(BREITBART) — Google will reportedly pay between $150 and $200 million to resolve a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into YouTube regarding its potential violation of a children’s privacy law, according to a report.
A Politico report detailed that the agency voted 3-2 along party lines to settle with Google. The settlement will then go to the Department of Justice (DOJ) as part of its review process.
The FTC’s settlement with Google serves as the latest move against big tech. The agency fined Facebook $5 billion to resolve its probe over its Cambridge Analytica scandal, which violated millions of Americans’ privacy.
You can believe that we will somehow beat the odds this time if you want, but history is completely against you. One of the biggest reasons why there is so much anxiety on Wall Street right now is because of how the yield curve is behaving. We have seen yield curve inversions before each of the last seven U.S. recessions, and now it has happened again. Perhaps this helps to explain why insiders are dumping stocks right now as if there will be no tomorrow. If you were looking for a giant waving red flag to tell you that it is time to run for the exits, it doesn’t get much better than this. This week, we watched the yield curve do something that it hasn’t done in 12 years…
The spread between the 10-year Treasury yield and the 2-year rate fell to negative 5 basis points, its lowest level since 2007. This is called a yield curve inversion. Experts fear it because in the past it has preceded recessionary periods. The 3-month Treasury bill rate also traded higher than the 30-year bond yield.
“The primary thing is yields are going down and going down with some acceleration,” said Art Cashin, the director of floor operations at UBS.
In addition, the spread between 3 month Treasury bonds and 10 year Treasury bonds just hit negative 50 basis points. We haven’t seen that happen since March 2007.
Source: Bloomberg
And as David Rosenberg has noted, when the spread between 3 month Treasury bonds and 10 year Treasury bonds goes negative for at least three months, we have a recession 100% of the time…
We now have had three months of a 3-mo/10-yr yield curve inversion. The track record this has had in predicting recessions: 100%.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that this indicator could be proven wrong this time.
But do you really want to bet against an indicator with a track record of 100% accuracy?
Plus, we have a trade war with China to deal with this time around. Hopeful comments from President Trump briefly bolstered the markets on Monday, but over in China prominent voices continue to pour cold water on the notion that a deal will happen any time soon. Here is an example from Tuesday…
Sentiment was also dampened after Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times in China, tweeted that China is “putting so much emphasis on trade talks,” adding that “it’s more and more difficult for the US to press China to make concessions” as China’s economy becomes increasingly driven by its domestic growth. China announced measures aimed at boosting consumption, including potentially removing car-buying restrictions.
Unless one side chooses to fold like a 20 dollar suit, there isn’t going to be a resolution to this trade war any time in the near future, and that is going to mean a tremendous amount of pain for the U.S., China and the entire global economy.
Another indication that things are about to get bad is the fact that investors are starting to flock to precious metals.
Gold and silver are considered to be “safe haven assets” during a financial crisis, and right now gold and silver are both surging…
Gold prices are moderately higher in early U.S. trading, while the silver market is again sharply higher and hit another two-year high overnight. Bullish technical postures in both metals continue to invite the chart-based buyers to climb on board the long side. A weaker U.S. dollar index is also supportive to the precious metals markets today. December gold futures were last up $4.60 an ounce at 1,541.90. December Comex silver prices were last up $0.295 at $18.075 an ounce.
But for most hard working Americans, it is going to be far more important to build up an emergency fund as we head deeper into this new crisis, and this is something that I have written about repeatedly. The reason why so many Americans lost their homes during the last recession was because they were living right on the edge financially. It is imperative that you have a financial cushion so that you can pay your basic expenses when things start getting really hard.
Unfortunately, it is often young people that get the hardest during an economic downturn, and this is something that Annie Lowrey discussed in her most recent article…
Recessions are never good for anyone. A sputtering economy means miserable financial, emotional, and physical-health consequences for everyone from infants to retirees. But the next one—if it happens, when it starts happening — stands to hit this much-maligned generation particularly hard. For adults between the ages of 22 and 38, after all, the last recession never really ended.
Millennials got bodied in the downturn, have struggled in the recovery, and are now left more vulnerable than other, older age cohorts. As they pitch toward middle age, they are failing to make it to the middle class, and are likely to be the first generation in modern economic history to end up worse off than their parents. The next downturn might make sure of it, stalling their careers and sucking away their wages right as the millennials enter their prime earning years.
I understand that a lot of people may not want to hear this, but every economic indicator is telling us that a U.S. recession is coming, and many experts believe that it will be far worse than the last one.
If you prepare in advance for what is coming, that is going to help to take fear out of the equation. Because when things get really crazy, it is those that don’t understand what is happening that are going to give in to fear, depression and despair.
We have not seen an economic environment like this in a decade, and there is no reason to believe that a miracle is going to come along and rescue us from the storm that is now looming above us.
The months ahead promise to be quite “interesting”, and not in a good way.
Enlarge / Paul Martin, then the nominee for Inspector General for NASA, answers questions during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in 2009. (credit: NASA)
On Tuesday, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin wrote a rather extraordinary letter to the US senators who determine the budget for the space agency. In effect, the independent NASA official asked Congress to kindly not meddle in decisions that concern actual rocket science.
The letter addressed which rocket NASA should use to launch its multibillion dollar mission to explore Jupiter's Moon Europa, an intriguing ice-encrusted world that likely harbors a vast ocean beneath the surface. NASA is readying a spacecraft, called the Europa Clipper, for a launch to the Jupiter system to meet a 2023 launch window.
Congress, in appropriations legislation, has for several years mandated that the space agency launch the Clipper mission on the Space Launch System rocket—the large, powerful, and very costly heavy-lift rocket that has earned the sobriquet Senate Launch System because its design and construction was mandated by senators nearly a decade ago. However, the rocket remains under development and probably will not fly for the first time until mid- or late 2021 at the earliest. And NASA has said that if it is to have any chance of landing humans on the Moon by 2024, the goal set by US Vice President Mike Pence, it must have the first three SLS rocket launches for the Artemis Moon program.
Fox News made the same grievous error that MSNBC did when it displayed a blue “verified” checkmark in a graphic depicting the unverified Twitter account of Professor David Karpf, the man who composed the “bedbug” tweet that sent Bret Stephensoff the deep end.
You may recall that a few weeks ago, blogs and Twitter users freaked out because MSNBC used a little “verified” checkmark in an onscreen graphic depicting a tweet from Media Matters researcher Bobby Lewis, whose Twitter account is not verified.
Well, on Wednesday morning’s edition of America’s Newsroom, Fox News did the exact same thing. In a segment on the implosion of New York Times writer Bret Stephens over being called a metaphorical “bedbug,” the network displayed a graphic of the original tweet, but with a twist: suddenly, “@davekarpf” had a verified blue Twitter checkmark!
The graphic remained onscreen for five full seconds, but we’ve slowed it down and enhanced it as well, just to be sure you don’t miss it.
We’ve also saved screenshots of the graphic in multiple resolutions, just in case anyone tries to scrub the evidence.
But as Mediaite’s Caleb Howe pointed out in our original story on the outrage over MSNBC’s misstep, this wasn’t a case of altering a photo of a tweet, it was a network-generated graphic of a tweet, and thus in both cases could likely have been an oversight.
Even if Fox News — or MSNBC — had deliberately added the blue check, however, it’s not like they were conferring legitimacy to some anonymous rando on Twitter. In both cases, the unverified Twitter accounts belonged to people whose identities are well-known and confirmed.
Maybe each network should fashion its own makeshift verification icon to avoid these scorching-hot controversies in the future. Perhaps a fox or a peacock making a “thumbs-up” gesture.
Still, cable news critics are known for their consistency, so the same people who complained about MSNBC will no doubt do the same for Fox News. Let’s all hold our breath.
New York City Mayor and 15th-ranked Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio professed his hatred last month for the "charter school movement," "high-stakes testing," and other educational policies bequeathed to him by his reform-friendly predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. Beginning Tuesday, de Blasio, who enjoys sweeping control over his city's school system, has a golden opportunity to act upon his prejudice.
The mayor's hand-picked School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG) came out yesterday with a detailed set of recommendations to "desegregate" New York's public schools. Among the proposals: Phase out most gifted and talented programs and the tests upon which they are based, eliminate almost all criteria having to do with student performance (for instance, no more auditions for performing arts schools), and radically overhaul admissions policies so that "all schools represent the socioeconomic and racial diversity of their community school district within the next three years, and by their borough in the first five years…[and] the city as a whole" within 10.
That last sweeping item in particular illustrates the overarching goal that dominates discussion of New York's public education system (in which both of my daughters are enrolled). The report, consistent with the advisory group's name and leadership (the three co-chairs are Hispanic Federation President José Calderón, NAACP New York State Conference President Hazel Dukes, and Maya Wiley, senior vice president for social justice at the New School), is fundamentally mobilized around the issue of demographic composition, rather than the problem of school quality.
The most telling statistics concern not the vast achievement gap between, say, charter schools and traditional public institutions among otherwise comparable populations of poor and minority kids, but rather the fact that whites and Asians disproportionately make it through most school "screens," whether they be tests that can be prepped for, or simple attendance criteria that can (with effort) be met.
"The current 'Screened' and Gifted and Talented programs…segregate students by race and socioeconomic status," the report concludes. "Today they have become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together…These programs segregate students by race, class, abilities and language and perpetuate stereotypes about student potential and achievement."
The New York Department of Education, with 1.1 million students (including 123,000 serviced by charters), is the country's largest. It contains all sorts of anomalies, and the gifted and talented emphasis—which kids can start testing for at age four—is definitely one. According to The New York Times, "Last year, New York's elementary school gifted classes enrolled about 16,000 students and were nearly 75 percent white and Asian." This is in a system whose overall ethnic composition is 41 percent Latino, 26 percent black, 16 percent Asian, and 15 percent white, with 73 percent of kids defined as living in poverty. The city's political class has been on its heels ever since an influential 2014 report from University of California, Los Angeles' Civil Rights Project concluded that Gotham is "home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation."
Striving for uniform demographics among schools even within a sub-district, let alone a full district—or borough, or city—requires mandating that more students travel further distances away from neighborhoods that have different racial or socioeconomic concentration than the average. In a city full of ethnic clusters and housing projects, that's basically all of them.
An example: At the elementary school my eldest daughter just graduated from, just 12 percent of the student population either qualifies for free or reduced-price student lunch, lives in temporary housing, or is learning English as a second language. (These proxies for poverty and disadvantage frequently overlap with racial categories, and are routinely—if sloppily—used to measure racial composition.) The combined rate of the seven schools in our area is more like 30 percent, ranging from a low of 11 percent to a high of 100.
To recalibrate the percentage of disadvantaged kids at each sub-district school to between 25 and 35, as is the current goal of the re-zoning process, will require many more 5-year-olds having to travel further than walking distance to kindergarten, in a dense swath of South Brooklyn. When I pointed out at a Community Education Council meeting in June that such increases in travel hassle will necessarily lead to "a lot of unhappy parents," a woman bearing a strong resemblance to Elizabeth Warren snapped back at me: "You mean a lot of unhappy white parents!"
Which is not at all what I meant, though it is representative of the dialogue accompanying these changes—including and especially from district officials themselves.
"I can't tell you how many times I hear in this discussion where there's an equation [of] diversity and a lowering of academic standards," Richard Carranza, New York City's school chancellor, said at a contentious public meeting in May. "I will call that racist every time I hear it…So if you don't want me to call you on it, don't say it." (Carranza is currently being sued for $90 million by three fired ex-administrators who allege his actions stemmed from anti-white bias, litigation that a de Blasio spokeswoman characterized as a "racially charged smear campaign.")
In its brief advocating the discontinuation of specialized schooling, the SDAG cast the very notion of gifted and talented programs as at least abetting overt acts of institutional racism.
"While Brown vs. Board of Education mandated school integration in 1954, gifted programs were used as a method of avoiding required integration," the report stated. "A wave of new gifted programs were founded in the 1970s…This wave also coincided with a number of national resegregation efforts, which used anti-school busing legislation and other tactics to clandestinely reinstitute separated schools."
A layman might read such a formulation as suggesting that gifted and talented programs are a tool for keeping colored people out. In fact, as adopted in New York City over the past three decades, they were an attempt to bring the middle and upper-middle classes back into a public system that they had long since abandoned. And by that standard, the trend was unquestionably a success: School "uptake"—the percentage of resident K-8 kids enrolled in government-run educational institutions—jumped from 67 percent in 2000 to 76 percent in 2010.
But there are different standards in 2019.
As subscribers to The New York Times have come to learn, white and Asian parents are problematic for leaving the public school system (or the city as a whole), but they're also problematic for staying in. "If a substantial number of those families leave the system," noted Times reporter Eliza Shapiro, "it would be even more difficult to achieve integration." And yet:
As the city has tried for decades to improve its underperforming schools, it has long relied on accelerated academic offerings and screened schools, including the specialized high schools, to entice white families to stay in public schools.
Eagle-eyed observers may note a crucial gap in the desegregationists' story—did the old system hurt or help students, and will the proposed new system improve on that? Here, de Blasio's SDAG engages in a lot of "yeah, but"-ing.
"Schools with exclusionary screens continually outperform the city mean for academic achievement and graduation rate," the report acknowledges, but that's "due to their selection policies." Sure, "many of these schools have high graduation rates and/or high standardized test scores," but "these statistics are not necessarily reflective of the quality of the school since many of these schools are populated by students who are considered 'high achieving.'"
What about those Asian immigrants who manage to bust ass and have their children succeed? "There are low-income communities, especially in New York City, where families make significant sacrifices to fund test prep and children spend large amounts of time preparing and sacrificing other developmentally appropriate activities to gain admission and do so at an unnecessary cost. This is not equitable even if it is effective for some." (Emphasis mine.)
Conclusion: "Schools that use exclusionary admission models must be reformed if their enrollment policies continue to enact inequity."
Will de Blasio follow the suggestions of his hand-picked panel? It's not clear, though the mayor did adopt 62 of the SDAG's previous slate of 67 diversity recommendations. Regardless, we can see which way the wind is blowing in New York, in other heavily Democratic polities, and maybe in a district near you: Inequality of outcome will be treated as equivalent to inequality of opportunity. Demographic leveling will be prioritized more than improving school quality for all kids.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will limit parliament's ability to derail his Brexit plan by cutting the amount of time it will sit between now and EU exit day on Oct. 31, infuriating opponents who urged Queen Elizabeth to intervene.
Growing up in the eighties, the VMAs were fantastic. The stars were cool and fun and naughty and spectacular to look at. Now they’re all fuddy-duddy, pious, stick-in-the-mud
Epstein's own defense team doesn't buy the suicide narrative, apparently, as one of his lawyers on Tuesday voiced deep skepticism that he hanged himself while addressing a final hearing in a Manhattan US District Court on Tuesday, which was held to formally dismiss the charges as is typical when the accused is deceased, but also to still allow testimony of some of the victims.
Defense lawyer Reid Weingarten told Judge Richard Berman during the hearing that Epstein's injuries are“far more consistent with assault”than suicide, especially given the broken bones in his neck discovered during the autopsy after he was found dead in his jail cell on Aug. 10. This after it was previously revealed that Epstein's defense attorneys had successfully lobbied for him to be taken off suicide watch on July 29, about a week before he was found dead in his cell, according to ABC News.
"Weingarten cited the defense’s own medical sources. Broken bones were found in Epstein’s neck during an autopsy after he died Aug. 10," reports CNBC. "Such fractures are somewhat more common in cases of strangulation than in hanging."
Weingarten explained to the judge that Epstein didn't at all appear suicidal during discussions and interactions the evening before his apparent early morning hours death. “We did not see a despairing, despondent, suicidal person,” the lawyer said.
Tuesday's proceedings were held to allow about 20 women, many choosing to remain anonymous during testimony, to tell the court and the world what happened to them at the hands of the wealthy sex predator and human trafficker.
Judge Berman wrote of the hearing, "The Court believes that where, as here, a defendant has died before any judgment has been entered against him, the public may still have an informational interest in the process by which the prosecutor seeks dismissal of an indictment."
Attorney David Boies who represents several of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex abuse victims, including
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, (pictured next to him on the left) walks into court for a special hearing Tuesday. @jkbjournalist @MiamiHerald #PerversionOfJusticepic.twitter.com/nJnMpKkkP3
But ironically, this week's District Court hearing marked the close of the federal criminal case, given Epstein's "conveniently-timed" death. Reports CNBC:
Another Epstein lawyer, Martin Weinberg, told Berman that the defense team had prepared a “significant” motion to dismiss the case, and that the lawyers were not approaching the case with a “futile, defeatist attitude.”
Weingarten said Berman had a “pivotal role to find out what happened.”
“We want the court to help us find out what happened,” Weingarten said.
“We’re skeptical of the certitude” of the finding of suicide by hanging by the New York City medical examiner, the lawyer said.
There are “significant doubts” regarding “the conclusion of suicide,” Weingarten said.
Federal prosecutor Maurene Comey told the judge that Epstein's death is already subject of “an ongoing and active grand jury investigation.” Comey explained, “It is not the purview, respectfully, of the court to conduct an investigation into uncharged matters.”
But Tuesday's proceedings and formal dismissal of the case on the grounds that the accused is deceased doesn't necessarily mark an end of the road "nothing to see here" point in the saga, given a number of Epstein's accusers have filed significant lawsuits against his estate, to say nothing of potential cases against his associates and enablers.
Former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh announced on Sunday that he will run for president as a Republican, challenging President Trump in next year's GOP primary race.
"I’m running because he’s unfit," Walsh told ABC's "This Week," adding "Somebody needs to step up."
Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh will primary Trump: "I'm going to run for president."
"No surprise: We've got a guy in the White House who is unfit, completely unfit to be president and it stuns me that nobody stepped up."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/w5e5YbSb5A
Of course, that's not all Walsh has tweeted - as the nevertrumper Bill Kristol's "chosen one" has called former president Obama a foreign-born Muslim as recently as 2015.
While Walsh has apologized over his past comments about Islam, The Federalist Papers notes that he "has acknowledged there’s little chance his candidacy will result in Trump losing the party nomination, and he is instead focused on offering GOP voters an alternative vision for the party."
While he has argued that he plans to make the moral case for his candidacy, the former Tea Party congressman has a history filled with incendiary and controversial statements ranging from using racist slurs on Twitter to promoting falsehoods around former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and that he’s Muslim.
Walsh only served one term in Congress, but his candidacy does perhaps bring a more current figure from conservative circles into the long-shot picture compared to Weld, who last held public office over 20 years ago. Walsh’s nationally syndicated radio show and large online following arguably kept him more relevant. -The Federalist Papers
And how did Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh respond to Walsh's announcement?
