- Russia & Greece Slam Turkey For Plans To Turn Hagia Sophia Church Into A Mosque
Russia & Greece Slam Turkey For Plans To Turn Hagia Sophia Church Into A Mosque
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/07/2020 – 02:45Greece and Turkey are once again at odds over the fate of one of Christendom’s largest and oldest churches, built under Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, and surviving changing empires throughout history.
The Church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was – prior to the Turkish takeover of Byzantium in 1453 – Constantinople’s most famous church and center of the Orthodox Christian world. Under the modern Turkish state it’s gone from mosque to museum to ‘protected’ UNESCO world heritage site, despite still being considered by Greece and Greek visitors, as well as Russian pilgrims, a church.
But now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and lawmakers are eyeing changing its status back to a mosque, which has outraged Athens. Russia has also chimed in, with both the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill condemning any potential move to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Hagia Sophia file image, via Greek City Times “We by all means hope that Hagia Sophia’s status as a world heritage site will be taken into consideration,” a Kremlin spokesman said Monday.
“Of course, this is a world masterpiece beloved by tourists coming to Turkey from all over the world and especially by tourists from Russia who not only recognize Hagia Sophia’s tourist value but also it’s sacred spiritual value,” he added.
Turkey’s top court is said to still be debating the move. There are still multiple tens of thousands of indigenous Christians in Istanbul and in parts of Anatolia, mostly Greek, Syriac, and and some few remnant Armenian Christians. These ancient communities say Erdogan has newly unleashed a war on Turkey’s Christians.
The Russian Orthodox Church slammed the potential Turkish move as “unacceptable” and a “violation of religious freedom”. The statement said: “We can’t go back to the Middle Ages now” — referencing centuries where Ottoman policy severely suppressed Christians throughout Asia Minor.
The controversy has unleashed a storm on social media, which has included those against turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque envisioning it as a church once again:
The Church of Holy Wisdom pic.twitter.com/rtsByIuEiQ
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 5, 2020
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Erdogan however, has interpreted it as a matter of “asserting Turkey’s sovereignty” over the site. Turkey argues that it can legally do what it wants with monuments and historic places within its sovereign territory.
Mike Pompeo has even weighed in on the side of the Greek government, urging that it be kept as a museum.
“We urge the government of Turkey to continue to maintain the Hagia Sophia as a museum, as an exemplar of its commitment to respect Turkey’s diverse faith traditions and history, and to ensure it remains accessible to all,” the US Secretary of State said within the last weeks.
Erdogan is unlikely to have a pluralist compromise in mind. Humiliating the millions of Christians who see an ancient home in Hagia Sophia may, to him, be a small price to pay—or even a bonus.https://t.co/H2b54Ia11c
— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) July 1, 2020
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Echoing Greek politicians, the leader of the Orthodox Church of Greece, Archbishop Ieronymos II, issued a provocative statement saying of the Turks, “they won’t dare!”
Greek television quoted the top clergyman as saying: “They (the Turks) play whatever games are in hand. This is one more game. I believe they won’t dare.”
Critics of Erdogan and his AKP have long said he and the party have Islamist and neo-Ottoman aspirations. One prominent lawyer and human rights activist with UN Watch commented that:
Turkey now occupies more Arab territories — Syria, Iraq, Libya — than any other country in the world. Yet when the U.N.’s human rights council next week will hold its regular debate on “Occupied Arab Territories,” Turkey’s name won’t be mentioned even once. Isn’t that odd?
Turkey has also lately caused tensions within the NATO alliance, especially over Libya policy and repeat violations of a UN arms embargo.
Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, or ancient Constantinople, public domain image. Turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque after almost a century as a museum would be but one more symbolic provocation, albeit a serious one further worsening Greece-Turkey relations, and risking Moscow’s wrath as well.
Meanwhile, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople – who represents the Orthodox Church and its some 300 million adherents worldwide, is still in residence in Istanbul. He and his predecessors have been barred from using Hagia Sophia as a place of prayer since the 15th century, though over the years there’s been a few provocative instances where Greek clergy were said to have stealthily entered the now museum to “illegally” conduct Christian worship.
* * *
- Slavery Rampant In Africa, Middle East; The West Wrongly Accuses Itself
Slavery Rampant In Africa, Middle East; The West Wrongly Accuses Itself
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/07/2020 – 02:00Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,
The United States abolished slavery 150 years ago, and has affirmative action for minorities. It is the country that elected a Black president, Barack Obama — twice! Yet, a new movement is toppling one historic monument after another one, as if the US is still enslaving African-Americans. Activists in Washington DC even targeted an Emancipation Memorial, depicting President Abraham Lincoln, who paid with his life for freeing slaves.
Today slavery still exists in many parts of Africa and Middle East, but the self-flagellating Western public is obsessively focused only on the Western past of African slavery rather than on real, ongoing slavery, which is alive and well — and ignored. For today’s slaves, there are no demonstrations in the streets, no international political pressure, and virtually no articles in the media.
“We must not forget that Arab-Muslims have been champions in this field,” Kamel Bencheikh, a Muslim poet, wrote in Le Matin d’Algerie.
“Emirs and sultans bought entire convoys of young black ephebes to make into eunuchs to guard their harems. And this continued with Ottoman emperors…. Even today, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia are still housing their own Ku Klux Klan. Slavery is still the order of the day in Nouakchott [Mauritania]. As for Riad, all you have to do is find out about young Asian girls that the potentates hire as maidservants”.
An investigation by BBC Arabic found that domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are even being sold online in a slave market that is booming.
According to Bencheikh, George Floyd’s death was an opportunity for many in Europe to turn a respectable fight into an unimaginable depravity.
“So, on the Place de la République in Paris or the Avenue Louise in Brussels, there are vengeful thugs, fed with hatred, taking advantage of the allotments that these two countries offer them, and attacking the past of those who enabled them to free themselves from their dictatorships…
“In France and Belgium, we do not execute apostates, crucify heterodox people, throw stones at unfaithful women, spit at heretics…
“… this anti-racism is biting its tail to turn into racism. You only have to see the angry crowd, the drool on their lips, to realize that we are dealing with people who have come to insult the white man guilty of having had, more than a hundred years ago, inappropriate gestures or shameful thoughts, and to insist, like the wolf in La Fontaine who said to the lamb: ‘If not you, then your brother’… Totalitarianism is among us again”.
He calls it a “Stalinism of communitarianism (sectarian politics) that makes itself into an indigenous victimization”. People who fled from Bouteflika and Gaddafi, the oppressors and tyrants of Kinshasa and Niamey, “come and spit incomprehensible hatred in Paris or Brussels”.
Bencheikh’s article shows just one brave group of dissidents in the Islamic world who are defending the West better than the Westerners are doing. These dissidents love freedom of expression and conscience; they know the difference between democracy and dictatorship; they enjoy religious tolerance, pluralism in the public sphere, and they outspokenly criticize the practice of Islam from which they fled. They also know that arousing historic and racial resentment is a dangerous game. For political Islam, their voices are revealing and devastating. For Western multiculturalism, they are “heretical” and annoying. Le Figaro pointed to this paradox: “Seen by their communities as ‘traitors’, they are accused by the elites in the West of ‘stigmatizing'”.
In The Spectator, Nick Cohen, explained:
“In the liberal orientalist world view the only ‘authentic’ Muslim is a barbarian. A battery of insults fires on any Muslim who says otherwise. They are ‘neo-conservatives,’ ‘native informants,’ and ‘Zionists’: they are as extreme as jihadists they oppose, or, let’s face it, worse…”.
Like Bencheikh, Algerian author Mohammed Sifaoui reminds all of us that “Mauritania, in North Africa, is the most slavery-supporting country in the world today. Qatar in the Middle East is as well, just as much, [as is] Saudi Arabia, under the banner of the Guardians of the Holy Places of Islam”.
The author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled her homeland of Somalia and now live in the US, writes:
“What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist“.
Black, female and gay, the apex of “intersectionality.” According to Andrew Sullivan:
“‘Intersectionality’ is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. “
For the intersectional activists, the US is the world’s biggest oppressor. Not Saudi Arabia or Iran. Hirsi Ali, who fled Somalia and experienced female genital mutilation, knows about oppression better than anti-statues activists. According to Hirsi Ali, writing in The Wall Street Journal:
“When I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up… America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East”.
Writing in Le Monde and Le Point, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud indicted this hypocrisy. “There is an instinct for death in the air of the total revolution”, Daoud notes.
“According to some, the West is guilty by definition, we find ourselves not in a demand for change but, little by little, in [a demand for] destruction, the restoration of a barbarity of revenge”.
Daoud calls these “anti-Western Soviet-style trials”.
“It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything”.
In Le Point, Daoud states that “with the great announcement of antiracism, the Inquisition returns”.
Daoud has been accused by twenty leftist academics, in an appeal in Le Monde, of “orientalist clichés” and “colonialist paternalism”. This new accusation of racism serves publicly to shame, mark and disqualify a politician or an intellectual who comments with too much frankness on the damage of multiculturalism.
Zineb el Rhazoui, a Moroccan-born anti-Islamist French journalist facing death threats, recently said:
“The only racism I suffer from comes from North Africans. For the Algerians, I am a Moroccan whore. For Moroccans, I am an Algerian whore. For both, a ‘whore of the Jews'”.
Arabs threaten other Arabs for speaking the truth about real racism and Islamization. They are the invisible victims of racism in France. Rhazoui claimed that “France is one of the most tolerant and least racist country in the world” and that real threat is not racism, but communitarism [importance placed on groups rather than individuals], denounced as well by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The Iranian writer Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran but now living in Paris, said to Le Figaro:
“The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (…) What resonates in this discourse is the prison of victimization….It implies that every white person is bad –– as witnessed by the recent debunking of the statues of Victor Schoelcher, father of the abolition of slavery, in Martinique — and that every black person is a victim“.
While the economist Thomas Piketty, in Le Monde, invited the West to make amends for its colonial past, the Franco-Senegalese author, Fatou Diome, called for the abandonment of a discourse on decolonization:
“It is an emergency for those who do not yet know that they are free. I do not consider myself colonized. The catchphrase on colonization and slavery has become a business”.
The “ideology” is simple: colonialism is supposedly still at work, people from formerly colonized countries continue to be oppressed, in particular Muslims who are said to be targets of a “racist” and “Islamophobic” hate. In this view, “White Western males” are always the oppressors, and the minorities are always victims.
A prominent anti-racism campaigner, Rokhaya Diallo, has said that France is “racist” in an opposition between “the dominator” and “the dominated”. It is a view that sees racism everywhere, especially where it does not exist. It has also produced many of the disasters of multiculturalism throughout Europe by making it impossible to criticize the consequences of mass immigration and Islamist separatism. The French author Pascal Bruckner has called this stance “imaginary racism“. It is a penitential creation that leads the public in the West — even though presumably no one in the West either was a slave or had a slave — to believe that anti-Western hatred is deserved.
The border between this Marxist view, in which someone always has to be a victim, has become porous with Islamism. In the movement named after Adama Traoré, the “French George Floyd“, you will find an alliance of organizations such as SOS Racisme and Muslim Salafists. Human rights organizations also rally with the “Union of Islamic Organization of France”, considered fundamentalist.
Manuel Valls, the former French prime minister, in an interview with Valuers Actuelles magazine said, “Human rights associations have been lost and have opened the doors to Tariq Ramadan”. This instead of taking the side of the many great Muslim reformers. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:
“Reformers such as Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Tawfiq Hamid, Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Saleem Ahmed, Yunis Qandil, Seyran Ates, Bassam Tibi and Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari must be supported and protected… These reformers should be as well known in the West as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Havel were generations earlier.” Instead, so-called human rights associations, politicians and the media have chosen to back political Islam.
By contrast, a group of 12 writers put their names to a statement in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo warning against Islamic “totalitarianism”.
“After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all”.
Among the 12 signatories, eight came from the Islamic world.
These anti-Islamist Muslim intellectuals were not born free; they fled dictatorships for democracies, where they still suffer death threats and abuses, but where they are far freer and prouder of the West than those Westerners who know only freedom but now practice a dreadful feeing of guilt — mostly for things they did not do.
The West not only turns its back the new slave markets; the UN Human Rights Council actually welcomes states such as Sudan, where tens of thousands of women and children from mostly Christian villages were enslaved during Jihadi raids; Kenya and Nigeria, where the police last fall rescued hundreds of men and boys chained in an Islamic school; Pakistan, where Christians are condemned to servitude, and Mauritania, where two in every 100 people are still held as slaves. It is the same UN Human Rights Council that now, thanks to pressure by African countries, wants to investigate “systemic racism in the US”. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted:
“If the Council were honest, it would recognize the strengths of American democracy and urge authoritarian regimes around the world to model American democracy and to hold their nations to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that we Americans apply to ourselves”.
It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations. The United Nations is being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.
Real slave traders and racists — those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all — most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.
- China Touts "Aircraft Carrier Killer" Missiles As US Supercarriers Operate In South China Sea
China Touts “Aircraft Carrier Killer” Missiles As US Supercarriers Operate In South China Sea
Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/07/2020 – 01:00China has slammed what it calls the United States flexing its muscles in the South China Sea to try to provoke tensions and conflict among countries of the region. But the Pentagon has called the maneuvers by two supercarriers sent to the region days ago, namely the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz, an act of standing up “for the right of all nations to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows” and further as a “symbol of resolve”.
Each carrier has 90 or more aircraft and about 6,000 personnel, making it a significant display of force off China’s coast. Given this, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is said to be tracking their movements closely, with Chinese vessels said to be within eyesight of the US carriers.
The carriers have been conducting flight drills since exercises commenced on July 4. Nimitz commander Rear Admiral James Kirk told reporters in a telephone interview: “They have seen us and we have seen them” – in reference to a nearby Chinese flotilla.
Aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan is one of two currently operating in the South China Sea. Interestingly, the US Navy and Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times had an exchange this weekend after on Sunday GT issued a veiled threat hyping Beijing’s advanced missile arsenal. China has a wide selection of anti-aircraft carrier weapons like DF-21D and DF-26 “aircraft carrier killer” missiles, the state-run paper said.
It then said any aircraft carrier movement in the region “is at the pleasure of PLA”.
“And yet, there they are,” the Navy Chief of Information Twitter account posted, saying the US ships “are not intimidated” because their exercises and navigation are “at our discretion”.
And yet, there they are. Two @USNavy aircraft carriers operating in the international waters of the South China Sea. #USSNimitz & #USSRonaldReagan are not intimidated #AtOurDiscretion https://t.co/QGTggRjOul
— Navy Chief of Information (@chinfo) July 5, 2020
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The carriers are holding some of the Navy’s largest exercises in recent years in the area, which is frequently beset upon by American destroyers sailing within 12 miles of certain islands developed by China that are the subject of competing international claims.
The exercises also involve four other warships as well, along with round-the-clock fights and missions.
- Why No One Should Believe COVID-19 Is Naturally Occurring
Why No One Should Believe COVID-19 Is Naturally Occurring
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 23:40Authored by Lawrence Sellin via WIONews.com,
After six months of exhaustive investigation, the global scientific community has been unable to identify the natural source of COVID-19, that is, the when, where and how it “jumped” from animals to humans.
Some now imply that we may never know the natural origin of COVID-19.
In a news article recently published by the international science journal Nature, the progress, or lack thereof, identifying the natural source of COVID-19 was reviewed.
According to the article, COVID-19 probably originated in bats, specifically horseshoe bats, which host two closely related coronaviruses, named RaTG13 and RmYN02, whose genomes are 96% and 93% identical to COVID-19, respectively.
Both coronavirus samples were isolated from bats in Yunnan Province, RaTG13 in 2013 and RmYN02 in 2019, and were studied in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wuhan is where the outbreak of COVID-19 originated and about 1,000 miles from Yunnan.
The Nature article does not mention that RaTG13 is actually a duplicate of another bat coronavirus, BtCoV/4991, about which there is nearly no published experimental data since it was isolated in 2013, despite clearly being a Potential Pandemic Pathogen.
That is, except for the structure, analyzed only by Chinese scientists, practically nothing is known about RaTG13.
The Nature article also does not mention that the receptor-binding domain of RmYN02 showed only a 61.3% sequence identity with COVID-19, meaning it is highly unlikely that RmYN02 could even bind to human cells.
The Nature article suggests that pangolins (scaly anteaters), might be an intermediate host because some pangolin coronaviruses “share up to 92% of their genomes” with COVID-19, presumably bridging the gap between bats and humans.
When asked about that possibility, Dr Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert from the University of North Carolina, in a March 15, 2020 interview, stated unequivocally that pangolins were not the source of COVID-19:
“Pangolins have over 3,000 nucleotide changes – no way they are the reservoir species [for COVID-19], absolutely no chance.”
Nevertheless, the receptor-binding domain of COVID-19 is structurally closer to pangolins than bats indicating a recombinant event, in this case, likely artificial.
In fact, Ralph Baric and Zheng-Li Shi, the “bat woman” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, conducted just such an artificial receptor-binding domain insertion from a newly isolated bat coronavirus (SHC014) onto the “backbone” from SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the 2003 pandemic.
In a December 9, 2019 interview, Dr Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance and a long-time collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, presumably referring to the Ralph Baric- Zheng-Li Shi experiments, stated “you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily” inserting a spike protein “into a backbone of another virus.”
Thus, an artificial recombinant event carried out in the laboratory would be a far better explanation of pangolin-like structures appearing on a bat coronavirus backbone than one occurring in nature, at least given the current state of knowledge.
The most conspicuous sign of COVID-19 genetic manipulation is the presence of a furin polybasic cleavage site, a structure that is not present in any of the coronaviruses so far identified as possible direct ancestors.
The authors of the RmYN02 article stretch credulity even further by claiming that RmYN02 has a precursor cleavage site.
In reality, it is a weak attempt to offer a naturally-occurring explanation for the presence of the furin polybasic cleavage site in COVID-19.
Unfortunately, the amino acid sequence PAA, the insertion cited by the authors, is chemically neutral, totally unlike COVID-19’s polybasic PRRAR sequence and PAA has no ability to cleave anything.
Based on the actual evidence, it is unlikely that RmYN02 is a natural close relative of COVID-19.
Although COVID-19 appears to have been “pre-adapted” for human infection, the artificial insertion of the furin polybasic cleavage site may explain a potentially significant point mutation in COVID-19 that may have increased its infectivity.
According to the article “The D614G mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reduces S1 shedding and increases infectivity,”, over the course of the human pandemic, one amino acid position has changed from aspartic acid to glycine, increasing the stability of the spike protein and, thereby, making COVID-19 more infectious.
As suggested by the authors, that mutation may have been what is known as a “positive selection” to compensate for the structural instability created after the artificial insertion of the furin polybasic cleavage site.
The burden of proof is now on China to demonstrate that COVID-19 is naturally-occurring because most of the available evidence indicates otherwise.
- Why Zuck Doesn't Give A F**k About The Virtue-Signaling Ad Boycott
Why Zuck Doesn’t Give A F**k About The Virtue-Signaling Ad Boycott
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 23:20More companies are cancelling their Facebook advertising campaigns amid the #StopHateForProfit boycott, a movement aiming to hold social media and tech companies like Facebook accountable for hate speech and online harassment on their platforms.
However, as Statista’s Willem Roper notes, while large companies like Target, Microsoft, Starbucks and others are removing ads from Facebook, revenue data for the social media giant shows just how little it affects the company’s overall advertising profits.
You will find more infographics at Statista
According to the Wall Street Journal, the top eight boycotting companies by spending made up just $57 million of Facebook’s advertising revenue in May. Microsoft, the largest, spent roughly $10.4 million, and Starbucks was right behind with around $8.1 million. Those top eight were just over 10 percent of what the top 100 U.S. advertisers spent on Facebook for the month. Compare those numbers to $34 billion – what Facebook made from just U.S. and Canada companies in 2019. Globally, Facebook made nearly $70 billion in 2019 from advertising revenue alone.
While large companies boycotting Facebook attract news headlines, these numbers show that they have very little impact on the company’s overall advertising revenue.
The Wall Street Journal also showed how 76 percent of Facebook’s total $69 billion in global advertising revenue is from small to medium-sized companies, with just 24 percent from larger corporations and companies.
- Should Professional Athletes Be More Worried About COVID-19 Or Lightning?
Should Professional Athletes Be More Worried About COVID-19 Or Lightning?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 23:00Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Znamya Truda, a Russian professional soccer team, has announced that Ivan Zaborovsky, a goalkeeper for the team, went to intensive care after being struck by lightning during training.
People being seriously harmed or killed by lightning strikes is rare. In America, the United States government’s National Weather Service relays that, in the ten years of 2009 through 2018, there were an average of 27 deaths and 243 estimated injuries each year from lightning countrywide. While the risk of an individual being struck by lightning is real, it is also quite small. The National Weather Service lays out the likelihood as follows: a one in 1,222,000 chance of being struck by lightning in a given year and a one in 15,300 chance of being struck in one’s lifetime.
A professional athlete like Zaborovsky being injured by lightning is a very unusual occurrence. In contrast, we hear regularly of professional athletes from just about every sport testing positive for coronavirus. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), for example, 25 players, about seven percent of NBA players, have tested positive for coronavirus in testing of players in the last couple weeks. Plenty of athletes in other professional sports leagues have also tested positive. Other professional sports players surely have had coronavirus but were never tested because they had no to minor health issues at the time.
Where are the many intensive care hospitalizations and deaths among these athletes who have had coronavirus? We are not hearing about that.
This makes sense given that coronavirus tends not to be a major threat to people the more healthy and young they are.
[ZH: In case you need a little more context on the COVID fatality rates, Holger Zschaepitz tweeted the following stunning chart: ]
DB’s Reid stresses major difference between Spanish flu and Covid-19. For Spanish flu of 1918, young working-age population were severely affected. Death rate from pneumonia among 25-34year-olds in US was >50% higher than that for 65-74year-olds. Remarkable difference to Covid-19 pic.twitter.com/w5fZPkimMQ
— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) July 6, 2020
For many top athletes in their 20s and 30s it may make more sense to be worried about being struck by lightning than about having coronavirus. And, for competitors in outdoor sports, the threat from lightning can be well above that experienced by the average person. Many professional athletes, weighing the risks, may find it is a better decision to stay inside on occasion because of a thunderstorm than to avoid practicing and competing in their sports for an extended period because of worry about coronavirus.
It could be a drag for professional sports players to stay indoors now and then for a few minutes to a few hours to ensure they are not struck by lightning. Many of them may find doing so to be excessively cautious, especially if it prevents them from doing something they see as particularly important or desirable. In comparison, players may see eliminating their ability to compete for a significant chunk of their prime athletic years — to refrain from using and developing the skills they have dedicated their lives to mastering — as a tragedy, especially when that restriction is imposed due to a disease that is nearly certain not to threaten them with major negative health consequences.
- Watch Putin's Limo Brand, Aurus, Crash Test Luxury Car At High-Rate Of Speed
Watch Putin’s Limo Brand, Aurus, Crash Test Luxury Car At High-Rate Of Speed
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 22:40Russian carmaker Aurus, best known for producing President Vladimir Putin’s new bulletproof limo, recently released a video showing one of its sedans slamming into a barrier at a high rate of speed with crash dummies inside.
The video was first released via Russian broadcaster Zvezda, and then reported by Sputnik, which shows two mannequins, one in the driver’s seat and another in the front passenger seat of the sedan, crashing into a barrier at 64kph (40mph).
The luxury sedan, listed for a quarter-million dollars, or about 18 million rubles, had the front end completely crushed from the impact. However, both mannequins remained in the car, protected from a full coverage airbag system.
Russia has dumped $190.6 million, or about 12 billion rubles, into the Aurus car program (includes a limousine, a sedan, a minivan, and an SUV). The automaker is set to begin series production of Putin’s bulletproof limo this year, which will be marketed to heads of states around the world.
Aurus Senat
Aurus Senat Aurus Limo
Aurus Arsenal
Aurus Arsenal Last year, Aurus sent the limo to Siberia for rugged testing, operated in -50°C (-58°F) conditions.
Aurus in Siberia Russia is trying to diversify its oil economy – now attempting to compete with high-end luxury automotive brands like Rolls Royce and Bentley.
- Behind China's Takeover Of Hong Kong: The Pearl River Delta Megacity
Behind China’s Takeover Of Hong Kong: The Pearl River Delta Megacity
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 22:20By Mustafa Zaidi, Research Director at Clarmond Wealth
As Hong Kong was being handed over in early July 1997, my old colleague and I began a series of short visits throughout the Pearl River Delta, from Macau to Shenzen to Canton; all rather sleepy spots relative to the towering buzz of Hong Kong. In Macau there was an unexpected statue of Jorge Alvares, the Portuguese explorer, who arrived here in 1513; he was soon followed a few years later by his colleague Rafael Perestrello, who happened to be a cousin of Christopher Columbus…so strange to think a single family produced explorers that sailed west to America and east to China.
At the end of our visit we concluded that the area had potential but given the lack of transport, communication and legal integration, it would be a very lengthy commitment and we reported back accordingly. It was too long term for the principals.
Today this long integration is on the verge of being complete and it will make the Pearl River Delta, now renamed as the “Greater Bay Area” (GBA), a rival to the great urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
To give a sense of the GBA its population is 71m and comprises ten key cities. The ‘Big Three’ are Hong Kong with GDP of$340bn, Shenzhen ($330bn) and Guangzhou ($320bn). The GDP of the whole GBA is $1.5tr. In comparison New York (pop. 20m) has a GDP of $1.6tr, San Francisco (pop. 7m) $800bn, and Tokyo (pop. 40m) $1.9tr.
The GBA is already one of the most valuable urban clusters on the globe and will certainly overtake its cousins. Over the last decade key road, rail, and bridge projects have been completed. Projects include the HK-Zuhai-Macau bridge, the Shenzhen-Zhongshan bridge, and high speed rail from Hong Kong to Guangzhou (the XRL). With completion of the transport and communication infrastructure now in sight, the final step is to bring the two Special Administration Regions (HK/Macau) into a seamless zone, where each city has specialisations: finance for HK, high tech manufacturing for Shenzhen, which is where Huawei is based along with its outlandish European-style campus called Oxhorn, Macau for entertainment, and Guangzhou for shipping; the other smaller cities will grow and find their own “flavor”.
Source: Visual Capitalist The current step by step reduction of HK autonomy needs to be seen through the lens of the GBA, given that HK becomes a smaller component of the regional economy and a very small one of the national economy.
Hong Kong, as we wrote a year ago, is following a similar trajectory to Trieste, once the key city of commerce for the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became just another Italian city. The global commotion about HK misses how the current rulers see the status of HK in the larger GBA scheme, which for the Chinese Communist Party is going to be the engine of their growth – they are forecasting doubling over the next decade.
- US Mint Ups Coin Production To Circumvent Shortage
US Mint Ups Coin Production To Circumvent Shortage
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 22:00According to the New York Times, the U.S. Mint is upping its coin production after shortages of coins have been reported in the U.S. as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
On June 15, the Federal Reserve had first implemented quotas for distribution locations to further protect its coin inventories, which were running low. As a result, banks and other distributors of coins received less than what they ordered or even less than their usual allotments, according to the Times. Especially businesses are routinely turning to banks in order to receive coins and other tender to fill up their registers.
Chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell, said that closures of parts of the economy due to COVID-19 were responsible for disrupting the normal flow of coins through the system.
Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that, according to numbers by the U.S. Mint, coin production for circulation has actually decreased during the last couple of years and because of COVID-19 restrictions for Mint workers, has had some particularly slow months in the first half of 2020.
In the second half of 2020, the Mint expects production increases to 1.2 billion coins in June and 1.35 billion coins per month for the rest of the year– which would add up to a projected total of 14.2 billion coins produced in 2020.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Members of the public who want to deposit coins into their banks to aid circulation can do so.
Officials also said that the public can also aid businesses and those who cannot operate without coins by paying electronically whenever possible.
Wouldn’t they love that?
- Is This The Real Reason For China's Massive Market Meltup?
Is This The Real Reason For China’s Massive Market Meltup?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 21:43Now that Hong Kong is facing a creeping monetary boycott by the US, and more importantly, by the US financial system as a result of its de facto annexation by China, a pesky question has emerged: how will China procure those much needed dollars which are oh so critical to keep the Chinese financial system, all $40 trillion of it, functioning smoothly.
While there has been surprisingly little discussion of this critical topic in the financial media, which looking at soaring stocks in China and the US is left with the false impression that all is well, one person who has continued to hammer this topic home has been Rabobank’s Michael Every, who this morning once again raised the alert level over China’s USD access:
Note this South China Morning Post article titled “Time for China to decouple the yuan from US Dollar, former diplomat urges”. Zhou Li, a former deputy director of the CCP’s International Liaison Department is “the latest in a series of voices in China” to warn the USD Weapon is real and “has us by the throat”, will pose an “increasingly severe threat” to Chinese development –USD oil sanctions seen as a key area of vulnerability– and so preparations for gradual decoupling and CNY internationalisation should begin “now”. Li adds China should “give up the illusion” of friendship and instead prepare for full-fledged conflict with the US.
His specific proposal is to increase cross-border payments and clearing, local FX settlement, and maximize CNY usage in industrial supply chains. The problems in internationalizing CNY are manifold, however, which is why the USD weapon exists. The capital account would need to be opened, precipitating a collapse in CNY as money floods out.
So with the natural gateway for more inbound dollars suddenly clogged up, China has to find other, just as effective ways to attract US dollars into its economy: by drawing foreign investors into its stock market. Here is Every again:
To try to counter that, it’s China bubble time again – not just in property, but in stocks: the Shanghai exchange was up 4% at time of writing today, and 7% last week, as Chinese press openly talk up a new bull market –despite a flat economy– going so far as to imply this is part of the struggle between the “world’s powers”, according to Bloomberg: with different percentages, the same dynamic is of course true in the US. Yet for both this is lethal can-kicking at best that only creates far larger problems.
There is just one problem: if Beijing relies on existing inertia it will fail miserably, because as the following Chart of the week from Goldman shows, China-dedicated equity funds saw an 11th consecutive week of net outflows.
And as a result of the substantial outflows, Goldman believes that “underweight positioning may have contributed to the outsized gains in Chinese shares and the Yuan at the start of this week.”
Maybe, but what is far more likely is that Beijing turned on turbo boost in the infamous National Team, aka China’s Plunge Protection Team, which led to a stunning rally in Chinese equities since March, with the CSI300 surging 32% since its Q1 troughs, and 14% in the past 5 trading days, while the Shanghai Composite soared almost 6% on Monday, its biggest one day gain since the bubble of 2015.
So why the massive intervention and ramp of stocks by Beijing officials?
The answer is simple: taking a page of the Robinhood playbook, China is desperate to halt and reverse the massive equity outflows as it urgently needs the flow of US Dollars to reverse into Chinese markets, instead of away from. To do that, it needs to create an initial upward momentum in prices which halts the selling/outflows and prompts a reappraisal of Chinese asset values. Ideally, it will also capture the euphoria of US daytraders who will buy Chinese, not US stocks.
Whether China succeeds is unclear, however it simply has no option and must follow through this plan until the bitter end, even if it means blowing an even bigger stock bubble than in 2015.
And as we reported this morning, Beijing is clearly on board: realizing that the economy is far weaker than a SHCOMP print of 3,400 will support, Beijing still sent a message to the Chinese population when a front-page editorial in the state-owned China’s Securities Journal said that fostering a “healthy” bull market after the pandemic is now more important to the economy than ever.
Why? Because without the “bull market” the equity outflows would continue, and soon China will run out of dollars, an outcome which would have far more catastrophic financial, monetary and geopolitical consequences for both China and the the entire world than a 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) Covid wave, coupled with a Biden win and a permanently jammed Fed money printer.
And so far it’s working: the Shangai Composite is up 2% in early trading…
- Quibi Squandered $2BN On Its Vision For "TV In Your Pocket": Here's How It All Went Horribly Wrong
Quibi Squandered $2BN On Its Vision For “TV In Your Pocket”: Here’s How It All Went Horribly Wrong
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 21:20Like many of our readers, we first learned about Quibi last spring, when Meg Whitman, the former CEO of HP Enterprise, started doing the rounds on CNBC, sitting first for a lengthy interview with David Faber, then for a longer interview alongside Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Walt Disney Studios chairman and Dreamworks co-founder who was now the husband in this odd couple.
Together, they delivered their jargon-laden pitch: a “TV in your pocket” focusing on “white space” “short-form” “bites” bringing together “the best of Hollywood and the best of Silicon Valley.” Whitman’s description of Quibi – pronounced “Quibby” – was equal parts glib and startlingly short-sighted. Did these two billionaire boomers really think they knew the secret cheat code to crack the mobile-streaming market, and earn a seat at an increasingly crowded table? Just because Americans are watching ten times as much streaming video on their smartphones as they were in 2012? We just weren’t buying it.
At times, Whitman sounded so out of touch, we couldn’t help but chuckle. Just minutes into her first solo interview, she revealed that the name “Quibi” is a portmanteau of “Quick Bites” – “as you probably guessed”. It was then that we knew this would be a supremely entertaining corporate trainwreck. And like the blind leading the blind, Whitman and Katzenberg, both of whom staked a tremendous amount of capital on the venture, were taking their buddies along for the ride.
When the entire world shut down in March because of the coronavirus, just as Quibi was coming to market, we marveled at the timing: maybe Quibi wouldn’t crash and burn quite as quickly as we expected. But then the first leaked subscriber numbers hit. And they were really, really bad.
Despite an unprecedented marketing blitz featuring a procession of beloved celebrities, from Chance the Rapper, to Chrissy Teigen and beyond, the app had managed to rack up just 1.3 million subscribers, not even 1% of Netflix’s total subscriber base.
Apparently, Quibi had been so hyper-focused on the ‘TV in your pocket’ concept, that they built an app that was designed exclusively for mobile viewing. When they first tried to download Quibi, millions found that it simply didn’t have the functionality to play on a TV or laptop. And while watching a video on your phone might be ideal on the subway, it makes binge-watching content almost impossible.
And that, we realized, was Quibi’s biggest blunder: that Whitman and Katzenberg were somehow so focused on the “mobile” concept that they completely forgot about how millennials’ favorite activity is to snuggle up with a tub of Ben and Jerries and watch 10 episodes of “Friends” over the course of a Saturday afternoon. And at $4.99 for the ad-supported version, Quibi was basically just a crappier, more expensive version of YouTube, with an extremely limited library of (albeit premium) content that nobody really even wanted to watch.
Now, executives and employees are abandoning ship, and Whitman and Katzenberg are trying to navigate a turn-around starting with making the product more “binge-able”. But on Monday morning, New York Magazine delivered something we had long been waiting for: a long-form inside look at how “Quibi” came to be.
And boy did NY Mag deliver.
In order to establish immediate legitimacy in Hollywood in accordance with the stature of its founders, Quibi started paying the talent gobs of money – “$100,000 a minute”, one insider quipped. Producers were being paid production costs plus 20% to take the risk on an unproven platform. Katzenberg reckoned that if he poured a billion dollars into the content, the viewers would come – the old “Field of Dreams” approach.
One comedian who went in for a pitch described Quibi’s lavish officers and the ‘cockiness’ of the team: everybody was acting like they had a guaranteed hit in hand.
“I can honestly say I’ve never been in such a cocky pitch environment,” Gairdner recalls. “I would describe the atmosphere as almost Wolf of Wall Street, not in terms of actual debauchery, but it’s an incredibly nice office that just goes and goes. They had two lobbies; you went in and checked in at a nice, big lobby, then you were moved to another lobby. There’s massive jars of expensive, nice-seeming candy everywhere. It’s sleek and modern, and you see hundreds of people passing by. And there’s this energy of people who really believe they’ve got the next big thing.”
Quibi was to launch in the spring of 2020 with 50 original shows, and another 125 were to be rolled out by the end of the first year. Recognizing the risk of making something for an unproven platform, Katzenberg typically offered to pay producers’ costs plus 20 percent. “People on Quibi have $100,000 a minute to make content,” Katzenberg tells me. “That doesn’t exist on other platforms.” Producers who went into meetings with him skeptical walked out thinking he might be onto something. “He pitched me at Nate ’n Al’s, and my eyes lit up,” recalls Jason Blum, whose horror-focused Blumhouse Productions was behind Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Get Out. Blum signed on to make Wolves and Villagers and, later, two other series.
And for a brief moment after the app launched on April 6, it looked like Quibi might have landed. It peaked at No. 3 most popular in the Apple app store before beginning a descent that has landed it at around No. 300 most popular. There are ad-supported version of bejeweled with more downloads than Quibi.
Now, the company appears to have set a land speed record for going from launch to the butt of late-night jokes.
That Quibi managed to spend ungodly amounts of money for high-gloss Hollywood content with A-list talent only to end up without a discernible hit has inspired a substantial amount of Schadenfreude. Jimmy Kimmel, hosting a virtual version of Disney-ABC’s annual upfront, said, “Here I am, standing here like a fucking fool with nobody watching. I feel like every show on Quibi right now.” Gairdner, who walked out of Quibi without a deal (“It was just clear that if we didn’t have a celebrity attached, they weren’t interested”), unveiled a satirical website called Swippi, in which longer videos are arbitrarily broken up into short chunks, sometimes in the middle of a scene. “We realized people want to take Swift Sips of content,” he says dryly.
Another detail: the ground-breaking “technology” that Whitman spoke of is the app’s “Turnstyle” technology, which allows users seemlessly flip their phone from vertical to horizontal and back without compromising the viewing experience. It’s arguably better than Netflix’s landscape technology.
During her initial round of interviews on CNBC, Whitman alluded to an affinity for the novelist Dan Brown.
Before Quibi even had a name, Katzenberg was singing the gospel of chapterized stories for your cell phone. “I believe there is going to be an enterprise ten years from now that will be as big as the television business is today,” he told a conference crowd in early 2017. He viewed the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with its 105 chapters, as validation of the thesis that consumers want entertainment in small chunks. He believed that, despite most shortform video sites’ reliance on user-generated content, every medium has room for a premium offering. And he considered the TV streamers to be playing a different game altogether than what he was envisioning.
If anyone in Hollywood could conjure something new purely through force of will, it was Katzenberg, who, though he’s approaching 70, remains a not-so-young man in a hurry. An NYU dropout, he studied gambling for a time in order to run a club in the city, and he learned how to count cards well enough that he was banned from several Las Vegas casinos. He eventually landed a job as Barry Diller’s assistant at Paramount, where the patronizing nickname bestowed on him by Diller and Michael Eisner was “Golden Retriever.”
After recruiting Whitman, Katzenberg set about winning over “investors” to back his vision with an interesting scheme: for every dollar invested in Quibi by a major studio, Quibi would commit to spending on dollars.
Because NewTV’s point was to charge for content, it had to start out by raising an enormous amount of money in order to afford content worth charging for. In August 2018, just five months after Whitman’s arrival, Katzenberg announced that NewTV had raised $1 billion. (It would eventually amass a total of $1.75 billion.) Its biggest investors included Madrone Capital, an investment vehicle for the Walmart Waltons, and Alibaba, the Amazon of China. But the most important investors were those Katzenberg had brought aboard: every major studio, from Disney to Viacom to Comcast-Universal to 21st Century Fox to Sony. “People doubted that we’d ever be able to pull all the entertainment companies into one boat at one time to support the new venture,” he says. “In the 100-year history of Hollywood, that never happened.”
Without their support, NewTV would be locked out from all the best talent, who tend to have exclusive deals with studios, and from intellectual property like Reno 911! and Punk’d (another show Quibi rebooted), both of which are owned by ViacomCBS. Katzenberg was able to make hay of the studios’ involvement, too, as a show of industry support for his start-up, even though the investments were relatively small — “in the $20 million range,” a studio executive says.
From the studios’ perspective, the investment provided schmuck insurance in the event that NewTV took off, and perhaps most important, according to two studio veterans, the deals came with assurances that NewTV would spend an equal amount on services and products provided by the investor. This is known as “round-tripping.” If Disney invested $20 million, NewTV would commit to spending $20 million on content and production supplied by Disney. There was really nothing for the studios to lose. (“Many of them asked that Quibi reciprocate their level of investment,” a Quibi executive says. “Quibi did not agree to that.”)
Unsurprisingly, the name “Quibi” was an invention of Whitman and Katzenberg after they discovered that their first choice, “NewTV”, was taken.
The investments helped secure a slate of A-list directors and producers for the launch of the app, which was no longer called NewTV. (It turned out — whoops — that there was already a company named NewTV.) The new name was Quibi. Katzenberg had originally wanted to call it Omakase, after the sushi tasting menus he enjoyed at least once a week at Nobu Malibu. “That would have really won over Wisconsin,” a former insider notes. Ultimately, Quibi won the day. “They never asked staff to weigh in on it,” this person says. “People on staff thought it was cringey and would ask, ‘Is it too late to change it?’ Meg loved it.” Though arguably no sillier-sounding than Hulu, Quibi would be roundly mocked by people who thought it sounded like a “quinoa-based doggy snack” or “the cry of an attacking Ewok.”
Six months before launch, Whitman and Katzenberg had seen their relationships wither to the point where they were no longer on speaking terms. The two would frequently get into fights over Katzenberg dipping into areas that weren’t “his purview”.
When Quibi was preparing to move offices, “they had a huge fight when [the design consultant] took Jeffrey to see the new office without Meg knowing, because the new office was Meg’s purview,” says a person with firsthand knowledge of the company’s inner workings. (A Quibi executive denies that this happened.) Once Quibi had moved into the 49,000-square-foot space, “they carved up North and South Korea, and they drew a DMZ line each doesn’t cross.” Whitman sits on the third floor, Katzenberg on the fourth. “Katzenberg was in the content corner. Meg did everything else.” On occasion, Whitman would have to discourage Katzenberg from reaching out to people in departments she oversaw, with marketing being a particular flashpoint. “It was like, ‘Oh, Mom and Dad are fighting again,’ ” this source adds. (“We’ve formed a strong partnership based on strength and authenticity,” Whitman says. “We’re friends who admire and respect one another.”)
At some point during the process, somebody apparently challenged Katzenberg to explain why the world needed Quibi to break up content into “snackable” bits when it seemed consumers were already having an easy enough time doing that on their own. After this, Katzenberg set about trying to prove that Quibi was “different” by adding features that seemed to deliberately hamstring the product, like the fact that the initial iteration of Quibi couldn’t even be streamed to a TV.
To combat the idea that Quibi would be providing something that already existed, Katzenberg leaned into making Quibi seem different. To emphasize that this wasn’t just TV on your phone, he declared that Quibi wouldn’t even be available on your TV when the app launched. He also heavily hyped Turnstyle, and once Quibi was all in on this phone-only tech, the decision not to prioritize casting to TV was even harder to reconsider. In interviews, Katzenberg would adamantly emphasize Quibi’s novelty.
But the juiciest part of the New York Mag article came when the writer finally got around to the big question: what drove Katzenberg, and then Whitman, to believe that they had some special insight into the untapped desires of the millennial generation.
When pressed by the reporter on this topic, the two seemed at a loss.
People have wondered why Katzenberg and Whitman, in their late and early 60s, respectively, and not very active on social media, would believe they have uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people. When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.” But any particular shows she likes? “Grant,” she offered. “On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”
Katzenberg is on his phone all the time, but he is also among the moguls of his generation who have their emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by an assistant. In enthusing about what a show could mean for Quibi, Katzenberg would repeatedly invoke the same handful of musty touchstones — America’s Funniest Home Videos, Siskel and Ebert, and Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes. When Gal Gadot came to the offices and delivered an impassioned speech about wanting to elevate the voices of girls and women, Katzenberg wondered aloud whether she might become the new Jane Fonda and do a workout series for Quibi. (“Apparently, her face fell,” says a person briefed on the meeting.)
At a casting session this year, while watching a tape test for a Daily Essentials host who was a Black man with an Afro, Katzenberg said the man didn’t look “authoritative.” Content executive Shawna Thomas, an Emmy-winning journalist from Vice News and NBC, was used to the political incorrectness endemic to casting conversations, but as a discussion of the candidate’s hair went on and on, she felt increasingly uncomfortable and left the room to avoid becoming visibly upset. That evening, she and Katzenberg had a long phone chat in which she explained why she makes a point of wearing her hair in a natural style on TV — so that, say, a little Black girl watching MSNBC could see someone authoritative who didn’t conform to the predominant white American standard of beauty. Afterward, she felt Katzenberg had understood her. “The discussion was frank, honest, and positive and might not have gone as well at another company,” Thomas says.
Moreover, Quibi’s offices were stocked with young employees, but all of them knew that challenging the inherent biases of their two bosses was not a road to success. During an enterprise where even one well-placed dissenting voice might have averted a disaster – for instance, if somebody had just pointed out to Katzenberg that it makes no sense to deliberately cripple a product’s functionality just to try and stand out – maybe this whole disaster could have been averted. Or at least mitigated.
But the one line that everybody knew not to cross was, of course, the money: “You never dissented on that point,” recalled one employee, referring to the notion that millennials might not pay up for the product in numbers large enough to satisfy Whitman’s models. “Their fund-raise was predicated on a plan that showed revenue targets, so they could never unwind that.” By doing this, Katzenberg might have backed himself into a corner. When asked why Quibi didn’t try out a free ad-supported version, Katzenberg reportedly responded that “Literally,” he said, “you cannot do the math.”
In July, all of the subscribers who signed up for Quibi’s 90-day free trial will start being asked to pay for the content. In just a few weeks, the public might have a better idea of how many millennials are truly willing to pay up for Whitman’s vision.
And once that happens, well, let’s just say that one doesn’t need the discerning wit of Judge Chrissy Teigen to figure out what happens next.
- USDollar & Stock Futures Dive As Offshore Yuan Spikes To 4-Month Highs
USDollar & Stock Futures Dive As Offshore Yuan Spikes To 4-Month Highs
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 21:16China’s offshore yuan extended its spike in early Asia trading, pushing back below 7/USD – its strongest vs the greenback in almost four months…
That triggered weakness in the dollar…
US equity futures are tumbling back from early gains…
And gold is bid…
What is China doing?
Are they pumping the yuan and stocks to provide a cushion for when Trump’s rising rhetoric turns into executive orders?
- Ohio Town Proclaims Itself A "Statuary Sanctuary City" For Outcast Historical Figures
Ohio Town Proclaims Itself A “Statuary Sanctuary City” For Outcast Historical Figures
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 21:00Authored by Alex Nitzberg via JustTheNews.com,
As protesters target statues around the nation, one town is becoming a statue sanctuary city for monuments honoring select figures.
Newton Falls, Ohio City Manager David M. Lynch has signed a proclamation that states that the city will accept and display spurned statues of people including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and certain other prominent figures.
“A Proclamation declaring that Newton Falls is a Statuary Sanctuary City and declaring a general amnesty for George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Patrick Henry, Francis Scott Key, Theodore Roosevelt and Christopher Columbus as represented by the statues of these great leaders, and volunteering to accept these statues that have been removed throughout the USA and place them in a location of honor in our community,” the proclamation says, according to a copy posted by 21-WFMJ.
“They founded our nation, they ended slavery, and established and protected our national parks,” Lynch said, according to Fox 8.
“Yes, they had warts but they laid the foundation for what we have today,” he said.
Protesters in Baltimore, Maryland on July 4th toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus and dumped it into the city’s Inner Harbor.
- COVID Concerns Send Casino Stocks Tumbling As Recovery Dims
COVID Concerns Send Casino Stocks Tumbling As Recovery Dims
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 20:40As the recovery stalls, states are pausing and or reversing reopenings as coronavirus cases surge. Mobility trends show retail and or corporate workspace activity slowed in late June, sparking new concerns the casino recovery could be coming to an end.
The S&P500 Casino and Gaming (Sub Ind) is down 1% in late afternoon trading on Monday. From mid-March to June 8, the casino index soared 133% on reopening optimism. Since June 9, the index has fallen 24% on technical exhaustion, coupled with rising virus cases across the country that could threaten recent reopenings of US casinos.
Notable declines MGM Resorts International (-2%), Wynn Resorts Ltd (-2%), Penn National Gaming (-4.1%), Golden Entertainment (-4.4%), Caesars Entertainment (-1.5%), and Boyd Gaming (-3.8%).
You’re never going to guess who panic bought casino stocks with their Trump checks and unemployment benefits – Robinhood traders, of course. Notice at the start of the pandemic, the number of Robinhood users holding MGM shares went from 7,800 to over 200,000 by early July.
Robinhood traders also panic bought Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy’s PENN during the pandemic.
Americans are quickly losing interest in casinos. No proven vaccine = no hanging out in indoor commercial spaces.
Don’t tell Robinhood daytraders, who panic bought not just casinos, but also airlines, cruise ships, and rental car companies – that a V-shaped recovery in the real economy won’t happen this year.
Former Chief Economist at the World Bank Paul Romer shocked a Fox Bussiness host Monday when he said a recovery in economic growth and jobs reverting to 2019 levels could take until 2028.
Millennials who panic bought virus-sensitive stocks could find out in the coming months/quarters what it means to be a bagholder.
- Niall Ferguson: China Has Already Declared Cold War On US
Niall Ferguson: China Has Already Declared Cold War On US
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 20:20Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,
America and China Are Entering the Dark Forest
To know what the Chinese are really up to, read the futuristic novels of Liu Cixin.
“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.
The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.
First, the history.
What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.
Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.
How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?
The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.
Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.
When Middle America voted for Trump four years ago, it was partly a backlash against the asymmetric payoffs of engagement and its economic corollary, globalization. Not only had the economic benefits of Chimerica gone disproportionately to China, not only had its costs been borne disproportionately by working-class Americans, but now those same Americans saw that their elected leaders in Washington had acted as midwives at the birth of a new strategic superpower — a challenger for global predominance even more formidable, because economically stronger, than the Soviet Union.
It is not only Kissinger who recognizes that the relationship with Beijing has soured. Orville Schell, another long-time believer in engagement, recently conceded that the approach had foundered “because of the CCP’s deep ambivalence about the way engaging in a truly meaningful way might lead to demands for more reform and change and its ultimate demise.”
Conservative critics of engagement, meanwhile, are eager to dance on its grave, urging that the People’s Republic be economically “quarantined,” its role in global supply chains drastically reduced. There is a spring in the step of the more Sinophobic members of the Trump administration, notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and trade adviser Peter Navarro. For the past three and a half years they have been arguing that the single most important thing about Trump’s presidency was that he had changed the course of U.S. policy towards China, a shift from engagement to competition spelled out in the 2017 National Security Strategy. The events of 2020 would seem to have vindicated them.
The Covid-19 pandemic has done more than intensify Cold War II. It has revealed its existence to those who last year doubted it. The Chinese Communist Party caused this disaster — first by covering up how dangerous the new virus SARS-CoV-2 was, then by delaying the measures that might have prevented its worldwide spread.
Yet now China wants to claim the credit for saving the world from the crisis it caused. Liberally exporting cheap and not wholly reliable ventilators, testing kits and face masks, the Chinese government has sought to snatch victory from the jaws of a defeat it inflicted. The deputy director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s information department has gone so far as to endorse a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in the U.S. and retweet an article claiming that an American team had brought the virus with them when they participated in the World Military Games in Wuhan last October.
Just as implausible are Chinese claims that the U.S. is somehow behind the recurrent waves of pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. The current confrontation over the former British colony’s status is unambiguously Made in China. As Pompeo has said, the new National Security Law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong last Tuesday effectively “destroys” the territory’s semi-autonomy and tears up the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, which guaranteed that Hong Kong would retain its own legal system for 50 years after its handover to People’s Republic in 1997.
In this context, it is not really surprising that American public sentiment towards China has become markedly more hawkish since 2017, especially among older voters. China is one of few subjects these days about which there is a genuine bipartisan consensus. It is a sign of the times that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign clearly intends to portray their man as more hawkish on China than Trump. (Former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new memoir is grist to their mill.) On Hong Kong, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, is every bit as indignant as Pompeo.
I have argued that this new Cold War is both inevitable and desirable, not least because it has jolted the U.S. out of complacency and into an earnest effort not to be surpassed by China in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other strategically crucial technologies. Yet there remains, in academia especially, significant resistance to my view that we should stop worrying and learn to love Cold War II.
At a forum last week on World Order after Covid-19, organized by the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a clear majority of speakers warned of the perils of a new Cold War.
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Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, argued instead for a “rivalry-partnership” model of “coop-etition,” in which the two nations would at once compete and cooperate in the way that Samsung and Apple have done for years.
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Harvard’s Graham Allison, the author of the bestselling “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”, agreed, giving as another example the 11th-century “frenmity” between the Song Emperor of China and the Liao kingdom on China’s northern border. The pandemic, Allison argued, has made “incandescent the impossibility of identifying China clearly as either foe or friend. Rivalry-partnership may sound complicated, but life is complicated.”
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“The establishment of a productive and predictable US/China relationship,” wrote John Lipsky, formerly of the International Monetary Fund, “is a sine qua non for strengthening the institutions of global governance.” The last Cold War had cast a “shadow of a global holocaust for decades,” observed James Steinberg, a former deputy secretary of state. “What can be done to create a context to limit the rivalry and create space for cooperation?”
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Elizabeth Economy, my colleague at the Hoover Institution, had an answer: “The United States and China could … partner to address a global challenge,” namely climate change. Tom Wright of the Brookings Institution took a similar line: “Focusing only on great power competition while ignoring the need for cooperation will not actually give the United States an enduring strategic advantage over China.”
All this sounds eminently reasonable, apart from one thing. The Chinese Communist Party isn’t Samsung, much less the Liao kingdom.
Rather — as was true in Cold War I, when (especially after 1968) academics tended to be doves rather than hawks — today’s proponents of “rivalry-partnership” are overlooking the possibility that the Chinese aren’t interested in being frenemies. They know full well this is a Cold War, because they started it.
To be sure, there are also Chinese scholars who lament the passing of engagement. The economist Yu Yongding recently joined Kevin Gallagher of Boston University to argue for reconciliation between Washington and Beijing. Yet that is no longer the official view in Beijing. When I first began talking publicly about Cold War II at conferences last year, I was surprised that no Chinese delegates contradicted me. In September, I asked one of them — the Chinese head of a major international institution — why that was. “Because I agree with you!” he replied with a smile.
As a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I have seen for myself the ideological turning of the tide under Xi. Academics who study taboo subjects such as the Cultural Revolution find themselves subject to investigations or worse. Those who take a more combative stance toward the West get promoted.
Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua, recently argued that Cold War II, unlike Cold War I, will be a purely technological competition, without proxy wars and nuclear brinkmanship. Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, was equally candid in an interview with the Beijing Cultural Review, published on April 28.
“To a certain degree we already find ourselves in the situation of a New Cold War,” he said. “There are two basic reasons for this. The first is the need for Western politicians to play the blame game” about the origins of the pandemic.
“The next thing,” he added, “is that now Westerners want to make this into a ‘systems’ question, saying that the reason that China could carry out such drastic control measures [in Hubei province] is because China is not a democratic society, and this is where the power and capacity to do this came from.”
This, however, is weak beer compared with the hard stuff regularly served up on Twitter by the pack leader of the “wolf warrior” diplomats, Zhao Lijian. “The Hong Kong Autonomy Act passed by the US Senate is nothing but a piece of scrap paper,” he tweeted on Monday, in response to the congressional retaliation against China’s new Hong Kong security law. By his standards, this was understatement.
The tone of the official Chinese communiqué released after Pompeo’s June 17 meeting in Hawaii with Yang Jiechi, the director of the Communist Party’s Office of Foreign Affairs, was vintage Cold War. On the persecution of the Uighurs, for example, it called on “the US side to respect China’s counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts, stop applying double standards on counter-terrorism issues, and stop using Xinjiang-related issues as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
And this old shrillness, so reminiscent of the Mao Zedong era, is not reserved for the U.S. alone. The Chinese government lashes out at any country that has the temerity to criticize it, from Australia — “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe” according to the editor of the Party-controlled Global Times — to India to the U.K.
Those who hope to revive engagement, or at least establish frenmity with Beijing, underestimate the influence of Wang Huning, a member since 2017 of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the most powerful body in China, and Xi’s most influential adviser. Back in August 1988, Wang spent six months in the U.S. as a visiting scholar, traveling to more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities. His account of that trip, “America against America,” (published in 1991) is a critique — in places scathing — of American democracy, capitalism and culture (racial division features prominently in the third chapter).
Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. “The Dark Forest” was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful “Three-Body Problem.” It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.
“The Dark Forest,” which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”
First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound … The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.
Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism.
Of course, you may say, it’s just sci-fi. Yes, but “The Dark Forest” gives us an insight into something we think too little about: how Xi’s China thinks. It’s not up to us whether or not we have a Cold War with China, if China has already declared Cold War on us.
Not only are we already in the foothills of that new Cold War; those foothills are also impenetrably covered in a dark forest of China’s devising.
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- Teachers "Scared" After All Florida Schools Ordered To Reopen In August
Teachers “Scared” After All Florida Schools Ordered To Reopen In August
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 20:06In what is sure to be discussed with some “blood on their hands” headline in the next 24 hour news cycle, Fox35 Orlando reports that Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran on Monday ordered public schools to reopen in August and offer “the full panoply of services” to students and families.
The full Emergency Order says that all public schools will be required to reopen in August for at least five days a week and to provide the full array of services required by law, including in-person instruction and services for students with special needs.
“Required services must be provided to students from low-income families, students of migrant workers, students who are homeless, students with disabilities, students in foster care, students who are English-language learners, and other vulnerable populations,” the order says.
Corcoran’s order also instructs school districts to follow the advice of state and local health officials as well as executive orders issued by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Read the full emergency order below:
Of course, as one would imagine, teachers are concerned. According to Florida Education Association President Fedrick Ingram.
“It’s clear in communications with our members that educators are scared. They don’t trust politicians to make sure things are safe — rightly so, with the record-breaking number of cases being reported,” Ingram told the News Service of Florida in an email Monday.
“The governor is trying to brush that off.”
Of course, while every mainstream media org is leading with the soaring “cases”, few, if any, have mentioned the flat incremental deaths (and this plunging mortality rate)…
The average age for those testing positive for COVID-19 in Florida is now only 21, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday in an update in The Villages. He said the younger age of those testing positive is contributing to lower mortality rates from the virus across the state. The fatality rate in Florida is currently less than 2%.
However, Ingram, who heads the state’s top teachers’ union, said students and school employees “need to be at the center of our conversations about reopening schools.”
And just like that it becomes politicized as ‘science’ goes out the door.
Under the order issued Monday, school districts and charter-school governing boards are required to submit reopening plans to the Department of Education showing how all schools plan to fully reopen and offer all services to students.
- Gary Shilling Sees 1930s-Style Decline In Stock Market
Gary Shilling Sees 1930s-Style Decline In Stock Market
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 20:00“I think we’ve got a second leg down and that’s very much reminiscent of what happened in the 1930s where people appreciate the depth of this recession and the disruption and how long it’s going to take to recover,” Gary Shilling, the president of A. Gary Shilling & Co., told CNBC’s Elizabeth Schulze in an interview on Monday, referring to the possibility the stock market will tumble once investors realize the shape of the recovery is an “L” rather than the overhyped “V.”
At the moment, President Trump, completely ignoring the millions of jobs that have been eliminated from the economy because it would make him look bad ahead of the elections – is touting “NASDAQ HITS ALL TIME HIGH!” on Twitter on Monday morning.
The optimism of a V-shaped recovery in the back half of the year, coupled with unprecedented central bank liquidity, is fueling the biggest stock market bubble in history, that Shilling says stocks could plunge 30-40% over the next year as investors figure out the shape of the recovery is an “L.”
Shilling said today’s stock market bounce from March lows resembles the initial dip then rebound in 1929 – and we all know what happened next…
He warned history could repeat as people, even back in the Great Depression, initially underestimate the depths of the downturn and how long a recovery phase would take.
“Stocks are [behaving] very much like that rebound in 1929 where there is absolute conviction that the virus will be under control and that massive monetary and fiscal stimuli will reinvigorate the economy,” he said.
Adding that, “I think we’re going to see downward pressure on prices and that works to the advantage of Treasury bonds, which have been my favorite since 1981.”
We noted on Sunday that recovery times continue to push out, now 2022, due to surging virus cases forcing states to pause or even reverse reopening plans. The latest data shows retail foot traffic stalled in late June – suggesting the V-shaped recovery narrative is more hype than truth, and jobs and economic growth will not revert to 2019 levels for several years.
There are emerging trends readers should know: the first, as states pause/reverse reopenings, those who were recently hired are now getting fired; the second is permanent job loss – as we noted over the weekend, nearly 3 million jobs have been eliminated from the economy since the pandemic began. Remember, permanent job loss is a consumption killer, considering consumer spending drives two-thirds of the economy.
To sum up, Wall Street’s bet is that the Federal Reserve can print its way out of a depression is unlikely as the recovery shape is set to transform from a “V” to “L.”
- CNBC Talking Head And Tesla Mega-Bull, Ross Gerber Received PPP Loan Days After He Called Program "Another Trump Scam"
CNBC Talking Head And Tesla Mega-Bull, Ross Gerber Received PPP Loan Days After He Called Program “Another Trump Scam”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 19:52As we pointed out on Twitter earlier today, Tesla’s favorite uber-bull and useful FinTwit punching bag Ross Gerber’s firm, the Santa Monica-based Gerber Kawasaki (not to be confused with a motorbike dealer, although perhaps it would hope to be) Wealth Management, was approved for a PPP loan on May 3, 2020.
The disclosure comes as part of a broader disclosure of firms who took PPP loans and confirms that Gerber’s firm took a loan ranging from $350,000 to $1 million through Wells Fargo Bank. While PPP loans were given out in exchange for “retaining jobs”, in the case of Gerber Kawasaki that particular number is unknown as the excel cell is empty.
The irony, of course, comes from the fact that on April 27, 2020, just 6 short days before his firm’s loan was approved, Gerber virtue signalled to the #resistance by tweeting that “this whole PPP thing looks like a scam. Another big Trump scam”.
… A scam which Ross Gerber had applied for weeks prior and was eagerly waiting approval.
Then, during the same thread about “another Trump scam”, when Gerber was called out for having Trump derangement syndrome, he doubled down and said “you can correlate PPP loans and Trump supporters” before suggesting “they should publish the list of companies and amounts.”
Well, Ross, we hate to tell you this… but they did. And your firm is on it as receiving up to $1 million in PPP grants.
It gets better. The NAICS code of “441228” which Gerber Kawasaki applied under indicates that the “investment advisory” company got the loan under the guise of being a “Motorcycle, ATV and Other Motor Vehicle Dealer”! Perhaps Gerber was hoping that someone at the Small Business Administration was dumb enough and would assume that a company named “Kawasaki” deal with, well, motorobikes. Because after all which financial advisor would like to be exposed as need bailout money to continue offering paid “advise” on what happens next.
This motorcycle/ATV PPP rescue grant – which the company should have applied for only if it meant the difference between life and death – follows not only Gerber’s constant boasting on Twitter about being long Tesla, which has more than tripled off of its recent lows, but constant bragging by Gerber on social media about how well his firm is doing and how rich he is. In fact, just days ago, he said he was taking a “victory lap” on Tesla…
Doing a Tesla victory lap with @TDANetwork who has been along for the $tsla ride. Always a great talk! Tune in Tesla fans for what comes next for the stock. 1:30 pm pst. https://t.co/wzzPKSD8aY
— Ross Gerber (@GerberKawasaki) July 2, 2020
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…he was also publishing text allegedly from one of his client’s statements, also bragging about Tesla:
Even better, a little over a year ago, Gerber was bragging about his wealth:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
…after bragging in 2017 that his firm was taking in $3 million per week.
Then, at the beginning of 2020 posting influencer-style photos of himself drinking what he called “Crystal”:
Ya we did it. #tesla420 #NYE2020 celebration. #Crystal #tesla $tsla pic.twitter.com/d4fNk0RJdS
— Ross Gerber (@GerberKawasaki) January 2, 2020
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…which he has been bragging about (and spelling wrong) for years….
The PPP loan disclosure caused an uproar on social media, with some also pointing out that Gerber Kawasaki’s Form ADV filings may not have been updated to reveal the loan. Even Dave Portnoy of Barstool Spots, with whom Gerber had a kerfuffle with several weeks ago, chimed in:
Can somebody put this in dumb person language for me? Thanks. @GerberKawasaki https://t.co/CNXvSaMCj9
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) July 6, 2020
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“Absolute dickhead looking motherfucker,” Portnoy had called Gerber in a live video in late May after Gerber suggested Portnoy’s wealth was because he was “lucky”.
“If you’re so good at this, why you helping strangers? Because you’re not. You need other people’s money, you coward,” Portnoy said in late May, in what is turning out to be an extremely prescient observation.
“Ross Gerber’s the worst to ever do it,” Portnoy concluded.
Gerber responded by saying he was up $10 million on the day and calling Portnoy out for bragging, which is beyond ironic given Gerber’s history of bragging himself.
But then again, we didn’t see Barstool Sports on the PPP recipient list. So there’s one thing Portnoy can brag about that Gerber will never again mention.
- China & India Agree To 1km Buffer Zone, Troop Pullback After Deadly Border Clash
China & India Agree To 1km Buffer Zone, Troop Pullback After Deadly Border Clash
Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/06/2020 – 19:20Following the deadly June 15 India-China border fight which had the highest casualties of any skirmish between the two along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in fifty years, Indian and Chinese officers have conducted multiple deescalation talks as each country’s media saber rattles, and as India has retaliated economically against Beijing.
These talks have led to a major breakthrough apparently, as on Monday both sides have announced the establishment of a sizable buffer zone along the LAC in the Galwan River valley, requiring each to move troop positions away from the site.
Modi in Ladakh on July 3, via ANI/Financial Express This after especially a semi-permanent PLA build-up was observed in the region, and as Indian troops responded by sending tanks and armored units.
The buffer zone agreement was reportedly firmed up Sunday during a phone call between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, which agreed to immediate mutual disengagement.
An Indian government statement said “it was necessary to ensure at the earliest complete disengagement osf the troops along the LAC and de-escalation from India-China border areas.” The statement as widely reported in Indian media said further: “In this regard they further agreed that both sides should complete the ongoing disengagement process along the LAC expeditiously.”
Regional media also said both sides have already begun the one kilometer pull-back from the disputed border line:
Today, sources said China has withdrawn its troops by at least a kilometer and dismantled its temporary structures in Ladakh’s Galwan river valley, where 20 soldiers were killed in action during a clash with Chinese troops on June 15. Indian soldiers have also pulled back and a buffer zone has been created, sources said.
Ahead of this days ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a visit to the Ladakh region in solidarity with troops stationed at the remote Himalayan border area.
Via Defense Aviation Post The Chinese foreign minister confirmed Monday that both countries have “agreed to follow the important consensus reached by leaders of the two countries”.
This came after at least three rounds of high level military talks held in the Ladakh region, potentially ending soaring tensions which for nearly a month grabbed international headlines and had analysts fearing to nuclear armed neighbors could be headed for a border war.
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