I would bet that they are a lot closer to the bomb than anyone things, and may actually already have one. Maybe all the North Koreans tests aren’t theirs — what if they are also testing Iranian weapons?
I’m sure there are American companies that make cement.
If North Korea starts WW III that would be a shame directly tied to Madeleine Albright and the William Clinton administration.
Good move!
In a report demonstrating the collapse in diplomatic relations between the current and previous president, the WSJ wrote overnight that rapport between Barack Obama and Donald Trump has “unraveled” with Trump “convinced that Mr. Obama is undermining his nascent administration” while Obama is “furious” over Trump tweets accusing him of illegal wiretapping. The WSJ notes that after shaking hands on Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, the two presidents haven’t spoken since, “although Trump tried to call Obama to thank him for the traditional letter that one president leaves for his successor in the Oval Office.” The reason: Obama was traveling at the time and the two never connected.
As an amusing aside, the WSJ adds that the rift is distancing Mr. Trump from a former two-term president “who had offered to give private advice and counsel as the onetime businessman settles into his first job in public office.” Of course, if Trump is correct and Obama did in fact order a wiretap of the Trump Tower, Obama was actively seeking to impair the Trump campaign and chances for presidency, so that statement may seem a little suspect in retrospect.
Accuracy of the report notwithstanding, it is obvious that the bad blood between the two people has grown to unprecedented levels: Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the open friction has upended tradition, an “almost unwritten rule that you treat your predecessor with a degree of grace and decorum.”
“There are these kinds of things that have happened in the past, but nothing to the degree where a sitting president would charge his predecessor with a felony,” Mr. Brinkley said. “It creates a feeling of instability in the United States.”
Whether real or imagine, Trump and other White House officials believe that Obama loyalists sprinkled throughout the federal bureaucracy are behind leaks that are damaging his personnel, White House officials said. A spokesman for Mr. Obama wouldn’t comment to the WSJ on the claim. In fact, as NewsMax CEO Christopher Ruddy, a friend of Mr. Trump who sees him on weekends at the president’s Mar-a-Lago, said in an interview: “From what I’m hearing, Trump’s people think Obama is at war with them.”
“This president has been under siege since Day One from both the press and Obama loyalists and he’s reacting to it,” Mr. Ruddy said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Obama loyalists inside the administration and outside are giving Donald Trump a lot of grief and a lot of problems.”
As is well-known by now, the animosity between Trump and Obama hit a climax last weekend, when Trump responded to recent allegations of ties to Russia by tweeting “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Keeping a low profile in post-presidency, Obama – who is currently writing a book for which he will receive tens of millions in proceeds – had decided he wouldn’t respond to every intemperate Trump tweet, an aide said. “But he was livid over the accusation that he bugged the Republican campaign offices, believing that Mr. Trump was questioning both the integrity of the office of the president and Mr. Obama himself, people familiar with his thinking said.”
Ironically, as the WSJ adds, Obama had been critical of leaks when he was president, specifically those related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the email use of Mrs. Clinton, his former secretary of state. “He was very quick to condemn it then and obviously his silence now is notable,” one White House official said Tuesday. Obama, in an interview with the mobile news outlet NowThis News just days before the November election, said that when it comes to investigations “we don’t operate on innuendo, we don’t operate on incomplete information, we don’t operate on leaks—we operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
For now, Trump’s attacks on Obama continue, first responding to a Fox News report yesterday when he claimed incorrectly that a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees who returned to the battlefield were released under Mr. Obama’s watch (most were released under President Bush), followed by calling Obamacare “a total disaster” and said Mr. Obama had allowed Russia to grow “stronger and stronger” over eight years in office.
So far, Obama and his spokesman have not responded to those tweets; it is unclear how long the former president can hold his silence.
Following January’s surge in employment (biggest gain in 7 months), February’s ADP print exploded higher to 298k (5 sigma above all expectations). This is the third biggest monthly employment gain of the expansion. It appears the ‘Trump Effect’ is the biggest driver as the ADP payroll surge was mostly due to a record surge in employment for goods-producing industries.
Private sector employment surged by 298,000 for the month, with goods producers adding 106,000. Construction jobs swelled by 66,000 and manufacturing added 32,000.
3rd best month of the recovery:
This is 5 standard deviations above the 187k expectation….
Led by a record surge in goods-producing jobs…
The details:
“Confidence is playing a large role,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told CNBC. “Businesses are anticipating a lot of good stuff — tax cuts, less regulation. They are hiring more aggressively.”
March rate-hike odds were 98% going into ADP and we suspect it will uptick from here.
“February proved to be an incredibly strong month for employment with increases we have not seen in years,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Gains were driven by a surge in the goods sector, while we also saw the information industry experience a notable increase.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said, “February was a very good month for workers. Powering job growth were the construction, mining and manufacturing industries. Unseasonably mild winter weather undoubtedly played a role. But near record high job openings and record low layoffs underpin the entire job market.”
Some more visual details:
Change in Nonfarm Private Employment
Change in Total Nonfarm Private Employment
Change in Total Nonfarm Private Employment by Company Size
Full Breakdown:
The EU is in serious trouble on all fronts. They are lashing out trying to maintain the supremacy of Brussels to dictate to the rest of Europe. Now the Polish MP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski has been threatened with expulsion for opposing the European Council President Donald Tusk, who is a believer in federalizing Europe by force. The EU dream is simply not working, for it was designed with arrogance and the objective to federalize Europe, which they denied at the outset. They assumed the people were too stupid to know what was best for them so they would do it covertly by dictatorship.
The dream of a federalized Europe was to prevent European internal war. It has had the exact opposite effect. This is exposing the centuries of resentment and differences. The EU should have remained as a simple economic trade cooperation entity. This concept of federalizing Europe into a single government to stop war has been a total failure. If Brussels does not stop this insanity, Europe will move once again into internal war.
In Wilbur Ross’ first public announcement, the former hedge fund manger and current Trump commerce secretary announced that China’s telecommunications giant ZTE has agreed to pay a total of $1.2 billion in penalties and plead guilty to violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, selling US technology to Tehran, and obstructing a federal investigation, ending a five-year probe that has raised trade tensions between the U.S. and China. The penalty was among the largest ever in a sanctions case.
ZTE was accused that over a six-year-long period, it planned to obtain technology products from the U.S., incorporate them into ZTE equipment and ultimately ship the equipment to Iran. The company agree to settle because as the WSJ adds, it avoided a more-devastating supply cutoff of U.S. components, which the Commerce Department slapped on ZTE in March 2016 and immediately suspended as a settlement was negotiated. Without key components such as Qualcomm processors for its smartphones, ZTE’s ability to produce some of its major products could have been crippled in a matter of months, putting it at the risk of bankruptcy.
The Chinese telecom giant will pay an initial fine of $892 million as part of the settlement, and will plead guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, among other charges, in the agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury and Department of Justice.
“The highest levels of management within the company approved the scheme,” and the company “repeatedly lied to and misled federal investigators,” said Mary McCord, who runs the Justice Department’s national security division.
The Commerce Department investigation followed reports by Reuters in 2012 that ZTE had signed contracts to ship millions of dollars worth of hardware and software from some of the best-known U.S. technology companies to Iran’s largest telecoms carrier.
“ZTE acknowledges the mistakes it made, takes responsibility for them, and remains committed to positive change in the company,” ZTE Chairman and Chief Executive Zhao Xianming said on Tuesday in a statement. An agreement caps a year of uncertainty for the Shenzhen-based company, which in March 2016 was placed on a list of entities that U.S. suppliers could not work with without a license. ZTE acted contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, the Commerce Department said at the time.
Commerce will recommend that ZTE be removed from that list if the company lives up to its deal and a court approves its agreement with the Justice Department.
According to Reuters, ZTE said it has agreed to an additional penalty of $300 million to a division of the Commerce Department that will be suspended during a seven-year term on the condition that the company complies with requirements in the agreement. The settlement includes $101 million to settle potential civil liability for Iran sanction violations. The action marks the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s largest settlement to date with a non-financial entity.
One of the world’s biggest telecommunications gear makers and the No. 4 smartphone vendor in the United States, ZTE sells handset devices to U.S. mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile US and Sprint. It relies on U.S. companies including Qualcomm, Microsoft and Intel for components.
Many people have claimed that the Ukrainian Revolution was all orchestrated by the CIA. That claim comes from the conspiracy side of people who comment without any direct knowledge. I have had friend there. One had the courage to go up to a Russian solider and thank them for protecting them and they allowed the person to take a picture with them. I published that as proof of Russian troops had entered Ukraine well before it was publicly known. (I cropped the photo to remove my source).
While the CIA began to intervene into the politics picking who they wanted for the new government, the uprising was genuine and came from the people. I was reporting in December 2013 that the uprising was starting and it was over corruption. That corruption continues and now the official who is in effect like the head of the IRS is hiding in court and the judges do not charge him because they are all part of the same corruption. Under the law, if he is not charged within 72 hours, he must be released. The people have once again stormed the courthouse and have barricaded it to prevent him from leaving.
His wealth is massive and it is assumed to have been gathered by bribes. The people of Ukraine rose up against the corruption and the West usurped the government for political purposes under Obama and Joe Biden’s son was even put in charge of energy there. The corruption continued and the Obama Administration sought to usurp the rights of the Ukrainian people to resurrect the cold war with Russia. So we are witnessing that the PEOPLE of Ukraine are still not free and the resentment remains as an open sore.
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
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