Jul 10

Today’s News 10th July 2017

  • Saudi King To Visit Russia: Bringing Relationship To New Phase

    Authored by Alex Gorka via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Much has been said about the much vaunted trip of US President Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia where he was lavished with extravagant royal pomp. The $110 billion arms deal was signed and the plans to create an Arab NATO set the agenda. The visit – the president’s first foreign trip – was described as a major step to boost the US clout in the Middle East but the days when the region was Washington’s exclusive sphere of influence are gone.

    The Kingdom has launched an ambitious Vision 2030 program to start a new chapter in its history, turning itself from a US dependent oil exporter to a regional powerhouse with diversified economy, gradually opening the doors to the whole world. Investment flows are to come from different directions with money put into different baskets. Saudi Arabia is intensifying its diplomatic efforts to change its perception to start a new era. Russia is viewed as a partner in the far-reaching plans.

    The blossoming relationship between Russia and Saudi Arabia signals yet another sea change in the ever-evolving global order. King Salman is to become the first Saudi monarch to visit Russia. The trip is expected this month with talks on the way to specify the date. The visit acquires special importance as the King has taken a decision not to attend the July 7-8 summit of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

    On May 30, President Putin welcomed then Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Kremlin and both men said they would deepen cooperation in oil and work on narrowing their differences over Syria. The visit came on the heels of US President Donald Trump’s historic visit to Riyadh.

    Prince Mohammed bin Salman was recently appointed to the position of Crown Prince and heir to King Salman of Saudi Arabia. This appointment bodes well for the Russia-Saudi relations. The crown prince has overseen the ties with Moscow and has visited Russia many times. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called him a «very reliable partner with whom you can reach agreements, and be certain that those agreements will be honored».

    Russia and Saudi Arabia might launch joint projects in petrochemical industry, in the field of renewable energy and liquefied natural gas (LNG) technologies among others. The Russia-Saudi Arabia brokered and recently extended oil output cut agreement between OPEC and non-OPEC members has become the flagship symbol of cooperation.

    On June 2, Russia's largest oil producer, Rosneft, and the Kingdom’s national oil company Aramco announced that they would look into joint investments in Saudi Arabia. The announcement was made after Rosneft head Igor Sechin and Saudi Aramco Chief Amin Nasser had held their first ever formal, scheduled meeting on May 30, going beyond brief encounters at international oil events.

    The parties discussed possible ways of cooperating in Asia, including Indonesia and India, as well as in other markets. Cooperation in Asia between the world's two biggest oil exporters would be unprecedented. Saudi Arabia via its oil giant Aramco has openly stated to be interested in global gas investment opportunities, starting in Russia’s Siberian region.

    Investments have all chances to be a true ram. Saudi Arabia would particularly consider the issue of participating in the Arctic LNG projects. Russia and Saudi Arabia give indications of a possible OPEC 2.0 scenario, with Russia becoming a member. This would confront the market with a renewed and stronger oil cartel.

    Russian gas giant Lukoil has revealed that it will also consider marketing oil alongside Saudi Aramco. Another Russian oil company, Tatneft, has announced it is open for cooperation with Saudi Arabia.

    Saudi Arabia has confirmed it would evaluate the possibility of joining Russia's arctic liquid natural gas (LNG) project. Saudi Aramco has always been heavily involved in the gas sector, as it is already a very large gas producer. It is pursuing shale gas in the future, with first production expected around 2020-2021.There are prospects for OPEC – non-OPEC cooperation going beyond crude oil to integrate the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF). A new cartel would be powerful enough to stabilize the energy market and protect it from negative developments.

    The parties do not agree on Syria and some other issues but the differences in political contacts are limited and do not affect the neutrality of Riyadh with respect to Crimea, the events in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, which Saudi Arabia has never joined.

    According to Dmitry Shugaev, the head of Federal service on military-technical cooperation (FSMTC), arms deals are being discussed. Russia's Rostec state corporation has been in talks with Saudi Arabia and on the T-90S third-generation main battle tanks deal. Riyadh wants to purchase Russia MiG-35 lightweight fighters. S-400 cutting edge air defense systems are also on the table.

    No doubt, the Qatar crisis will be part of the agenda. Russia has not taken sides in the current dispute between Qatar and other Arab states and it has a recent history of cooperation with all sides of this conflict. As a result, Russia is well suited to act as a mediator and a communications channel between Riyadh and those who support Doha – such influential actors as Iran and Turkey.

    Evidently, Saudi Arabia wants to introduce adjustments to its policy of one-sided focus on the United States. Russia has improved its strategic stance in the region significantly in recent years. The King’s visit will be a "turning point" in relations between the two countries. Riyadh’s desire to boost the relations with Moscow can be seen as a shift to affect the political dynamics of the Middle East and even global politics.

  • JaCKaSS CoMeY…
  • Still Living In Propaganda-ville

    Authored by Robert Parry via ConsoortiumNews.com,

    As much as the U.S. mainstream media wants people to believe that it is the Guardian of Truth, it is actually lost in a wilderness of propaganda and falsehoods, a dangerous land of delusion that is putting the future of humankind at risk as tension escalate with nuclear-armed Russia.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses a crowd on May 9, 2014, celebrating the 69th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Crimean port city of Sevastopol from the Nazis. (Russian government photo)

    This media problem has grown over recent decades as lucrative careerism has replaced responsible professionalism. Pack journalism has always been a threat to quality reporting but now it has evolved into a self-sustaining media lifestyle in which the old motto, “there’s safety in numbers,” is borne out by the fact that being horrendously wrong, such as on Iraq’s WMD, leads to almost no accountability because so many important colleagues were wrong as well.

    Similarly, there has been no accountability after many mainstream journalists and commentators falsely stated as flat-fact that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” concurred that Russia did “meddle” in last November’s U.S. election.

    For months, this claim has been the go-to put-down whenever anyone questions the groupthink of Russian venality perverting American democracy. Even the esteemed “Politifact” deemed the assertion “true.” But it was never true.

    It was at best a needled distortion of a claim by President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper when he issued a statement last Oct. 7 alleging Russian meddling. Because Clapper was the chief of the U.S. Intelligence Community, his opinion morphed into a claim that it represented the consensus of all 17 intelligence agencies, a dishonest twist that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton began touting.

    However, for people who understand how the U.S. Intelligence Community works, the claim of a 17-agencies consensus has a specific meaning, some form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE) that seeks out judgments and dissents from the various agencies.

    But there was no NIE regarding alleged Russian meddling and there apparently wasn’t even a formal assessment from a subset of the agencies at the time of Clapper’s statement. President Obama did not order a publishable assessment until December – after the election – and it was not completed until Jan. 6, when a report from Clapper’s office presented the opinions of analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency – three agencies (or four if you count the DNI’s office), not 17.

    Lacking Hard Evidence

    The report also contained no hard evidence of a Russian “hack” and amounted to a one-sided circumstantial case at best. However, by then, the U.S. mainstream media had embraced the “all-17-intelligence-agencies” refrain and anyone who disagreed, including President Trump, was treated as delusional. The argument went: “How can anyone question what all 17 intelligence agencies have confirmed as true?”

    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)

    It wasn’t until May 8 when then-former DNI Clapper belatedly set the record straight in sworn congressional testimony in which he explained that there were only three “contributing agencies” from which analysts were “hand-picked.”

    The reference to “hand-picked” analysts pricked the ears of some former U.S. intelligence analysts who had suffered through earlier periods of “politicized” intelligence when malleable analysts were chosen to deliver what their political bosses wanted to hear.

    On May 23, also in congressional testimony, former CIA Director John Brennan confirmed Clapper’s description, saying only four of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies took part in the assessment.

    Brennan said the Jan. 6 report “followed the general model of how you want to do something like this with some notable exceptions. It only involved the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It wasn’t a full inter-agency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies.”

    After this testimony, some of the major news organizations, which had been waving around the “17-intelligence-agencies” meme, subtly changed their phrasing to either depict Russian “meddling” as an established fact no longer requiring attribution or referred to the “unanimous judgment” of the Intelligence Community without citing a specific number.

    This “unanimous judgment” formulation was deceptive, too, because it suggested that all 17 agencies were in accord albeit without exactly saying that. For a regular reader of The New York Times or a frequent viewer of CNN, the distinction would almost assuredly not be detected.

    For more than a month after the Clapper-Brennan testimonies, there was no formal correction.

    A Belated Correction

    Finally, on June 25, the Times’ hand was forced when White House correspondent Maggie Haberman reverted to the old formulation, mocking Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

    New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)

    When this falsehood was called to the Times’ attention, it had little choice but to append a correction to the article, noting that the intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

    The Associated Press ran a similar “clarification” applied to some of its fallacious reporting repeating the “17-intelligence-agencies” meme.

    So, you might have thought that the mainstream media was finally adjusting its reporting to conform to reality. But that would mean that one of the pillars of the Russia-gate “scandal” had crumbled, the certainty that Russia and Vladimir Putin did “meddle” in the election.

    The story would have to go back to square one and the major news organizations would have to begin reporting on whether or not there ever was solid evidence to support what had become a “certainty” – and there appeared to be no stomach for such soul-searching. Since pretty much all the important media figures had made the same error, it would be much easier to simply move on as if nothing had changed.

    That would mean that skepticism would still be unwelcome and curious leads would not be followed. For instance, there was a head-turning reference in an otherwise typical Washington Post take-out on June 25 accusing Russia of committing “the crime of the century.”

    A reference, stuck deep inside the five-page opus, said, “Some of the most critical technical intelligence on Russia came from another country, officials said. Because of the source of the material, the NSA was reluctant to view it with high confidence.”

    Though the Post did not identify the country, this reference suggests that more than one key element of the case for Russian culpability was based not on direct investigations by the U.S. intelligence agencies, but on the work of external organizations.

    Earlier, the Democratic National Committee denied the FBI access to its supposedly hacked computers, forcing the investigators to rely on a DNC contractor called CrowdStrike, which has a checkered record of getting this sort of analytics right and whose chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, is an anti-Putin Russian émigré with ties to the anti-Russian think tank, Atlantic Council.

    Relying on Outsiders

    You might be wondering why something as important as this “crime of the century,” which has pushed the world closer to nuclear annihilation, is dependent on dubious entities outside the U.S. government with possible conflicts of interest.

    President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)

    If the U.S. government really took this issue seriously, which it should, why didn’t the FBI seize the DNC’s computers and insist that impartial government experts lead the investigation? And why – given the extraordinary expertise of the NSA in computer hacking – is “some of the most critical technical intelligence on Russia [coming] from another country,” one that doesn’t inspire the NSA’s confidence?

    But such pesky questions are not likely to be asked or answered by a mainstream U.S. media that displays deep-seated bias toward both Putin and Trump.

    Mostly, major news outlets continue to brush aside the clarifications and return to various formulations that continue to embrace the “17-intelligence-agencies” canard, albeit in slightly different forms, such as references to the collective Intelligence Community without the specific number. Anyone who questions this established conventional wisdom is still crazy and out of step.

    For instance, James Holmes of Esquire was stunned on Thursday when Trump at a news conference in Poland reminded the traveling press corps about the inaccurate reporting regarding the 17 intelligence agencies and said he still wasn’t entirely sure about Russia’s guilt.

    “In public, he’s still casting doubt on the intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election nearly nine months after the fact,” Holmes sputtered before describing Trump’s comment as a “rant.”

    So, if you thought that a chastened mainstream media might stop in the wake of the “17-intelligence-agencies” falsehood and rethink the whole Russia-gate business, you would have been sadly mistaken.

    But the problem is not just the question of whether Russia hacked into Democratic emails and slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication (something that both Russia and WikiLeaks deny). Perhaps the larger danger is how the major U.S. news outlets have adopted a consistently propagandistic approach toward everything relating to Russia.

    Hating Putin

    This pattern traces back to the earliest days of Vladimir Putin’s presidency in 2000 when he began to rein in the U.S.-prescribed “shock therapy,” which had sold off Russia’s assets to well-connected insiders, making billions of dollars for the West-favored “oligarchs,” even as the process threw millions of average Russian into poverty.

    Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

    But the U.S. mainstream media’s contempt for Putin reached new heights after he helped President Obama head off neoconservative (and liberal interventionist) demands for a full-scale U.S. military assault on Syria in August 2013 and helped bring Iran into a restrictive nuclear agreement when the neocons wanted to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.

    The neocons delivered their payback to Putin in early 2014 by supporting a violent coup in Ukraine, overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installing a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. operation was spearheaded by neocon National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman and neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, with enthusiastic support from neocon Sen. John McCain.

    Nuland was heard in an intercepted pre-coup phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should become the new leaders and pondering how to “glue” or “midwife this thing.”

    Despite the clear evidence of U.S. interference in Ukrainian politics, the U.S. government and the mainstream media embraced the coup and accused Putin of “aggression” when ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, called the Donbas, resisted the coup regime.

    When ethnic Russians and other citizens in Crimea voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to reject the coup regime and rejoin Russia – a move protected by some of the 20,000 Russian troops inside Crimea as part of a basing agreement – that became a Russian “invasion.” But it was the most peculiar “invasion,” since there were no images of tanks crashing across borders or amphibious landing craft on Crimean beaches, because no such “invasion” had occurred.

    However, in virtually every instance, the U.S. mainstream media insisted on the most extreme anti-Russian propaganda line and accused people who questioned this Official Narrative of disseminating Russian “propaganda” – or being a “Moscow stooge” or acting as a “useful fool.” There was no tolerance for skepticism about whatever the State Department or the Washington think tanks were saying.

    Trump Meets Putin

    So, since Trump met with Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, the U.S. mainstream media has been in a frenzy, linking up its groupthinks about the Ukraine “invasion” with its groupthinks about Russia “hacking” the election.

    Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. (Photo credit: Aude)

    In a July 3 editorial, The Washington Post declared, “Mr. Trump simply cannot fail to admonish Mr. Putin for Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. He must make clear the United States will not tolerate it, period. Naturally, this is a difficult issue for Mr. Trump, who reaped the benefit of Russia’s intervention and now faces a special counsel’s investigation, but nonetheless, in his first session with Mr. Putin, the president must not hesitate to be blunt. …

    “On Ukraine, Mr. Trump must also display determination. Russia fomented an armed uprising and seized Crimea in violation of international norms, and it continues to instigate violence in the Donbas. Mr. Trump ought to make it unmistakably clear to Mr.Putin that the United States will not retreat from the sanctions imposed over Ukraine until the conditions of peace agreements are met.”

    Along the same lines, even while suggesting the value of some collaboration with Russia toward ending the war in Syria, Post columnist David Ignatius wrote in a July 5 column, “Russian-American cooperation on Syria faces a huge obstacle right now. It would legitimize a Russian regime that invaded Ukraine and meddled in U.S. and European elections, in addition to its intervention in Syria.”

    Note the smug certainty of Ignatius and the Post editors. There is no doubt that Russia “invaded” Ukraine; “seized” Crimea; “meddled” in U.S. and European elections. Yet all these groupthinks should be subjected to skepticism, not simply treated as undeniable truths.

    But seeing only one side to a story is where the U.S. mainstream media is at this point in history. Yes, it is possible that Russia was responsible for the Democratic hacks and did funnel the material to WikiLeaks, but evidence has so far been lacking. And, instead of presenting both sides fairly, the major media acts as if only one side deserves any respect and dissenting views must be ridiculed and condemned.

    In this perverted process, collectively approved versions of complex situations congeal into conventional wisdom, which simply cannot be significantly reconsidered regardless of future revelations.

    As offensive as this rejection of true truth-seeking may be, it also represents an extraordinary danger when mixed with the existential risk of nuclear conflagration.

    With the stakes this high, the demand for hard evidence – and the avoidance of soft-minded groupthink – should go without question. Journalists and commentators should hold themselves to professional precision, not slide into sloppy careerism, lost in “propaganda-ville.”

  • 38 Incredible Facts About The Modern U.S. Dollar

    We’ve previously showed you 31 Fascinating Facts About the Dollar’s Early History, which highlighted the history of U.S. currency before the 20th century. This was a very interesting period in which we looked at the money used by the first colonists, the extreme bust of the Continental currency, the era of privately-issued bank notes, and Congress’ emergency issuance of the fiat “greenback” during the Civil War.

    However, as The Money Project – an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money – notes, the modern era of the U.S. dollar is just as interesting. We have it starting in 1913, when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Woodrow Wilson. Not only did it establish a new central bank, but it also gave the Fed the authority to issue the Federal Reserve Note, which is (for now) the dominant form of U.S. currency both domestically and abroad.

    Courtesy of: The Money Project

    A New Legal Tender

    Leading up to the 20th century, there were four main forms of U.S. currency being used:

    • Gold and silver coins
    • Gold and silver certificates
    • Commercial bank notes, issued by private banks and backed by government bonds
    • “Greenbacks”, a fiat currency declared legal by Congress to help fund the Civil War

    In 1913, however, the Federal Reserve Note was authorized as U.S. currency. The new notes were supposed to be backed by gold or other “lawful money”, based on the stipulations of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

    However, this only lasted about 20 years. By the time of the Great Depression, the Fed considered itself to be in a tight spot. It simply did not have enough gold to back all Federal Reserve Notes and Gold Certificates in circulation, and at the same time wanted flexibility with monetary policy to fight deflation and unemployment.

    In 1933, the Emergency Banking Act was passed by President Roosevelt, and Executive Order 6102 was also signed. The latter move famously criminalized monetary gold, and ended the gold standard.

    After all, if gold can’t be legally owned, it can’t be legally redeemed.

    Modern Paper Money

    After a brief return to a pseudo gold standard after WWII, Nixon severed all remaining ties between gold and money in 1971. Since then, U.S. money has been purely fiat, and backed by the government rather than any physical commodity or precious metal.

    Some facts on today’s paper money:

    • There is $1.54 trillion of U.S. currency in circulation, and 97% of that is Federal Reserve Notes
    • Over two-thirds of all $100 bills are held outside the U.S.
    • Dollar bills can be folded at least 8,000 times, which is 20x more than a normal sheet of paper
    • That’s because dollar bills are made of a special 75% cotton and 25% linen blend, patented by Crane & Co.
    • The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing produces 38 million notes every day, worth $541 million
    • The two facilities, located in Washington, D.C. and Fort Worth, Texas use 9.7 tons of ink per day
    • For 2017, the Fed ordered 7.1 billion new notes, worth $209 billion
    • More than 70% of these notes are used to replace damaged ones
    • Notes with smaller denominations ($1, $5, $10) tend to last for shorter periods of time, due to more frequent usage

    Coins

    The coins used today are similar to U.S. Federal Reserve Notes in that their face values tend to greatly exceed their intrinsic values.

    This is because cheaper metals such as copper, zinc, and nickel are used instead of gold or silver.

    • The average lifespan of a coin is 25 years, according to the U.S. Mint
    • It’s estimated that Americans throw away around $62 million of coins every year
    • In 2016, the U.S. Mint produced 16 trillion coins, valued at over $1.09 billion
    • The amount of copper in a penny has fluctuated over the years. It ranges from 0% (in WWII, pennies were made of steel so copper could be used for ammunition) to 95%.
    • Today’s pennies are 2.5% copper, with the remainder being 97.5% zinc

    Just Remember, Nothing Last Forever…

    Source: The Burning Platform

  • Exposed! Bussed-In Baltimore Protesters Promote Violent Revolution In America

    Co-authored by Taylor Larson, StockBoardAsset , Derp McDergal, and Carlisle du Rozel via StockBoardAsset.com,

    Over the weekend, Squawker Media attended a “Unity March,” which was organized in support of the immigrant community in Baltimore, Maryland. In a Facebook group titled “Patterson Park Neighbors,” City Councilman Zeke Berzoff-Cohen of District 1 said in a post, “The march was organized by local Baltimore young people as part of the Free Minds Free People Conference. This will be a family march and I invite everyone to come out and show love and support.”

    What we’re about to show you is the true nature of the groups actively working to ensure that America remains divided. The above Facebook post by Councilman Berzoff-Cohen deceptively telling the citizens of Baltimore that the march was organized by Baltimore’s youth demonstrates a harrowing reality: operatives are trying to undermine the system. Such operatives receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from organizations dedicated to undermining the social cohesion of the United States and have infiltrated even local city politics. From this report, and the exclusive video captured on-site at the protest, you will see firsthand just how deeply George Soros’ Open Society Foundation is entrenched in our political system, even at the municipal and local levels.

    The video below shows throngs of anti-Trump, pro-immigration protestors bused into a protest on Eastern Avenue. Footage depicts protestors stepping off of unmarked buses and entering the site of the protest.

    In the next video, after all the protestors are brought in, a female keynote speaker rails against President Trump, calling him “a monster.” While much of what she said about disappearing jobs and crumbling infrastructure as the result of globalization rings true, she fails to place the blame where it rightfully belongs: at the feet of the globalist svengalis. When she gave a resounding call to arms at the end of her speech, a chilling reminder of “America divided” rang through her radical insistence for protesters to grab pitchforks, shovels, and bats.

    “If we don’t stand together, and you and I unite like we’ve never been before, if we don’t pool our resources together, and our spirits together, and our souls together, and everything we can think of together… revolutions were fought with pitchforks and shovels, and bats, and cans, and anything and everything we can get our hands on.”

    In the second half of the video, Casa De Maryland Inc., an entity funded directly by George Soros, then leads a march down the streets of Baltimore, actively disrespecting traffic ordinances and shutting down streets. For the record, there were no traffic marshals in this march, as evidenced by the content provided above.

    Soros’s Open Society Foundation has its tentacles in the funding of urban protests, disruption, and chaos. Soros has been directly linked to the Ukrainian Revolution and the ouster of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The Open Society Foundation has also been linked to other groups in various European countries that promote revolutionary calls to action.

    Soros is notorious for funding revolutionary ideologies and has openly contributed $81.7M toward “Human Rights Movements & Institutions” in 2017, a portion of which is clearly seen in the recently disruptive Baltimore protest. Additionally, Soros’s Open Society Foundation has contributed $82.8M to matters of “Equality & Anti-Discrimination,” which is essentially euphemistic for the advocation of culturally regressive social reforms.

    Despite the massive amounts of funding to Baltimore from the pocket of Soros, Baltimore’s homicide, opioid abuse, and overall crime rates are only skyrocketing.

  • Guess How Many Tesla Vehicles Were Registered In April In Hong Kong?

    And the hits just keep on coming for Elon Musk.

    After a tax incentive for electric cars was slashed in Hong Kong, new registrations of Teslas vehicles dropped from 2,939 to zero…

    Hong Kong, though relatively small, is a significant outpost of luxury car buyers and trend setters. Its government had long waived its vehicle registration tax for newly purchased electric automobiles, adding to the attractiveness of Tesla’s cars.

     

    Citing increased congestion of privately owned vehicles on its streets, the government said in February that it would be changing the policy so the tax would be waived only on the first 97,500 Hong Kong dollars (about US$12,500) of an electric car’s purchase price for individuals.

     

    After the change came into effect on April 1, the cost of a basic Tesla Model S in Hong Kong effectively rose to around US$130,000 from less than US$75,000.

    And the reaction – demand tumbled…

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Tesla sales in Hong Kong plummeted after authorities slashed a tax break for electric vehicles on April 1, demonstrating how sensitive the company’s performance can be to government incentive programs. Official data from Hong Kong’s Transportation Department, analyzed by The Wall Street Journal, show that no newly purchased Tesla Model S sedans or Model X sport-utility vehicles were registered in April in the Chinese territory, and only five privately owned electric vehicles were registered in May.

    The collapse followed a surge just before the tax change, which had been announced in February, with new registrations of almost 3,700 Tesla vehicles in the first quarter – including 2,939 in March alone – compared with 1,506 vehicles in the entire second half of 2016.

    The end of the tax exemption “has really put the brakes on electric-vehicle adoption in Hong Kong,” said Mark Webb-Johnson, a founder of Charged Hong Kong, a group that promotes electric vehicles.

    In a statement, Tesla said…

    “Tesla welcomes government policies that support our mission and make it easier for more people to buy electric vehicles, however, our business does not rely on it."

    The company said its sales revenue in China, where it faces large tariffs, has risen without government incentives.

    “At the end of the day, when people love something, they buy it,” it said.

    Except it appears they're not!

    *  *  *

    We have one last question – does anyone feel like this recent string of terrible headlines (and reality checks) for Musk and Tesla smells a lot like the recent collapse in Uber? Is the smoke starting to clear? Are the mirrors starting to break?

  • Comey Bombshell: FBI Director's Leaked Trump Memos Contained Classified Information

    Amid the constant media outrage over everything Trump, Trump, Trump, some might have forgotten that in the political rollercoaster over the past 12 months, there were numerous other high-profile individuals involved, including not only former DOJ head Loretta Lynch, whose every interaction with the Clinton campaign is about to be probed under a Congressional microscope, but the man who some say started it all: former FBI Director James Comey.

    First loved by the Democrats when he personally absolved Hillary Clinton of any sins regarding her (ab)use of her personal email server, then furiously loathed when he reopened the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton one week before the election, then finally getting into a feud with President Trump which cost his him job, Comey ultimately admitted to leaking at least one memo which contained personal recollections of his conversations with the president, in hopes of launching a special probe into the president’s alleged Russian collusion. 

    There was just one problem: according to a blockbuster report from The Hill, in addition to the leaked memos, Comey also leaked classified information in gross and direct violation of FBI rules and regulations. And just like that Comey finds himself in trouble. Only not just any trouble, but the virtually same trouble that Hillary Clinton was in in the summer of 2016… and which James Comey was tasked to investigate.

    We’ll repeat the above because it bears repeating: in the purest definition of irony, James Comey is about to be investigated for the exact same thing which he absolved Hillary Clinton of doing last summer. Almost as if neither Comey nor Clinton were aware of – or willing to abide by – the security protocol of the agency they were in charge of.

    Aside from once again confirming that Trump may have been right all along in his accusation of the ex-FBI chief’s motives, this shocking revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules – by putting his own interests above those of his country – but far more grotesquely, ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election, in order to settle his vendetta with President Trump.

    Amusingly, Comey’s alleged flagrant disregard for FBI regulations would explain why he also found Clinton’s email server transgressions to not be a material concern, contrary to what most Republicans claimed at the time. After all, if it was good – or rather not bad enough for Clinton, maybe it was the same with Comey’s own abuse of confidential data? The only problem is that while Comey was generous enough to let Hillary go, now that the ex-FBI chief is facing the president of the US as his adversary, he may not be quite so lucky.

    Upon hearing of Comey’s alleged transgressions, the now former Chair of the House Oversight Committee said simply that “IF true, this is bombshell news.”

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    Incidentally, the first to warn of Comey’s imminent headaches, was Breitbart News, which on Friday reported that a new Senate report said recent leaks by former FBI Director James Comey’s leaking of memos could “potentially harm national security.” The report, released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday, found that there were 125 separate leaks in President Trump’s first 126 days that were potentially damaging to national security. The report said it included Comey’s leaking of his memos after he was fired by Trump in May.

    * * *

    Comey’s troubles started when he testified under oath last month that he considered the memos he prepared to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a Columbia University lawyer friend. As Comey later disclosed, he asked that lawyer to leak information from one memo to the news media in hopes of increasing pressure to get a special prosecutor named in the Russia case after Comey was fired as FBI director.

    The Hill recounts that particular exchange with Senator Roy Blunt:

    “So you didn’t consider your memo or your sense of that conversation to be a government document?,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asked Comey on June 8.  “You considered it to be, somehow, your own personal document that you could share to the media as you wanted through a friend?”

     

    “Correct,” Comey answered. “I understood this to be my recollection recorded of my conversation with the president. As a private citizen, I thought it important to get it out.”

    Comey insisted in his testimony he believed his personal memos were unclassified, though he hinted one or two documents he created might have been contained classified information. “I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership,” he testified about the one memo he later leaked about former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Additionally, he added, “My view was that the content of those unclassified, memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded.”

    That’s when the problems escalated, because according to The Hill – which for the first time disclosed that the total number of memos linked to Comey’s nine conversations with Trump – when the seven memos Comey wrote regarding his nine conversations with Trump about Russia earlier this year were shown to Congress in recent days, the FBI claimed all were, in fact, deemed to be government documents.

    Oops.  As The Hill reveals, four, or more than half, of the seven memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the “secret” or “confidential” level, according to officials directly familiar with the matter.

    This is a major problem for Comey because FBI policy forbids any agent from releasing classified information or any information from ongoing investigations or sensitive operations without prior written permission, and mandates that all records created during official duties are considered to be government property.

    “Unauthorized disclosure, misuse, or negligent handling of information contained in the files, electronic or paper, of the FBI or which I may acquire as an employee of the FBI could impair national security, place human life in jeopardy, result in the denial of due process, prevent the FBI from effectively discharging its responsibilities, or violate federal law,” states the agreement all FBI agents sign.

    FBI policy further adds that “all information acquired by me in connection with my official duties with the FBI and all official material to which I have access remain the property of the United States of America” and that an agent “will not reveal, by any means, any information or material from or related to FBI files or any other information acquired by virtue of my official employment to any unauthorized recipient without prior official written authorization by the FBI.”

    Comey indicated in his testimony the memos were in his possession when he left the bureau, leaving him in a position to leak one of them through his lawyer friend to the media. But he testified that he has since turned them over to Robert Mueller, a former FBI chief and now spearheading the investigation about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  It is not clear whether Comey as director signed the same agreement as his agents, but the contract is considered the official policy of the bureau. It was also unclear when the documents were shown to Congress whether the information deemed “secret” or “confidential” was classified at the time Comey wrote the memos or determined so afterwards, the sources said.

    Meanwhile, Congressional investigators have already begun examining whether Comey’s creation, storage and sharing of the memos violated FBI rules, but the revelation that four of the seven memos included some sort of classified information opens a new door of inquiry into whether classified information was mishandled, improperly stored or improperly shared.

    Where things get especially ironic, is that this was the same issue the FBI – under Comey – investigated in 2015-16 about Clinton’s private email server, at the time the most sensitive and controversial issue of the Clinton campaign, where as secretary of State she and top aides moved classified information through insecure channels.

    Ultimately, Comey concluded in July 2016 that Clinton’s email practices were reckless, but that he could not recommend prosecution because FBI agents had failed to find enough evidence that she intended to violate felony statutes prohibiting the transmission of classified information through insecure practices. While the news initially was loved by Democrats as it let Hillary get off scott-free from any potential criminal probe, Comey’s subsequent decision to restart the FBI probe into Clinton’s email server one week before the election is what eventually prompted both Hillary and John Podesta to claim that James Comey was one of the two factors that cost Clinton the presidency… along with the “Russian hacking” of course.

    The only problem is that while there is yet no evidence of Russian hacking, suddenly with the factual emergence of Comey’s transgression, questions may emerge not only into the ex-FBI chief’s actions and motives, but whether the FBI’s clearance of Clinton’s use of an email server under Comey was proper after all…

    * * *

    So what happens next? According to The Hill, congressional investigators are likely to turn their attention to the same issues to determine if Comey mishandled any classified information in his personal memos.

    In order to make an assessment, congressional investigators will have to tackle key questions, such as:

    • Where and how were the memos were created, such as whether they were written on an insecure computer or notepad.
    • Where and how the memos were stored, such as inside his home, his briefcase or an insecure laptop.
    • Were any memos shown to private individuals without a security clearance and did those memos contain any classified information
    • When was it determined by the government that the memos contained classified information, before Comey took them and shared one or after.

    One avenue for answering those questions is for a panel like Senate Intelligence, House Intelligence or Senate Judiciary to refer the matter to the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, the inspector general, or to the Director of National Intelligence and its inspector general. One thing is certain: the near-future will see many more of Comey’s sworn Congressional testimonies, and the vendetta between Trump and Comey is about to not only be rekindled but escalate to previously unseen levels. For an appetizer of what’s to come, look closely at Trump’s twitter feed once the president learns the news of Comey’s alleged transgressions.

  • What Russian Journalists Think Of How American Reporters Cover Putin & Trump

    Authored by Joshua Yaffa via The New Yorker,

    As James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, put it, Watergate “pales” in comparison to the current political scandal surrounding the White House. For the past six months, the U.S. media has followed the story of Russia’s interference in the 2016 Presidential election – and the question of possible collusion between figures close to Donald Trump and the Kremlin – with vigor, intensity, and the deployment of an extraordinary amount of newsroom resources. In advance of Trump and Putin’s first meeting, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, I decided to ask Russia’s sharpest and most experienced political journalists and investigative reporters what they thought of this coverage.

    The Russian media is under nearly omnipresent pressure from numerous entities: political operatives in the Kremlin, who tightly monitor what is said in the press about Putin and the myriad arms of the Russian state; media owners, who neuter coverage and readily get rid of overly ambitious reporters and editors; and financial constraints, namely a small advertising market and a tiny number of readers willing to pay for independent journalism. The result is that the space for independent, muckraking journalism has shrunk further. Yet, even given these many constraints, Russia is nevertheless home to a coterie of talented and self-motivated journalists, who produce work that is courageous and illuminating.

    I spoke to more than a half-dozen of them, all of whom found themselves in some way bemused, frustrated, or disappointed in the way that the U.S. press has covered Putin and Russia—especially concerning the question of election interference—over the last months.

    On the whole, said Mikhail Zygar, a political journalist and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men,” a well-sourced insider look at the cloistered world of Russian politics, the way the U.S. media has covered the Russia scandal has made “Putin seem to look much smarter than he is, as if he operates from some master plan.” The truth, Zygar told me, “is that there is no plan—it’s chaos.”

    By way of an example, Zygar narrated what he saw as the total disorder that has marked Russia’s military campaign in Syria, which began with a surprise incursion of air power, in September, 2015. Putin seems to consider the intervention a success, because it outmaneuvered Western attempts to isolate him and elevated him to the position of global statesman; but, whatever the achievements, they came out of an absolutely slapdash policy, according to Zygar. “Nothing was calculated,” Zygar said. “There was no strategy, no preparatory work, no coördination with Iran, none with Turkey either, which is how we almost ended up in a war—not to mention the huge amount of money that was simply stolen in the course of this operation.”

    According to Zygar’s sources, Putin forced Russia’s military prosecutor into retirement, in April, before he could deliver a report to the country’s upper house of parliament that would have revealed substantial financial losses in Syria due to corruption. Such cynicism and malfeasance is more the rule than the exception, Zygar said. He retold the story of how Putin showed Oliver Stone a video that was supposedly of Russian forces bombing ISIS fighters – “our aviation at work,” Putin told Stone – which turned out to be a lifted clip from 2013 of U.S. pilots attacking Taliban positions in Afghanistan. Zygar shook his head with laughter. “They couldn’t even film a two-minute video!”

    From the beginning, much of the U.S. coverage of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has focussed on the hacks of the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign adviser, John Podesta. There is little concrete information available regarding the world of Russian state hackers, with reporting on the subject somewhere between difficult and impossible. Some of the best reporting appeared in an investigation last winter by Danya Turovsky, a correspondent for Meduza, an online publication that is based in Riga, Latvia, in order to circumvent the pressure and attempts at censorship faced by newsrooms in Moscow. (Turovsky and his editors ended up in a dispute with the Times, with Meduza claiming that an article from a series on Russia and its projection of power abroad, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, were based on Meduza’s reporting and not given proper citations. After an internal review, the Times determined that the article in question was based on original reporting.) In his articles, Turovsky identified private companies that had lucrative cybersecurity contracts with Russian intelligence agencies, uncovered Russian military-recruiting videos for would-be hackers, and documented a case of Russian officials testing a DDoS attack.

    When I asked him what he thought of how American journalists have described both the composition and tactics of Russian hacking squads, he said that the general understanding “is correct, but, all the same, there isn’t really much in the way of real evidence.” It’s one thing to say Russia has both the motive and, with its cyber forces, the technical ability to hack U.S. accounts, Turovsky told me—but, after that, things get very murky. “We can be sure that Russian cyber forces exist, that there are a lot of people involved, that the special services are capable of something like this—but that doesn’t mean we can say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty they are guilty.” It appears that the primary sources for many Washington-based reporters are U.S. intelligence agencies, which unanimously concluded that the effort to disrupt the election was directed by Putin and emanated from Russia. That makes it possible that American journalists know more about the hacking than their Russian colleagues do.

    Still, Turovsky is suspicious of the level of specificity in U.S. reporting on Russian hackers. For example, the way that the terms “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear”—nicknames for hacking units linked to Russian intelligence services—entered the American journalistic lexicon gave him pause. “As I understand, there aren’t really groups, just a lot of different people who do this work; it’s pure conjecture to think they form into discrete, particular squads that you could call this or that,” Turkovsky said. He told me that, during the course of his reporting, he was struck by how technologically backward much of the Russian state’s security apparatus appeared—a nuance he said that he hasn’t often observed in American press coverage of the situation. Once, a source took Turovsky inside a cybersecurity facility run by the F.S.B., Russia’s main security service and the successor agency to the K.G.B. As he described it, “the F.S.B. officers had to give up their phones upon entering. There were no computers connected to the Internet—just one for each floor. To access it, they have to sign up in advance and get a key that was good for a certain amount of time. They were complaining that it was impossible to investigate anything in such conditions.”

    Even as Turovsky was cautious about some of the more sweeping allegations directed at hackers working for the Russian state, he acknowledged that the chances of the claims being true were just as high as the chances of them being false—that is the hall-of-mirrors reality of reporting on Kremlin plots and intrigue. “Oftentimes, in Russia, what seems totally absurd actually turns out to be the truth,” he said, pointing to the story, reported in detail by my colleague Adrian Chen, of a so-called “troll farm” run out of a nondescript office in St. Petersburg. “Who would have imagined there was a building where people go to work and get paid salaries to sit all day and write online comments in different languages?” Turovsky said.

    I also spoke with Roman Shleinov, an investigative editor at Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper that was home to Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless reporter killed in 2006, and which first broke the news of an anti-gay crackdown in Chechnya. Shleinov was the Russian coördinator for reporting on the Panama Papers, which revealed high cash flows to offshore accounts run by close Putin friends and associates. He told me that the U.S. press was unduly focussed on the particulars of real-estate deals surrounding Trump, parsing which Russians had purchased apartments from Trump or lived in buildings operating under the Trump name. “It’s hard to say for sure, but the idea that a Russian person who buys an apartment somewhere—say, in Trump Tower—is trying to get influence over someone, to me it seems strange,” Shleinov said.

    The most important thing that U.S. reporters should remember, Shleinov told me, is that “money is fleeing Russia in all directions, people are trying to invest anywhere they can, to get their assets out before the secret services or their competitors show up and try and take them all.” On the whole, Shleinov said, a wealthy Russian—even a politically connected one—is likely buying real estate abroad “as a place to run to,” not on Putin’s orders.

    Shleinov was more intrigued by the meeting, last December, between Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, and Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, or V.E.B., a Russian state bank. What exactly the two discussed is under some dispute. The White House said that Kushner was acting in a political capacity. V.E.B. said that the meeting was about business interests. Shleinov called the very fact that the two sat down at Trump Tower “curious—now that’s interesting, something to actually talk about.” He went on to explain V.E.B.’s role in the Putin state: “All these state banks are not really businesses, they are meant to carry out state functions. If the head of V.E.B. was talking about possibly financing projects connected to the son-in-law of the President of the United States, that was certainly discussed on the highest levels here in Moscow.”

    A notion I have heard from Russian journalists again and again is that the U.S. media, in its reporting of the possible Russia ties of Trump associates, can veer toward trafficking in the conspiracy theories that define so much of Russian coverage of the United States. Elena Chernenko is head of the foreign desk at Kommersant, a Russian paper that started out as a respectable and independent chronicler of business and politics but is now a rather muted one. Chernenko is among its remaining high-profile reporters, and the paper’s international coverage continues to be strong. She has written on Russian foreign policy and the country’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, for the past seven years. Every morning, before she reads the Russian press, she checks the Times and the Washington Post. For years, she said, they represented a “moral compass and a model of what I strived for.” These days, she said, it seemed as if American journalists had lowered their standards when reporting on Russia. “Now, I don’t exclude that this indeed was an operation carried out by the Russian special services,” she told me, referring to the notion of Russian effort to influence the election. But, so far, she hasn’t seen incontrovertible evidence. “The way the American press writes about the topic, it’s like they’ve lost their heads,” she complained.

    Chernenko compared the U.S. media’s fixation on the comings and goings of Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s Ambassador in Washington, to how the Russian media treated Michael McFaul, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. “The state media would take every one of his unfortunate statements and blow it up to an unimaginable degree,” she said. On state airwaves, McFaul was portrayed as being behind all manner of nefarious American plots to weaken Russia, a narrative that Chernenko said she now sees in reverse. She thought it was silly then, and she thinks the same of it now. For her, the height of the U.S. media’s “unbelievable hysteria” came when Lavrov visited Trump at the White House, in May. American journalists were kept out of the meeting but a photographer from a Russian state news agency was allowed to attend and take photos of a grinning Trump hamming it up with Lavrov and Kislyak. “Lavrov did what he always does, he is not guilty for the fact the White House did not let in the American press,” Chernenko said. She told me the resulting speculation in some corners of the U.S. media that the Russian photographer may have sneaked a listening device into the Oval Office was “full face-palm.”

    Perhaps the most unexpected skeptic of U.S. coverage whom I talked to was Alexey Kovalev, who runs an online project called Noodleremover, a play on the Russian expression “to hang noodles on your ears,” which means to knowingly tell someone nonsense. The Web site is dedicated to debunking the most galling factual errors on Russian state media, with RT a regular and favorite target. Kovalev described himself to me as “one of RT’s biggest critics,” and added, “but I’m critical of what deserves to be criticized: namely, that RT is home to conspiracy theories, has a general disregard for objectivity, and gives a platform to lunatics to get on air.” But Kovalev is convinced that the channel’s reach and propaganda effect in the United States are minimal, and that the attention it has received is “absolutely oversized” compared to its actual power in affecting the American political agenda—which he said is basically zero.

    “Bernie Sanders gave a forty-minute interview to RT,” Kovalev said, pointing me to comments in which the head of the channel, Margarita Simonyan, called Sanders the “coolest” candidate in last year’s campaign. “And nobody gave a shit. You know why? Because, in truth, nobody really watches RT.” He explained that the channel’s broadcast footprint in the United States is so small that it fails to register on the Nielsen ratings system. And when people do watch, they tend not to click on political content. A 2015 investigation by the Daily Beast showed that, on RT’s YouTube channel, “political news videos, featuring the content by which it seeks to shape Western opinion and thus justify its existence, accounted for a mere 1 percent of its total YouTube exposure.” Kovalev said that, these days, the biggest beneficiaries of all the undue attention are RT executives, Simonyan above all. “People in RT have been telling me it’s been six months of Christmas for them,” he told me.

    That echoes another refrain I heard from several Russian journalists: that Putin, like a naughty kid in school, finds all this attention—even if its uniformly critical— flattering and even rewarding, a salve for years of feeling ignored. Zygar told me that, as far he understands, Putin “likes the image of himself as a kind of Bond villain, that Fareed Zakaria calls him the most powerful man in the world. That’s what he has been aspiring for this whole time, that he is respected, on the top of the world.” When I spoke with Anton Zhelnov, a political reporter at Dozhd, a scrappy and creative independent cable channel, which is in perpetual danger of shutting down, he said that his contacts in the Kremlin can’t help but be pleased by the multiple U.S. investigations into Russian interference, whether by the media or Congress. “Yes, it’s unpleasant, but at the same time they like that Russia is being discussed all the time, that Russia has become a topic in American politics. They like this very much, and don’t try and hide it in private conversations,” Zhelnov said.

    Ultimately, among the Russian journalists I talked to, one of the most consistent reactions is simple exhaustion with the endless amount of Trump-Russia coverage.

    “I have the sense a lot of these articles are being published without new information, that we are going around in circles,” Turovsky, the Meduza journalist, told me.

     

    Yet he still starts his day browsing the headlines in the American press, a ritual that takes an hour or more.  “Of course, what can I do,” he told me.

     

    “I read this stuff every day.”

    Indeed…

  • Trump Folds On Russia Cybersecurity Cooperation

    Just fourteen hours after crowing proudly of his success during discussions with Russian President Putin in forming an 'impenetrable cyber security unit'…

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    And after //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“>various Democrats and Republicans blasted him for "the dumbest idea ever"…

    Rubio, on Twitter, said:

    "While reality & pragmatism requires that we engage Vladimir Putin, he will never be a trusted ally or a reliable constructive partner.

     

    "Partnering with Putin on a 'Cyber Security Unit' is akin to partnering with (Syrian President Bashar al) Assad on a 'Chemical Weapons Unit'."

    But it was Graham that really let loose on NBC News' 'Meet the Press'… (via The Hill)

    “When it comes to Russia I am dumbfounded, I am disappointed, and at the end of the day he’s hurting his presidency by not embracing the fact that Putin is a bad guy,”

     

    “He is literally the only person I know of who doesn’t believe Russia attacked our election in 2016,” Graham said of Trump, who has said that “nobody really knows” whether the Russians were behind attempts to hack the 2016 presidential election.

    President Trump appears to have reversed course rather quickly… or already given up hope…

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    But, hey, at least we got a ceasefire in Southwest Syria (for now).

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