Ayman Shanaa, the Hamas chief for the area of Lebanon where Ein al-Hilweh is located, explained that Hamas is still determined to wage attacks on Israel.
Tag: Politics
BREAKING: German police arrest Syrian refugee over ISIS-claimed mass stabbing attack at the Festival of Diversity
The man was identified as Issa al H., a 26-year-old Syrian that came to Germany at the end of December 2022.
BREAKING: Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested in France: report
Durov had been traveling on his private jet and was targeted by an arrest warrant in France, according to a French outlet.
Powell Pivot Sparks Buying Panic In Bonds, Bitcoin, & Bullion As Dollar Dumps To 2024 Lows
Powell Pivot Sparks Buying Panic In Bonds, Bitcoin, & Bullion As Dollar Dumps To 2024 Lows
With seven little words, Fed Chair Powell unleashed some chaos today as he confirmed “time has come for policy to adjust” and rate-cut expectations adjusted dovishly (though we note they were pretty much fully priced for this after the Minutes).
September rate-cut expectations rose to 32bps (so around a 1/3rd chance of 50bps, 2/3 chance of 25bps)…
Source: Bloomberg
2024 rate-cut expectations lifted to 104bps (just over 4 full cuts – well above the single-cut according to The Fed’s Dot-Plot) and 213bps thru the end of 2025…
Source: Bloomberg
Gold, bonds, and stocks rallied while the dollar tumbled…
Source: Bloomberg
The instant bid in stocks only really held in Small Caps…
…thanks to a huge short-squeeze…
Source: Bloomberg
The dollar crashed to 2024 lows…
Source: Bloomberg
Treasury yields tumbled, led by the short-end today (2Y -10bps, 30Y -2bps) and down 14bps on the week…
Source: Bloomberg
The 2Y yield snapped back below 4.00% and the curve (2s30s) pushed notably steeper…
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin blasted off on the Powell headlines, setting the scene for the big short-squeeze we have discussed and testing $64,000…
Source: Bloomberg
Crude oil prices also surged, bouncing further off those early August lows…
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, we note that five of the six Powell Jackson Hole speeches saw the S&P 500 drop 7.5% on average in the next three months…
Source: Bloomberg
…and The Fed will begin cutting rates with the MSCI All-World Stocks Index at an all-time record high!!!
So brace!
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/24/2024 – 16:00
BREAKING: ISIS claims responsibility for deadly mass stabbing attack in Germany
On Friday, a mass stabbing took place in the German city of Solingen, leaving three people dead and several more critically injured. According to the US Sun, the attack has been claimed by ISIS. The suspect reportedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the mass stabbing attack. Police have arrested a 15-year-old who may have known about it…
Elon’s SpaceX To Rescue Stranded Astronauts After NASA Dumps Boeing
Elon’s SpaceX To Rescue Stranded Astronauts After NASA Dumps Boeing
NASA said it has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring home the US astronauts who were forced to extend their stay at the International Space Station because of the latest debacle plaguing the woke DEI disaster that is Boeing, whose space capsule suffered major technical issues.
Boeing’s spacecraft will return without people on board, the US space agency said during a Saturday news conference announcing its decision, in which it said that it was too risky to bring two astronauts back to Earth in Boeing’s troubled new capsule. What should have been a weeklong test flight for the pair will now last more than eight months.
LIVE: We’re discussing NASA’s @BoeingSpace Crew Flight Test following the completion of today’s Agency Test Flight Readiness Review. Listen in for the latest #Starliner updates. https://t.co/M2ODFmLuTj
— NASA (@NASA) August 24, 2024
The contingency plan means that NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will hitch a ride home on SpaceX’s rival Crew Dragon capsule during a mission slated to launch in late September. That would put them back on US soil in February, when that capsule is slated to return and months later than originally planned. Their empty Starliner capsule will undock in a week or two and attempt to return on autopilot.
The seasoned pilots have been stuck at the International Space Station since the beginning of June. A cascade of vexing thruster failures and helium leaks in the new capsule marred their trip to the space station, and they ended up in a holding pattern as engineers conducted tests and debated what to do about the trip back.
As Starliner’s test pilots, the pair should have overseen this critical last leg of the journey, with touchdown in the U.S. desert.
It was a blow to Boeing, adding to the safety concerns plaguing the company on its airplane side. Boeing had counted on Starliner’s first crew trip to revive the troubled program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had insisted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests both in space and on the ground.
Retired Navy captains with previous long-duration spaceflight experience, Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, anticipated surprises when they accepted the shakedown cruise of a new spacecraft, although not quite to this extent.
Before their June 5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, they said their families bought into the uncertainty and stress of their professional careers decades ago. During their lone orbital news conference last month, they said they had trust in the thruster testing being conducted. They had no complaints, they added, and enjoyed pitching in with space station work.
Wilmore’s wife, Deanna, was equally stoic in an interview earlier this month with WVLT-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, their home state. She was already bracing for a delay until next February: “You just sort of have to roll with it.”
There were no other options.
The SpaceX capsule currently parked at the space station is reserved for the four residents who have been there since March. They will return in late September, their stay extended a month by the Starliner dilemma. NASA said it would be unsafe to squeeze two more into the capsule, except in an emergency.
The docked Russian Soyuz capsule is even tighter, capable of flying only three — two of them Russians wrapping up a yearlong stint.
So Wilmore and Williams will wait for SpaceX’s next taxi flight. It’s due to launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the usual four for a routine six-month stay. NASA yanked two to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return flight in late February.
NASA said no serious consideration was given to asking SpaceX for a quick stand-alone rescue. Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original craft was damaged by space junk. The switch pushed their mission beyond a year, a U.S. space endurance record still held by Frank Rubio.
Starliner’s woes began long before its latest flight.
Bad software fouled the first test flight without a crew in 2019, prompting a do-over in 2022. Then parachute and other issues cropped up, including a helium leak in the capsule’s propellant system that nixed a launch attempt in May. The leak eventually was deemed to be isolated and small enough to pose no concern. But more leaks sprouted following liftoff, and five thrusters also failed.
All but one of those small thrusters restarted in flight. But engineers remain perplexed as to why some thruster seals appear to swell, obstructing the propellant lines, then revert to their normal size.
These 28 thrusters are vital. Besides needed for space station rendezvous, they keep the capsule pointed in the right direction at flight’s end as bigger engines steer the craft out of orbit. Coming in crooked could result in catastrophe.
With the Columbia disaster still fresh in many minds — the shuttle broke apart during reentry in 2003, killing all seven aboard — NASA embraced open debate over Starliner’s return capability. Dissenting views were stifled during Columbia’s doomed flight, just as they were during Challenger’s in 1986.
Despite Saturday’s decision, NASA isn’t giving up on Boeing.
NASA went into its commercial crew program a decade ago wanting two competing U.S. companies ferrying astronauts in the post-shuttle era. Boeing won the bigger contract: more than $4 billion, compared with SpaceX’s $2.6 billion.
With station supply runs already under its belt, SpaceX aced its first of now nine astronaut flights in 2020, while Boeing got bogged down in design flaws that set the company back more than $1 billion. NASA officials still hold out hope that Starliner’s problems can be corrected in time for another crew flight in another year or so.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/24/2024 – 13:28
Manhunt underway after deadly mass knife attack at German ‘Diversity Festival,’ suspect reportedly yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’
A police report translated to English stated: “A witness who was injured in the attack stated that the unknown suspect was ‘known from Solingen’ and that he was also a visitor to a local mosque. A witness reported that the suspect shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during his actions.”
COVID-19: The Preventable Pandemic | ZeroHedge
COVID-19: The Preventable Pandemic
Authored by Jeff M. Smith via RealClearWorld,
When the Heritage Foundation released its comprehensive report on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, headlines tended to focus on the cost to the U.S. That’s not surprising: At an eye-popping $18 trillion, it’s almost 10 times the projected 2024 budget deficit.
Arguably, however, the Commission’s most infuriating conclusion was this: The global pandemic was “totally preventable,” in the words of Commissioner Dr. Robert Redfield, an experienced virologist who headed the CDC during the outbreak.
Had the Chinese government been more transparent and cooperative at the outset of the pandemic, millions of lives and trillions of dollars could have been spared. The pandemic’s “proximal origin,” the Commission found, was the Chinese government’s “aggressive opposition to honesty, transparency, and accountability” along with its “systemic cover up.”
The Cover-Up
The Commission—a blue-ribbon team of experts led by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and supported by data scientists, economists, and lawyers—concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus began circulating months before Beijing warned the world, likely in August-September 2019. The Chinese government then not only withheld key details, it engaged in an elaborate and deadly coverup.
Dr. Jamie Metzl—one of the Commission’s Democrats who served at the National Security Council, U.S. Senate, and State Department—condemned Beijing for having “destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned Chinese citizen journalists, gagged Chinese scientists, blocked any meaningful international investigations, and cynically sandbagged the World Health Organization.”
Ratcliffe described China’s behavior during this period as “frankly inexcusable.”
Added Metzl: “There can be, in our view, little doubt that China’s government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.”
The Cost
Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic is considered one of the seven deadliest plagues in human history, with excess deaths topping 28 million, according to some estimates. The World Bank has characterized the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic as “the largest global economic crisis in more than a century,” with low-income countries hit the hardest.
The Commission’s assessment that the pandemic cost the U.S. alone $18 trillion includes $8.6 trillion in “excess deaths,” $1.8 trillion in income lost, $6 trillion in chronic conditions like “long COVID,” $1.1 trillion in mental health costs, and $400 million in education losses.
The Origin
While the origin of the pandemic wasn’t the focus of the Commission, notably all nine Commissioners concluded, without dissent, that the pandemic “very likely stemmed from a research-related incident in Wuhan.”
Indeed, evidence continues to emerge further strengthening the “lab leak” theory and casting greater doubt on the “natural spillover” theory. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was at the time conducting dangerous gain of function experiments to make coronaviruses more transmissible to humans, and it was doing so in alarmingly unsafe conditions.
The WIV experienced an unspecified “incident” in 2019, when several lab workers fell sick, the Chinese military abruptly assumed control of the lab, the lab mysteriously deleted its online database of over 10,000 bat virus samples at 2:00am, and ordered an expensive new air incinerator. A Chinese military scientist then produced a vaccine with logic-defying speed before suddenly going missing and being scrubbed from government records.
In recent months, new details have emerged about a 2018 grant proposal that sought funding to manipulate coronaviruses at the WIV in very specific ways—ways that exactly match the highly unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have never been seen in nature.
At the event unveiling the Heritage report, Dr. Redfield contended SARS-CoV-2 shows “clear signs of engineering” and its origin “had nothing to do with” a natural spillover event at a Wuhan animal market. The full Commission report concludes that despite four years of extensive hypothesis testing, today “there is no evidentiary basis” for the theory of natural spillover. The handful of early pandemic academic papers advancing the natural spillover theory have since been hollowed out by fatal challenges to their underlying methods and conclusions.
Rather than a viral leap from animal to humans, Dr. Redfield contended that the pandemic was “a direct consequence of scientific arrogance, with the scientists that were intentionally teaching this virus how to infect humans never recognizing something would ever go wrong. And, in fact, unfortunately this virus did escape.”
Preventing Another Pandemic
To avoid a future pandemic and hold the Chinese government accountable, the Commission report concluded with several practical recommendations for the U.S. government:
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Establish a bipartisan national COVID commission to conduct “a review of China’s negligence and cover-up as well as an evaluation of domestic policies that were implemented” in response to the pandemic;
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Create a bipartisan reparations or compensation task force to cover claims against the Chinese government;
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Facilitate the filing of civil claims against China to allow civilians harmed by COVID to receive compensation by amending the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act;
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Decouple U.S. government and commercial supply chains from Chinese state-backed companies;
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Audit all U.S. government funding for biomedical research and related research activities in China;
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Impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials and entities who were complicit in or supported the “distortion and concealment” of information related to the COVID pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic was almost certainly the deadliest and costliest event of the 21st century. Beijing’s ability to escape virtually any accountability—and the global media’s relative disinterest in the pandemic’s origins, cost, and China’s culpability—are equal parts confounding and infuriating.
“China’s response to SARS1 20 years ago was abysmal,” Dr. Metzl argued at the Heritage event. “China’s response to SARS2, 20 years later despite all these international processes, was even worse. And the reason…is there was no accountability for all the obfuscation in the first case. With 28 million people dead as a result of COVID-19 and tens of trillions of dollars in damages it simply unacceptable, and frankly unimaginable, that every stone should not be overturned examining what went wrong.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/23/2024 – 23:40
The Top 10 Countries By Gold Reserves In 2024 (& Who’s Adding Most)
The Top 10 Countries By Gold Reserves In 2024 (& Who’s Adding Most)
Central banks hold gold reserves due to their safety, liquidity, and return characteristics.
They are significant owners of gold, accounting for approximately a fifth of all the gold mined throughout history.
The country with the most gold is the United States, with 8,133 tonnes, which has a value of $579 billion.
The top ten countries in total gold reserves (tonnes) as of May 2024.
These figures come from the World Gold Council.
Amid escalating geopolitical tensions, increased sanctions, and discussions around de-dollarization, interest in gold purchases is rising.
But which countries are leading the charge in increasing their gold reserves?
This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks the top 10 countries by the change in gold reserves over the past decade (2013-2023).
The figures, measured in tonnes, were compiled by the World Gold Council.
Russia and China Lead in Gold Purchases
Central banks, particularly those of Russia and China, have bought gold at the fastest pace as countries seek to diversify their reserves away from the dollar.
Russia’s reserves jumped from 1,035 tonnes in 2013 to 2,333 in 2023. China’s reserves rose from 1,054 tonnes to 2,235 in 2023.
In third place in our ranking of central bank gold additions, Türkiye increased its reserves from 116 tonnes in 2013 to 540 tonnes in 2023.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/23/2024 – 23:15
RFK sacrificed his ambition to save America
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a stand for good, and against evil.