Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein – who sources tell Page Six is about to be indicted for rape by the Manhattan DA – used a network of attorneys, private detectives and a firm run by former Israeli Mossad agents in a failed attempt to silence his accusers and prevent The New York Times and The New Yorker from publishing allegations of sexual harassment, assault and rape – according to an explosive New Yorker article by journalist Ronan Farrow.
One of the firms employed by Weinstein, referred to him by Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, was UK based Black Cube – which promotes itself as “a select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units,” set up a fake London wealth management firm and sent a female ex-Mossad agent posing as women’s rights advocate “Diana Filip” to befriend and spy on actress Rose McGowan.
“I took her to the Venice boardwalk and we had ice cream while we strolled,” McGowan told Farrow, adding that Filip was “very kind.
Ronan Farrow writes in The New Yorker:
When I sent McGowan photos of the Black Cube agent, she recognized her instantly. “Oh my God,” she wrote back. “Reuben Capital. Diana Filip. No fucking way.”
The same female agent from Black Cube posed as a different woman with a possible allegation against Weinstein in an attempt to trick various journalists working on unflattering Weinstein reports into revealing information about other accusers, according to Farrow’s report.
Black Cube, founded in 2010 by former Mossad agents, operates out of London, Paris and Tel Aviv. Their international advisory board was headed by Meir Dagan [deceased, 2012] – former head of Mossad. Other advisory board members include Major General Giora Eiland – former head of the Israeli National Security Council who headed the IDF’s Operation Branch and IDF’s Planning Branch, Itiel Maayan – member of Microsoft’s Customer Advisory Board (?), Professor Asher Tishler – President of the College of Management Academic Studies, Paul Reyniers – former partner at Price Waterhouse, Colonel Ephy Yerushalmy – former head of Unit 504, IDF Humint Division, and Doron Arbelli – former director of the Israeli Tax Authority.
Weinstein’s contract with Black Cube lists primary objectives of “providing intelligence which will help the Client’s efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper,” as well as “Obtain additional content of a book which currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the Client.”
To execute the contract, Black Cube provided “a dedicated team of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA and any other necessary country,” including a project manager in charge of researching accusers, intelligence analysts, a full time agent “by the name of “Anna” who will be based in New York and Los Angeles, an investigative journalist, “Avatar Operators” – experts in social media, and “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.”
Other firms employed by Weinstein performed deep dives into the social and sexual histories of accusers thought to be working with journalists, digging for embarrassing or otherwise contradictory evidence that could be used to silence the actresses.
Weinstein’s Attorney And NYT Conflict of Interest
In order to attempt to cloak his spying activities with Attorney-client privilege, Weinstein used lawyer David Boies of the firm Boies Schiller Flexner L.L.P. to act as an intermediary, executing the Black Cube contract and possibly others.
In what appears to be an obvious conflict of interest, Mr Boies’s firm also provided The New York Times with outside legal counsel in three cases over the past decade – including one libel case. Upon hearing that Boies was representing Weinstein in an effort to halt the Times from publishing accusations against him, while at the same time representing the newspaper, The Times’s issued a stern statement Monday night:
“We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters,” the statement read. “We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies.”
NYT deputy general counsel declined to elaborate on what those remedies might be, however he did say “I think that what they owe us is an explanation of what actually happened,” adding, “We need to know much more.”
Mr. Boies responded, telling The New Yorker that while he oversaw Weinstein’s contract, he did not select Black Cube or direct its agents, adding that while he said he did not believe his work for Mr. Weinstein was a conflict of interest, “We should not have been contracting and paying investigators that we did not select and direct.”
Ronan vs. NBC
During his months-long investigation into Weinstein, Farrow said that NBC – which employs him has a freelance correspondent, spiked his story before he took it to The New Yorker who agreed to publiss the report. Appearing on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Farrow claimed that NBC News executives caved to pressure from Weinstein and his attorneys, including Lisa Bloom and David Boies. Maddow went on to tell Farrow “NBC says that the story wasn’t publishable, that it wasn’t ready to go at the time that you brought it to them.”
Farrow retorted, “I walked into the door at The New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public earlier. And immediately, obviously, The New Yorker recognized that. And it is not accurate to say that it was not reportable. In fact, there were multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC.”
On Tuesday, Farrow unleashed a Twitter storm accusing NBC of shutting down his story and even threatening his NBC producer’s job.
“My reporting is only possible because of a group of brave journalists who fought for the story,” Farrow began a 10-tweet thread.
My reporting is only possible because of a group of brave journalists who fought for the story & put up with this v tired reporter. (Thread)
“.@RichMcHughNBC, my wonderful producer, refused to bow to pressure to stop, through numerous shoots, even when it meant risking his job,” Farrow tweeted.
.@RichMcHughNBC, my wonderful producer, refused to bow to pressure to stop, through numerous shoots, even when it meant risking his job.
As Fox reports: To add insult to injury, Farrow, whose Twitter bio currently describes him as an NBC reporter and “Today” show correspondent, appeared Tuesday morning on “Good Morning America,” arch-rival of the “Today” show, during the crucial November “sweeps” period. “GMA” described Farrow as a New Yorker contributor and mentioned NBC only when co-host George Stephanopoulos asked Farrow if Weinstein “got to” NBC when it decided to spike the original story.
“I think the story makes it clear [Weinstein and his team] were focusing on everyone trying to get word out about this,” Farrow said carefully.
Despite using the best spies money could buy to accomplish this task – including former agents of Israel’s Mossad, Weinstein was outed as a sexual predator by numerous accusers and may be in cuffs as early as next week.
Award winning journalist and UN correspondent of 25 years, Joe Lauria, penned an outstanding article on the origins of “Russiagate” which he published to the liberal Huffington Post this week.
24 hours later, HuffPo yanked the article – leaving a dead link and a sad message in its place.
Perhaps the insights offered in the article didn’t quite conform to HuffPo’s approved narratives, or maybe it has something to do with Lauria’s new book “How I Lost By Hillary Clinton,” with a forward written by Julian Assange.
Considering Joe Lauria’s tenure as the Wall St. Journal’s UN correspondent of nearly seven years, as well as the Boston Globe’s for six – covering just about every major world crisis over the past quarter century, his unique perspective on the matter merits a read.
Reproduced below for your edification:
The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate
As Russia-gate continues to buffet the Trump administration, we now know that the “scandal” started with Democrats funding the original dubious allegations of Russian interference, notes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — without providing convincing evidence — were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
We have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its computer server for clues about who may have hacked it – or even if it was hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within a day, CrowdStrike blamed Russia on dubious evidence.
And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for opposition research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele using hearsay accusations from anonymous Russian sources to claim that the Russian government was blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump in a scheme that presupposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw Trump’s presidency years ago when no one else did.
Since then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate Steele’s allegations, but those suspicions still colored the thinking of President Obama’s intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “hand-picked” the analysts who produced the Jan. 6 “assessment” claiming that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.
In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.
If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims.
Absent new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst of a bitter general election campaign, a manufactured “scandal” that also has fueled a dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case of a dirty political “oppo” serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance over Russia that they enjoyed in the 1990s, as well as feeding the voracious budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Based on what is now known, Wall Street buccaneer Paul Singer paid for GPS Fusion, a Washington-based research firm, to do opposition research on Trump during the Republican primaries, but dropped the effort in May 2016 when it became clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. GPS Fusion has strongly denied that it hired Steele for this work or that the research had anything to do with Russia.
Couple walking along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Then, in April 2016 the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid its Washington lawyer Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS to unearth dirt connecting Trump to Russia. This was three months before the DNC blamed Russia for hacking its computers and supposedly giving its stolen emails to WikiLeaks to help Trump win the election.
“The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia, court filings revealed this week,” The New York Times reported on Friday night.
So, linking Trump to Moscow as a way to bring Russia into the election story was the Democrats’ aim from the start.
Fusion GPS then hired ex-MI6 intelligence agent Steele, it says for the first time, to dig up that dirt in Russia for the Democrats. Steele produced classic opposition research, not an intelligence assessment or conclusion, although it was written in a style and formatted to look like one.
It’s important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict standards on his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into the government’s decision-making. Instead, he was working for a political party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their opponent, what the Clintons used to call “cash for trash” when they were the targets.
Had Steele been doing legitimate intelligence work for his government, he would have taken a far different approach. Intelligence professionals are not supposed to just give their bosses what their bosses want to hear. So, Steele would have verified his information. And it would have gone through a process of further verification by other intelligence analysts in his and perhaps other intelligence agencies. For instance, in the U.S., a National Intelligence Estimate requires vetting by all 17 intelligence agencies and incorporates dissenting opinions.
Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had different motivations. The first might well have been money, as he was being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a government salary presumably serving all of society. Secondly, to continue being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been incentivized to please his clients or at least give them enough so they would come back for more.
Dubious Stuff
Opposition research is about getting dirt to be used in a mud-slinging political campaign, in which wild charges against candidates are the norm. This “oppo” is full of unvetted rumor and innuendo with enough facts mixed in to make it seem credible. There was so much dubious stuff in Steele’s memos that the FBI was unable to confirm its most salacious allegations and apparently refuted several key points.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)
Perhaps more significantly, the corporate news media, which was largely partial to Clinton, did not report the fantastic allegations after people close to the Clinton campaign began circulating the lurid stories before the election with the hope that the material would pop up in the news. To their credit, established media outlets recognized this as ammunition against a political opponent, not a serious document.
Despite this circumspection, the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved. (Obama’s intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took part and The New York Times printed a correction saying so.)
If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all. It could be that because the three agencies knew the dossier was dodgy that there was no substantive proof in the Jan. 6 “assessment.” Even so, a summary of the Steele allegations were included in a secret appendix that then-FBI Director James Comey described to then-President-elect Trump just two weeks before his inauguration.
Five days later, after the fact of Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the Steele dossier was published in fullby the sensationalist website BuzzFeed behind the excuse that the allegations’ inclusion in the classified annex of a U.S. intelligence report justified the dossier’s publication regardless of doubts about its accuracy.
Russian Fingerprints
The other source of blame about Russian meddling came from the private company CrowdStrike because the DNC blocked the FBI from examining its server after a suspected hack. Within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian “fingerprints” in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by an Internet site called DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia.
Dmitri Alperovitch, the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike Inc., leading its Intelligence, Technology and CrowdStrike Labs teams.
CrowdStrike also claimed that the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy hackers or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.
CrowdStrike’s credibility was further undermined when Voice of America reported on March 23, 2017, that the same software the company says it used to blame Russia for the hack wrongly concluded that Moscow also had hacked Ukrainian government howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
“An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election,” VOA reported. Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
More speculation about the alleged election hack was raised with WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release, which revealed that the CIA is not beyond covering up its own hacks by leaving clues implicating others. Plus, there’s the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has declared again and again that WikiLeaks did not get the Democratic emails from the Russians. Buttressing Assange’s denials of a Russian role, WikiLeaks associate Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he met a person connected to the leak during a trip to Washington last year.
And, William Binney, maybe the best mathematician to ever work at the National Security Agency, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern have published a technical analysis of one set of Democratic email metadata showing that a transatlantic “hack” would have been impossible and that the evidence points to a likely leak by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Binney has further stated that if it were a “hack,” the NSA would have been able to detect it and make the evidence known.
Fueling Neo-McCarthyism
Despite these doubts, which the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored, Russia-gate has grown into something much more than an election story. It has unleashed a neo-McCarthyite attack on Americans who are accused of being dupes of Russia if they dare question the evidence of the Kremlin’s guilt.
The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)
Just weeks after last November’s election, The Washington Post published a front-page story touting a blacklist from an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that alleged that 200 news sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other leading independent news sources, were either willful Russian propagandists or “useful idiots.”
Last week, a new list emerged with the names of over 2,000 people, mostly Westerners, who have appeared on RT, the Russian government-financed English-language news channel. The list was part of a report entitled, “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West,” put out by an outfit called European Values, with a long list of European funders.
Included on the list of “useful idiots” absurdly are CIA-friendly Washington Post columnist David Ignatius; David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s opposition research chief; and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The report stated: “Many people in Europe and the US, including politicians and other persons of influence, continue to exhibit troubling naïveté about RT’s political agenda, buying into the network’s marketing ploy that it is simply an outlet for independent voices marginalised by the mainstream Western press. These ‘useful idiots’ remain oblivious to RT’s intentions and boost its legitimacy by granting interviews on its shows and newscasts.”
The intent of these lists is clear: to shut down dissenting voices who question Western foreign policy and who are usually excluded from Western corporate media. RT is often willing to provide a platform for a wider range of viewpoints, both from the left and right. American ruling interests fend off critical viewpoints by first suppressing them in corporate media and now condemning them as propaganda when they emerge on RT.
Geopolitical Risks
More ominously, the anti-Russia mania has increased chances of direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. The Russia-bashing rhetoric not only served the Clinton campaign, though ultimately to ill effect, but it has pushed a longstanding U.S.-led geopolitical agenda to regain control over Russia, an advantage that the U.S. enjoyed during the Yeltsin years in the 1990s.
Time magazine cover recounting how the U.S. enabled Boris Yeltsin’s reelection as Russian president in 1996.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.
That inflamed Hillary Clinton and other American hawks whose desire was to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of Russia’s vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia’s border.
In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate offensive was intended not only to explain away Clinton’s defeat but to stop Trump — possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage — because he had talked, insincerely it is turning out, about detente with Russia. That did not fit in well with the plan at all.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
Facebook is asking users in Australia to send the social media giant nude pictures in order to test out a new system designed to prevent revenge porn.
The technology uses image recognition to identify potential revenge porn and promptly deletes it.
The move goes hand in hand with Australia’s recent crackdown on revenge porn, where one in five women aged 18-45 and one in four indigenous Australians are victims.
Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told the ABC News ”We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” adding that victims of ‘image-based abuse’ would be able to take action before photos were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
Ms Inman Grant went further, saying ‘It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether.‘
Ms Inman Grant explained: ‘They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies.
‘So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded.’
If the technology works as expected, the photo should never appear on Facebook – even if a jealous ex tries to upload it.
Antigone Davis, head of global safety at Facebook, reassured that ‘the safety and well-being of the Facebook community is our top priority.’
She added: ‘As part of our continued efforts to better detect and remove content that violates our community standards, we’re using image matching technology to prevent non-consensual intimate images from being shared on Facebook.
‘These tools, developed in partnership with global safety experts, are one example of how we’re using new technology to keep people safe and prevent harm.’
While Facebook says they aren’t storing the nude pictures – and are instead keeping the “digital footprint” of the image on file, users may want to steer clear altogether, considering the company maintains a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license” to your photos per their EULA.
Apple is launching a public beta of their previously announced Apple Pay Cash feature – allowing people to send and receive cash inside the iMessage app on iPhones. Just in time for the holidays!
The program – which will compete with the likes of Square, Venmo, AliPay, and of course Android Pay, allows users running iOS 11.2 beta 2 to opt in using the iOS Public Beta program here. Once updated, an Apple Pay button will appear in the Apps section of Messages, allowing for the initiation of a payment. The payment feature can also be triggered by simply asking for money in a message or tapping on a message sent by someone else asking for money, TechCrunchreports. Parents whose kids are in college, prepare yourselves.
The beta is available for U.S. customers only with iOS devices on 11.2 or later and with two-factor authentication set up on their Apple ID.
The source of funding is any debit or credit card you have currently added to Apple Pay. Apple will charge no fees for money that is funded via debit cards and an ‘industry standard’ fee for credit cards, likely in the few percent. -TC
The first time a user is sent money, they can opt in to Apple Pay Cash to accept it, and will be issued a “virtual Apple Pay Cash” card, which can only be used to send money or pay for things via Apple Pay.
The Apple Pay Cash card in has an iridescent effect matched to gyro – just like a 'holo' on a real card. Someone in design having fun. pic.twitter.com/8u3pI38tGB
The Apple Pay Cash card also functions as a transaction log for all Apple Pay purchases on the web or at physical locations.
Apple has an agreement with prepaid card issuer Green Dot to handle the back end of Apple Cash.
The mechanics of payments
“Sending and receiving works pretty much as you’d expect. If you ask for money in a text, say ‘hey you owe me $10 for movie tickets’, the other party can tap on the underlined dollar amount and send it. You can also use the Pay Cash app in Messages to send a formal request, they’ll see that and can tap to pay. When they send it you’ll get a notification and you tap on that to accept the money. You can choose to automatically accept payments or not in settings. The first time you use it you’ll have to accept the money within 7 days.
You can also send money directly from the Contacts app in iOS by tapping a contact and then the $ icon below their name. Siri, of course, is also involved and you can use it to send money or request money from a friend. Saying “ask Sally to pay me $10 for breakfast” will send that message via Messages and they can tap and pay” –TC
Twitter is officially rolling out its expansion to 280 characters across the entire platform, the company announced on Tuesday.
The upgrade follows a September beta test in which approximately 10 percent of users were granted 280 character privileges – noting at the time that the longer character count will allow users to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet.
Otherssuggested that Twitter’s focus on a feature no one really asked for was diverting its attention from more critical problems – like the rampant abuse, harassment and bullying it’s become known for unfortunately.
And still more argued that the expansion doesn’t really mean people will be able to better express themselves – they’ll just say the same thing, but use more words to do so.
One particularly funny tweet on that subject even went viral.
A redlined and edited version of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s 280-character tweet demonstrated how it was possible to shrink the tweet’s word count down without losing its meaning.
Twitter’s user base is somewhat split on whether the change would ruin Twitter. Tech media – outside of a couple level-headed responses – seemed to be opposed to the change.
However, the media – a group of largely power users lamenting the loss of an information-dense timeline – may not represent Twitter’s larger user base, some of whom have been begging for the feature since September.
In addition, one poll from last month found more Americans were in favor of the expansion than opposed to it, and the majority had no opinion.
Crammed timelines?
Addressing concerns over timelines filled with wordy tweets, Twitter said that during the trial period, most people with 280 character privileges continued to tweet below 140 characters, most of the time – with only 5 percent of tweets exceeding the old limit, and only 2 percent over 190 characters.
Only one percent of tweets hit the new 280 character limit, the company reported.
Notably, Twitter claims that those who had more room to tweet received more likes, retweets and @mentions, gained more followers, and spent more time on Twitter. However, it didn’t quantify these findings with hard data. –TechCrunch
During Donald Trump’s visit to Japan over the weekend, the President and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe headed down to a koi pond before lunch to feed the fish and connect with nature.
Yet, instead of reporting things like “Trump and Abe strengthen ties,” or “Shinzo Abe agrees to freeze assets of 35 North Korean organizations,” Fake News networks decided to fabricate a lie about Trump being ‘disrespectful’ by dumping his entire box of fish food in the koi pond.
CNN’s Veronica Rocha went full retard with the help of CNN White House producer Kevin Liptak – because apparently this took two people, tweeting “President Trump feeds fish with PM Shinzo Abe in Japan, then ours the entire box of food into the koi pond.”
Embedded in the tweet is a selectively edited .gif which zooms in on Trump tossing his koi food into the pond.
President Trump feeds fish with PM Shinzo Abe in Japan, then pours the entire box of food into the koi pond. pic.twitter.com/CQjGGf5k0J
As an aide clapped loudly, Abe and Trump tossed spoonfuls of fish food into the pond. Then, with a look of enjoyment, Trump quickly poured his entire box of food into the pond.
CNN was just one of many outlets to push the fabricated narrative, however the whole thing began with Bloomberg’s Justin Sink, who was on scene inJapan when he tweeted “Towards the end, @potus decided to just dump the whole box in for the fish“):
Trump and Abe spooning fish food into a pond. (Toward the end, @potus decided to just dump the whole box in for the fish) pic.twitter.com/WRFVaHqOEF
Oops! FakeNews then ran with Sink’s lie and the rest is history.
Once the truth was revealed, a swath of formerly smug liberal journalists quickly backpedaled and apologized – however some in the Twitterverse doubled down, claiming that yes, even though Abe dumped first, he only dumped a tiny bit vs. Trump’s TWO SCOOP POUR.
Sorry haters, we’re talking roughly a 40 grain difference:
Devin Kelley, the gunman who stormed into a Texas church Sunday, killing 26 people, had a disturbing and violent past, including a court-martial from the Air Force for fracturing his infant stepson’s skull, an arrest for animal cruelty in 2014, and frequent harassment of ex-girlfriends.
Due to his Court Marshall, Kelley was denied a license to conceal and carry, according to Texas governor Greg Abbott, however he bought the Ruger AR platform rifle used in the attack at a local sporting store in April 2016 by simply lying on the application about his criminal past.
Two ex-girlfriends told NBC News that Kelley stalked them after breakups.
“He was very sick in the head,” Katy Landry, a former girlfriend of Devin Patrick Kelley, told NBC News.
“Years after dating me he would try to bribe me to hang out with him,” Landry, who met Kelley in church as a teenager, told NBC News in a Facebook message. “He ended up assaulting me. He would stalk me by repeatedly calling me — even prank calling me, saying really weird stuff.
Brittany Adcock, 22, said she and Kelley dated when she was 13 and he was 18. “At the time I didn’t think much into it being so young but now I realize that there’s something off about someone who is 18 with someone who is 13,” she said.
Via NBC News:
“He somehow would always find out my number although none of my friends talked to him and he would constantly call me until I blocked his number,” she said. “Then I’d get calls from an unknown number so I’ve had to change my number quite a bit.
“He would offer me money to hang out with him quite a bit. There has been one point that I called the police because he was just calling me so much I wanted to report harassment,” Adcock said.
“One time he told me I should move in with him and his wife and that he would take care of me as long as I walked around topless. Not long after, his wife messaged me and asked why I’m talking to her husband and I told her what he was saying and sent her screenshots and she then apologized and then I was blocked from speaking to her.”
When she broke it off, he continued to harass her, she said.
Animal Cruelty
Kelley was charged with animal cruelty in 2014 when he lived in Colorado Springs, CO. Witnesses told investigators they saw Kelley chasing a dog through their trailer park, attacking the animal when he caught it.
“The suspect then started beating on the dog with both fists, punching it in the head and chest,” the police report said, citing a witness. “He could hear the suspect yelling at the dog and while he was striking it, the dog was yelping and whining. The suspect then picked up the dog by the neck into the air and threw it onto the ground and then drug him away to lot 60.”
Kelley told police he was trying to stop the dog from attacking another animal.
Motive
While a motive behind the shooting has yet to emerge, authorities noted that Kelley may have been involved in a domestic dispute, possibly targeting his mother-in-law who attended the church.
Mental health
In response to a question on whether gun control is the answer to mass shootings, President Trump, speaking from Japan, said “This is a mental health problem at the highest level,” calling the gunman “deranged.”
Q: Is gun control the answer to mass shootings like the one in Texas?
Active asset manager Franklin Templeton ($BEN) has just stepped into the world of passive investing with last week’s announcement of 16 market-cap weighted, single-country, and regional ETFs – the largest simultaneous NYSE listing in five years.
Franklin is taking direct aim at passive ETF offerings from BlackRock’s ($BLK) iShares.
Price is key. Franklin Templeton is charging ultralow fees that will undercut those of the biggest player in this area, iShares from BlackRock (BLK). Franklin Templeton’s single-country ETFs for developed markets will charge just nine basis points, or 0.09%, while those for individual emerging nations will charge 19 basis points, or 0.19%. Market leader iShares, charges 0.48% to 0.64% for ETFs focused on developed lands and 0.48% and 0.93% for those for that invest in one developing country. “Beta should be cheap. It’s a competitive price that reflects value,” says O’Connor.
Todd Rosenbluth, of independent research firm CFRA, says Franklin Templeton picked a good spot to attack with low fees. “This is one of the few areas where there is not much competition other than iShares,” says Rosenbluth. WisdomTree (WETF) and Global X both have international funds that serve other investor needs, he notes.
It also happens to be good timing for specific international strategies. Retail investors don’t have much use for single-country ETFs, says Rosenbluth, but institutional investors may be looking for ways to double down on certain countries or regions, especially emerging markets, where performance often varies widely. And since Franklin Templeton’s funds track the FTSE Russell indexes, they can be used in conjunction with the broader Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets (VEA) and Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets (VWO) ETFs. The iShares single-country funds track the MSCI indexes.
The funds, their tickers and their expense ratios are as follows:
Franklin FTSE Australia ETF (FLAU), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Canada ETF (FLCA), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE France ETF (FLFR), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Germany ETF (FLGR), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Hong Kong ETF (FLHK), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Italy ETF (FLIY), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Japan ETF (FLJP), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE United Kingdom ETF (FLGB), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Europe ETF (FLEE), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Europe Hedged ETF (FLEH), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE Japan Hedged ETF (FLJH), 0.09%
Franklin FTSE South Korea ETF (FLKR)
Franklin FTSE Brazil ETF (FLBR), 0.19%
Franklin FTSE China ETF (FLCH), 0.19%
Franklin FTSE Mexico ETF (FLMX), 0.19%
Franklin FTSE Taiwan ETF (FLTW), 0.19%
“We’re trying to provide the investors with the flexibility to construct across active, across smart beta, across passive. This allows us to acknowledge that investors want to gain exposure to various markets and they want to do it in a cost-effective manner,” said Templeton’s head of capital markets, David Mann.
Anthony Weiner is set to begin his 21-month stay at the cushy Federal Medical Center in Devens, Mass. today in the hopes of curing his pedophilia.
The disgraced Democrat spent Sunday quietly holed up in his Union Square apartment, as his father brought coffee at around 11 a.m. before the two spent about five hours together, reports the New York Post.
Weiner pled guilty in May after sending lewd messages to a 15-year old girl between January and March of 2016 – including one picture of the disgraced former legislator lying in bed with his young son.
According to a January report in the Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors were considering child pornography charges against Weiner. On May 19, Weiner surrendered to the FBI and struck a plea agreement to a single charge of transferring obscene material to a minor.
Under the agreement, Weiner will be required to register as a sex offender, along with three years of supervision upon his release. The disgraced Congressman will be eligible to leave 3 months early for good behavior.
The Federal Medical Center in Devens, Mass. is located on a former Army base about 40 miles northwest of Boston. Other infamous residents include Wall Street trader Raj Rajaratnam, who was busted for insider trading, as well as Peter Madoff – brother of Bernie Madoff who participated in his $20 billion ponzi scheme. Boston Marathon Bomber Tzhokhar Tsarnaev also resides at the facility on 23-hour-per-day lockdown.
Weiner described his crime as “rock bottom” following several years of sexting scandals that resulted in the loss of his seat in Congress, his reputation, and his marriage – after Weiner’s wife and longtime Hillary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, filed for divorce in May.
As his sentence was handed down in September, Weiner, 53, broke down in tears. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 after it emerged that he had been sexting with around six women over the course of three years.
In 2013, Weiner attempted a comeback bid for Mayor of New York, only to quit in disgrace after a second sexting scandal emerged, when it was revealed he had been texting a 22 year old women under the alias “Carlos Danger.”
On September 21, 2016, the Daily Mail dropped a bombshell, revealing that Weiner had been sexting with a 15 year old girl. As a result, electronic devices owned by Weiner – including his laptop, were seized as part of an investigation into the incident.
During the investigation, the FBI found several emails related to the Clinton email investigation on Weiner’s laptop – leading to the brief reopening of the Clinton case by former FBI Director James Comey shortly before the 2016 election. Clinton has blamed that decision, in part, for her monumental loss to President Donald Trump.
While the Fed may still be confused by the lack of inflation, if only in the “real economy”, if not in financial assets, increasingly more analysts have realized that what the Fed has done is tantamount to blowing an roaring inflationary bubble, if largely confined to the realm of asset prices. And while we used a Goldman chart to demonstrate this divergence a little over a month ago…
… now it’s JPMorgan’s turn to undergo the proverbial epiphany.
In a note from JPM’s Jan Loeys, titled “Financial overheating a problem yet?”, the strategist writes that “growth-sensitive assets, such as equities, credit, cyclicals, and commodities continue to gain and outperform, keeping us comfortably in the Growth Trade. Growth prospects have been rising and accelerating over the past two months from the only slow and dispersed upgrades of the previous 12 months. By now, we are in a full-fledged and globally synchronized move up in growth optimism.” Perhaps, but there is a catch as JPM unwillingly concedes:
The speed of these upgrades and asset price rallies is both exhilarating and scary. The faster we rally, the greater the joy, but the more one should be worried about the eventual reckoning. How far from now is that and what should we do about it?
JPM’s answer to this rhetorical question is ambivalent: while the largest US bank says that the current rally still has upside, it quietly advises its clients to start selling.
We stay in the Growth Trade as we believe that the steady upgrading of growth prospects and asset price moves is still benefiting from greater positive feedback loops and that the negative feedback from economic and financial overheating are both still too weak or too far off. At the same time, the speed of the rally is inducing us to start trimming slowly, through going neutral on HY.
Going back to the top chart, JPM then distinguishes between economic and financial overheating:
Economic overheating to us means that as companies start spending more, they eventually push up input prices – wages, resources – and the cost of borrowing, which all eat into profits and then future capital spending, making the economy vulnerable to the downside. The good news here is that so far, these negative feedback forces remain quite weak with even today’s US Jobs report showing no wage pressures. Corporate bond yields are down on the year, oil is flat and only industrial metals are up a lot, but that is too narrow to drive company costs.
Financial overheating, in contrast, is well advanced and feels so late 90s, that it merits monitoring a lot more closely for signs of bubble-trouble.
JPM then goes so far as suggesting that the asset bubble is closest to bursting in the US: “The country to focus on for signals of financial bubble risk is the US, because its expansion is much further advanced than that in other large countries, and because dollar assets make up half of all investable assets in the world.”
Here’s why JPM, along with everyone else, is worried the financial bubble is on the verge of bursting:
The signs of financial overheating in the US can be seen from elevated equity multiples, which for the S&P500 reached 24 on a trailing reported GAAP basis, the same as in 1997; new cycle lows on HG spreads and lower than the last cycle lows when adjusted for maturity and ratings changes; HY yields below 6%, which cannot be called high yield anymore; US Households with a higher share of equities in their financial assets than anytime except 1999-2000; and US household confidence back to the highs of the 90s, and their unemployment rate back to the lows then.
JPM eases client concerns, claiming that at least for now, the feedback loops of the bubble’s melt-up phases are self-reinforcing in a positive feedback loop:
The immediate impact of asset price inflation, and rising confidence and risk investing is to actually boost the positive growth shock that started it, reinforcing and providing positive feedback which in turn feeds risk asset prices further.
However, this benign initial state is unstable:
The reason we monitor financial overheating closely, despite its initial reinforcing impact, is that the last few cycles have shown that it leads to excesses that eventually make the markets and economy vulnerable to any setback, innocuous as the setback may be initially. The low vol and easy money environment of the current cycle, both at historic extremes, are a perfect breeding ground for financial excess. Simple leverage and low risk premia signals are to this analyst not the most worrying areas.
And then the best phrase perhaps ever penned by a JPM analyst, one who may have been watching Stranger Things a little too much in recent days: beware the shadow world.
It is instead the stuff we can’t see, hidden in the shadow world, outside the control of the regulators, as well as the economic and financial innovation that in the end leads to extremes.
Following these rather explicit warnings from JPM about the risk of “financial overheating”, the bank has some advice for clients on what they should do next:
What should investors do about the risk of financial overheating? There are in principle three options: i) full speed ahead with risk assets, but run fast away at the first sign of serious trouble; ii) start trimming and hedging risk asset positions; or iii) cut now and move to cash as the eventual correction will be ugly. We choose the middle road, and have started trimming, despite remaining net long the growth trade.
The first approach – pedal-to-the-metal and then brake all you can when trouble is in sight – requires ultimate timing, is vulnerable to head-fakes, and is challenged by the fact that is analyst did not react fast enough in 2000 and 2007.
The last option – to cut and run fast now – faces the risk that the market and economy may still only be in 1997, and could thus miss the doubling of the equity markets that was still coming.
Hence, our preference to dollar average over the next year or so into a more neutral, and eventually defensive risk position. Some of that can be done by slowly building downside protection through 3-year out options, during
periods of extreme volatility and good liquidity. Another way is to sell some of the longs in risk assets that do not always perform well late cycle and that are at their most extreme valuation now. For that we selected HY bonds. US HY yields fell this week to under 6%. From these levels, in the past the next 12-month returns were only just positive.
In conclusion: “The rolling fundamentals of earnings and default rates remain positive for HY, but these data are backward looking and do not tell us that much about the future. Our bullish view on growth and the rising odds of US tax reform keep us long and OW US risk assets, but the challenging value of HY make us prefer equity to credit longs. Go neutral on the HY asset class.”
Be that as it may, it is – as Loeys poetically puts it – all about the “shadow world” from this point on…
