- 20 More Questions That Journalists Should Be Asking About The Skripal Case
Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,
To my knowledge, none of the questions I wrote in my previous piece – 30 questions That Journalists Should be Asking About the Skripal Case – has been answered satisfactorily, at least not in the public domain.
Yet despite the fact that these legitimate questions have not yet been answered, and many important facts surrounding the case are still unknown, the case has given rise to a serious international crisis, with the extraordinary expulsion of Russian diplomats across many EU countries and particularly the United States on March 26th.
This is a moment to stop and pause.
A man and his daughter were poisoned in the City of Salisbury on 4th March. Yet despite the fact that investigators do not yet appear to know how they were poisoned, when they were poisoned, or where they were poisoned, a number of Western nations have used the incident as a pretext for the co-ordinated expulsion of diplomats on a scale not witnessed even during the height of the Cold War. These are clearly very abnormal and very dangerous times.
I pointed out in my previous piece that it is not my intention to advance some sort of conspiracy theory on this blog. It remains the case that I simply don’t have any holistic theory — “conspiracy” or otherwise — for who carried this out, and I continue to retain an open mind. But since the Government of my country has rushed to judgement without many of the facts of the case being established, and since this has led to the biggest deterioration in relations between nuclear-armed nations since the Cuban Missile Crisis, it seems to me that it is more important than ever to keep asking questions in the hope that answers will come.
And so, for what it’s worth, here are 20 more important questions that I think that journalists ought to be asking regarding this case:
1. Have the police yet identified any suspects in the case?
2. If so, is there any evidence connecting them to the Russian Government?
3. If not, how is it possible to determine culpability, as the British Government has done?
4. In her statement to the House of Commons on 12th March 2018, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May stated the following:
“It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’. Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down” [my emphasis added].
In the judgement at the High Court on 22nd March on whether to allow blood samples to be taken from Sergei and Yulia Skripal for examination by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), evidence submitted by Porton Down to the court (Section 17 i) stated the following:
“Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent” [my emphasis added].
So the Prime Minister said that Porton Down had positively identified the substance as a Novichok nerve agent. The statement from Porton Down says that their tests indicated that it was a Novichok agent or closely related agent. Are these two statements saying exactly the same thing?
5. Why were the phrases “related compound” and “closely related agent” added to the statement given by Porton Down, and is this an indication that the scientists were not 100% sure that the substance was a “Novichok” nerve agent?
6. Why were these phrases left out of the Prime Minister’s statement to the House of Commons?
7. Why did the Prime Minister choose to use the word “Novichok” in her speech, rather than the wordFoliant, which is the actual name of the programme initiated by the Soviet Union when attempting to develop a new class of chemical weapons in the 1970s and 1980s?
8. When asked in an interview with Deutsche Welle how scientists at Porton Down had found out so quickly that the nerve agent was of the “Novichok” class of chemical weapons, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, was asked whether Porton Down possesses samples of it. Here is how he replied:
“They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said there’s no doubt” [My emphasis].
If Mr Johnson’s statement is correct, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down has samples of “Novichok” in its possession, where did they come from?
9. Were they produced at Porton Down?
10. How long have they had them?
11. Why has the DSTL not registered possession of these substances with the OPCW, which it is legally obliged to do under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)?
12. Does this admission by Mr Johnson not indicate that “Novichoks” can be made in any advanced chemical weapons facility, as indeed they were under the auspices of the OPCW in Iran in 2016?
13. If so, how can the Government be sure that the substance used to poison Mr Skripal and his daughter was made in or produced by Russia?
14. In her statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday 14th March, the British Prime Minister stated that there were only two plausible explanations for poisoning of Mr Skripal and his daughter:
“Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or conceivably, the Russian government could have lost control of a military-grade nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”
Other than the actual substance used, is there any hard evidence that led the Government to conclude these as being the only two plausible scenarios?
15. On March 26th, a number of countries expelled Russian diplomats in an apparent response to the incident in Salisbury. Yet at this time, the OPCW had not yet investigated the case, nor analysed blood samples. Why was the clearly co-ordinated decision to expel diplomats taken before the OPCW’s investigation had concluded?
16. Has this not put huge pressure on the OPCW to come up with “the right” conclusion?
17. It is reckoned that the OPCW’s investigation into the substance used will take at least three weeks to complete, whereas it took Porton Down less than a week to analyse it. What accounts for this difference?
18. Will the OPCW be using the samples of “Novichok” that Boris Johnson says are held at Porton Down to compare with the blood samples of Mr Skripal and his daughter?
19. If not, on what basis will this comparison be made, since the first known synthesis of a “Novichok” was made by Iran in 2016?
20. If the OPCW discovers that the substance is indeed a “Novichok”, will this be sufficient evidence with which to establish who carried out the attack on the Skripals or — given that other countries clearly have the capability to produce such substances — would more evidence be needed?
- You Know The US Is Losing, We're Willing To Talk
How do you know when a politician is lying?
Their lips move and words come out.
How do you know when the United States is at a disadvantage in a geopolitical quagmire?
Our diplomats and Presidents want to ‘open up talks.’
Multiple times in the past four years the U.S. has used negotiating ceasefires in Syria and Ukraine to rearm and regroup those we’re backing or get our opposition (the Syrian Arab Army, the Russians) to let their guard down and then attack within 24 hours.
We’ve used the U.N. Security Council as a bludgeon to brazenly lie about on the ground facts in Syria to attempt to save our pet jihadists in places like Aleppo and now eastern Ghouta.
And in each of these instances the Russian counterparts have documented the U.S.’s mendacity, patiently building up an international file of such incidents for future use. As I’ve pointed out so many times, the Russians rightly feel we are “Not Agreement Capable” either from a short-term or long-term perspective.
Winning Looks like Losing
So, why do I think the U.S. is in a losing position right now, despite the pronouncements from President Trump and his most ardent supporters that he’s winning on everything?
Because on the two most important issues of 2018, Korean denuclearization and strategic arms control, Trump is ready to sit down and talk. And we have not been willing to do that on either of these issues at the Head of State level for most of this century, if not longer.
I wrote recently that the Neoconservative cabal in D.C. is in its final push for war with Russia. The catalyst, for me, was President Putin’s state of the union address on March 1st where he unveiled new weapons that conjured up images from the finale of Dr. Strangelove.
I said, and still believe …
The neocons are cornered. All of their major pushes to destroy Russia and Iran and control central Asia are collapsing. The EU is fast approaching a political crisis. The U.K. is still a loyal subject but the White House has a cancer at its center, Donald Trump. The window has nearly closed on regime change in Russia. In effect, it’s now or never.
And the clock started the moment Putin unveiled these weapons. It’s not that the military and intelligence services in the U.S. didn’t know about these systems. They did.
The embarrassing part is that for fifteen years (or more) the neocons, through their mouthpieces like John Bolton, have argued that war with Iran and Russia was the right course of action precisely because it was winnable at minimal cost to the U.S.
They peddled the lie that the Russians couldn’t defend themselves against us while our military commanders, especially one James Mattis, argued otherwise and from a position of knowledge, not ideological fervor.
In Korea it is the Koreans themselves that are pushing for reunification. The election of President Moon Jae-in is a testament to that. And the rapidity with which the situation has gone from full throated U.S. push for war and regime change to, “Hey, let’s talk about this,” has been stunning.
It means that some underlying fact has changed which precludes the U.S. from taking the neocon approach of further encirclement and destabilization of Russia and China.
Trump is now willing, against the advice of his inner council, to talk with Vladimir Putin about arms control. Why? The Russians have weapons that we cannot and will not be able to counter for a decade, if not longer.
We may have or will soon have weapon systems of parallel aggressive capabilities, but counter systems, like missile defense and electronic warfare, no. In fact, the Russians are most likely ahead of us in both of those areas as well.
So, now that the neocon push for war has been outed as the worst kind of malicious fever dream the only thing left to do is push this moment to its crisis point and trap Trump and Putin in a stand-off that most likely ends in tears.
MOAR Escalation!
Remember, not two weeks ago U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley failed to advance a total ceasefire in eastern Ghouta to save our ISIS/Al-Qaeda pet Salafist head-choppers there before they were wiped out. The resolution went nowhere because you can only go to that well so many times before it doesn’t work anymore.
The hysteria surrounding the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal is being used cynically to force Europe back into the fold of the U.S.’s ambitions to destroy Russia.
Every time Haley goes to the security council with another worthless ceasefire she is building the case for Russia’s removal from the U.N. Security Council. Or, at least, that’s the thinking. But, if that happens, then the U.N. is finished.
Meanwhile, as I pointed out earlier, the Russians keep making the case that it is the U.S. that negotiates in bad faith, treats allies like lepers and abuses its status to push for ends orthogonal to their interests.
And that brings me to Germany and the Nordstream 2 pipeline, Russia’s next weapon in its war with the U.S. U.S. lawmakers are apoplectic that this pipeline is getting built. Just this morning Germany issued the permits to allow its construction over the most strenuous objections from the U.S.
More sanctions are being threatened, assets frozen. More pressure will be placed on Denmark to not issue the permit. But Nordstream can be re-routed around Danish waters if need be for a small cost. So, with Germany’s permit Nordstream 2 is, for all practical intents, a go.
Lastly, China’s yuan-denominated oil futures contract (which is convertible to gold, FYI) began trading on Sunday evening and the initial volume was impressive to say the least. With China becoming the world’s largest importer of oil and the need for an oil futures benchmark in something other than light sweet crude, the challenge posed by this contract to the pricing of oil to the current petrodollar system is real.
And this will play into any and all trade negotiations between Trump and Jinping over the next year. The goal of this contract is not only to remove unnecessary friction from oil pricing but also to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to un-peg the Riyal from the U.S. dollar and accept Yuan as payment for the significant amount of oil they sell China.
You will know in the next few months just how much this new weapon is forcing change by how willing the U.S. is willing to cut deals on trade.
We’re approaching the crescendo of Trump’s ‘Crazy Ivan’ ploy to exert maximum leverage in a number of areas including foreign policy and trade. I believe the neoconservatives are worried he will not cut acceptable deals in the end, because they know his hand is poor.
Therefore, the big bluff he’s trying to execute will be called. This is why they are pushing for war so badly. And this is why he’s willing to go along with them, they are handing him leverage that he understands.
Unfortunately, Putin doesn’t bluff. And for a bully like Trump, losing is not an option. Lying our way into war is a time-honored U.S. Presidential tradition. Is this time different? The world hopes so.
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- A Majority Of Americans No Longer Trust Facebook
When it comes to obeying laws protecting personal information, Americans have less faith in Facebook than other tech companies.
That’s according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Facebook has been engulfed in a storm of criticism after it emerged that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested and exploited the personal information of 50 million of its users. The firm is trying to restore its badly tarnished image with CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently issuing a public apology. Judging by the findings of the poll, the social network certainly has serious work to do in order to restore confidence in its user base.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The research found that only 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws, far less than other tech companies known to gather user data.
66 percent of respondents said they trust Amazon, 62 percent trust Google and 60 percent trust Microsoft. Apple and Yahoo! were also ahead of Facebook in the trust stakes. The evaporation of trust among its users wasn’t the only headache for Facebook in recent days.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said it is investigating the firm to determine if it had “failed” to protect the privacy of its users. According to former FTC officials, the social network could be penalized severely if it is found to have violated or failed to comply with the consent decree it agreed in 2011. Fines could amount to $40,000 per violation and theoretically, this could all add up to $2 trillion.
- US Judge Allows 9/11 Lawsuits Against Saudi Arabia To Proceed
A US judge in New York on Wednesday rejected Saudi Arabia’s request to dismiss lawsuits accusing it of helping in the 9/11 attacks.
The cases are based on the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (Jasta), a 2016 law that provides an exemption to the legal principle of sovereign immunity, allowing families of the victims to take foreign governments to court.
The families point to the fact that the majority of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and claim that Saudi officials and institutions “aided and abetted” the attackers in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, according to court documents.
US District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan said the plaintiffs’ allegations “narrowly articulate a reasonable basis” for him to assert jurisdiction under Jasta.
Still, Daniels dismissed claims against two Saudi banks and a Saudi construction company for allegedly providing material support to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to carry out the attacks, saying he lacked jurisdiction.
The Saudi government has long denied involvement in the attacks in which hijacked planes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon outside Washington, DC and a Pennsylvania field. Almost 3,000 people died.
Riyadh and its Gulf allies had strongly opposed Jasta, which was initially vetoed by then-President Barack Obama. The US Senate overturned the veto by overwhelmingly adopting the legislation.
Critics of the law say it is politically motivated and an infringement on the sovereignty of foreign nations.
Wednesday’s ruling comes during Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the US. President Donald Trump heaped praise on the Saudi royal during a meeting at the White House last week.
Jim Kreindler, a lawyer for about 850 victims’ families in the case against the Saudi government, said his clients are watching bin Salman’s visit to Washington carefully.
He added that they are “aware of the many US-Saudi issues at play,” including the possible listing of Saudi state oil giant Aramco on the New York Stock Exchange, a potential nuclear deal and further arms sales.
“It remains to be seen whether he is going to take a step in accepting Saudi accountability for 9/11,” Kreindler told MEE earlier this month.
Kreindler told Reuters on Wednesday he is “delighted” that the judge dismissed Saudi Arabia’s motion.
“We have been pressing to proceed with the case and conduct discovery from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so that the full story can come to light, and expose the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks,” he added.
- In Nearly 70% Of US Counties, The Average Worker Can't Afford To Buy A Home
Housing, as we’ve pointed out in the past, is perhaps the most reliable bellwether of widening economic inequality in the US. And in its latest quarterly report on housing affordability in the US, ATTOM discovered that median-priced homes aren’t affordable to average wage earners in an astounding 68% of US housing markets.
In its report, the company calculated affordability by incorporating the amount of income needed to make monthly home payments – including mortgage payments, property tax payments and insurance – on a median-priced home, assuming a 3% down payment and a 28% maximum “front-end” debt-to-income ratio.
That required income was then compared with the median home price.
The 304 counties where a median-priced home in the first quarter was not affordable for average wage earners included Los Angeles County, California; Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona; San Diego County, California; Orange County, California; and Miami-Dade County, Florida. Meanwhile, the 142 counties (32 percent of the 446 counties analyzed in the report) where a median-priced home in the first quarter was still affordable for average wage earners included Cook County (Chicago), Illinois; Harris County (Houston), Texas; Dallas County, Texas; Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan; and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.
Already, the “hottest” housing markets are seeing an exodus of working- and middle-class individuals who can no longer afford to pay the high rents – let along afford to set aside enough money for a down payment.
Eight of the top 10 counties with the highest median home prices in Q1 2018 posted negative net migration in 2017: Kings County (Brooklyn), New York (25,484 net migration decrease); Santa Clara County (San Jose), California (5,559 net migration decrease); New York County (Manhattan), New York (3,762 net migration decrease); Orange County, California (3,750 net migration decrease); and San Mateo, Marin, Napa and Santa Cruz counties in Northern California.
Furthermore, ATTOM’s data found that this problem is getting worse, not better, with 41% of housing markets less affordable than their historical average during the first quarter. That’s up from 35% the quarter before.
Meanwhile, a staggering 73% of markets posted worsening affordability compared with a year ago, including Los Angeles, Cook County (home to Chicago), Maricopa County (Phoenix) and Kings County (Brooklyn).
The counties where the average wage earner would need to spend the highest share of their income to buy a median-priced home are Baltimore, Bibb County (Macon, Georgia) and Wayne County (Detroit).
Continuing with the trend of home prices rising more than twice as quickly as wages, home-price appreciation outpaced wage growth in 83% of housing markets.
When Fed Chairman Jerome Powell warned last month that “valuations are still elevated across a range of asset classes” and that he fears “signs of rising non-financial leverage” it’s possible that he was still understating the problem.
- Escobar: China Taking The Long Road To Solve The Petro-Yuan Puzzle
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
A number of pieces have to fall into place before the petrodollar moves into second place…
Few geoeconomic game-changers are more spectacular than yuan-denominated future crude oil contracts – especially when set up by the largest importer of crude on the planet.
And yet Beijing’s media strategy seems to have consisted in substantially play down the official launch of the petro-yuan at the Shanghai International Energy Exchange.
Still, some euphoria was in order. Brent Crude soared to $71 a barrel for the first time since 2015. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) reached the highest level in three years at $66.55 a barrel; then retreated to $65.53.
A series of petro-yuan “firsts” include the first time overseas investors are able to access a Chinese commodity market. Significantly, US dollars will be accepted as deposit and for settlement. In the near future, a basket of currencies will also be accepted as deposit.
Does the launch of the petro-yuan represent the ultimate deathblow to the petrodollar – and the birth of a completely new set of rules? Not so fast. That may take years, and depends on many variables, the most important of which will be China’s capacity to bend, tweak and ultimately rule the global oil market.
As the yuan progressively reaches full consolidation in trade settlement, the petro-yuan threat to the US dollar, inscribed in a complex, long-term process, will disseminate the Holy Grail: crude oil futures contracts priced in yuan fully convertible into gold.
That means China’s vast array of trade partners will be able to convert yuan into gold without having to keep funds in Chinese assets or turn them into US dollars. Exporters facing the wrath of Washington, such as Russia, Iran or Venezuela, may then avoid US sanctions by trading oil in yuan convertible to gold. Iran and Venezuela, for instance, would have no problems redirecting tankers to China in order to sell directly in the Chinese market – if that’s what it takes.
How to bypass the US dollar
In the short- to medium-term the petro-yuan will surely boost the appeal of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), especially when it comes to the House of Saud.
It’s still unclear in what capacity Beijing will be part of the Aramco IPO, but that will be a decisive step towards the fateful historic moment when Beijing will tell – or compel – Riyadh to start accepting payment for oil in yuan.
Only then the petrodollar may be at serious risk – along with the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
I have stressed before how, at the 2017 BRICS summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin went no holds barred supporting the petro-yuan, specifically challenging the “unfairness” of the US dollar’s unipolar dominance.
How to bypass the US dollar, as well as the petrodollar, has been discussed at BRICS summits for years now. Russia is now China’s largest crude oil supplier (1.32 million barrels a day last month, up 17.8% from a year earlier.) Moscow and Beijing have been forcefully bypassing the US dollar in bilateral trade. In October last year, China launched a payment system in both currencies – the yuan and the ruble. And that will apply to Russian oil bought by China.
Still, the whole petrodollar edifice lies on OPEC – and the House of Saud– pricing oil in US dollars; as everyone needs greenbacks to buy oil, everyone needs to buy (spiraling) US debt. Beijing is set to break the system – as long as it takes.
The petro-yuan as it stands does not provide access to Chinese oil markets. It starts as a great deal especially for Chinese companies who need to buy oil but would rather avoid the oscillations of foreign exchange. Nothing changes for the rest of the US dollar-dominated commodity planet – at least for now.
The game will really start to change when other nations realize they have found a real credible alternative to the petrodollar, and switching to the yuan en masse will certainly spark a US dollar crisis.
What the petro-yuan may be able to provoke in the short term is an acceleration of the next crises in treasuries and bond markets, which will inevitably spill out in the form of a crisis in global currency markets.
That pan-Eurasian resource basket
The game-changing aspect, for now, mostly has to do with the exquisite timing. Beijing has crafted an ultra-long-term plan and yet chose to launch the petro-yuan smack in the middle of a period of sharp deterioration in trade relations with Washington.
The answer to the geoeconomic riddle is bound to be The Golden Moment. Eventually gold will rise to a level where Beijing – by then totally in control over physical gold markets – feels ready to set a conversion rate.
The – Arabian – ‘petro’ side of the petrodollar equation should have been replaced long ago by a priceless, captured pan-Eurasian resource basket. That was what Dick Cheney dreamed of – centering his dreams on the energy wealth of Central Asia and Russia.
That did not happen. What we have instead is shrieking, manic Russophobia – more like a graphic indication of how precarious is the position of Western banking elites. On top of it, with the petro-yuan, China deploys the key weapon, incorporated into BRI, capable of accelerating the end of the unipolar moment.
Yet this is just the initial step in an ultra-high-stakes game. One should keep one’s eyes firmly focused on the interpolations between trade connectivity and technological breakthroughs. The petrodollar may be in danger but is far from finished.
- Facebook Hires "Third-Party" Fact-Checkers To Stamp Out "Fake News"
As Facebook scrambles to avoid a potentially devastating fine from the Federal Trade Commission, the company announced more measures on Thursday seemingly designed to appease Democratic lawmakers like Senator Mark Warner who are insisting that strenuous regulations are the only way to ensure that Facebook does everything within its power to prevent state actors from “sowing discord” by planting disingenuous advertisements and posts on the company’s platform.
According to the Verge, Facebook is now partnering with “third-party fact checkers” to investigate photos and videos published on the company’s platform – while also attempting to filter out fraudulent accounts.
This, of course, is only “one part of [Facebook’s] strategy for holding purveyors of “fake news” to account.
Here’s how it works:
- We use signals, including feedback from people on Facebook, to predict potentially false stories for fact-checkers to review.
- When fact-checkers rate a story as false, we significantly reduce its distribution in News Feed — dropping future views on average by more than 80%.
- We notify people who’ve shared the story in the past and warn people who try to share it going forward.
- For those who still come across the story in their News Feed, we show more information from fact-checkers in a Related Articles unit.
- We use the information from fact-checkers to train our machine learning model, so that we can catch more potentially false news stories and do so faster.
The company announced its plans on a conference call with journalists organized to keep them apprised of its efforts to combat tampering in the 2018 midterms. The contents of the call were later summarized in a blog post. The group of executives who spoke on the call included Alex Stamos, the company’s outgoing chief information security officer.
Stamos illustrated how the company is developing new methods for rooting out people making accounts under fake identities. It’s also cracking down on faked metrics used to make content appear more popular than it actually is.
“It’s important to match the right approach to each of these challenges” Stamos said on the call, according to the Verge, as Stamos explained how Facebook was applying different strategies based on each individual market’s needs.
Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager for civic engagement who was also on the call, explained that Facebook is now proactively looking for foreign-based pages producing political content that the company believes to be inauthentic. If a user is found in violation, they will be manually removed from the platform. This applies to everything from suspicious advertisements to misleading memes.
Now our work also includes a new investigative tool that we can deploy in the lead-up to elections. I’d love to tell you a little bit about how it works.
Rather than wait for reports from our community, we now proactively look for potentially harmful types of election-related activity, such as Pages of foreign origin that are distributing inauthentic civic content. If we find any, we then send these suspicious accounts to be manually reviewed by our security team to see if they violate our Community Standards or our Terms of Service, said Chakrabarti.
Facebook first piloted this tool in the Alabama special election, but has now deployed it to protect this year’s Italian election – and it will be used to “protect Facebook users” during this year’s midterms.
The new rules build on the ad-transparency measures introduced by the company late last year, which purported to show Facebook users the name of the organization funding the content, as well as any other pertinent information.
But those red flags were shown to entrench some people’s belief in false stories, leading Facebook to shift to showing Related Articles with perspectives from other reputable news outlets. As of yesterday, Facebook’s fact checking partners began reviewing suspicious photos and videos which can also spread false information. This could reduce the spread of false news image memes that live on Facebook and require no extra clicks to view, like doctored photos showing the Parkland school shooting survivors ripping up the constitution.
The news comes on the heels of a revelation earlier today that the company is ending its partnership with “third party” data providers including TransUnion and Experian who supply advertisers with even more specific data gleaned from real-life activities and other parties that aren’t Facebook.
But as CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before two Congressional committees early next month, the company hasn’t said anything about its partnerships with third-party “affiliate marketers” who help hucksters sell dubious health supplements and other fraudulent products on Facebook’s platform.
- The Cart In Front Of The Horse: Are Gold Miners Actually Leading The Spot Price?
The Wall Street Journal published an article this morning that could be putting the cart a bit in front of the horse, suggesting that poor performance in gold miners could drag the spot price of the commodity lower, despite the fact that gold has outperformed the S&P 500 year to date by a factor of 1.4% to -2.6%.
The Journal suggests that with bond yields on the rise, investors are going to be more likely to allocate capital to treasuries instead of gold, reporting:
Higher interest rates tend to buoy Treasury yields and make gold less attractive by comparison. The dollar has also been rebounding, which has cooled some optimism for gold bugs, analysts said. A stronger dollar makes commodities denominated in the currency more expensive for overseas buyers.
Gold miners have underperformed despite a strong fourth-quarter earnings season and upbeat 2018 projections. One reason is that some of the companies still aren’t generating as much cash as miners of other metals such as copper, analysts said.
What’s the journal doesn’t mention is the major difference between gold miners in the spot price of gold: namely the fact that miners are companies with staff, management, administrative expenses and other variables that have nothing to do with whether or not the spot price of gold is usually bid or not. The assertion that miners are going to lead the price of gold lower versus looking at miners within a potential positive light due to the fact that they could actually be argued to be “underperforming“ the spot price of gold due to this price divergence may leave some of us scratching our heads.
The article goes on to note that several miners have actually exceeded their targets for this year due to the spot price of gold but that a key metric in free cash flow relative to market value continues to lag:
In 2017, gold prices had their best year since 2010, allowing many miners to repair their balance sheets. Barrick Gold, the world’s largest producer, said it paid down $1.5 billion in debt, exceeding its target, while Newmont Mining Corp. reported an 8% rise in production from a year earlier.
But the companies still haven’t caught up in free cash flow relative to market value, a commonly-used metric for evaluating performance, according to Citigroup research.
It isn’t unreasonable to think that gold may still lead the price of these miners going forward and that this divergence is simply an aberration that may actually signal a buying opportunity versus coming in in a decline in the price of spot gold.
No macroeconomic data has come more into focus over the last couple of months than the CPI number, as inflation continues to be the key metric watched by “economists“ as the bull market reaches its peak and stock market volatility has been undoubtedly on the rise.
Given that gold is not only a traditional hedge against volatility and “the system”, but also a hedge against inflation itself, it is more likely that the Wall Street Journal has the cart in front of the horse in this case.
- Mexican Drug Kingpin Smuggled Enough Fentanyl To "Kill Millions" In NYC
An alleged Mexican drug kingpin and five of his accomplices have just been indicted for smuggling enough fentanyl from Mexico into New York City “to kill millions,” officials announced Tuesday.
An undercover investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, NYC Special Narcotics Prosecutor Unit, and local law enforcement agencies discovered that San José del Cabo resident Francisco Quiroz-Zamora, 41, known as “Gordo,” or “Fatso,” was the primary source of large fentanyl shipments to the New York City region.
In the first half of 2017, an undercover narcotics officer posed as a drug trafficker and successfully negotiated two large shipments of Mexican fentanyl from Quiroz-Zamora.
Quiroz-Zamora was arrested on November 27 when he arrived via Amtrak to the city’s Pennsylvania Station “to personally collect payment for drug deals he unwittingly negotiated with an undercover officer,” said NBC News.
“This investigation provides the American public with an inside view of a day in the life of a Sinaloa Cartel drug trafficker; including international travel, money pick-ups, and clandestine meetings,” Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent in Charge James Hunt said in a statement.
“Quiroz-Zamora oversaw the delivery of multi-kilogram loads of fentanyl to New York, powerful enough to kill millions. The Strike Force and the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor acted quickly and efficiently to seize the toxic kilograms before hitting the streets and arresting all conspirators, including the Kingpin,” Hunt added.
Quiroz-Zamora’s drug trafficking operations stemmed from San José del Cabo, a resort town plagued with cartel violence on the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
NBC indicates Quiroz-Zamora was “charged with operating as a major trafficker, first-degree sale or a controlled substance and second-degree conspiracy.”
Further, Quiroz-Zamora’s accomplices (Carlos Ramirez, Jesus Perez-Cabral, Johnny Beltrez, David Rodriguez and Richard Rodriguez) were charged with “second-degree conspiracy, criminal possession of controlled substances in the first and third degrees, criminal facilitation in the second degree, and criminal possession of a firearm,’ said NBC.
Authorities told NBC that it was Quiroz-Zamora who “allegedly orchestrated two sales of fentanyl” to uncover agents in the first half of 2017.
This led to the arrest of Carlos Ramirez and the largest ever fentanyl seizure in New York City when DEA special agents seized 44 pounds of the potent synthetic opioid at the Umbrella Hotel in the Bronx.
Despite the operational setback of running a high-stakes drug trafficking business, Quiroz-Zamora negotiated another deal with undercover drug traffickers, which resulted in a tense police raid last August on a Manhattan condo — down the street from Trump Tower. The raid resulted in the arrest of Perez-Cabral, Beltrez, and Rodriguez.
“Agents conducted a search and recovered two large ziplock bags containing powder, 1,100 individual dose glassine envelopes stamped with the brand name ‘UBER,’ a loaded .25-caliber Beretta pistol and $12,000 in cash,” authorities said in a statement.
The arrests and indictments of the Mexican drug kingpin and five of his high-level colleagues was the result of a “long-term” investigation by a group of governmental agencies, including the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, NYC Special Narcotics Prosecutor Unit, and the New York City Police Department.
“Fentanyl has been ravaging my county of the Bronx, killing people and shattering communities,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said.
“Tracing the source to its foreign origins and indicting the kingpin will help stem the flow of this high-profit poison to our city. I am pleased to work with our local, state and federal partners to target these major suppliers,” he added.
“In New York City and across the nation, fentanyl is causing untold tragedy as it pushes the number of overdose deaths ever higher. This indictment demonstrates our collaborative approach and commitment to tracking those at the top of the lethal supply chain and putting them out of business permanently,” Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan said.
Citywide, the drug was responsible for 44 percent of all overdose deaths. Across the river, New Jersey noticed a five-fold explosion in fentanyl overdose deaths in the last two years.
Drug overdoses killed more Americans in 2016 than the Vietnam War.
While authorities in New York City have thwarted a Fentanyl bomb from detonating across the boroughs, America’s opioid crisis is far from over as the drug overdose mayhem explodes across the homeland. Rome is burning.
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