Browsed by
Category: Politics

Insider trading? Trump’s talk can move markets — and make some futures traders billions

Insider trading? Trump’s talk can move markets — and make some futures traders billions

William D Cohan writes: On Thursday, June 27, the S&P 500 index stood at about 2915; a week or so later, it was just below 3000, a gain of 84 points, or $4,200 per e-mini contract. Whoever bought the 420,000 e-minis on June 28 had made a handsome profit of nearly $1.8 billion. Traders in the Chicago pits have been watching these kinds of wagers with an increasing mixture of shock and awe since the start of the Trump presidency….

Read More Read More

Trump’s letter to Erdogan was ‘dumped in the trash’

Trump’s letter to Erdogan was ‘dumped in the trash’

Middle East Eye reports: A leaked letter written by US President Donald Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdogan warning his Turkish counterpart not to be a “fool” has sent shockwaves around Turkey due to its lack of protocol and seriousness. Dated 9 October, the day Erdogan launched an offensive in northeastern Syria against the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia, the letter aimed to make a deal between Turkey and the SDF and included an open economic sanctions threat. Yet this…

Read More Read More

Brexit deal may be a rare win-win for Boris Johnson

Brexit deal may be a rare win-win for Boris Johnson

The Guardian reports: Boris Johnson’s team were pasty-faced with exhaustion as they briefed journalists about the details of the Brexit deal in Brussels on Thursday afternoon – but the PM himself was unable to suppress a beam of triumph, as he glad-handed his fellow leaders. Just a week after Johnson’s meeting with the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, at a wedding venue on the Wirral, Downing Street hopes it has now engineered that rare thing in politics – a win-win…

Read More Read More

In the U.S., workers are now paying a higher tax rate than investors and owners

In the U.S., workers are now paying a higher tax rate than investors and owners

Christopher Ingraham writes: Most Americans have to work to earn a living. But the rich are different: They get most of their income not from labor but from what they own — companies, stocks, real estate and the like. These income-generating assets are what economists call capital. And because capital is heavily concentrated among the rich, the U.S. government taxed earnings derived from capital at a higher rate than earnings made through labor for the entirety of the 20th century….

Read More Read More

Putin is on a victory lap of the Middle East

Putin is on a victory lap of the Middle East

Matthew Chance writes: After years battling to assert the Kremlin’s power on the international stage, Vladimir Putin is now on what seems like a victory lap of the Middle East. On Tuesday, Kremlin-backed forces further stepped up to fill the vacuum left in northern Syria by the US. Russian military police units patrolled the contact line between Syrian and Turkish forces, while Putin-backed Bashar al-Assad troops gained full control of the town of Manbij and surrounding areas, according to a…

Read More Read More

Turkey’s Erdogan presses offensive in Syria boosted by a nationalist surge at home

Turkey’s Erdogan presses offensive in Syria boosted by a nationalist surge at home

The Washington Post reports: Turkey’s offensive in northern Syria has exposed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to a furious international backlash, with threats of arms embargoes, sanctions that could tank his vulnerable economy and daily, stinging condemnations from Western allies. But in Turkey, where Erdogan’s voice dominates, the military campaign has generated little public debate. Turkish celebrities and athletes have rallied behind the military. Opposition parties have been broadly supportive. Flag-waving Turks greet soldiers in border towns as they prepare for…

Read More Read More

Trump tax documents show possible indications of fraud

Trump tax documents show possible indications of fraud

ProPublica reports: Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax. For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building…

Read More Read More

Trump tried to use meeting with bereaved parents as ‘a stunt’; they said they’d been ambushed

Trump tried to use meeting with bereaved parents as ‘a stunt’; they said they’d been ambushed

CNN reports: The grieving parents of a British teenager say they are “extremely angry” and feel they have been “taken advantage of” after a highly choreographed White House encounter with US President Donald Trump — where he presented them with an unexpected offer to meet the woman involved in the crash that killed their son. The family says that Trump surprised them with the “bombshell” news that Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US diplomat stationed in the UK, was…

Read More Read More

Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon

Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon

Inside Climate News reports: The Trump Administration wants to allow logging in previously off-limit areas of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service announced Tuesday, a move that could turn one of the nation’s largest carbon sinks into a source of new climate-changing emissions. The old-growth temperate rainforest contains trees that are centuries old and play a crucial role in storing carbon. In a state that is synonymous with oil production, the Tongass National Forest represents the potential for…

Read More Read More

Trump has disgraced America and the soldiers who serve this country

Trump has disgraced America and the soldiers who serve this country

David Ignatius writes: At a gathering last Saturday night of military and intelligence veterans, one topic shrouded the room: President Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish fighters in Syria who had fought and died to help America destroy the Islamic State. “It’s a dagger to the heart to walk away from people who shed blood for us,” one former top CIA official who attended the black-tie dinner told me later. A retired four-star general who was there said the same thing:…

Read More Read More

Russians take over military bases that Americans abandoned

Russians take over military bases that Americans abandoned

The New York Times reports: Russia said on Tuesday that its military units were patrolling territory in northern Syria vacated by the Americans following the withdrawal ordered by President Trump, underscoring the sudden loss of United States influence in the eight-year-old Syria war. The Americans had until Monday maintained two military bases in the area, and Russia’s announcement signaled that Moscow, the Syrian government’s most important ally, was moving to fill a security void left by the withdrawal of both…

Read More Read More

Trump’s impeachment barricade has collapsed

Trump’s impeachment barricade has collapsed

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s impeachment blockade has collapsed. The president’s former top Russia adviser, Fiona Hill — the first White House official to cooperate in Democrats’ investigation of the Ukraine scandal — has detailed for lawmakers a trail of alleged corruption that extends from Kiev to the West Wing. In dramatic testimony on Monday, she roped in some of Trump’s top advisers as witnesses to the unfolding controversy. And on Tuesday, a senior State Department official, George Kent, appeared on…

Read More Read More

After Poland, no democracy is safe

After Poland, no democracy is safe

Yascha Mounk writes: Democracy was on the ballot yesterday in Poland. It suffered a stinging defeat that will have consequences far beyond the country’s borders. For decades, political scientists regarded Poland as the great success story of the transition from communism to democracy. In no other large country in Central or Eastern Europe had democratic institutions taken such a deep hold, was there such a raucous press, and had civil society flourished to such a remarkable extent. According to a…

Read More Read More

How Elizabeth Warren found her voice

How Elizabeth Warren found her voice

The Washington Post reports: Elizabeth Warren hadn’t stepped foot on the University of Houston Law Center campus in nearly 15 years, not since she’d left her first full-time teaching job there. But on a mid-September morning in 1997, Warren, by then a celebrated professor at Harvard Law School, returned to memorialize a man who had played a small but not insignificant role in her teaching career. The five years Warren spent in this sprawling Texas city were among the most…

Read More Read More

Trump helped Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Iran, and ISIS

Trump helped Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Iran, and ISIS

Mitch Prothero reports: Syrian President Bashar Assad — backed by his Russian patrons — moved on Monday to exploit the collapse of the US military presence in northeastern Syria by driving troops into the previously autonomous region managed by a Kurdish-dominated militia that had been under American protection for five years. The unlikely sequence of events began earlier this month after President Donald Trump ended US opposition to a Turkish offensive into Syria during a phone call with Turkish President…

Read More Read More

Kurds targeted in Turkish attack include thousands of female fighters who battled ISIS

Kurds targeted in Turkish attack include thousands of female fighters who battled ISIS

By Haidar Khezri, University of Central Florida Kurdish fighters under attack by Turkey have described President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria as a “stab in the back.” Since bombing began on Oct. 9, Turkish military operations against the Syrian Democratic Forces in northern Syria, Washington’s staunchest and most effective allies in the war against the Islamic State, has killed at least 11 civilians and an unconfirmed number of Kurdish fighters, with estimates ranging from dozens…

Read More Read More