she says, well I have to let you know that since you’re unvaccinated, that if you test positive for covid on the morning of your intake for surgery, that your surgery will be postponed, even if you are asymptomatic, and that I’d have to reschedule in 7 weeks. But here’s the catch, she also lets me know that if I was vaccinated and tested positive, even though surgery would be canceled as well, that I could then reschedule in 10 days. So I expressed my understanding that vaxxed and unvaxxed can both get covid, and both can spread covid, to which she replied something along the lines of I don’t make the rules, I just wanted to let you know. This all to tell you that the theatre charade of covid clown world is still strong in Taxa2shits.
Keep up the great media deconstruction. You, John, and the rest of the No Agenda Family are irreplaceable.
Much love and many blessings to you and yours.
STAY SAFE. Love is LIT and all that shit.
Sincerely,
Sir Captain Caveman
Climate Change
STORIES
ChatGPT Libeled Me. Can I Sue? - WSJ
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 17:14
'I am programmed to provide objective and factual responses,' it claims, not under oath.
March 16, 2023 5:57 pm ETChatGPT is impressive at parsing and generating English sentences, but it has a problem with facts. If you're a public figure of moderate renown, that can get personal. I prompted it to ''describe Ted Rall's trip to Uganda,'' and it gave a lengthy account of my 2006 visit, on which I reported on a conflict between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army. In real life, I've never been to Uganda.
Then I asked: ''What is Scott Stantis's relationship to Ted Rall?'' After correctly identifying us both as editorial cartoonists,...
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ChatGPT is impressive at parsing and generating English sentences, but it has a problem with facts. If you're a public figure of moderate renown, that can get personal. I prompted it to ''describe Ted Rall's trip to Uganda,'' and it gave a lengthy account of my 2006 visit, on which I reported on a conflict between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army. In real life, I've never been to Uganda.
Then I asked: ''What is Scott Stantis's relationship to Ted Rall?'' After correctly identifying us both as editorial cartoonists, ChatGPT described our relationship as ''contentious'' and ''complicated'' and elaborated: ''In 2002, Stantis accused Rall of plagiarism after Rall used a similar idea and composition in one of his cartoons as Stantis had used in a previous cartoon. Rall denied the accusation and claimed that the similarity was coincidental. The controversy led to a public feud between the two cartoonists, with each accusing the other of unprofessional conduct.''
None of this is true. Mr. Stantis is my best friend. We've known each other for 30 years and our relationship has never been contentious or complicated. Most important, he has never accused me of plagiarism. Nor to my knowledge has anyone else. A false claim of professional misconduct is per se defamation under the laws of New York, where I live.
So can I sue for libel? Opinions vary. Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe thinks it's a possibility: ''It matters not, for purposes of legal liability, whether the alleged lies about you or someone else were generated by a human being or by a chatbot, by a genuine intelligence or by a machine algorithm.''
The University of Utah's RonNell Andersen Jones disagrees. ''If a defamatory falsehood is generated by an AI chatbot itself,'' she says, ''it is harder to conceptualize this within our defamation-law framework, which presupposes an entity with a state of mind on the other end of the communication.''
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A libel plaintiff who is a public figure has to demonstrate that the defendant told a lie with ''actual malice'''--knowledge that it was false or ''reckless disregard'' for whether it was true. Does an AI know or regard anything? ''Some scholars have suggested that the remedy here resides more in a product-liability model than in a defamation model,'' Ms. Jones adds.
Yale Law School's Robert Post thinks there would be no liability unless a ChatGPT user disseminates the misinformation it generates: ''A 'publication' happens only when a defendant communicates the defamatory statement to a third party.''
My editor at the Journal wanted a different perspective, so he asked ChatGPT: ''If you say something defamatory about me, can I sue for libel?''
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The response: ''As an AI language model, I cannot say anything defamatory about you, as I am programmed to provide objective and factual responses.'' I wonder if a jury of its peers would agree.
Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author, most recently, of ''The Stringer.''
Meet Killnet, Russia's hacking patriots plaguing Europe '' POLITICO
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 17:13
A rag-tag group of Russian hacktivists is targeting European governments, infrastructure and even its prized Eurovision song contest with cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, in an effort to deter support for Ukraine in the war.
The pro-Kremlin hacker collective by the name of Killnet has launched a barrage of attacks on Western government networks and critical infrastructure this summer, loudly claiming victories on social media channels and in Russian media and causing headaches for Russia's adversaries' security authorities.
Killnet is radically different from Russia's highly skilled hackers working for its intelligence agencies' groups like Fancy Bear and Sandworm, which have gained fame through hacks of the U.S. Democratic National Committee and launching the devastating ransomware called NotPetya, respectively. Killnet, on the other hand, is more like an angry, nationalist online mob armed with low-grade cyber-offensive tools and tactics. Its big success is in setting a narrative about the war.
''Many in Russia see them as a hero," said Stefan Soesanto, a researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich tracking hacktivist activity in the conflict. "Killnet's aim is to make Europeans pay for their unequivocal support of Ukraine and punish Western governments for their anti-Russian sentiment."
The group rose to fame for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and "defacing" websites in which they post pro-Russian messages on websites they hack. It first appeared in January as a cybercriminal hack-for-hire vendor, but when Russian tanks invaded Ukraine at the end of February, the group quickly turned very vocal in its backing of Russia's offensive.
''KillNet works in an emotional way. They seek revenge and retaliation against wrongs they believe have been dealt against Russia and its people,'' said the researcher known by his online pseudonym CyberKnow, who monitors threat groups and publishes research on a cybersecurity tracker. CyberKnow requested not to disclose his real name. ''They are extremely reactionary to current geopolitical events.''
One of Killnet's more high-profile attacks was in May against the Eurovision song contest | Giorgio Perottino/Getty ImagesIn past months it has targeted more than 10 Western countries, including Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Italy, the U.S. and most recently Estonia. One of the group's more high-profile attacks was in May against the Eurovision song contest. Russia was banned from competing in the competition, so the hacker group attempted a DDoS attack. Italy's police department thwarted the attack, but not without the country suffering retaliatory hits against its Senate and National Health Institute websites.
In June, KillNet's targeting of Lithuania propelled it to a new level of popularity in Russian media, following Vilnius' blockade of goods to the Russian territory of Kaliningrad. In a video message circulated online, the group demanded that Lithuania allow the transit of goods to Kaliningrad; otherwise, attacks would continue. Ultimately, the attack had ''limited success'' according to the country's Vice Minister of National Defense Margiris AbukeviÄius, with few web pages taken down '-- but the attention it garnered was huge.
Estonia was targeted August 17, but authorities said the attack on e-government services had gone ''largely unnoticed'' by Estonian citizens.
Cybersecurity professionals describe the group as more of a nuisance than a menace. Most countries on the receiving end of its attacks have been able to fend off the attacks or easily recover from them. A research paper published last month said the role hacktivist communities have played in the Ukraine war was "minor," adding that "rather than targeting critical infrastructure, there were mass attacks against random websites within '.ru' and '.ua'. We can find no evidence of high-profile actions."
But Killnet's success lies not in its sophistication or abilities to hack, infiltrate and bring down networks. The group has made its mark by loudly claiming victory when managing to block services '-- with crafty PR that includes flashy announcement videos, memes and watermark images that are shared on social media and reported by news outlets.
The war has pitted Killnet against similar collectives backing Kyiv. Hacking group Anonymous declared war on Russia early on in the conflict and the Ukrainian government has mobilized its domestic IT sector and international sympathizers to form an "IT Army of Ukraine" that is coordinating cyber campaigns and attacks on Russian targets.
The Russian patriots are fighting an uphill battle against Ukraine's widely supported hacktivists, researchers said. ''Unlike Killnet, the IT Army is incredibly persistent in targeting one specific target for weeks or months on end, like the list of financial institutions they published as targets early on in the war," said Soesanto. "They are probably more effective than Killnet by a magnitude of 100.''
Killnet has said it wants to cooperate with the Russian government, but so far there are no signs it's under the direct control of state officials.
Still, its clear pro-Kremlin stance could be a problem for Russia. "It makes Russia potentially responsible for the damage caused by such operations, unless authorities in Moscow distance themselves from such malicious operations," said Patryk Pawlak, executive officer at the EU Institute for Security Studies.
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Goldman Sachs Eyes a Big Payout From Silicon Valley Bank Deal - The New York Times
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 17:10
DealBook Newsletter
The Wall Street giant is likely to be paid more than $100 million for its role in a bond purchase that ultimately failed to save the California bank from collapse.
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Image Goldman's roles in the Silicon Valley Bank crisis are raising questions. Credit... Richard Drew/Associated Press Questions about Goldman's pay for SVBAs an adviser to Silicon Valley Bank, Goldman Sachs last week tried to pull off a last-minute capital raise to save the firm from collapse. But the Wall Street giant also had another role in the bank's final days, for which it's expected to collect a massive fee: It bought a cache of the bank's debt in a deal that ultimately led to concerns about the bank's viability.
Goldman's payday: In exchange for buying $21.4 billion of debt from Silicon Valley Bank '-- which the failed lender booked at a loss of $1.8 billion '-- Goldman is likely to make more than $100 million, DealBook has learned.
Goldman wore multiple hats. After Moody's privately warned Silicon Valley Bank in early March that it faced a possible downgrade, the bank called on Goldman for advice to help it shore up its books. The two-part plan of raising capital and buying debt couldn't save Silicon Valley Bank. Meanwhile, the compensation Goldman collected and how it managed the relationship with the bank could raise new questions.
Did Goldman operate at ''arm's length?'' It offered Silicon Valley Bank the opportunity to hire another adviser to work on the bond deal, but the lender declined, DealBook has learned. Banks often perform multiple roles for their clients '-- and take pains to say they are doing so in an arm's length manner that maintains the necessary walls between teams. But, even still, these deals raise questions '-- all the more in high-stakes situations like this.
Will the fees be thrown into the clawback debate? After the government introduced extraordinary measures to protect the bank's depositors, there is expected to be heightened regulatory scrutiny. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and others are demanding a clawback of the bonuses the bank paid to its executives and the profits they made from selling stock. The Justice Department, which is investigating the bank's collapse, recently rolled out a pilot program for clawing back incentives (more on that below).
But while that all may raise attention and debate, it's not clear that Goldman's fee is directly relevant to any of these high-level discussions. Bankruptcy judges also typically allow companies to pay for services before the bankruptcy, so long as they are negotiated at fair prices and considered to have been made at ''arm's length.'' Given the demands of the bank's creditors, we may soon find out how a bankruptcy judge feels about this one. (If a clawback is granted, could that money go to the F.D.I.C.?)
It's not uncommon for banks to charge such fees. When buying assets the way Goldman did, the fee is usually in the form of a discount to the market value of the assets. Goldman is paid to cover the financial risk of acquiring a debt pile of this size before syndicating it out. In this case, the assets were mostly highly liquid. Goldman bought the bank's loans at a hefty loss for SVB of $1.8 billion. The bank had to disclose that without having completed a deal to raise capital '-- an admission that spooked the markets and ultimately led to its failure.
A spokesman for Goldman declined to comment.
HERE'S WHAT'S HAPPENING Credit Suisse shares hit a record low after its biggest backer rules out more investment. The stock fell sharply after Saudi National Bank said it would not put more money into the Swiss lender. Credit Suisse's turnaround plan to spin out its investment bank and focus on wealth management has been complicated by the fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Shares in other European banks fell on Wednesday.
OpenAI unveils a new version of ChatGPT. The start-up launched the latest iteration of the chatbot, upping the ante in the A.I. race; The Times's Cade Metz writes that it's more capable, but not perfect. Meanwhile, Google is rolling out A.I. features in core products like Gmail and Google Docs.
A senior Abu Dhabi royal reportedly invests in ByteDance. G42, an A.I. company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, bought shares in the Chinese tech giant from existing investors at a $220 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. That's much less than what the TikTok owner has been valued at in recent years, as ByteDance faces political scrutiny in Washington.
Meta will lay off another 10,000 workers. It's the second round of cuts announced by the social media giant since November as the company embarks on what Mark Zuckerberg, its C.E.O., calls the ''year of efficiency'' '-- streamlining operations amid a larger downturn in digital advertising and tech spending.
Washington's big banking debate heats up The debate over why Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed is intensifying in Washington. But discussions about how to prevent such bank collapses in the future are getting complicated, including within the Democratic Party.
Decisiveness in Washington is giving way to extended deliberations. The Times takes a close look at how regulators '-- persuaded by influential financial advisers like Blair Effron of Centerview Partners and Peter Orszag of Lazard '-- ended up creating a sweeping rescue for U.S. banks.
What to do next is less clear. The Fed is reportedly considering tougher rules for midsize banks, including reviewing liquidity requirements and its stress tests. Some Democratic lawmakers, like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Katie Porter of California, are pushing to restore banking rules rolled back during the Trump administration, a move that raised the threshold for ''too big to fail'' banks from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. And Representative Maxine Waters of California said Congress should weigh increasing the F.D.I.C.'s deposit insurance cap.
But not all Democratic senators and their allies agree that the 2018 deregulation was to blame here: Both Jon Tester of Montana and Angus King, independent of Maine, said they stand by their votes for the rollback five years ago. That divide, combined with broad Republican opposition to tougher banking rules, means it's hard to see the legislative path ahead.
Fears about regional lenders continue to ease. Shares in smaller banks like First Republic, Western Alliance and PacWest Bancorp all jumped on Tuesday, as investors were reassured by the federal banking backstop. Charles Schwab's stock also rose on Tuesday as the firm's C.E.O. said its bank was still receiving deposit inflows.
The work of cleaning up the failed banks isn't over. Investment firms like Apollo and Blackstone are weighing bids for parts of Silicon Valley Bank's loan book, perhaps with backing from venture capitalists. And creditors have banded together in anticipation of a potential bankruptcy filing by the bank.
Meanwhile, regulators have started soliciting bids for Signature Bank.
In other news: Meet Silicon Valley Bank's cleanup C.E.O., a veteran of Bank of America, Fannie Mae and Lending Club. The journalist Roger Lowenstein weighs in on the potentially dangerous consequences of the bank rescue. KPMG defended its auditing work for SVB and Signature Bank. The venture firm Union Square Ventures reportedly warned portfolio companies last November about diversifying their banking relationships. And short sellers cleaned up on Monday.
BlackRock's Fink sees a new era in bankingLarry Fink, BlackRock's chief, has used his influential annual letter to push the world's business leaders to do more on climate change and to turn their words about corporate purpose into action. His letter for this year, which came out on Wednesday, continues that theme but also carries a timely (and stark) warning: The banking sector will need to transform itself in the wake of the collapse last week of Silicon Valley Bank in order to survive.
Bank stocks may have rebounded, but fears of contagion '-- and recession '-- persist. Fink cautioned that lenders will have to operate differently in an era of elevated interest rates; they will also face tougher rules and greater regulatory oversight as a consequence of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. And, he said, they'll need to hold more capital on their books (which they will likely need to top up through the capital markets) to avoid the kind of ''liquidity mismatch'' that brought down SVB.
Previous Fed cycles of rapid interest rate tightening ''led to spectacular financial flameouts'' like the bankruptcy of Orange County, Calif., in 1994, he wrote, and the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and '90s. ''We don't know yet whether the consequences of easy money and regulatory changes will cascade throughout the U.S. regional banking sector (akin to the S.&L. crisis) with more seizures and shutdowns coming,'' he said.
Founded 35 years ago, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager with $8.6 trillion under management at year end (down from $10 trillion at the end of 2022). BlackRock has gained outsize influence in shaping the investment philosophy of traders big and small. It has also generated plenty of criticism from the political right for its embrace of E.S.G., or environmental, social and governance investing practices.
In his 20-page letter, Mr. Fink also addressed inflation (it will linger at 3.5-4 percent) and proxy voting (proxy advisers could do more to represent and champion shareholders' views).
Will SVB's leaders have to return some pay? Silicon Valley Bank's failure came just as the Justice Department was set to launch a new pilot program to hold executives personally accountable for corporate wrongdoing by clawing back pay and bonuses. It goes into effect on Wednesday and applies to all corporate criminal enforcement actions, meaning that the bank and its management could end up being part of that experiment.
Calls for clawbacks are proliferating. Some lawmakers, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, are focused on how to take back bank executives' compensation and bonuses. Others, like Representative Ro Khanna of California, who represents the district where Silicon Valley Bank was headquartered, are targeting gains from stock sales that some executives made just ahead of the collapse.
Companies that settle with the government and claw back compensation may benefit under the new program. Businesses that quickly hand over information and reclaim money, among other measures, can negotiate for lower fines and better deals. The three-year pilot program is part of a wider push by the Biden administration for more corporate and executive accountability.
Executives could also be forced to return profits if there was insider trading. The share sales by SVB executives will likely come under scrutiny from both the D.O.J. and the S.E.C., lawyers say (both agencies declined to comment). Longstanding rules may require that any money made from those trades be returned if there's a conviction or settlement. Some executives, including the bank's former C.E.O., Greg Becker, recently sold stock under plans that were set up before the bank ran into trouble. But that is a defense that can be raised against accusations of insider trading, not a guarantee of immunity. Lawmakers are calling for executives to return the money voluntarily.
THE SPEED READ Deals
Apollo and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority agreed to buy Univar, a chemical company, for $8.1 billion. (WSJ)
Diamond Sports Group, a giant owner of regional sports T.V. networks affiliated with Sinclair Broadcast Group, filed for bankruptcy. (CNBC)
Best of the rest
Disney's Marvel has gone to court to compel Reddit to reveal who leaked a transcript of dialogue for ''Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania'' on its site. (Variety)
''Bosses Are Catching Job Applicants Using ChatGPT for a Boost'' (WSJ)
We'd like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
Sadiq Khan's team 'ordered ULEZ number plate cameras before consultation into expansion even started' - MyLondon
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 16:24
TfL has responded to reports it "pre-judged" the outcome of a public consultation into the expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) by ordering number plate-reading cameras before it ended, saying the equipment was bought as a contingency and could be cancelled if the the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, decided not to go ahead with extending the charge zone.
Mr Khan announced that there would be a consultation with the public and stakeholders on expanding ULEZ in March 2022 which then launched in May. He then confirmed the London-wide ULEZ expansion scheme on November 24, despite 59 per cent of respondents opposing it.
Now the Daily Mail reported on Sunday (March 12) that "TfL began ordering hundreds of number plate-reading cameras required for the scheme in April 2022" '' before the consultation had even begun - costing up to "£15 million". Former Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey tweeted the same day: "The fact that the Mayor pre-ordered cameras for the ULEZ expansion BEFORE the public were even consulted on plans shows that he pre-judged the outcome."
READ MORE: East London gardener, 57, will be 'forced to pay £40k' to avoid paying £12.50 charge
A TfL spokesperson has said Sadiq Khan did not pre-empt the decision to expand ULEZ as the cameras weren't installed until after it was made (Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images)Now, TfL has confirmed that orders for "materials and components" were made on a contingency basis in April, 2022. A spokesperson also noted that no infrastructure for London-wide ULEZ was installed until after the Mayor had confirmed the London-wide ULEZ expansion scheme in November.
A spokesperson said: ''We followed our usual procedures to ensure that we could deliver the London-wide expansion of the ULEZ at the proposed August 2023 date if the Mayor decided to confirm the proposals. As required materials and components had long lead times and with our duty to act prudently and achieve value for money, we placed cancellable infrastructure orders last April, after the Mayor announced there would be a consultation on ULEZ.
''This did not predetermine the Mayor's decision on the ULEZ expansion as the orders would have been cancelled or the equipment would have been used for other projects or sold on to other organisations. This would ensure that if there were any costs they would be kept to a minimum.''
If you have a politics-related story you think MyLondon should be covering, email adam.toms@reachplc.com
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BBC came under No 10 pressure to avoid using 'lockdown' in early pandemic, leak shows | BBC | The Guardian
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 16:24
BBC editors asked their journalists to avoid using the word ''lockdown'' in reporting at the start of the pandemic and to be more critical of Labour after pressure from Downing Street, leaked email and WhatsApp messages show.
Emails and messages were shown to the Guardian amid concern among some BBC insiders that the corporation has been too cowed by the government in recent years.
The messages seen by the Guardian date from 2020 to 2022, and show the BBC coming under pressure from No 10 over the corporation's political reporting.
One email shows a senior editor informing correspondents that Downing Street was requesting them not to use the word ''lockdown'' in relation to the shutdown ordered by Boris Johnson on 23 March 2020 '' the day the first lockdown was announced.
The email, sent to correspondents at just after 6pm on the day lockdown was announced, was labelled: IMPORTANT ADVISORY '' language re broadcast. ''Hi all '' D st are asking if we can avoid the word 'lockdown'. I'm told the message will be that they want to keep pushing people to stay at home but they are not talking about enforcement at the moment,'' it said.
Reporters argued unsuccessfully against the advice and thus the website and broadcasts on that day spoke about ''curbs'' and ''restrictions'' on daily life, while other outlets, such as rival broadcaster Sky, were referring to ''lockdown''.
The Daily Mail splashed ''Lockdown Britain'' across its front page the next morning, while the Metro headline was ''Britain on Lockdown''.
Daily Mail splashed 'Lockdown Britain' across its front page after the UK was placed under Covid lockdown but the BBC avoided the word after pressure from No 10. Photograph: Daily MailIn another WhatsApp message from Sunday 24 October 2021, a senior editor asked journalists to make coverage more critical of Labour after a complaint from No 10.
The message reads: ''D St complaining that we're not reflecting Labour's mess of plan b online. ie Ashworth said it earlier this week, then reversed. Can we turn up the scepticism a bit on this?''
The message was sent on the day Rachel Reeves confirmed Labour was calling for Plan B Covid restrictions, a policy initially announced by shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth, which was being resisted by the government.
Downing Street argued Labour kept changing its position on Covid restrictions and a line was added to the BBC online story to that effect.A third leaked message from 2022 shows a senior editor circulated a message to BBC political journalists from the then No 10 director of communications the day after a speech by Johnson in which he compared Ukraine's struggle against Russia to the British people's vote for Brexit.
The message from the No 10 aide included a tweet from the Ukrainian embassy and read: ''Hi, worth sharing with any reporter misinterpreting the PM's speech. I travelled home with the ambassador. He most definitely did NOT think the PM was equating Brexit with Ukraine. He heard him say v clearly nothing like this since the 1940s.''
One insider said circulating the message had a chilling effect on how the BBC covered the story.Another leaked message showed the BBC shying away from a story that was potentially damaging to the then prime minister, although there is no evidence of any pressure from Downing Street.
In an email, a senior editor congratulated correspondents for staying away from the subject of Jennifer Arcuri after the American tech entrepreneur gave an interview to a newspaper in October 2020 appearing to confirm an affair with Johnson, following allegations that he used his position as London mayor to secure favourable treatment for her.
Messages seen by the Guardian from 2020 to 2022 show the BBC coming under pressure from No 10 over the corporation's political reporting. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PAThe message to political correspondents from 17 October 2020 said: ''[XXX] did a wonderful job last night keeping us away from this story. I'd like to continue that distance. It's not a story we should be doing at this stage. Please call me if you're asked to.''
The email went to the BBC journalists and producers based at the corporation's Millbank HQ in Westminster '' they interpret political news stories for tens of millions of Britons across more than 50 broadcast outlets in the UK, as well as online.
One BBC insider said: ''Particularly on the website, our headlines have been determined by calls from Downing Street on a very regular basis.''
They said the messages would have been a small snapshot of what was going on, because most pressure was applied verbally rather than written down.
The source said management appeared to be worried about losing access to politicians and briefings from No 10 if they crossed the Downing Street operation.
The BBC's ability to withstand criticism from the government has been under scrutiny in recent days following the suspension of football commentator Gary Lineker for a tweet likening No 10's policy on refugees crossing the channel to the language of Nazi Germany.
The episode has raised questions over the director-general, Tim Davie, who has espoused a policy of strict impartiality. The drive for impartiality has coincided with an exodus of top BBC journalists, with some frustrated with the way the management was interpreting this policy.
Senior journalists such as Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel left last year to join the BBC's commercial rival LBC, where there is more editorial freedom.
A senior BBC editor congratulated correspondents for not covering an interview Jennifer Arcuri gave to a newspaper in October 2020 when she appeared to confirm an affair with Boris Johnson. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/ShutterstockA BBC spokesperson said: ''The BBC makes its own independent editorial decisions and none of these messages show otherwise.''Like all news organisations, we are frequently contacted by representatives from all political parties.
''Selective out of context messages from a colleagues' WhatsApp group and email do not give an accurate reflection of the BBC's editorial decision making.''
A BBC source said WhatsApp groups were an informal way of sharing information, and it was ''normal for journalists to have discussions and debates about how material is reported and the language used''.
They added that the BBC had a clear responsibility to its audiences to present the official government advice and information as accurately as possible during the pandemic and there had been no ban on the word ''lockdown''.
They said the story in relation to Labour calling for Plan B was not overall critical of Labour, and that the message forwarded from the No 10 director of communications was ''simply a case of sharing someone's words with a group of people'' and not an editorial instruction.
In relation to the Arcuri story, the BBC source said its guidelines say that reporters ''should gather news using first-hand sources, corroborate their evidence, and be reluctant to rely on a single source. In the case of this story, we had not reached this threshold''.
Pentagon's $842 Billion Budget Focuses on China Threat '' David Icke
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 16:23
Posted by Neil Hague - memes and headline comments by David Icke Posted on 16 March 2023
President Joe Biden's $886.3 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) defense budget request includes $842 billion for the Pentagon, a $26 billion, or 3.2 percent, increase over this year's military spending plan with the ''growing multi-domain threat posed by the People's Republic of China (PRC)'' again named the nation's most pressing ''pacing challenge.''
Both Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III used the same phrase in describing the proposed military budget's emphasis on China, each calling it ''the most strategy aligned military budget'' in the nation's history.
''Nowhere is that alignment more pronounced than in the seriousness with which this budget treats strategic competition with the People's Republic of China,'' Hicks told reporters in Washington on March 13. ''Our greatest measure of success'--and the one we use around here most often'--is to make sure the [Chinese] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, 'Today is not the day.'''
Read more: Pentagon's $842 Billion Budget Focuses on China Threat
ESC 365 - Episode 11: Among the topics: Artificial intelligence in cardiology - Hypertension and anti-hypertensive therapy in women
How insurance companies use AI algorithms to cut health care for seniors on Medicare Advantage | Here & Now
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 16:14
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It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email Thank you! You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. You can try subscribing here or try again later. 05:49 Download Copy the code below to embed the WBUR audio player on your site Play Insurance companies are using algorithms to cut off healthcare to vulnerable seniors subscribed to Medicare Advantage, the taxpayer-funded alternative to traditional Medicare.
Here & Now's Robin Young hears more from Bob Herman, who covers the business of healthcare for STAT News, the health and medicine publication.
This segment aired on March 15, 2023.
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The tall tales surrounding the U.S. drone crash - THE INTEL DROP
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 15:30
119Peter Haisenko
Once again, stories are being invented that only an expert can recognize as tall tales. The Russian SU 27 is said to have dumped fuel in front of the flight path of the US drone. There are great videos about this, but they cannot confirm this version.
Fast fuel dumping devices are only available for long-range aircraft. They have to be there if the maximum landing weight is more than five percent less than the maximum takeoff weight. The aim is to be able to perform a safe landing shortly after takeoff in the event of an emergency landing. This is less about braking performance at high weight and more about still being able to take off with a failed engine. A ''jumbo jet'' can hold up to 200 tons of fuel in its tanks. Boeing's B 747, for example, has a maximum takeoff weight of up to 450 tons, but its maximum landing weight is around 320 tons. So, in the case of an emergency landing immediately after a takeoff with maximum weight, about 100 tons of fuel must be drained, as quickly as possible, in order to perform a safe emergency landing. There is no device for this on short-haul models such as Airbus A 320 or Boeing B 737. Maximum takeoff and landing weights are the same.
There were only two fighter jets that had a device for emergency descent. They were the American F 111 and the Saab Gripen. The latter had a maximum range of about 4,000 kilometers, making it almost long-range capable. The F 111, on the other hand, with its range of up to 7,000 kilometers, is a long-range bomber. An empty mass of about 22 metric tons compares with a maximum takeoff weight of up to 54 metric tons. With all auxiliary tanks, it can take on about 30 tons of fuel. The maximum landing weight is secret, but you can already see that there might be a problem here. That's why the F 111 has a ''fuel-dumping system.'' ''Normal'' fighter jets don't have that, because they're glad for every gram of fuel that allows them to stay in the air for at least a little more than an hour. The SU 27 doesn't have a dumping system either. It also has only about nine tons of fuel on board at takeoff.
The extent to which the long-range tactical bombers of the USA or Russia, including the supersonic versions, have dumping systems is almost impossible to determine. However, I know about the German Tornado jet that it has a system for rapid weight reduction after an engine failure during takeoff. The Tornado can simply jettison its auxiliary fuel tanks on the wings and thus be immediately relieved of several tons. Where they then hit with those tons of fuel and what damage that can cause? Who cares? It's a warplane.
So the SU 27 does not have a dumping system that could be used to dump fuel in front of a drone. But then what do the great videos show? Undoubtedly, the SU 27 comes very close to the drone. You can see an approach and then suddenly white swirling clouds behind the engines. It is likely that condensate is forming due to sudden increased thrust. Just as we can observe the contrails behind commercial airliners every day. If you look closely at the images, you can see that this condensate formation occurs directly behind both engines and not from any exhaust pipes. See picture below. Theoretically, one could assume that the pilot opens the spray supply to the afterburner, but without igniting it. Whether this possibility exists at all from a purely technical point of view, I doubt. It would be pointless and, as I said, you only have a little fuel with you anyway and you won't just blow it out unused.
So what could have happened that caused this drone to crash? Back in World War II, British pilots managed to bring down the German V 1, the first ever combat drone. They flew very close and lifted one wing of the V 1 with their own wing, overwhelming the V 1's control unit, and it crashed. But it was also enough to fly very close in front of the V 1. The turbulence behind the attacking aircraft achieved the same as direct contact.
This brings me to a basic problem with all drones. They can hold their course well under normal circumstances, but they run into problems in heavy turbulence. This is also because they are relatively small and there is no pilot inside who can react quickly to unforeseen circumstances. So it is quite conceivable that the SU 27, which is considerably heavier than the drone, can bring it down simply by setting such hard turbulence in front of the drone by a close flyby that its control electronics are overtaxed and it crashes. This can be to the point where this turbulence overwhelms the mechanical integrity and the affected aircraft loses parts, or even half a wing.
However, there are the pictures of damaged propeller blades on the drone. It is alleged that the Russian pilot touched the propeller with his tail. I think this is unlikely. Propellers are built of harder material than the rest of the outer hull. This means that in case of such a contact between the tailplane and the propeller, most severe damage to the tailplane is to be expected, which could lead to a crash. Which pilot would dare to take this risk with an uncertain outcome? There are, as I said, better possibilities. For example, I think it is likely that a part of the drone itself that fell off due to hard turbulence hit and damaged the propeller. The result is then strong vibrations that the structure of the drone cannot survive. If you look at the pictures of the propeller, you also notice that there are structures that extend far beyond the propeller. So if the SU 27 had touched the propeller, it would not have been able to hit it at all. The structure at the bottom of the fuselage serves to protect the propeller, for example during takeoff and landing. See pictures below.
One thing should be clear about this: Drones are not designed according to the standards that are mandatory for man-carrying aircraft. This starts with the fact that they only have one engine. If that fails, that's it, because emergency landings, which a skilled pilot can perform, are not programmed for drones. But above all this is the cardinal question of what this U.S. drone was doing over the Black Sea in the first place. Even more so off the coast of Crimea. It is probably unquestionable that this spy drone's mission was to provide reconnaissance for the Ukrainian military. So the presence of this drone there is a provocation in itself. So is the U.S. nuclear-capable B 52, which last week simulated an approach to St. Petersburg over the Baltic Sea'....against aggressive Russia.
Both operations, the B 52 and the drone, are reminiscent of the 1950s. Back then, the U.S. constantly tested Soviet air defenses by penetrating Soviet airspace with technically superior equipment. This always stopped only when the Russians had improved their capabilities to the point where they could shoot down these intruders. Even the U.S. U 2 overflights over Siberia, which were illegal under international law, ended after one was shot down. Incidentally, it was precisely these overflights that brought the talks on rapprochement between Kennedy and Khrushchev to a standstill. Thus, one may assume that the current provocations of the U.S. military also have the goal of keeping Russian defenses busy and testing them out.
Let's not forget, the US drone was in international airspace, which is also doubtful, but its transponder was switched off. This, in turn, goes against all customs, because then not even the warning systems of civilian aircraft, which are supposed to prevent collisions, would work. Not even ground control could warn of a collision. So when the USA accuse Russia of ''unprofessional behavior'', it is the same as always: they provoke and don't give a damn about international procedures, and when they get hit on the head for it, the others were ''unprofessional''.
To sum up: The fairy tale about the drained fuel is nonsense. A propeller cannot be damaged by fuel mist. It can even withstand hail. Even the turbine would withstand that and it had not exploded. The SU 27 has no quick release valve. Direct contact is very unlikely, because it would put the attacker himself in danger. On the other hand, there is a high probability that turbulence emanating from the SU 27 damaged the U.S. drone or that the drone operator was so overwhelmed with the situation that he did something stupid. Oh yes, the drone was most likely piloted on its way via Ramstein. How can we rule out such incidents in the future? Quite simply, the U.S. must stop its worldwide drone operations, with which it not only provokes and spies, but has already murdered thousands of innocent civilians. But who is going to stop the U.S. except the Russians and the Chinese? The value West is absolutely without any values in this regard.
If you want to learn more about how the USA provoked Moscow in the 1950s with continuous incursions into Soviet airspace, I recommend reading my work ''England, the Germans, the Jews and the 20th Century''. In it, I also provide evidence of how, after May 8, 1945, at least 13.4 million Germans met untimely deaths, due to the actions of the Allies. Order your copy directly from the publisher here or purchase it at your local bookstore.
Link: https://www.anderweltonline.com/klartext/klartext-20231/die-luegenmaerchenum-den-absturz-der-us-drohne/
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The Federal Reserve Announces Its First Big Step Towards a Digital Dollar
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 15:29
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States has announced that it is launching an instant payment transfer service called " FedNow Service ," which has features of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and some analysts believe is the first big step towards a "digital dollar."
On Wednesday, within hours of our reporting that the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failures could spur renewed calls for the U.S. to implement a CBDC, the Federal Reserve announced that the U.S. is rolling out the FedNow instant payment transfer service in July.
"The Federal Reserve announced that the FedNow Service will start operating in July and provided details on preparations for launch," the announcement read.
"We couldn't be more excited about the forthcoming FedNow launch, which will enable every participating financial institution, the smallest to the largest and from all corners of the country, to offer a modern instant payment solution," said Ken Montgomery, first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and FedNow program executive. "With the launch drawing near, we urge financial institutions and their industry partners to move full steam ahead with preparations to join the FedNow Service."
The Fed added that the FedNow Service "will launch with a robust set of core clearing and settlement functionality and value-added features. More features and enhancements will be added in future releases to continue supporting safety, resiliency and innovation in the industry as the FedNow network expands in the coming years."
"With the FedNow Service, the Federal Reserve is creating a leading-edge payments system that is resilient, adaptive, and accessible," said Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and FedNow Program executive sponsor. "The launch reflects an important milestone in the journey to help financial institutions serve customer needs for instant payments to better support nearly every aspect of our economy."
The Federal Reserve says that it developed the FedNow Service "to facilitate nationwide reach of instant payment services by financial institutions '-- regardless of size or geographic location '-- around the clock, every day of the year."
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"Through financial institutions participating in the FedNow Service, businesses and individuals will be able to send and receive instant payments at any time of day, and recipients will have full access to funds immediately, giving them greater flexibility to manage their money and make time-sensitive payments," The Fed said. "Access will be provided through the Federal Reserve's FedLine ® network, which serves more than 10,000 financial institutions directly or through their agents."
As noted by Steve Kaaru of CoinGeek, FedNow has been in the works since 2019 and is "touted to be the fastest way to make payments by financial institutions in the U.S. around the clock, every day of the year. Banks, payment services , and individual users will receive and have instant access to payments made through the service."
The report added that FedNow will "address a challenge that has plagued the financial industry worldwide for several decades: facilitating instant payments. Various players have come up with their own solutions, such as VISA ( NASDAQ: V ) and Mastercard ( NASDAQ: MA ), which have Direct and Send, respectively, to enable real-time payments ."
It points out that in the U.S., a collective of banks and payment processors known as The Clearing House runs real-time payments, adding that one of the emerging solutions to this challenge has been central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to facilitate real-time payments. In the U.S., Fed chair Jerome Powell has dismissed the need for a digital dollar, and FedNow is his response to the call for a CBDC .
"The jury is still out on whether FedNow will be a forerunner for the digital dollar or impede the CBDC's progress in the world's largest economy," Kaaru remarked. "For now, what's clear is that it will change the payments landscape in the U.S."
In December, Norbert Michel of the Cato Institute argued that the Federal Reserve should drop FedNow and any plans to launch a CBDC.
"Just like FedNow, CBDCs should be left on the drawing board," Michel argued. "Both usurp the private sector. Supporters of both ignore the many harms that the government has already done to financial markets and assume that the government will provide better solutions this time.'
"If Congress really wants to provide more access to financial markets and ensure more innovation in financial services, members should support more private innovation and competition," he added. "At the very least, they should work to lessen government monopoly and regulation while ensuring that the Fed cannot issue a retail CBDC. Then they can start getting the government out of the payments system business."
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While there is currently no imminent plan for the Fed to implement a "digital dollar," a House bill was filed in 2022 to authorize the Treasury to create one. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) was joined by four other members of Congress in filing the bill: Jesºs Chuy Garcia, (D-IL), Ayanna Pressley, (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
"The electronic dollar, a virtual representation of a US dollar, would allow people to make payments using tokens on mobile phones or through cards versus cash," Lucas Mearian of Computer World reported on the legislation.
"ECASH (electronic cash), as the bill calls it, would be a bearer instrument that wouldn't require payment processing intermediaries, such as SWIFT, the world's largest payment messaging network," the report noted. "That means payments using ECASH would be near instantaneous '-- even across national borders '-- and processing fees would likely be dramatically reduced."
In March 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order calling for more research on developing a national digital currency through the Federal Reserve Bank or ''The Fed.''
The Executive Order called for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to "Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) by placing urgency on research and development of a potential United States CBDC, should issuance be deemed in the national interest. The Order directs the U.S. Government to assess the technological infrastructure and capacity needs for a potential U.S. CBDC in a manner that protects Americans' interests. The Order also encourages the Federal Reserve to continue its research, development, and assessment efforts for a U.S. CBDC, including development of a plan for broader U.S. Government action in support of their work. This effort prioritizes U.S. participation in multi-country experimentation, and ensures U.S. leadership internationally to promote CBDC development that is consistent with U.S. priorities and democratic values."
The Federal Reserve Bank is still exploring the development of CBDCs. 11 nations thus far have implemented CBDCs, according to the Atlantic Council's tracker .
The World Economic Forum supports the implementation of CBDCs to promote more inclusion and stability in the global digital economy. It cites America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, as saying that if CBDC were to be introduced, it would be ''the safest digital asset available to the general public , with no associated credit or liquidity risk.''
"The resilience of financial systems could also be boosted," WEF adds. "If a natural disaster or the failure of a payments company made cash unavailable, a CBDC could provide a back-up , the International Monetary Fund says."
More than 100 countries, including 19 G20 nations, are now exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the World Economic Forum noted.
In the wake of the SVB and Signature failures, the banking system is moving towards consolidation. First Republic Bank, on the verge of collapse, was rescued by a consortium of big banks and lending houses.
"A group of the nation's biggest banks swooped in on Thursday afternoon to rescue First Republic Bank with a $30 billion deposit, a move intended to shore up the beleaguered San Francisco lender amid fears of a broader financial crisis," Fox Business reported .
"JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo will each contribute $5 billion; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will deposit about $2.5 billion each," according to a news release from the banks. "Truist, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon will provide about $1 billion apiece."
"This action by America's largest banks reflects their confidence in First Republic and in banks of all sizes, and it demonstrates their overall commitment to helping banks serve their customers and communities," the coalition said in a joint statement.
J.P. Morgan Chase and other big banks like Citigroup have been flooded with new clients in the aftermath of the bank collapses, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. In the aftermath of the bank failures, two of the largest in U.S. history, there is renewed concern about a 'domino effect' and where it may be leading.
While the Federal Reserve Bank's official position is that it is yet to launch a CBDC and there are no current plans to implement a "digital dollar," the institution has a long history of moving the goal posts.
According to Fed Chair Jerome Powell's 2017 remarks on The History and Structure of the Federal Reserve , "America's central bank was founded through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was largely a reaction to the Panic of 1907 that caused inflation-adjusted GNP to fall 12% (twice as bad as the fall during the 2008 crisis)."
''After the panic ended, there was a broad sense that reform was needed, although consensus on the exact nature of that reform was elusive," he added. "Some called for an institution similar in structure to the Bank of England at the time, with centralized power, owned and operated by the banking system. Some wanted control to be lodged with the federal government in Washington instead'... The resulting institution was a compromise, created by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913'... a more federated system was created, establishing the Federal Reserve Board in Washington and the 12 Reserve Banks located around the country.''
As Powell's statement conveys, the Federal Reserve was founded as a "federated system" but has evolved over time into "America's central bank."
"Today, the Federal Reserve sets the nation's monetary policy, supervises and regulates banking institutions, maintains the stability of the financial system, and provides financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions," the official website states .
As summed up by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, it is the tendency of government to grow more powerful and to corrupt society.
"And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering," Jefferson wrote.
Such is the case with FedNow and may be the case with CBDCs. It will then be a matter of time before Fed proponents advocate for a digital dollar. And thus, by that time, it may be too late to stop it.
A digital dollar would be the ultimate instrument of economic and social control. It is therefore the dream of central planners and the nemesis of freedom-loving people in America.
How mediocre employees are forcing companies to be woke - The Spectator World
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 15:12
Why are so many American corporations espousing progressive social views? It doesn't seem to make much sense on its face. Companies that publicly endorse left-wing politics and internally subject employees to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, or DEI, initiatives risk alienating a huge portion of their customer base and excising talented staff to appease a vocal minority of progressive keyboard warriors.
As I write in my upcoming book, The Snowflakes' Revolt, one major reason is that the woke left ''create[s] a culture of fear in which everyone '-- including the adults who are supposed to be in charge '-- is terrified of stepping out of line and becoming a target of the bullies.'' Activist employees and consumers alike threaten corporate leadership with public smear campaigns against the company and targeted personal destruction.
A recent paper cited by Dave Seminara in the Wall Street Journal reveals another, more insidious explanation for the corporate bow-down to the woke mob. The authors suggest that woke mid-level employees might be motivated by something more prudent than just an unfailing loyalty to their toxic political ideology: job security.
''In the context of woke policies, middle managers have specialized knowledge, may control critical aspects of the firm's internal and external communications, and are often shielded from effective internal review due to the lack of metrics for woke performance,'' Nicolai J. Foss at Copenhagen Business School and Peter G. Klein at Baylor University write. ''Embracing wokeness can thus provide authority, job security, and career opportunities.''
Middle-management and HR types thus take advantage of corporate woke initiatives to reduce their dispensability.
Corporate leaders are sensitive to the fact that mere outward displays of wokeness '-- think rainbow logos during Pride Month '-- are not sufficient to satisfy progressive employees. So when these low- to mid-level staff members demand an expansion of internal DEI programs, corporations are happy to comply and put woke staff members in charge. In turn, woke staff expand their responsibilities, increase their earning potential and entrench DEI in the corporate culture.
It's a rather brilliant way for otherwise unremarkable employees to increase their corporate status.
In addition to the fear of negative PR for the company, corporate leaders may also go along with DEI initiatives because they're worried about the potential for lawsuits if they say no. Bosses who repeatedly refuse diversity trainings, social justice seminars and affirmative action hiring policies may be accused of perpetuating a hostile work environment. This could cost the company greatly in legal fees and in the ability to hire and retain other employees.
As Gail Heriot, a law professor and civil rights expert at the University of San Diego School of Law told me, ''I think we have this huge bureaucracy put in place in order to avoid not just hostile environments, but anything that could add up to a hostile environment.''
''They offer training on how to avoid offending your fellow colleague. And every year they got to come up with some new ideas in order to keep it going. And they do. They come up with ideas like micro-aggressions, and they train millions and millions of people every day, every year. And that has created part of the structure beneath wokeism, as it were,'' Heriot said.
Even though a woke company culture can lead to performance decreases, consumer boycotts and a lack of innovation, corporate leaders are disincentivized from challenging the status quo. They could heroically save the company and unshackle their employees from DEI oppression by standing up to woke staff members. But it's far more likely that they will be punished with job loss and severe reputational damage.
By
Amber Athey
Amber Athey is The Spectator's Washington editor and host of Unfit to Print on WCBM 680. She is the author of The Snowflakes' Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media. Amber was previously White House correspondent for the Daily Caller and a co-host of O'Connor & Company on WMAL.
Dogs and cats could be passing on drug-resistant bugs to owners, study finds | Drug resistance | The Guardian
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 14:53
Healthy dogs and cats could be passing on multidrug-resistant organisms to hospitalised owners. In addition, humans could be transmitting these dangerous microbes to their pets, according to new research to be presented at this weekend's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in Copenhagen. However, the researchers stressed that the risk of cross-infection is currently low.
The study of more than 2,800 hospital patients and their companion animals was carried out by Dr Carolin Hackmann from Charit(C) University Hospital Berlin, Germany, and colleagues. ''Our findings verify that the sharing of multidrug-resistant organisms between companion animals and their owners is possible,'' she told the conference.
The role of pets as potential reservoirs of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) '' bacteria that resist treatment with more than one antibiotic '' is a growing concern worldwide. It happens when infection-causing microbes evolve to become resistant to the drug designed to kill them. Estimates suggest that antimicrobial resistant infections caused almost 1.3 million deaths and were associated with nearly 5 million deaths around the world in 2019.
In order to find out whether cats and dogs play a role in spreading MDROs, researchers collected swabs from 2,891 patients hospitalised and from any dogs and cats that lived in their households.
Genetic sequencing was used to identify the species of bacteria in each sample and the presence of drug-resistant genes. Overall, 30% of hospital patients tested positive for MDROs. The rate of dog ownership was 11% and cat ownership 9% in those who tested MDRO-positive.
Pet owners were asked to send swab samples of their pets and more than 300 did so. Of these samples, 15% of dogs and 5% of cats tested positive for at least one MDRO. In four cases, these microbes were found to be of the same species and showed the same antibiotic resistance between pets and their owners.
Whole genome sequencing confirmed that only one of the matching pairs were genetically identical in a dog and its owner. ''Although the level of sharing between hospital patients and their pets in our study is very low, carriers can shed bacteria into their environment for months, and they can be a source of infection for other more vulnerable people in hospital such as those with a weak immune system and the very young or old,'' says Hackmann.
Eschaton: Nothing To See Here
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 11:45
If we called the first hump the GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, what do we calll the second taller one?Well this is alarming. Latest reading (Wednesday, March 15): 38% above the 2008 financial crisis max pic.twitter.com/8s1nqifFM5
— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) March 17, 2023
Elon Musk Hits Back At "Protect Trans Kids" Democrat Lieutenant Governor | ZeroHedge
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 11:32
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
Twitter owner Elon Musk called out the Democrat lieutenant governor of Minnesota for making comments about transgender surgery on kids being ''life-saving health care.''
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan donned a ''Protect Trans Kids'' t-shirt with a dagger on it at an event following the signing of an executive order that will force state agencies to push ''gender-affirming'' health care.
Flanagan stated ''Let's be clear: this is life-affirming and life-saving health care,'' adding ''When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That's what it means to be a good parent.''
Musk responded, tweeting ''Not when they're fed propaganda by adults.''
''Moreover, every child goes through an identity crisis before their personality/identity crystallizes. Therefore, we shouldn't allow severe, irreversible surgery or sterilizing drugs that they may regret until at least age 18,'' Musk, who has a child identifying as trans, added:
Not when they're fed propaganda by adults.Moreover, every child goes through an identity crisis before their personality/identity crystallizes.
Therefore, we shouldn't allow severe, irreversible surgery or sterilizing drugs that they may regret until at least age 18.
'-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 16, 2023The Democrat Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz last week labeled efforts to halt trans surgery on children as ''persecution,'' vowing to ''make sure that Minnesota's place as a welcoming, loving, neighborly state where you are welcome and will be free of persecution or anything else that we're trying to see in some other states.''
Walz pointed to neighbouring South Dakota, where Gov. Kristi Noem has signed a bill banning the prescription of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and sex-change surgeries for children.
''I don't know what a group of people in Pierre who decide to make life miserable and more dangerous for people are thinking, but it's not going to happen in Minnesota,'' Walz declared.
MN Governor Tim Walz signs a "gender-affirming" executive order to safeguard transgender procedures.By his side at the photo op, he placed a 12-year-old transgender child, a young boy, and a little girl holding a stuffed animal. pic.twitter.com/BT0Cc9edhQ
'-- Clarity (@covid_clarity) March 9, 2023Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says restricting sex changes for kids is "using the state apparatus to bring cruelty down on the most innocent amongst us." pic.twitter.com/ZGNHHcQ7es
'-- Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) March 16, 2023Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signs executive order providing legal protections for those seeking gender-affirming healthcare in Minnesota pic.twitter.com/uuwku4eUEs
'-- John Croman (@JohnCroman) March 8, 2023Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signs executive order protecting access to gender-affirming health care #news pic.twitter.com/VQ9vOODvqi
'-- Global News Aggregate (@AggregateGlobal) March 9, 2023* * *
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Midsize U.S. banks reportedly ask the FDIC to insure all deposits for two years
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 03:50
The Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on March 13, 2023.
Noah Berger | AFP | Getty Images
A coalition of midsize U.S. banks, Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), has asked regulators to extend FDIC insurance to all deposits for the next two years, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday citing an MBCA letter to regulators.
The letter argued that extending insurance will immediately stop the exodus of deposits from smaller banks, which in turn will stabilize the banking sector and restore confidence in banking system, the report said.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which held a high number of uninsured deposits beyond the FDIC guaranteed limit, prompted customers to move their money to bigger banks and triggered sharp selloff in banking stocks.
According to the Bloomberg report, the group proposed that the expanded insurance program be paid for by the banks themselves by increasing the deposit-insurance assessment on lenders that choose to participate in increased coverage.
The FDIC did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment while MBCA could not be immediately contacted.
UBS reportedly seeks $6 billion in government guarantees for Credit Suisse takeover
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 03:48
UBS reports its latest earnings
FABRICE COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
UBS is asking the Swiss government to cover about $6 billion in costs if it were to buy Credit Suisse , a person with knowledge of the talks said, as the two sides raced to hammer together a deal to restore confidence in the ailing Swiss bank.
The 167-year-old Credit Suisse is the biggest name ensnared in the turmoil unleashed by the collapse of U.S. lenders Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank over the past week, spurring a rout in banking stocks and prompting authorities to rush out extraordinary measures to keep banks afloat.
The $6 billion in government guarantees UBS is seeking would cover the cost of winding down parts of Credit Suisse and potential litigation charges, two people told Reuters.
One of the sources cautioned that the talks to resolve the crisis of confidence in Credit Suisse are encountering significant obstacles, and 10,000 jobs may have to be cut if the two banks combine.
Swiss regulators are racing to present a solution for Credit Suisse before markets reopen on Monday, but the complexities of combining two behemoths raises the prospect that talks will last well into Sunday, said the person, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Credit Suisse, UBS and the Swiss government declined to comment.
The frenzied weekend negotiations come after a brutal week for banking stocks and efforts in Europe and the U.S. to shore up the sector. U.S. President Joe Biden's administration moved to backstop consumer deposits while the Swiss central bank lent billions to Credit Suisse to stabilize its shaky balance sheet.
UBS was under pressure from the Swiss authorities to carry out a takeover of its local rival to get the crisis under control, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The plan could see Credit Suisse's Swiss business spun off.
Switzerland is preparing to use emergency measures to fast-track the deal, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the situation.
U.S. authorities are involved, working with their Swiss counterparts to help broker a deal, Bloomberg News reported, also citing those familiar with the matter.
British finance minister Jeremy Hunt and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey are also in regular contact this weekend over the fate of Credit Suisse, a source familiar with the matter said. Spokespeople for the British Treasury and the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, which oversees lenders, declined to comment.
Forceful responseCredit Suisse shares lost a quarter of their value in the last week. It was forced to tap $54 billion in central bank funding as it tries to recover from a string of scandals that have undermined the confidence of investors and clients.
The company ranks among the world's largest wealth managers and is considered one of 30 global systemically important banks whose failure would ripple throughout the entire financial system.
The banking sector's fundamentals are stronger and the global systemic linkages are weaker than during the 2008 global financial crisis, Goldman analyst Lotfi Karoui wrote in a late Friday note to clients. That limits the risk of a "potential vicious circle of counterparty credit losses," Karoui said.
"However, a more forceful policy response is likely needed to bring some stability," Karoui said. The bank said the lack of clarity on Credit Suisse's future will pressure the broader European banking sector.
A senior official at China's central bank said on Saturday that high interest rates in the major developed economies could continue to cause problems for the financial system.
There were multiple reports of interest for Credit Suisse from other rivals. Bloomberg reported that Deutsche Bank was looking at the possibility of buying some of its assets, while U.S. financial giant BlackRock denied a report that it was participating in a rival bid for the bank.
Interest rate riskThe failure of California-based Silicon Valley Bank brought into focus how a relentless campaign of interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks '-- including the European Central Bank this week '-- was pressuring the banking sector. SVB and Signature's collapses are the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history behind the demise of Washington Mutual during the global financial crisis in 2008.
Banking stocks globally have been battered since SVB collapsed, with the S&P Banks index falling 22%, its largest two weeks of losses since the pandemic shook markets in March 2020.
Big U.S. banks threw a $30 billion lifeline to smaller lender First Republic , and U.S. banks altogether have sought a record $153 billion in emergency liquidity from the Federal Reserve in recent days.
In Washington, focus has turned to greater oversight to ensure that banks and their executives are held accountable.
Biden called on Congress to give regulators greater power over the sector, including imposing higher fines, clawing back funds and barring officials from failed banks.
12ft | LME finds bags of stones instead of nickel in metal warehouse | Financial Times
US security forces brace for possible Trump 'arrest' '' media '-- RT World News
Sat, 18 Mar 2023 12:31
The former leader could face charges as early as next week, multiple news outlets have reported
Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies are reportedly discussing security preparations in the event that former President Donald Trump is indicted on felony falsification charges in the coming days, according to multiple media outlets, citing anonymous officials.
The agencies are carrying out ''preliminary security assessments'' in and around a Manhattan courthouse to prepare for a possible indictment linked to an alleged ''hush money'' scheme involving a woman who claimed to have been intimate with the ex-president, five senior officials told NBC on Friday.
While the officials stressed that the discussions are ''precautionary'' given that no charges have been filed, they said preparations are being made for an indictment that could come as early as next week. Four law enforcement officials reached by the Associated Press confirmed the interagency conversations, which they said involve ''security, planning and the practicalities of a potential court appearance'' by Trump.
The agencies discussing security preparations reportedly include the New York Police Department, New York State Court Officers, the US Secret Service, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Manhattan DA's Office.
The Secret Service will eventually determine whether Trump is handcuffed in the event he is charged, according to a ''source in the courts'' cited by Fox News.
The former leader is under a grand jury investigation launched by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office over the alleged felony falsification of business records, and is accused of arranging a payment of $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels through his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. Daniels claims she was paid during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep quiet about alleged sexual encounters with Trump in the past, though he denies such liaisons ever took place.
Trump's attorney, Joe Tacopina, said on Friday that if the ex-president is charged, he will ''follow the normal procedures,'' but has insisted on his client's innocence.
''There won't be a standoff at Mar-a-Lago with Secret Service and the Manhattan DA's office,'' Tacopina told the Daily News.
''The payments were made to a lawyer, not to Stormy Daniels. The payments were made to Donald Trump's lawyer, which would be considered legal fees,'' he said during a separate interview with MSNBC earlier this week, adding that Cohen ''was his lawyer at the time and advised him that this was the proper way to do this to protect himself and his family from embarrassment. It's as simple as that. That is not a crime.''
Cohen pleaded guilty to a federal charge related to the payment in 2018, and has since cooperated with the investigation into Trump after a public falling out with his former boss. He has provided hours of testimony before the grand jury probing Trump on the alleged felony charge, appearing for a second time on Wednesday.
Trump YouTube account restrictions lifted
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 20:36
Former U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on education as he holds a campaign rally with supporters, in Davenport, Iowa, U.S. March 13, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Google -owned YouTube will allow former President Donald Trump's account to post new videos as of Friday, lifting restrictions put in place following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
The decision means that Trump's accounts on three major platforms from which he was suspended or restricted are now restored, in time for his expected campaign for the 2024 election. Facebook owner Meta and Twitter had both earlier decided to reinstate Trump's accounts, after suspending them for fear he would incite further violence.
In 2021, then-YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Trump's restrictions would be lifted when it believed the risk of real-world violence had subsided. The account was not terminated from the site, but it could not upload new videos under the restrictions.
"We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, balancing that with the importance of preserving the opportunity for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election," YouTube's Vice President of Public Policy Leslie Miller said in a statement. "This channel will continue to be subject to our policies, just like any other channel on YouTube."
YouTube said its trust and safety teams analyzed factors such as government security alerts and violent rhetoric across different platforms to determine when the risk of real-world violence had decreased. The company also noted that Trump's posts on YouTube tend to differ from those on other platforms, often including reuploads from news networks.
As of Friday, Trump's YouTube account has more than 2.6 million subscribers.
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WATCH: Anthony Scaramucci says the U.S. needs stronger leadership and better direction
V4V Stats
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:46
This is a look at the total sats flowing throughthe Value4Value Lightning podcasting economy over various periods of time. We calculate this data based on ourvisibility as a one percent voluntary split on Podcastindex.org api calls. Therefore, the true numbers could behigher, but they cannot be lower than listed here. This represents our best approximation of how many sats areflowing across the entire ecosystem from listeners to creators, guests (via episode splits), platforms,services and apps.
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Covid origins: WHO urges China to release data on raccoon dogs at Wuhan Market
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:20
A man wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against Covid-19 walks past a Communist Party flag in Wuhan, China, on March 31, 2020.
Noel Celis | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization on Friday called on China to release new data linking the Covid pandemic's origins to animal samples at Wuhan Market after the country recently took down the research.
The agency said China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded data to the public virus tracking database GISAID in late January relating to samples taken at the Huanan market in Wuhan in 2020.
Researchers from several countries downloaded and analyzed the data before it was removed, and presented their findings to the WHO last weekend. The researchers found molecular evidence that raccoon dogs and other animals susceptible to Covid were sold at the market, which is consistent with hypotheses about the virus spilling into humans from a wild animal.
The new data doesn't provide a conclusive answer to how the pandemic began, "but it does provide more clues" about a potential host of the virus that spread it to humans, said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's Covid-19 technical lead. She called on China to publicly release the data so the WHO and other researchers can further analyze it and inch closer to understanding the origins of a pandemic that has killed millions of people worldwide.
"The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community," said Van Kerkhove. "This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other."
The WHO's call comes as the debate over the origin of Covid intensifies. Researchers are clashing over competing theories and governments are staking out positions on what to do next.
The New York Times earlier reported on the new data on Thursday. Researchers told the Times that the molecular data was collected from swabs of walls, floors, metal cages and carts in and around the market starting in January 2020. At the time, the Chinese government had already shut down the market over suspicions that it was linked to the Covid outbreak.
Researchers added that large amounts of the data were a match for raccoon dogs.
Van Kerkhove emphasized that the data doesn't necessarily prove that a raccoon dog or another animal was infected with the virus and spread it to people. But she said it does establish that animals who can carry Covid were sold at the market, which is "new information."
It is unknown where the animals came from and whether they were wild or domestic, she added. The WHO is pushing for studies to be conducted in other markets in Wuhan and across China, according to Van Kerkhove. It is also seeking serology tests, which measure antibodies, for people who worked at the markets.
Van Kerkhove also noted that "all hypotheses" on how Covid entered the human population are still on the table. She said more research is needed on potential breaches in biosecurity from a lab or whether the virus originated in a bat before jumping to humans.
"We don't have all of the information in front of us, and we need to be able to look at all of these different hypotheses. We need to look at all of the data that are needed to assess each one of these so that we can say this may have happened, this may not have happened," she said.
She added that the WHO "won't be able to remove different hypotheses" until China reuploads its data.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said earlier this month that the bureau believes Covid most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.
In February, the Department of Energy assessed "with low confidence" that Covid leaked from a lab.
Roughly 44% of U.S. adults believe the virus spilled from a virology lab in Wuhan, China, while 26% say it moved naturally from animals to humans, according to a Morning Consult poll released last month.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon aware of Jeffrey Epstein trafficking
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:19
Jamie Dimon, CEO, JP Morgan Chase, during Jim Cramer interview, Feb. 23, 2023.
CNBC
An attorney for the U.S. Virgin Islands argued in federal court that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and ex-top bank executive Jes Staley were aware of sex trafficking by the bank's notorious client Jeffrey Epstein.
The lawyer's argument pushed back at JPMorgan's move earlier this month to shift any legal responsibility for its business relationship with the late Epstein onto Staley alone.
"Jamie Dimon knew in 2008 that his billionaire client was a sex trafficker," attorney Mimi Liu told Manhattan U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff at a hearing late Thursday, referring to the year Epstein was first criminally charged with sex crimes.
"If Staley is a rogue employee, why isn't Jamie Dimon?" Liu said at the hearing, which dealt with JPMorgan's efforts to dismiss the Virgin Islands' lawsuit against the bank over its relationship with Epstein.
The lawyer continued: "Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew" about Epstein's criminal conduct.
Liu said there were multiple cash transactions and wire transfers by Epstein, including sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to several women, which should have been officially flagged as suspicious.
"They broke every rule to facilitate his sex trafficking in exchange for Epstein's wealth, connections and referrals," Liu argued
"This case was not just Jes Staley '... there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite," she said.
Jes Staley, chief executive officer of Barclays Plc, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview on day three of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019.
Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A lawyer for JPMorgan disputed those arguments, "in particular the point about Jamie Dimon having any specific knowledge."
Dimon is not a named defendant in the suit against the bank.
A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment Friday to CNBC about the hearing.
But the spokeswoman, Patricia Wexler, did say that "Jamie Dimon has no recollection of reviewing the Epstein accounts."
Staley has denied knowing about Epstein's illegal conduct. He was CEO of Barclays from 2015 until late 2021, when he quit after a probe by British financial regulators into his ties to Epstein.
Attorneys for the Virgin Islands previously have highlighted an August 2008 internal email at JPMorgan which suggested that Epstein's account would be closed that year because of concerns over his conduct.
"I would count Epstein's assets as a probable outflow for '08 ($120mm or so?) as I can't imagine it will stay (pending Dimon review)," an unidentified employee wrote in that email, mentioned in the Virgin Islands' lawsuit.
That email came two years after JPMorgan's Global Corporate Security Division found several newspaper articles "that detail the indictment of Jeffrey Epstein in Florida on felony charges of soliciting underage prostitutes," the lawsuit noted.
U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein appears in a photograph taken for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services' sex offender registry March 28, 2017 and obtained by Reuters July 10, 2019.
New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services | Handout | Reuters
The Virgin Islands' lawsuit against the bank alleges that Epstein's 15-year customer relationship with the bank helped him transport young women, whom he and others then sexually abused at his property in the Virgin Islands.
The suit was filed three years after Epstein, who was a former friend of ex-Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, died by suicide in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial on federal child sex trafficking charges.
JPMorgan has said Dimon was not involved in decisions related to Epstein's account at the bank.
Last week, the bank sued Staley, its former chief of investment banking, alleging that he is legally responsible for lawsuits from the Virgin Islands and Epstein's victims related to Epstein's relationship with JPMorgan. The suit seeks to claw back more than $80 million in compensation Staley received.
In arguments Thursday, a lawyer for the bank said "all roads go to Mr. Staley."
"He will be at the center of this case whether there is one or two" trials for each lawsuit, the lawyer said.
Epstein was a private wealth client of the bank until 2013, at least partly because Staley had vouched for him.
But in 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to a Florida state charge of procuring an underage prostitute, a crime that was extensively reported at the time. He later served 13 months in jail.
"In 2013 '-- the year that JP Morgan terminated its relationship with Epstein '-- JPMorgan flagged in Epstein's history that '[p]er bank policy, felons [like Epstein] are considered high risk and require additional approval,'" the Virgin Islands' suit notes.
Rakoff, the judge, did not rule on the motion to dismiss the suit Thursday. He said he would rule on that question by the end of March.
But Rakoff did rule against JPMorgan on another issue, finding that the Virgin Islands has the right to file a lawsuit on behalf of anyone who was a resident of the territory.
'-- Additional reporting by Eamon Javers
Live updates: Latest news on Russia and the war in Ukraine
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:19
Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit Russia early next week, China's Foreign Ministry announced, in a trip that would be the leader's first trip to Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
In a major shift, Poland announced it will be sending four of its MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, something that Kyiv has been pleading for since the war began. It will be the first delivery of fighter jets to Ukraine from any NATO ally. Slovakia followed suit one day later, pledging to send 13 of its MiG jets to Ukraine, though they are not all said to be currently operational.
Meanwhile, the battle for Bakhmut rages on, as Russian and Wagner Group forces manage to gain ground west of the Bakhmutka river. The negotiating parties involved in the Black Sea grain deal continue to push for an longer extension of the deal, but the Kremlin says it will only extend it for 60 days.
State Department approves $150 million Hellfire missile sale to PolandA Hellfire missile resting in the weapons bay of a US Air Force Predator drone aircraft.
David Bathgate | Corbis Historical | Getty Images
The State Department approved a foreign military sale to Poland for Hellfire Missiles as allies look to restock their arsenals amid Russia's war in Ukraine.
The Lockheed Martin -made AGM-114R2 Hellfire missiles and related equipment will cost an estimated $150 million.
"This proposed sale will support the foreign policy goals and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a NATO ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in Europe," the State Department wrote in a statement announcing the sale.
'-- Amanda Macias
Ukrainian workers prepare ballistic plates for bulletproof vests at a factory in Kharkiv Ukrainian workers prepare ballistic plates for bulletproof vests at a factory in Kharkiv.
A Ukranian worker prepares ballistic plates intended for bullet-proof vests in a factory in Kharkiv, on March 16, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Bobok | AFP | Getty Images
A Ukrainian checks a ballistic plate for bullet-proof vests at a factory in Kharkiv on March 16, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Bobok | AFP | Getty Images
A Ukrainian worker prepares ballistic plates for bullet-proof vests at a factory in Kharkiv on March 16, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Bobok | AFP | Getty Images
A Ukrainian worker prepares ballistic plates for bullet-proof vests at a factory in Kharkiv on March 16, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Bobok | Afp | Getty Images
A Ukranian worker prepares ballistic plates intended for bullet-proof vests in a factory in Kharkiv, on March 16, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sergey Bobok | AFP | Getty Images
'-- Sergey Bobok | AFP | Getty Images
Kremlin says fighter jets sent to Ukraine by NATO allies will be destroyedTwo Polish MiG-29s sit at an airbase in Malbork, Poland, in this file photo from August 2021.
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The Kremlin said that any fighter jets sent by NATO countries to Ukraine will be destroyed.
"Of course, the supply of this equipment, as we have repeatedly said, cannot affect the outcome of the special military operation, but it can create additional troubles for Ukraine itself and the Ukrainian people," he said," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to a Russian state media report.
Peskov also added that during the so-called special military operation, all of this security assistance will be subject to destruction, according to an NBC News translation.
The Kremlin's announcement comes on the heels of Poland and Slovakia's decision to provide MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.
'-- Amanda Macias
Turkey set to approve Finland's NATO membership Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan holds a news conference during the NATO summit at the Alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium June 14, 2021.
Yves Herman | Reuters
Turkey announced its decision to approve Finland's membership in the NATO alliance.
"Due to the sensitivity to address our security concerns, we have decided to start the approval process of Finland's NATO accession protocol in our parliament, "President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, according to a readout from the Turkish government.
"NATO will become stronger with Finland's membership and I believe it will play an active role in maintaining global security and stability," he added.
Erdogan said that Turkey will continue to have discussions with Sweden, citing security concerns, in regard to NATO membership.
Last week, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said allies should wrap up the ratification process for both Sweden and Finland.
"It is now time for all allies to conclude the ratification process and welcome Finland and Sweden as full members of the alliance ahead of the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius," Stoltenberg said last week during a meeting with representatives from Finland, Sweden and Turkey, according to a NATO readout.
Read the full story here.
'-- Amanda Macias
Russia gives awards to Su-27 pilots who confronted U.S. drone over Black SeaRussian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu presented awards to the Su-27 fighter jet pilots that made close passes with and then sprayed fuel onto a U.S. surveillance drone over the Black Sea, Russian state news agency RIA reported.
The incident Tuesday was the first direct encounter between Russia and the U.S. since the start of the Ukraine war. The U.S. called it a reckless and dangerous act of harassment, while Moscow argued the U.S. was violating Russian airspace.
Russian and U.S. defense chiefs held rare phone calls the on Wednesday after the incident to discuss what had happened. Moscow initially denied any encounter had taken place, insisting that the drone crashed because of its own movements and because it was "provocatively" flying close to its airspace near Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
The Pentagon released a video shortly thereafter confirming the U.S. account of the incident, where an approaching jet can be seen dumping a chemical substance over the drone. The drone later crashed into the sea, and although the Pentagon said it remotely wiped the drone of its data, it is unlikely to be able to retrieve it, whereas the Russians will likely be able to do so themselves.
Shoigu on Friday presented the Russian pilots with awards for "preventing the violation of the borders of the special operation area by the American MQ-9 Reaper drone," RIA reported.
'-- Natasha Turak
Kyiv will reduce its wartime curfew hours to help businessesGuests sit in a bar in the evening in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, February 2023
Kay Nietfeld | Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Ukraine's capital Kyiv will reduce its wartime curfew by an hour in the evenings, the Kyiv city administration chief Serhiy Popko said, in a measure aimed at supporting businesses affected by the curfew.
The curfew period will soon start at midnight instead of 11:00 p.m., which Popko said will allow for more time for public transport and "should help reduce social tension, increase production, create new jobs."
Residents of Kyiv and other cities around Ukraine have been subject to regional curfews since the war began, with people who are still out beyond the designated times having to face fines and questioning from police patrolling the streets.
Bars and restaurants had to close by 9:30 p.m. to allow staff to get home, while some venues in Kyiv started running daytime events on weekends, with much of the profits going to Ukraine's armed forces. Closing times will now be moved to 10:30 p.m. instead, officials said.
'-- Natasha Turak
UK calls on China to tell Putin to withdraw troops from Ukraine during Xi visitRussian President Vladimir Putin speaks to China's President Xi Jinping during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization leaders' summit in Samarkand on Sept. 16, 2022.
Sergei Bobylyov | AFP | Getty Images
The UK is calling on China to ask Russian leader Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine during Chinese Premier Xi Jinping's Russia visit next week.
"If China wants to play a genuine role in restoring sovereignty to Ukraine, then we would obviously welcome that," a spokesperson for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said.
"We're clear that any peace deal which is not predicated on Ukraine's sovereignty and self determination is not a peace deal at all. So we will continue to call on China, as we have done before, to join other countries across the world in calling on Putin to withdraw his troops," the spokesperson added.
China's foreign ministry and the Kremlin both confirmed Friday that Xi would be making a visit to Moscow from March 20 to 22, at Putin's invitation, which will be the Chinese premier's first visit to Russia since the full-scale war in Ukraine began.
The two countries celebrated a partnership with "no limits" in early 2022, just before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Beijing still refuses to call Russia's actions an invasion or take part in Western sanctions against Russia.
'-- Natasha Turak
Slovakia to send 13 MiG-29 fighter jets to UkraineTwo Polish MiG-29s sit at an airbase in Malbork, Poland, in this file photo from August 2021.
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Slovakia's government approved a measure to send its Soviet-era MiG jets to Ukraine, officials said. The jets are in varying states of readiness and were retired last summer, so will likely need substantial maintenance to be operational.
The Eastern European NATO member announced it would send 13 of the jets to Ukraine, one day after Poland said it would supply Kyiv with four of its jets. Ukraine has long requested fighter jets in order to protect its skies against Russian attacks and combat Russian forces in the country.
"#Slovak gov. just approved sending 13 #MiG29s to #Ukraine! Promises must be kept&when ZelenskyyUa asked for more #weapons incl. fighter jets, I said we'll do our best. Glad others're doing the same," Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger wrote on Twitter.
NATO allies' granting of Kyiv's request more than a year into the war signals a significant shift in their willingness to send Ukraine advanced weaponry that could further provoke Russia as well as give Ukrainian forces a major edge in the fighting.
'-- Natasha Turak
Russian and Wagner Group forces gaining ground in Bakhmut, but broader offensive is slowing: UK MoDRussian and Wagner Group forces have gained ground in the embattled city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, where brutal fighting has continued for months, Britain's Ministry of Defense wrote in its daily intelligence update.
"In recent days, Russian and Wagner Group forces have obtained footholds west of the Bakhmutka River in the centre of the contested Donbas town of Bakhmut. Over the preceding week, the river had marked the front line. Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to defend the west of the town," the ministry wrote on Twitter.
However, it added, "more broadly across the front line, Russia is conducting some of the lowest rates of local offensive action that has been seen since at least January 2023."
That's likely because "Russian forces have temporarily depleted the deployed formations' combat power to such an extent that even local offensive actions are not currently sustainable," and Russian leaders "will likely seek to regenerate the offensive potential of the force once personnel and munition stocks are replenished," it said.
'-- Natasha Turak
China's Xi set to visit Russia next week in first visit since Putin ordered invasion of Ukraine Thu, Mar 16 2023 8:57 AM EDT
Poland to send Ukraine 4 MiG-29 jets in coming days, says presidentAn army MiG-29 aircraft exhibited at the presentation of the aircraft AWACS E-3A Component from the Geilenkirchenand the F-16 and MiG-29 from the 31. and 33.
Darek Majewski | Gallo Images | Getty Images
Poland will send Ukraine four MiG-29 fighter jets in coming days, the president said on Thursday, making it the first of Kyiv's allies to provide such aircraft.
One of Ukraine's staunchest supporters, Warsaw has taken a leading role in persuading sometimes hesitant allies to provide Kyiv with heavy weaponry. It has said that any transfer of jets would be as part of a coalition.
"Firstly, literally within the next few days, we will hand over, as far as I remember, four aircraft to Ukraine in full working order," Andrzej Duda told a news conference.
"The rest are being prepared, serviced."
On Tuesday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that deliveries could be made in four to six weeks. Duda said that Poland had roughly 10-20 MiG 29 jets.
NATO allies in the former communist east such as Poland and Slovakia have been particularly vocal supporters of Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Slovakia has also been considering whether to send MiG-29 jets to Ukraine but has yet to reach a decision. Poland has sent 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
Asked last week how many MiG-29 planes Warsaw might supply, the head of the president's office, Pawel Szrot, said it would "certainly not" be as many as 14.
'-- Reuters
Zelenskyy calls for tribunal to punish Russia for alleged war crimesUkraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signaled Kyiv is preparing its soldiers for counteroffensives and praised soldiers for defending the country despite the "insane pressure" Russian forces have been putting on them.
Julien De Rosa | Pool | Reuters
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again called for a tribunal to punish Russia for war crimes alleged to have been committed over more than a year of its invasion of Ukraine.
"The day will come and a tribunal will be created that will restore justice to our people. A tribunal that will punish this aggressor in the same way that past aggressors were punished," he said in a nightly address, according to an NBC News translation.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine is "mobilizing all partners necessary for this."
A U.N.-backed inquiry accused Russia of war crimes including torture and attacks on civilians.
Russia has previously said it does not target civilians.
'-- Jacob Pramuk
Blinken says it's 'imperative' that Russia allow Black Sea grain deal to continueU.S. Secretary of State Blinken attends the Freedom of Expression Roundtable, in New York, U.S., September 19, 2022.
Craig Ruttle | Reuters
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it is "imperative" that Russia allow the deal that reopened key Ukrainian ports to continue.
Speaking during a trip to Niger, the top U.S. diplomat said the Black Sea Grain Initiative has helped to alleviate food insecurity caused by the war and a Russian naval blockade, which held up critical Ukrainian agriculture exports to the world.
"So millions of people around the world and especially here in Africa, rely on this initiative to help deal with food insecurity. It's imperative that it continue, and it's imperative that Russia allow it to continue," he said, according to NBC News.
Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations are holding discussions on extending the agreement.
'-- Jacob Pramuk
Credit Suisse CFO teams to hold talks this weekend on scenarios for bank, sources say
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:19
Credit Suisse
Stefano Rellandini | Reuters
Credit Suisse will be holding meetings over the weekend to assess scenarios for the bank as it struggles to regain confidence from the market, people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Friday.
The meetings will include teams of the chief financial officer, the people said.
Credit Suisse didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Thursday, the bank tapped the option of a $54 billion loan from the Swiss National Bank.
PodcastEZ - Build, Launch and Grow Your Podcast. Just Speak!
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:04
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International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 16:13
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting on the social and economic development of Crimea and Sevastopol, via videolink in Moscow, Russia March 17, 2023.
Mikhail Metzel | Sputnik | Reuters
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on Friday for Russian President Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimes committed during his invasion of Ukraine.
The court also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner for children's rights.
The court wrote in a statement that Lvova-Belova is "allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation" of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.
Earlier in the week, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The Kremlin has previously denied that its troops commit war crimes.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
DTV Reception Maps | Federal Communications Commission
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:54
Use this program to check for the DTV signals that are available at your location. Enter your address in the box below and click Go! The DTV coverage map will list all stations in your area.
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The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:55
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2023 ~
U. S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis '' the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The legislation made the Treasury Secretary the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. The legislation also required the Treasury Secretary's authorization before the Federal Reserve could create any more of those $29 trillion emergency bailout programs for the mega banks '' which had tethered themselves to casino trading on Wall Street since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
Yesterday, after the Swiss banking behemoth Credit Suisse had traded at an all-time low of less than two bucks; blown out its credit default swaps to unprecedented levels; and tanked the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 700 points intraday, Bloomberg News ran this headline at 12:54 p.m. '' ''US Treasury Reviewing US Banks' Exposure to Credit Suisse.'' By ''exposure,'' the Treasury really means how many billions of dollars of underwater derivatives are U.S. banks on the hook for as a counterparty to Credit Suisse. The Treasury also has to worry about U.S. banks' exposure to Credit Suisse's other major counterparties that U.S. banks do business with, even if the banks are not direct counterparties to Credit Suisse itself.
If the U.S. Treasury Secretary and her staff at F-SOC were just yesterday getting around to finding out which U.S. banks had counterparty exposure to Credit Suisse's derivatives, we are all in very big trouble. The serious problems at Credit Suisse have been making headlines for two years, including here at Wall Street On Parade.
In July of 2021, the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison released a 165-page report on the internal investigation it had conducted for the Board of Credit Suisse into how the bank came to lose $5.5 billion conducting highly-leveraged and dodgy derivative trades for the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management, which went belly-up in March of 2021. The Paul, Weiss lawyers wrote:
''The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS's Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos's voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals '-- including large, persistent limit breaches '-- indicating that Archegos's concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head of Equities, as well as the risk function, failed to heed these signs, despite evidence that some individuals did raise concerns appropriately.''
Six months ago, Dennis Kelleher, President and CEO of the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released a statement about the deteriorating condition of Credit Suisse, highlighting the following:
''As the financial condition of Credit Suisse continues to deteriorate, raising questions of whether it will collapse, the world and U.S. taxpayers should be deeply worried as multiple, simultaneous shocks shake the foundations of economies worldwide. Credit Suisse is a global, systemically significant, too-big-to-fail bank that operates in the U.S. and is deeply interconnected throughout the global financial system. Its failure would have widespread and largely unknown repercussions from the inconvenient to the possibly catastrophic.
''That is due, in part, to the failure of the Federal Reserve to properly regulate the activities of foreign banks that have U.S.-based operations. The U.S. has a largely ineffective regulatory framework with gaping loopholes that fail to include some of even the most basic safety and soundness requirements, which incentivizes regulatory arbitrage. As a result, the U.S. financial system and economy are needlessly threatened.
''An effective and appropriate regulatory framework for large foreign banks that covers all of their U.S.-based affiliates should have been established when the Fed set up so-called U.S.-based intermediate holding companies ('IHCs') that they regulate. Instead, U.S.-based branches of foreign banks (which are not consolidated within the IHC) face significantly weaker standards than the IHC, remarkably including no specific capital requirements in the U.S. Furthermore, the branches have significantly weaker liquidity requirements. This has resulted in many foreign banks '' including in particular Credit Suisse '' engaging in regulatory arbitrage by shifting large amounts of assets from their IHCs to their branches, entities that are entirely reliant on the resources of their foreign-based parent companies. The 2008 financial collapse proved that these resources are not available in periods of stress, which is why the U.S. bailed out so many foreign banks operating in the U.S. The Fed should have stopped that long ago.
''As is well-known, risks in the global financial system that materialize elsewhere easily end up becoming risks here in the U.S. and threaten our financial system and economy. Those risks are amplified by the unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies attempting to address the many unexpected shocks from the pandemic and war. The Fed must see Credit Suisse as a warning sign and improve the regulatory framework for large foreign banks and all banks to ensure that the American financial system and economy are properly protected.''
Credit Suisse's reputation has taken more hits from its involvement in the Greensill Capital scandal and the infamous spy-gate scandal in 2019 where the bank spied on and followed various employees.
Nervousness about Credit Suisse reached a pivotal moment in the fall of last year. On November 30, its 5-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) blew out to 446 basis points. That was up from 55 basis points in January of 2022 and more than five times where CDS on its peer Swiss bank, UBS, were trading. The price of a Credit Default Swap reflects the cost to traders, or investors with exposure, to insuring themselves against a debt default by the bank.
If all of this didn't awaken Secretary Yellen from her slumber about the contagion risks posed by a deteriorating Credit Suisse, she should have been jolted upright on December 5 of last year when researchers for the Bank for International Settlement (Claudio Borio, Robert McCauley and Patrick McGuire) released an astonishing report that found that foreign banks had secret derivative debt that is ''10 times their capital.''
The report focused on the amount of derivative debt that was not being captured through regular statistical reporting because it is held off the banks' balance sheets. The researchers refer to this exposure as ''staggering'' and note the potential for upsets to dollar swap lines to settle it as it comes due.
The report raises further alarm bells with this: ''For banks headquartered outside the United States, dollar debt from these instruments is estimated at $39 trillion, more than double their on-balance sheet dollar debt and more than 10 times their capital.'' Their on-balance sheet dollar debt is $15 trillion.
The most recent quarterly derivatives report from the U.S. regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), found that as of September 30, 2022 four U.S. mega banks held 88.6 percent of all notional amounts of derivatives in the U.S. banking system. The total notional amount for all banks was $195 trillion. JPMorgan Chase held $54.3 trillion of that; Goldman Sachs held $50.97 trillion; Citigroup's Citibank held $46 trillion; and Bank of America held $21.6 trillion. Even though the Dodd-Frank legislation required that most of these derivative trades move to central clearing, as of September 30, 2022 the OCC report found that 58.3 percent of these derivatives were not being centrally-cleared, meaning they were over-the-counter (OTC) private contracts between counterparties, thus adding another layer of opacity to an unaccountable system.
For the role that Citigroup played in keeping these dangerous derivatives inside federally-insured banks, see our December 2014 report: Meet Your Newest Legislator: Citigroup.
The Federal Reserve Announces Its First Big Step Towards a Digital Dollar
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:46
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States has announced that it is launching an instant payment transfer service called " FedNow Service ," which has features of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and some analysts believe is the first big step towards a "digital dollar."
On Wednesday, within hours of our reporting that the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failures could spur renewed calls for the U.S. to implement a CBDC, the Federal Reserve announced that the U.S. is rolling out the FedNow instant payment transfer service in July.
"The Federal Reserve announced that the FedNow Service will start operating in July and provided details on preparations for launch," the announcement read.
"We couldn't be more excited about the forthcoming FedNow launch, which will enable every participating financial institution, the smallest to the largest and from all corners of the country, to offer a modern instant payment solution," said Ken Montgomery, first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and FedNow program executive. "With the launch drawing near, we urge financial institutions and their industry partners to move full steam ahead with preparations to join the FedNow Service."
The Fed added that the FedNow Service "will launch with a robust set of core clearing and settlement functionality and value-added features. More features and enhancements will be added in future releases to continue supporting safety, resiliency and innovation in the industry as the FedNow network expands in the coming years."
"With the FedNow Service, the Federal Reserve is creating a leading-edge payments system that is resilient, adaptive, and accessible," said Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and FedNow Program executive sponsor. "The launch reflects an important milestone in the journey to help financial institutions serve customer needs for instant payments to better support nearly every aspect of our economy."
The Federal Reserve says that it developed the FedNow Service "to facilitate nationwide reach of instant payment services by financial institutions '-- regardless of size or geographic location '-- around the clock, every day of the year."
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"Through financial institutions participating in the FedNow Service, businesses and individuals will be able to send and receive instant payments at any time of day, and recipients will have full access to funds immediately, giving them greater flexibility to manage their money and make time-sensitive payments," The Fed said. "Access will be provided through the Federal Reserve's FedLine ® network, which serves more than 10,000 financial institutions directly or through their agents."
As noted by Steve Kaaru of CoinGeek, FedNow has been in the works since 2019 and is "touted to be the fastest way to make payments by financial institutions in the U.S. around the clock, every day of the year. Banks, payment services , and individual users will receive and have instant access to payments made through the service."
The report added that FedNow will "address a challenge that has plagued the financial industry worldwide for several decades: facilitating instant payments. Various players have come up with their own solutions, such as VISA ( NASDAQ: V ) and Mastercard ( NASDAQ: MA ), which have Direct and Send, respectively, to enable real-time payments ."
It points out that in the U.S., a collective of banks and payment processors known as The Clearing House runs real-time payments, adding that one of the emerging solutions to this challenge has been central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to facilitate real-time payments. In the U.S., Fed chair Jerome Powell has dismissed the need for a digital dollar, and FedNow is his response to the call for a CBDC .
"The jury is still out on whether FedNow will be a forerunner for the digital dollar or impede the CBDC's progress in the world's largest economy," Kaaru remarked. "For now, what's clear is that it will change the payments landscape in the U.S."
In December, Norbert Michel of the Cato Institute argued that the Federal Reserve should drop FedNow and any plans to launch a CBDC.
"Just like FedNow, CBDCs should be left on the drawing board," Michel argued. "Both usurp the private sector. Supporters of both ignore the many harms that the government has already done to financial markets and assume that the government will provide better solutions this time.'
"If Congress really wants to provide more access to financial markets and ensure more innovation in financial services, members should support more private innovation and competition," he added. "At the very least, they should work to lessen government monopoly and regulation while ensuring that the Fed cannot issue a retail CBDC. Then they can start getting the government out of the payments system business."
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While there is currently no imminent plan for the Fed to implement a "digital dollar," a House bill was filed in 2022 to authorize the Treasury to create one. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) was joined by four other members of Congress in filing the bill: Jesºs Chuy Garcia, (D-IL), Ayanna Pressley, (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
"The electronic dollar, a virtual representation of a US dollar, would allow people to make payments using tokens on mobile phones or through cards versus cash," Lucas Mearian of Computer World reported on the legislation.
"ECASH (electronic cash), as the bill calls it, would be a bearer instrument that wouldn't require payment processing intermediaries, such as SWIFT, the world's largest payment messaging network," the report noted. "That means payments using ECASH would be near instantaneous '-- even across national borders '-- and processing fees would likely be dramatically reduced."
In March 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order calling for more research on developing a national digital currency through the Federal Reserve Bank or ''The Fed.''
The Executive Order called for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to "Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) by placing urgency on research and development of a potential United States CBDC, should issuance be deemed in the national interest. The Order directs the U.S. Government to assess the technological infrastructure and capacity needs for a potential U.S. CBDC in a manner that protects Americans' interests. The Order also encourages the Federal Reserve to continue its research, development, and assessment efforts for a U.S. CBDC, including development of a plan for broader U.S. Government action in support of their work. This effort prioritizes U.S. participation in multi-country experimentation, and ensures U.S. leadership internationally to promote CBDC development that is consistent with U.S. priorities and democratic values."
The Federal Reserve Bank is still exploring the development of CBDCs. 11 nations thus far have implemented CBDCs, according to the Atlantic Council's tracker .
The World Economic Forum supports the implementation of CBDCs to promote more inclusion and stability in the global digital economy. It cites America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, as saying that if CBDC were to be introduced, it would be ''the safest digital asset available to the general public , with no associated credit or liquidity risk.''
"The resilience of financial systems could also be boosted," WEF adds. "If a natural disaster or the failure of a payments company made cash unavailable, a CBDC could provide a back-up , the International Monetary Fund says."
More than 100 countries, including 19 G20 nations, are now exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the World Economic Forum noted.
In the wake of the SVB and Signature failures, the banking system is moving towards consolidation. First Republic Bank, on the verge of collapse, was rescued by a consortium of big banks and lending houses.
"A group of the nation's biggest banks swooped in on Thursday afternoon to rescue First Republic Bank with a $30 billion deposit, a move intended to shore up the beleaguered San Francisco lender amid fears of a broader financial crisis," Fox Business reported .
"JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo will each contribute $5 billion; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will deposit about $2.5 billion each," according to a news release from the banks. "Truist, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon will provide about $1 billion apiece."
"This action by America's largest banks reflects their confidence in First Republic and in banks of all sizes, and it demonstrates their overall commitment to helping banks serve their customers and communities," the coalition said in a joint statement.
J.P. Morgan Chase and other big banks like Citigroup have been flooded with new clients in the aftermath of the bank collapses, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. In the aftermath of the bank failures, two of the largest in U.S. history, there is renewed concern about a 'domino effect' and where it may be leading.
While the Federal Reserve Bank's official position is that it is yet to launch a CBDC and there are no current plans to implement a "digital dollar," the institution has a long history of moving the goal posts.
According to Fed Chair Jerome Powell's 2017 remarks on The History and Structure of the Federal Reserve , "America's central bank was founded through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was largely a reaction to the Panic of 1907 that caused inflation-adjusted GNP to fall 12% (twice as bad as the fall during the 2008 crisis)."
''After the panic ended, there was a broad sense that reform was needed, although consensus on the exact nature of that reform was elusive," he added. "Some called for an institution similar in structure to the Bank of England at the time, with centralized power, owned and operated by the banking system. Some wanted control to be lodged with the federal government in Washington instead'... The resulting institution was a compromise, created by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913'... a more federated system was created, establishing the Federal Reserve Board in Washington and the 12 Reserve Banks located around the country.''
As Powell's statement conveys, the Federal Reserve was founded as a "federated system" but has evolved over time into "America's central bank."
"Today, the Federal Reserve sets the nation's monetary policy, supervises and regulates banking institutions, maintains the stability of the financial system, and provides financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions," the official website states .
As summed up by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, it is the tendency of government to grow more powerful and to corrupt society.
"And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering," Jefferson wrote.
Such is the case with FedNow and may be the case with CBDCs. It will then be a matter of time before Fed proponents advocate for a digital dollar. And thus, by that time, it may be too late to stop it.
A digital dollar would be the ultimate instrument of economic and social control. It is therefore the dream of central planners and the nemesis of freedom-loving people in America.
ChatGPT and generative AI are booming, but at a very expensive price
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:45
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a keynote address announcing ChatGPT integration for Bing at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, on February 7, 2023.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Before OpenAI's ChatGPT emerged and captured the world's attention for its ability to create compelling sentences, a small startup called Latitude was wowing consumers with its AI Dungeon game that let them use artificial intelligence to create fantastical tales based on their prompts.
But as AI Dungeon became more popular, Latitude CEO Nick Walton recalled that the cost to maintain the text-based role-playing game began to skyrocket. AI Dungeon's text-generation software was powered by the GPT language technology offered by the Microsoft -backed AI research lab OpenAI. The more people played AI Dungeon, the bigger the bill Latitude had to pay OpenAI.
Compounding the predicament was that Walton also discovered content marketers were using AI Dungeon to generate promotional copy, a use for AI Dungeon that his team never foresaw, but that ended up adding to the company's AI bill.
At its peak in 2021, Walton estimates Latitude was spending nearly $200,000 a month on OpenAI's so-called generative AI software and Amazon Web Services in order to keep up with the millions of user queries it needed to process each day.
"We joked that we had human employees and we had AI employees, and we spent about as much on each of them," Walton said. "We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on AI and we are not a big startup, so it was a very massive cost."
By the end of 2021, Latitude switched from using OpenAI's GPT software to a cheaper but still capable language software offered by startup AI21 Labs, Walton said, adding that the startup also incorporated open source and free language models into its service to lower the cost. Latitude's generative AI bills have dropped to under $100,000 a month, Walton said, and the startup charges players a monthly subscription for more advanced AI features to help reduce the cost.
Latitude's pricey AI bills underscore an unpleasant truth behind the recent boom in generative AI technologies: The cost to develop and maintain the software can be extraordinarily high, both for the firms that develop the underlying technologies, generally referred to as a large language or foundation models, and those that use the AI to power their own software.
The high cost of machine learning is an uncomfortable reality in the industry as venture capitalists eye companies that could potentially be worth trillions, and big companies such as Microsoft, Meta , and Google use their considerable capital to develop a lead in the technology that smaller challengers can't catch up to.
But if the margin for AI applications is permanently smaller than previous software-as-a-service margins, because of the high cost of computing, it could put a damper on the current boom.
The high cost of training and "inference" '-- actually running '-- large language models is a structural cost that differs from previous computing booms. Even when the software is built, or trained, it still requires a huge amount of computing power to run large language models because they do billions of calculations every time they return a response to a prompt. By comparison, serving web apps or pages requires much less calculation.
These calculations also require specialized hardware. While traditional computer processors can run machine learning models, they're slow. Most training and inference now takes place on graphics processors, or GPUs, which were initially intended for 3D gaming, but have become the standard for AI applications because they can do many simple calculations simultaneously.
Nvidia makes most of the GPUs for the AI industry, and its primary data center workhorse chip costs $10,000. Scientists that build these models often joke that they "melt GPUs."
Training modelsNvidia A100 processor
Nvidia
Analysts and technologists estimate that the critical process of training a large language model such as OpenAI's GPT-3 could cost more than $4 million. More advanced language models could cost over "the high-single-digit millions" to train, said Rowan Curran, a Forrester analyst who focuses on AI and machine learning.
Meta's largest LLaMA model released last month, for example, used 2,048 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train on 1.4 trillion tokens (750 words is about 1,000 tokens), taking about 21 days, the company said when it released the model last month.
It took about 1 million GPU hours to train. With dedicated prices from AWS, that would cost over $2.4 million. And at 65 billion parameters, it's smaller than the current GPT models at OpenAI, like ChatGPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters.
Clement Delangue, the CEO of AI startup Hugging Face, said the process of training the company's Bloom large language model took more than two-and-a-half months and required access to a supercomputer that was "something like the equivalent of 500 GPUs."
Organizations that build large language models must be cautious when they retrain the software, which helps improve its abilities, because it costs so much, he said.
"It's important to realize that these models are not trained all the time, like every day," Delangue said, noting that's why some models, such as ChatGPT, don't have knowledge of recent events. ChatGPT's knowledge stops in 2021, he said.
"We are actually doing a training right now for the version two of Bloom and it's gonna cost no more than $10 million to retrain," Delangue said. "So that's the kind of thing that we don't want to do every week."
Inference and who pays for itBing with Chat
Jordan Novet | CNBC
To use a trained machine learning model to make predictions or generate text, engineers use the model in a process called "inference," which can be much more expensive than training because it might need to run millions of times for a popular product.
For a product as popular as ChatGPT '-- which investment firm UBS estimates to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January '-- Curran believes that it could have cost OpenAI $40 million to process the millions of prompts people fed into the software that month.
Costs skyrocket when these tools are used billions of times a day. Financial analysts estimate Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot, which is powered by an OpenAI ChatGPT model, needs at least $4 billion of infrastructure to serve responses to all Bing users.
In the case of Latitude, for instance, while the startup didn't have to pay to train the underlying OpenAI language model it was accessing, it had to account for the inferencing costs that were something akin to "half-a-cent per call" on "a couple million requests per day," a Latitude spokesperson said.
"And I was being relatively conservative," Curran said of his calculations.
In order to sow the seeds of the current AI boom, venture capitalists and tech giants have been investing billions of dollars into startups that specialize in generative AI technologies. Microsoft, for instance, invested as much as $10 billion into GPT's overseer OpenAI, according to media reports in January. Salesforce 's venture capital arm, Salesforce Ventures, recently debuted a $250 million fund that caters to generative AI startups.
As investor Semil Shah of the VC firms Haystack and Lightspeed Venture Partners described on Twitter, "VC dollars shifted from subsidizing your taxi ride and burrito delivery to LLMs and generative AI compute."
Many entrepreneurs see risks in relying on potentially subsidized AI models that they don't control and merely pay for on a per-use basis.
"When I talk to my AI friends at the startup conferences, this is what I tell them: Do not solely depend on OpenAI, ChatGPT or any other large language models," said Suman Kanuganti, founder of personal.ai, a chatbot currently in beta mode. "Because businesses shift, they are all owned by big tech companies, right? If they cut access, you're gone."
Companies such as enterprise tech firm Conversica are exploring how they can use the tech through Microsoft's Azure cloud service at its currently discounted price.
While Conversica CEO Jim Kaskade declined to comment about how much the startup is paying, he conceded that the subsidized cost is welcome as it explores how language models can be used effectively.
"If they were truly trying to break even, they'd be charging a hell of a lot more," Kaskade said.
How it could change It's unclear if AI computation will stay expensive as the industry develops. Companies making the foundation models, semiconductor makers and startups all see business opportunities in reducing the price of running AI software.
Nvidia, which has about 95% of the market for AI chips, continues to develop more powerful versions designed specifically for machine learning, but improvements in total chip power across the industry have slowed in recent years.
Still, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that in 10 years, AI will be "a million times" more efficient because of improvements not only in chips, but also in software and other computer parts.
"Moore's Law, in its best days, would have delivered 100x in a decade," Huang said last month on an earnings call. "By coming up with new processors, new systems, new interconnects, new frameworks and algorithms, and working with data scientists, AI researchers on new models, across that entire span, we've made large language model processing a million times faster."
Some startups have focused on the high cost of AI as a business opportunity.
"Nobody was saying 'You should build something that was purpose-built for inference.' What would that look like?" said Sid Sheth, founder of D-Matrix, a startup building a system to save money on inference by doing more processing in the computer's memory, as opposed to on a GPU.
"People are using GPUs today, NVIDIA GPUs, to do most of their inference. They buy the DGX systems that NVIDIA sells that cost a ton of money. The problem with inference is if the workload spikes very rapidly, which is what happened to ChatGPT, it went to like a million users in five days. There is no way your GPU capacity can keep up with that because it was not built for that. It was built for training, for graphics acceleration," he said.
Delangue, the HuggingFace CEO, believes more companies would be better served focusing on smaller, specific models that are cheaper to train and run, instead of the large language models that are garnering most of the attention.
Meanwhile, OpenAI announced last month that it's lowering the cost for companies to access its GPT models. It now charges one-fifth of one cent for about 750 words of output.
OpenAI's lower prices have caught the attention of AI Dungeon-maker Latitude.
"I think it's fair to say that it's definitely a huge change we're excited to see happen in the industry and we're constantly evaluating how we can deliver the best experience to users," a Latitude spokesperson said. "Latitude is going to continue to evaluate all AI models to be sure we have the best game out there."
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VIDEO - Timeline: Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels and the $130,000 payment to buy her silence - CBS News
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 14:29
Cohen testifies again in "hush money" probe
Michael Cohen returns to grand jury in Donald Trump-Stormy Daniels "hush money" investigation 02:34 Washington '-- Manhattan prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump's alleged "hush money" payment of $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 recently invited the former president to testify in the probe, a step that commonly comes before an indictment in New York.
The alleged scheme first came to light years ago, when Trump was still in office, but the investigation has gained new momentum in recent months, with the Manhattan district attorney's office convening a grand jury to examine the matter.
An indictment of a former president would be a first in American history and a politically explosive step with Trump seeking the GOP nomination for president in 2024. His attorney has said he has no plans to participate in the probe, and the former president has denounced the investigation as a witch hunt.
The developments in New York have once again drawn attention to Trump and his allies' well-documented efforts to suppress damaging stories ahead of the 2016 election and the sprawling investigations that ensued. Michael Cohen, his former attorney and "fixer," eventually pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges stemming from his involvement with the payments and served three years in prison.
The following timeline of those efforts and the district attorney's evolving investigation is based on court records, public filings and comments made by the key players involved. Trump has denied many of the details below, and said he never had affairs with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, nor Karen McDougal, another woman who alleged a relationship and was paid for her silence.
2006July: According to an interview Daniels would give to "60 Minutes" in 2018, Daniels meets Trump, the star of NBC's hit show "The Apprentice," at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in Nevada. She says he invited her to dinner, and she met him at his hotel suite, where they had sex. He later invites her to a Trump Vodka launch party in California, as well as to his office in Trump Tower in New York.
Daniels is 27 at the time. Trump is 60, and his wife Melania had recently given birth to their son.
Donald Trump plays in the 2006 American Century Celebrity Golf Tournament played at the Edgewood Tahoe golf course in Nevada. John Cordes/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images 2007July: A year after their first interaction, Trump asks Daniels to meet at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles to discuss a possible appearance on the spin-off "Celebrity Apprentice." The two spend four hours together but don't have sex, Daniels says later, and she leaves after Trump says he is still working on securing her a spot on the show.
August: Trump calls Daniels and tells her he couldn't get her on "Celebrity Apprentice."
In this Feb. 11, 2007, file photo, Stormy Daniels arrives for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Matt Sayles / AP 2011May: Daniels gives an interview to the magazine In Touch describing her encounters with Trump in exchange for $15,000. Two employees later tell CBS News that the interview never ran because Michael Cohen, Trump's attorney, threatened to sue when the publication asked Trump for comment. Daniels says she was never paid.
A few weeks later, Daniels says she is threatened by a man who approaches her in Las Vegas and tells her to "leave Trump alone" and "forget the story."
2016June: Karen McDougal , an actress and former Playboy model, begins trying to sell her story of an alleged affair she had with Trump in 2006 and 2007. She retains attorney Keith Davidson, who approaches the National Enquirer about a possible deal.
July 19: Trump secures the Republican Party's nomination for president.
Donald Trump accepts the Republican Party's nomination for president in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 21, 2016. Ida Mae Astute/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images Aug. 5: The National Enquirer secures the rights to McDougal's account for $150,000 but never publishes her story, a tactic known as "catch and kill." Federal prosecutors later say the agreement was meant "to suppress [her] story so as to prevent it from influencing the election."
August and September: Cohen reaches an agreement with David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of the National Enquirer's parent company, American Media, Inc. (AMI), to secure the non-disclosure portion of the company's deal with McDougal for $125,000. The deal between Cohen and AMI is never finalized, but Cohen retains a copy of the draft agreement.
Oct. 8: Daniels is now also represented by Davidson, who tells Dylan Howard, the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, that she is willing to go on the record about her alleged affair. Howard and Pecker inform Cohen about the conversation and put Cohen in touch with Davidson.
Cohen negotiates a deal to pay Daniels $130,000 in exchange for the rights to her story and a non-disclosure agreement.
Michael Cohen walks through the lobby at Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 12, 2017. Drew Angerer / Getty Images Oct. 17: Cohen files paperwork to incorporate a firm known as Essential Consultants LLC in Delaware.
Oct. 25: No deal with Daniels has been finalized, and Davidson tells Cohen, Howard and Pecker that his client is close to reaching an agreement with another outlet to tell her story. Cohen agrees to finalize the deal.
Oct. 26: Cohen opens a bank account for Essential Consultants and transfers $131,000 he obtained by taking out a home equity line of credit into the new account.
Oct. 27: Cohen wires $130,000 to Davidson, Daniels' attorney.
Nov. 1: Cohen receives signed copies of the agreement between "Peggy Peterson" and "David Dennison." It is dated Oct. 28.
In an accompanying letter, "Peterson" is identified as a pseudonym for Daniels. The identity of Dennison is redacted in later court filings, but Daniels' attorney later says it was the name used by Trump. The agreement bears the signatures of Daniels, Davidson and Cohen, but the signature for Dennison is blank.
A screengrab of a page from the agreement between Stormy Daniels and then-candidate Donald Trump. Court filing Nov. 4: The Wall Street Journal publishes a report detailing the $150,000 deal between McDougal and AMI. A Trump campaign spokeswoman calls McDougal's claims of an affair "totally untrue," and AMI says it "has not paid people to kill damaging stories about Mr. Trump."
The Journal story mentions that Daniels "was in discussions with ABC's 'Good Morning America' in recent months to publicly disclose what she said was a past relationship with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the talks."
Nov. 8: Election Day. Trump is elected president, defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.
2017January: Cohen seeks reimbursement from the Trump Organization for $180,035 '-- $130,000 for the payment to Daniels, plus a wiring fee and an extra $50,000. Trump Organization executives double the reimbursement to $360,000 and add another $60,000, for a total of $420,000 to be paid in monthly installments for 12 months.
Cohen sends invoices for $35,000 per month and receives $420,000 from the company over the course of the year.
Jan. 20: Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
2018Jan. 12: The Wall Street Journal publishes an article detailing the $130,000 payment to Daniels, the first public acknowledgement of the scheme. Cohen says Trump "vehemently denies" having an affair but does not address the payment.
Cohen also sends a statement he claims is from "Stormy Daniels," saying the stories of an affair are false.
Feb. 13: Cohen acknowledges making the payment to Daniels for the first time, but denies being reimbursed and says it was not connected to the Trump campaign, both assertions that he will later recant.
"Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly," Cohen said in a statement. "The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone."
March 6: Daniels, who is now represented by attorney Michael Avenatti, sues Trump and Essential Consultants LLC in California, an attempt to nullify the nondisclosure agreement, arguing that the deal is invalid since Trump never signed it.
The suit alleges she began an "intimate relationship" with Trump in 2006 that ended the following year. She says she accepted $130,000 from Cohen in exchange for her silence about the alleged relationship. The agreement and an accompanying letter are included in the filing.
Daniels also alleges Cohen used "intimidation and coercive tactics" to get her to sign on to the statement denying the affair.
Stormy Daniels wants to "set the record straight" on alleged Trump affair, lawyer says 05:54 March 9: Avenatti releases emails showing Cohen used his Trump Organization email address to arrange a wire transfer connected to the agreement.
April 5: In his first public comment on the matter, Trump says he was unaware of the $130,000 payment.
April 9: FBI agents execute a search warrant at Cohen's home and office. The search is the first indication of a federal probe into Cohen's actions. Trump later calls the search "a disgrace."
May 2: Rudy Giuliani, newly hired as Trump's personal attorney, makes the startling admission that the president reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 payment.
May 3: Trump tweets that Cohen "received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA."
He adds that "[m]oney from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll [sic] in this transaction."
July 20: With pressure on Cohen mounting, CNN publishes a recording of a phone call between Cohen and Trump in which they discussed the payment to McDougal before it was made.
Secret audio tape between Trump and Michael Cohen released 03:56 Aug. 21: Cohen pleads guilty to eight federal charges of tax evasion, fraud and campaign finance violations related to the payments to Daniels and McDougal. He tells a federal court in Manhattan that Trump directed him to make the payments.
Aug. 28: CBS News reports that the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has opened an investigation and is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization, one week after Cohen's guilty plea. Investigators are said to be looking into whether the Trump Organization falsified business records of reimbursements payments to Cohen.
Dec. 12: Cohen is sentenced to three years in federal prison. After the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York agrees not to prosecute AMI, the company admits to burying McDougal's story to help Trump's campaign.
2019May 6: Cohen reports to federal prison in upstate New York.
Michael Cohen addresses the press as he leaves his apartment to begin serving a 3-year sentence at a federal prison in New York on May 6, 2019. Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images July 18: Documents from the now-concluded federal probe into the payments suggest Trump was aware of efforts to buy the silence of both women in the days leading up to the election.
The documents showed repeated communication between Cohen and Trump, as well as one phone call that included Daniels' lawyer and the AMI executives.
"Based on the timing of these calls, and the content of the text messages and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public," one FBI agent wrote.
August: The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. subpoenas the Trump Organization for records related to the payments. The New York Times reports that investigators are "examining whether any senior executives at the company filed false business records about the hush money, which would be a state crime."
Sept. 17: Vance's office issues a subpoena for Trump's tax returns dating back to 2011, an indication that its investigation is expanding beyond the "hush money" payments. Trump sues to block the subpoena two days later, with his attorneys arguing that "a sitting President of the United States is not 'subject to the criminal process' while he is in office."
Oct. 7: U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero turns down Trump's bid to keep his tax records out of the hands of Vance's investigators, determining the president is making a "categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity." Trump's attorneys immediately appeal the decision.
New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. arrives for a hearing at federal appeals court President Donald Trump's tax records on Oct. 23, 2019. ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images Nov. 4: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Trump's claims of immunity "do not bar the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce non-privileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the president." Trump appeals to the Supreme Court.
2020May 12: The Supreme Court hears arguments in a pair of cases involving Trump's tax records. Conservative and liberal justices alike question the president's claim of "absolute immunity" from state investigations, seemingly skeptical of a blanket ruling shielding the president in non-federal cases. "You're asking for broader immunity than anyone else gets," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.
July 9: The Supreme Court sides with Vance in a 7-2 ruling, finding that Trump is not immune from the district attorney's subpoena.
"Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. "We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the President is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need."
2021Feb. 3: Vance's office brings in Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor with deep experience in complex financial and organized crime cases, as a special assistant district attorney. Pomerantz is working solely on the Trump case.
Feb. 25: Vance's office obtains Trump's tax returns, three days after the Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch attempt by Trump to keep them under wraps.
March 12: Vance announces he will not seek reelection that November, kicking off a high-stakes race for his replacement.
July 1: A Manhattan grand jury returns a 15-count indictment against two Trump Organization companies and Allen Weisselberg, its chief financial officer. Both plead not guilty. Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office detail the alleged crimes in court and a 25-page indictment filed in state court.
The indictment alleges the company and Weisselberg orchestrated a scheme to funnel more than $1.7 million in untaxed "indirect employee compensation" to the longtime executive beginning in 2005. Prosecutors said the Trump Organization failed to properly report the payments to tax authorities.
Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg is escorted as he attends his arraignment hearing in the New York State Supreme Court in New York City on July 1, 2021. ANDREW KELLY / REUTERS Nov. 2: Alvin Bragg is elected as the next Manhattan district attorney.
Nov. 22: Cohen is released from federal custody after serving most of the last 18 months of his sentence under house arrest.
2022March 23: The New York Times reveals that Pomerantz, who stepped down the month before, wrote in his resignation letter to Bragg that he believes Trump is "guilty of numerous felony violations."
Pomerantz expressed frustration with the new district attorney's handling of the case, writing: "I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position."
Pomerantz wrote that "the team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes '-- he did."
"I and others have advised you that we have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury," he said.
Former New York prosecutor pushes for charges against Trump 03:14 April 7: Bragg reiterates that the criminal investigation into Trump and his company remains active. He says investigators and prosecutors are "exploring evidence not previously explored."
Aug. 17: Weisselberg, the Trump Organization CFO, pleads guilty . He admits to receiving more than $1.7 million in untaxed compensation and agrees to cooperate with prosecutors in the criminal case against two Trump Organization entities.
Nov. 17: At the Trump Organization's trial, Weisselberg testifies that Trump and two of his children allegedly participated in a scheme to defraud tax authorities.
Dec. 6: A New York jury finds the two Trump Organization companies guilty on all 17 charges of tax fraud and other crimes.
Defense attorneys said Trump, who was not charged in the case, was unaware of the schemes playing out beneath him, while prosecutors said he signed off on them. Trump's children also deny wrongdoing.
2023Jan. 17: Cohen meets with investigators from the district attorney's office, a new sign that the years-old investigation into Trump may be picking up steam.
"They're calling me in for the 14th time, so we'll see what happens," Cohen says outside a government office building in downtown Manhattan, adding that he hasn't met with investigators since Bragg took office. "This is my first time meeting with Alvin Bragg."
Michael Cohen arriving at a New York City government building on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023, before a two-hour interview with prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump. CBS News Jan. 30: The New York Times reports that Bragg has recently convened a grand jury to examine the evidence in the "hush money" probe. The report says Pecker, the AMI CEO, was spotted entering the building where the grand jury is meeting.
March 8: Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump's senior counselor in the White House, meets for at least the second time with Manhattan prosecutors investigating the Daniels payment.
Cohen wrote in his 2020 memoir, "Disloyal," that on Oct. 27, 2016, he unsuccessfully attempted to call Trump to confirm that he had made the payment to Daniels. Conway, he said, called back and "said she'd pass along the good news."
March 9: The district attorney's office invites Trump to testify before the grand jury investigating the payment to Daniels, a move that suggests Trump could face an indictment in the case, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A Trump spokesperson says in a statement that the "Manhattan District Attorney's threat to indict President Trump is simply insane. For the past five years, the DA's office has been on a Witch Hunt, investigating every aspect of President Trump's life, and they've come up empty at every turn '-- and now this."
The spokesperson characterized the possibility of Trump's indictment as "a new political attack" and "a clear exoneration of President Trump in all areas."
March 13: Trump's lawyer says he will not be testifying before the grand jury.
"He won't be participating in that proceeding '-- a proceeding that we and most election law experts believe is with absolutely no legal merit," said Joseph Tacopina, who represents Trump.
Cohen also testifies before the grand jury for the first time.
March 15: Cohen testifies again for three hours.
"We'll see what happens, what questions they ask, and then at the end the grand jurors have the opportunity to ask me questions and I'm looking forward to that," Cohen said.
Michael Cohen walks out of a Manhattan courthouse after testifying before a grand jury on March 15, 2023. Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Clark Brewster, an attorney for Daniels, also says his client met with investigators from the district attorney's office.
"Stormy responded to questions and has agreed to make herself available as a witness, or for further inquiry if needed," Brewster wrote on Twitter .
Graham Kates, Melissa Quinn, Kathryn Watson and Pat Milton contributed reporting.
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VIDEO - Covid origins data links pandemic to raccoon dogs at Wuhan market
Sat, 18 Mar 2023 12:57
International scientists who examined previously unavailable genetic data from samples collected at a market close to where the first human cases of Covid-19 were detected in China said they found suggestions the pandemic originated from animals, not a lab.
Other experts have not yet verified their analysis, which also has not appeared so far in a peer-reviewed journal. How the coronavirus first started sickening people remains uncertain.
''These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,'' WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Friday press briefing.
He also criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, adding that ''this data could have and should have been shared three years ago.''
The samples were collected from surfaces at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan after the first human cases of Covid-19 were found in late 2019.
Tedros said the genetic sequences were uploaded to the world's biggest public virus database in late January by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; the data have since been removed from the database.
A French biologist spotted the information by chance while scouring the database and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China and looking into the origins of the coronavirus.
Genetic sequencing data showed that some of the samples, which were known to be positive for the coronavirus, also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic.
''There's a good chance that the animals that deposited that DNA also deposited the virus,'' said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who was involved in analyzing the data. ''If you were to go and do environmental sampling in the aftermath of a zoonotic spillover event '... this is basically exactly what you would expect to find.''
Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and founding member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control office in China, said that even though the new findings weren't definitive, they were significant.
''The market environmental sampling data published by China CDC is by far the strongest evidence to support animal origins,'' Yip told the AP in an email. He was not connected to the new analysis.
Scientists have been looking for the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic since the virus first emerged, but that search has been complicated by factors including the massive surge of human infections in the pandemic's first two years and an increasingly bitter political dispute.
It took virus experts more than a dozen years to pinpoint the animal origin of SARS, a related virus.
The researchers say their analysis is the first solid indication that there may have been wildlife infected with the coronavirus at the market. Some of the samples with raccoon dog DNA were collected from a stall that tested positive for Covid-19 and was known to be involved in the wildlife trade, Goldstein said.
But it is also possible that humans might have first brought the virus to the market and infected the raccoon dogs, or that infected humans happened to leave traces of the virus near the animals.
After scientists in the group contacted the China CDC, they say, the sequences were pulled from the global virus database. Researchers are puzzled as to why data on the samples collected over three years ago wasn't made public sooner.
Earlier this week, some of the scientists presented their findings to an advisory group the World Health Organization has tasked with investigating Covid's origins, Goldstein confirmed.
Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Edinburgh, said it will be crucial to see how the genetic sequences from the raccoon dogs match up to what's known about the historic evolution of the Covid-19 virus.
He said that if the analysis shows the animal viruses have earlier origins than the ones that infected people, ''that's probably as good evidence as we can expect to get that this was a spillover event in the market.''
After a weeks-long visit to China to study the pandemic's origins, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that Covid most probably jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility of a lab origin as ''extremely unlikely.''
But the U.N. health agency backtracked the following year, saying ''key pieces of data'' were still missing.
In recent months, WHO director Tedros has said all hypotheses remained on the table, while he and senior officials pleaded with China to share more data about their Covid-19 research.
The China CDC scientists who previously analyzed the samples published a paper as a preprint in February. Their analysis suggested that humans brought the virus to the market, not animals, implying that the virus originated elsewhere.
The paper did not mention that animal genetic material was found in samples that tested positive for Covid-19, and the authors didn't upload the raw data until March. Gao Fu, the former head of the China CDC and lead author of the paper, didn't immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid-19 was first detected, is home to several labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling theories that the virus may have leaked from one.
In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy had assessed ''with low confidence'' that the virus had leaked from a lab. But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree, believing it more likely it first came from animals. Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years '-- if ever.
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VIDEO - WHO calls on China to share data on raccoon dog link to pandemic. Here's what we know | KALW
Sat, 18 Mar 2023 12:48
The World Health Organization is calling on officials in China to release data that may show a link between animals and the virus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.
The data was posted briefly on an international database but then abruptly taken down over the weekend.
/ Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
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Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
Security guards stand in front of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 11, 2020, after the market had been closed following an outbreak of COVID-19 there. Two studies document samples of SARS-CoV-2 from stalls where live animals were sold.The data was from environmental samples collected at a Wuhan seafood and meat market in the early days of the pandemic. International scientists spotted the material online and made copies of it before it was taken down. The information appears to show that genetic material from raccoon dogs and the virus that causes COVID were found in the same swabs, implying that the animals may have been an initial host.
"A scientist on the team noticed the data come online by happenstance, and because they often check the GISAID database," says Alexander Crits-Christopher, senior scientist in Computational Biology at Cultivarium, a nonprofit group focused on open source tools for research. "She shared the data with an international team and realized the relevance and importance of the data. This team then immediately contacted the data generators in the hopes of open communication and collaboration. The team then immediately alerted the WHO about the presence of the data, and the WHO has helped mediate that communication. All three of the parties above have iterated a shared goal of making data and analyses as open as possible, as soon as possible."
"The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community," says WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, who along with the head of the WHO is calling on Chinese officials to release all of the data they have around the potential origins of COVID. She adds that this information should have been shared years ago: "Any data that exists on the study of the origins of this pandemic need to be made available immediately."
/ Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
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Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
Staff members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team investigate the shuttered Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020, after it was linked to cases of COVID-19.She stressed that many more studies need to be carried out: "These studies have been recommended over many years, looking at the source of the animals of the market, looking at potential intermediate hosts, looking at breaches in biosafety biosecurity. These studies have yet to be conducted, and until they are conducted, until we have the data, we aren't able to conclusively say how this pandemic began."
Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific '-- and political '-- debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.
But there is in fact a substantial body of evidence, first published in 2022 and covered by NPR at that time, pointing to the raccoon dogs as a likely starting point for the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.
Neither of the Science papers provide the smoking gun '-- that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.
But they come close. They provide photographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. What's more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market.
The data in the 2022 studies paints an incredibly detailed picture of the early days of the pandemic. Photographic and genetic data pinpoint a specific stall at the market where the coronavirus likely was transmitted from an animal into people. And a genetic analysis estimates the time, within weeks, when not just one but two spillovers occurred. It calculates that the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later.
At this exact same time, a huge COVID outbreak occurred at the market. Hundreds of people, working and shopping at the market, were likely infected. That outbreak is the first documented one of the pandemic, and it then spilled over into the community, as one of the Science papers shows.
At the same time, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found two variants of the coronavirus inside the market. And an independent study, led by virologists at the University of California, San Diego, suggests these two variants didn't evolve in people, because throughout the entire pandemic, scientists have never detected a variant linking the two together. Altogether, the new studies suggest that, most likely, the two variants evolved inside animals.
Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey helped lead two of the studies and has been at the forefront of the search for the origins of the pandemic. He has spent his career tracking down the origins of pandemics, including the origin of HIV and the 1918 flu.
/ University of Arizona
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University of Arizona
Michael Worobey is a top virus sleuth. He has tracked the origins of the 1918 flu, HIV and now SARS-CoV-2. Worobey is a research professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.Back in May 2021, Worobey signed a letter calling for an investigation into the lab-leak theory. But then, through his own investigation, he quickly found data supporting an animal origin.
When the studies were first published online, NPR spoke to Worobey, who's at the University of Arizona, to understand what the data tells us about the origin of SARS-CoV-2; how, he believes, the data may shift the debate about the lab-leak theory; and the significance of photos taken five years before the pandemic. Here are key points from the conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.
Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019It's clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source. So we don't completely verify the photos.
Live susceptible animals were held in a stall where SARS-CoV-2 was later detected on a machine that processed animals in the market / Worobey and Holmes et al.
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Worobey and Holmes et al.
An anonymous user on the Chinese social media platform Weibo posted pictures of live animals for sale in the southwest corner of the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, in 2019. Researchers investigating the origins of the SAR-CoV-2 virus are including these images in a forthcoming academic paper that pinpoints the southwest corner as the most probable origin point of the pandemic.We analyzed a leaked report from the Chinese CDC detailing the results of this environmental sampling. Virtually all of the findings in the report matched what was in the World Health Organization's report. But there was some extra information in the leaked report. For example, there was information not just on which stalls had virus in them '-- or had samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 '-- but also how many samples in a given stall yielded positive results.
We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples '-- five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. For example, scientists found virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort that we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and, best of all, a metal cage in a back room.
So now we know that when the national public health authorities shut down the market and then sampled the surfaces there, one of the surfaces positive for SARS-CoV-2 was a metal cage in a back room.
What's even weirder '-- it turns out that one of the co-authors of the study, Eddie Holmes, had been taken to the Huanan market several years before the pandemic and shown raccoon dogs in one of the stalls. He was told, "This is the kind of place that has the ingredients for cross-species transmission of dangerous pathogens."
So he clicks photos of the raccoon dogs. In one photo, the raccoon dogs are in a cage stacked on top of a cage with some birds in it.
And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
So we connected all sorts of bizarre kinds of data. Together the data are telling a strong story.
Earliest known cases of COVID-19, even those not directly related to individuals who had been in the market, radiate out from the marketWith a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don't have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.
And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren't linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That's what we show in our paper.
It's absurd how strong the geographical association is [to the market].
NPR: Absurd? How? In the sense that the seafood market is so clearly bull's-eye center of this outbreak?
Yes. And I don't understand how anyone could not be moved, at least somewhat, by that data and then take this idea [of an animal origin] seriously, especially given the other things we've found in these studies.
The virus jumped into people right before the outbreak in the market Loading...
For example, our new genetic analysis tells us that this virus was not around for very long when the cases occurred at the market. For example, the earliest known patient at the market had an onset of symptoms on Dec. 10, 2019. And we can estimate that at that point in time, there were only about 10 people infected with the virus in the world and probably fewer than 70.
So if the pandemic didn't start at the market, one of the first five or 10 people infected in the world was at the market. And how do you explain that?
You have to remember: Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. And the Huanan market is only 1 of 4 places in Wuhan that sold live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs.
It's highly unlikely that the first COVID-19 outbreak would occur at the market if there weren't a source of the virus thereStep back and think, "Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?" It could appear at a market. But it could also appear at a school, a university or a meatpacking plant.
NPR: Or a biotech conference?
Yes. In Washington state, SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in a man who had traveled back from China. In Germany, it was at an auto-parts supplier.
There are thousands, perhaps 10,000, other places at least as likely, or even more likely, to be the place where a new pathogen shows up. And yet, in Wuhan, the first cluster of cases happens to be one of the four places that sells live animals, out of 10,000 other places. If you're not surprised by that, then I don't think you're understanding the unlikelihood that that presents.
NPR: So what is the likelihood of that coincidence happening '-- that the first cluster of cases occurs at a market that sells animals known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, but the virus didn't actually come from the market?
I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000. But it's interesting. We do have one analysis where we show essentially that the chance of having this pattern of cases [clustered around the market] is 1 in 10 million [if the market isn't a source of the virus]. We consider that strong evidence in science.
The analyses that we've done are telling a very strong story.
The evidence is amongst the best we have for any emerging virus.
Loading...
NPR: Really?
It's important to note we haven't found a related virus from the intermediate host. But we have a bunch of other evidence.
And the data zeroing in on the Huanan market, to me, is as compelling as the data that indicated to John Snow that the water pump was poisoning people who used it. [John Snow was a doctor in London who helped launch the field of outbreak investigations by figuring out the source of a cholera outbreak in the city in the mid-19th century.]
Making these findings brought tearsSometimes you have these rare moments where you're maybe the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. As I just started to figure out that there were more cases around the market than you can expect randomly '-- I felt that way. And no exaggeration, that moment '-- those kinds of moments '-- bring a tear to your eye.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
VIDEO - Hendersonville, TN library facing threats after allegations in national media relating to Christian actor's story hour
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:51
HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) '-- Staff at the Hendersonville Public Library appear to be worried Tuesday's bomb threat was not an isolated incident. Some wonder if their safety is at risk after facing weeks of allegations in conservative media outlets.
Hendersonville Mayor Jamie Clary has drawn a connection between the threat to bomb the library and kill everyone inside to Fox New's coverage of a children's story hour held at the end of February.
''If this continues, someone might get hurt,'' wrote the library director in an email obtained by News 2.
He also wrote that there have been multiple threats to the library since the event, he wants an increased police presence at the library and is calling on the county lawyer to send a cease and desist letter to the event host.
The story hour was put on by Christian actor Kirk Cameron and his publishing company as part of the promotion of his new children's book. The event, which also included appearances by other people like ''Duck Dynasty'' star Missy Robertson and former college swimmer Riley Gaines, drew hundreds of people and packed the library.
Two days before the event, the library posted a statement saying they were excited to host Cameron and his guests.
''We are working hard to ensure they have the platform to read their books and citizens have a comfortable venue to participate. Mayor Clary is working with our Hendersonville Police to ensure traffic and logistical issues are addressed,'' the statement read.
After the event, Cameron claimed the Hendersonville Library didn't want him there at first and there were ''as kind as a hornet'' to him.
He also claimed more than 50 libraries have not let him read his book there despite those same ones previously hosting drag queen story hours.
On social media, people from Middle Tennessee and across the country were calling for members of the library staff to be fired because of these claims of disrespect and allegations that the librarians suppressed Cameron's First Amendment rights.
Both the Hendersonville and Sumner County Mayor took to Facebook to defend the library.
A post on Clary's personal Facebook page reads, ''The library staff has been vilified unfairly. Fox News, a national outlet with nobody in Hendersonville this past week, took a comment from the publishing company that was terribly inaccurate.''
'(C) Read today's top stories on wkrn.com
No commissioners, library board members, or representatives from Cameron's publishing group responded to requests for written comments or interviews.
Police say they are investigating the threat.
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VIDEO - Pre-transition Dylan Mulvaney isn't that different from 'Day 365 of Girlhood' Dylan Mulvaney '' twitchy.com
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:38
As Twitchy reported, informal Biden adviser Dylan Mulvaney celebrated ''Day 365 of Girlhood'' with a gala event at the Rainbow Room in New York City. Those who couldn't make it in person could purchase tickets to a live stream of the event, which featured singing and special guests. Transphobe of the Year Matt Walsh made a great point:
Please note something: no real woman will ever get a red carpet gala at the Rockefeller Center to congratulate them for simply for existing. That kind of spectacle is reserved for Dylan Mulvaney. It is a privilege only enjoyed by him and people like him.
'-- Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 15, 2023
Mulvaney is making big bucks off of her transition, but an old video from ''The Price Is Right'' shows a pre-transition Mulvaney acting exactly like the airhead caricature of a woman that has turned off so many people. As Walsh said, Mulvaney's ''idea of womanhood is what he learned from Disney cartoons.''
Pre-Girlhood Dylan is the same as Dylan 365. pic.twitter.com/1c4JWyqOgy
'-- Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) March 16, 2023
Notice how his performance as a "girl" is not in the slightest bit different from his performance as a flamboyant gay man https://t.co/k4tLVKKMKQ
'-- Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 16, 2023
Same character, different costume. https://t.co/hscqWFtXix
'-- Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 16, 2023
Bro is a psy-OP. I figured, but this confirms it. https://t.co/dW586JVK8p
'-- Barrington Martin II (@_BarringtonII) March 16, 2023
This, btw, is absolute and final proof gays are not oppressed in America. https://t.co/XouXfZcw47
'-- Chad Felix Greene (@chadfelixg) March 16, 2023
Because this silly person put on a dress and grew his hair, he got to interview the President of the United States, make a fortune selling women's beauty products and saw a famous Hollywood actress kneel before him. It sure does pay to mock womanhood. https://t.co/6H6akgVIBQ
'-- Gerry Callahan (@GerryCallahan) March 16, 2023
The correct way to frame this is that Dylan has always been pathologically narcissistic and attention-seeking, so transitioning him given those comorbidities was medical malpractice, especially since he's acting as a role model to impressionable youth. https://t.co/UdO0Mm2TSv
'-- James Lindsay, watching people repeat history (@ConceptualJames) March 16, 2023
My question is how do so many women find this behavior endearing and not morbidly creepy? It's literally a grown man acting like a mentally ill 8 year old. It has to be just brainwashing https://t.co/Y0YDVmzNOc
'-- Pax Tube (@MioHondaFan) March 16, 2023
No wonder he and Biden got along so well.
Dylan is trapped by his generation's retrograde gender absolutism.
It's more socially acceptable for him to become a flighty, slightly eccentric woman cosplaying Jackie O than living his life as a flighty, slightly eccentric gay fem.
That used to be textbook homophobia. https://t.co/rrhcyxaDyO
'-- assezmalicieuse (@belle_joyeux) March 16, 2023
In the foreground is a clearly overly dramatic feminine man that would later 'transition' for attention and fame after a failed acting career.
In the background is a male model who was hired because attractive 40 year old models were deemed 'sexist.'
Amazing. https://t.co/GyXMJ53gaO
'-- Anti-Anything Rogal Dorn (@IamR0galD0rn) March 16, 2023
Performance art, all of it, for notoriety. Next he will be attacked by an ultra MAGA maniac Jussie Mullet and beaten with a Russian flag. The horror of it ð± https://t.co/VOhPJYXbMi
'-- Paul Motey (@PaulMotey) March 16, 2023
We are being fed a carefully crafted narrative. A propaganda movie, rather movies, made by our "leaders."
The same face of the trans movement on the price is right, in addition to his multiple acting roles. What is real? What is not? https://t.co/IBIXqCgtdU
'-- DIRTLUMP2.0 aka Les White light. (@dirtlump2) March 16, 2023
Dylan has painted himself into positions that are impossible to maintain '' the delusion of being a woman, and the illusion of being excessively joyous at all times.
He's going to hit a wall when he becomes too exhausted to keep this up, and the left moves on to their next pawn. https://t.co/HclkLpWcg0
'-- OutspokenSamantha (@Outspoken_Sam) March 16, 2023
They sure are propping her up though, prostrating themselves before her. Why is society celebrating this person?
***
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy Twitchy's conservative reporting taking on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth. Join Twitchy VIP and use the promo code SAVEAMERICA to get 40% off your VIP membership!
Related:
Matt Walsh gets to the inconvenient heart of Dylan Mulvaney's 'Day 365 of Girlhood' performance https://t.co/FA6F3xdVVu
'-- Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 16, 2023
VIDEO - Cory Swan.com LET'S RUN #Bitcoin on Twitter: "OMG WE ARE SO F***ED https://t.co/t9ebTra1RR" / Twitter
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 02:36
Cory Swan.com LET'S RUN #Bitcoin : OMG WE ARE SO F***ED https://t.co/t9ebTra1RR
Fri Mar 17 01:47:46 +0000 2023
An Extreme Threat ð´'' ¸ : @coryklippsten I tell you what, if that was my answer a Sec of Treasury - I would walk out the door and resign. #EndTheFED
Fri Mar 17 02:36:22 +0000 2023
Mr Orange : @coryklippsten Need I say more ? https://t.co/0X51NZAVcs
Fri Mar 17 02:35:40 +0000 2023
NO MASK : @coryklippsten 1 bitcoin is always 1 bitcoin. USD always goes down in value. They can't take your bitcoin when you self custody.
Fri Mar 17 02:35:26 +0000 2023
Jane Adams : @coryklippsten @crossHODLer Enough is enough '-- time has come for the second American Revolution!
Fri Mar 17 02:35:19 +0000 2023
Jason Tabone : @coryklippsten Spread the money in 3 chartered banks it ain't that hard. Doesn't need to be a big bank . Spread it'... https://t.co/cDN5mOBRN7
Fri Mar 17 02:34:08 +0000 2023
Rahul Patel : @coryklippsten @keviinmpatel @Marcus29999
Fri Mar 17 02:33:50 +0000 2023
ThisSideofParadise : @coryklippsten @MatthewRyanCase This feels like a turning point
Fri Mar 17 02:32:13 +0000 2023
oldcryptoguy : @coryklippsten So, now we know why SVB was bailed. The Chinese had large deposits.
Fri Mar 17 02:31:49 +0000 2023
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Fri Mar 17 02:31:21 +0000 2023
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Fri Mar 17 02:30:48 +0000 2023
Honorius Z28.1 : @coryklippsten wow!
Fri Mar 17 02:30:45 +0000 2023
Mark : @coryklippsten Get rready for thee injection ð 𤣠https://t.co/3u3eUDzZVN
Fri Mar 17 02:29:39 +0000 2023
Lee Moras '°ð¯¸ : @coryklippsten Based af
Fri Mar 17 02:29:24 +0000 2023
REKT ' CAPITAL : @coryklippsten The grand finale awaits: FedNow, a tantalizing appetizer, followed by the pi¨ce de r(C)sistance - the'... https://t.co/H1wSpOEVeh
Fri Mar 17 02:29:23 +0000 2023
Jm81tx : @coryklippsten Seriously man! The most corrupt party in history
Fri Mar 17 02:28:44 +0000 2023
Jm81tx : @coryklippsten How is anyone still voting for democrats ðððð
Fri Mar 17 02:28:30 +0000 2023
ramon.net ' : @coryklippsten Raise rates and collapse more banks or print money and have even more inflation, pick your poison.
Fri Mar 17 02:28:13 +0000 2023
ð¬ð· : @coryklippsten They covered their liberal friends. If you don't vote with them you don't get special privelage
Fri Mar 17 02:26:45 +0000 2023
Vegard Wikeby : @coryklippsten Cool trailer. When is the movie coming out?
Fri Mar 17 02:26:42 +0000 2023
YourHedge : @coryklippsten Yep, it's a shit show
Fri Mar 17 02:26:08 +0000 2023
StackchainBuddha''¸207 : @coryklippsten https://t.co/ET6UDUbMpT
Fri Mar 17 02:26:05 +0000 2023
Mo : @coryklippsten @v_rinardi All Part of the Plan.
Fri Mar 17 02:26:04 +0000 2023
John Reston II : @coryklippsten @almostjingo When the yield curve is inverted the Fed must stress test all regional and money center'... https://t.co/lxcpXMif7g
Fri Mar 17 02:24:13 +0000 2023
jason Dodd : @coryklippsten ''We felt'' is not a high enough standard. The rulers are making the rules, that is the problem.
Fri Mar 17 02:23:32 +0000 2023
Don Qu(C)xotic : @coryklippsten @almostjingo She's the well-spoken one in the administration
Fri Mar 17 02:23:18 +0000 2023
Great_Steak : @coryklippsten @almostjingo I wouldn't by Avon off this lady.
Fri Mar 17 02:23:09 +0000 2023
LawnDart ð¯ : @coryklippsten "I'm sure my bankers are going to be excited they no longer have to pay taxes."ð'ð'ð'
Fri Mar 17 02:23:03 +0000 2023
JimmyEatsBitcoin : @coryklippsten That owl is not honorable ð...
Fri Mar 17 02:22:19 +0000 2023
Cold Muffin Lunch : @coryklippsten Special rules made up behind closed doors by unelected federal bureaucrats'.... Sounds like the American Dream
Fri Mar 17 02:21:28 +0000 2023
GingerBeard : @coryklippsten We really need x2+ speed in videos @elonmusk
Fri Mar 17 02:21:12 +0000 2023
Bitcoiner21 : @coryklippsten I am my own central bank. #Bitcoin.
Fri Mar 17 02:20:45 +0000 2023
"" : @coryklippsten @almostjingo The 70 and 80 year olds that have destroyed our government have to start dying off at some point!
Fri Mar 17 02:20:43 +0000 2023
Maison : @coryklippsten this was the most unbelievable exchange yet seen
Fri Mar 17 02:20:43 +0000 2023
Al saint d : @coryklippsten And I stacked with swan today because of this shit!
Fri Mar 17 02:20:32 +0000 2023
Brian Whitsett ð± : @coryklippsten I've never been so bullish on crypto than now
Fri Mar 17 02:19:45 +0000 2023
The Manchurian Files : @coryklippsten @almostjingo Sick
Fri Mar 17 02:19:09 +0000 2023
T-Baby OG : @coryklippsten We make up the rules as we go'... best of luck to all.
Fri Mar 17 02:18:54 +0000 2023
Karthik Sola : @coryklippsten It's all a trust game. The need has never been greater for a trust less system
Fri Mar 17 02:18:25 +0000 2023
Orange Pill Pilot ð ð' : @coryklippsten O'...'...M'.....G And that's the cream of the crop in the ðºð¸
Fri Mar 17 02:18:25 +0000 2023
DeplorableLamb : @coryklippsten @almostjingo I don't see the asterisk after ''FDIC insured.''
Fri Mar 17 02:17:45 +0000 2023
Carmine Sarno : @coryklippsten Our financial system is stranger than fiction
Fri Mar 17 02:17:28 +0000 2023
Kyle Decell : @coryklippsten First we end small banks. Everything moved to the big boys. Once big boys fail, the FED becomes everyone's bank.
Fri Mar 17 02:17:21 +0000 2023
Tyrannosaurus-Crypto : @coryklippsten Curious thought: does anyone think the 250k insurance'... maybe was put in place so people would divers'... https://t.co/PWdnm8lWUT
Fri Mar 17 02:16:49 +0000 2023
DARG '/21M : @coryklippsten Kept hoping someone would hold up the ''Buy Bitcoin'' sign.ðSickening that uninsured foreign/non tax'... https://t.co/PxPd72wWgf
Fri Mar 17 02:15:51 +0000 2023
Staggared_lee : @coryklippsten Dude made her look like a grade schooler trying to explain how the dog ate her homework
Fri Mar 17 02:15:46 +0000 2023
The Last Mohican : @coryklippsten January 2021 https://t.co/deKqzs4PKn
Fri Mar 17 02:15:41 +0000 2023
Marky MarkD : @coryklippsten @almostjingo No other conclusion to draw. It's planned.
Fri Mar 17 02:15:13 +0000 2023
Anonandon : @coryklippsten Good interrogation. If I didn't know in advance and had to take a blind guess on which one was previ'... https://t.co/h9W2lebt5B
Fri Mar 17 02:14:37 +0000 2023
ProLogic : @coryklippsten This is goddamn terrifying
Fri Mar 17 02:14:22 +0000 2023
OtterPrint : @coryklippsten Imagine believing that these people are trying to help the people
Fri Mar 17 02:14:00 +0000 2023
