René Magritte Memory of a journey 1955
Axios reported yesterday that Rod Rosenstein was on his way to the White House to resign. Zero Hedge ran with the story. It turned out to be false. Now Zero Hedge has no less than 5 updates to the story. It keeps changing. But are you now going to go to Axios for your news?
• Axios Issues Critical “Clarification” To Rosenstein Resignation Report (ZH)
Update 5: Jonathan Swan, the Axios reporter who initially broke the news this morning that Rod Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” and subsequently triggered a drop in the Dow that erased billions of dollars in value, has issued an important “clarification” that – as fate would have it – changes the story from a major news-cycle-dominating revelation to a barely noteworthy tidbit. After sparring with Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman, who suggested that Swan “got played” by a White House insider looking to distract from the second Kavanaugh revelation, Swan has admitted that the phrasing of his initial report was a little off.
Instead of reporting that Rosenstein had “verbally resigned”, Swan said he meant to say that Rosenstein had verbally offered his resignation to Chief of Staff John Kelly. “Note for readers: I regret the way I wrote this morning’s version of the story. By saying Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” to Kelly rather than “offered his resignation,” I conveyed a certainty that this fluid situation didn’t deserve. It’s an important nuance, and I regret the wording.”
We’re sure all of those algos that sold on the headline also “regret” their error, too.
Update 4: Speaking to reporters at the United Nations, President Trump finally commented on the political event du jour, saying he’s looking forward to meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday to discuss his future and “determining what’s going on”, after Axios reported earlier that Rosenstein told Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly that he was resigning. “We’ll be determining what’s going on,” Trump told reporters at the United Nations on Monday. “We want to have transparency, we want to have openness and I’m looking forward to meeting with Rod at that time.” Trump didn’t answer a question about what may happen to Rosenstein. “I spoke with Rod today and we’re going to have a meeting on Thursday when I get back to the White House,” he said.
Another gone out of hand tale. Kavanaugh’s claim is bold. If he did have sex while in school, that should be easy to prove.
• Kavanaugh: “I’m Not Going Anywhere”… And I Was A Virgin In High School (ZH)
Breaking his public silence for first time since the hearings last month, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, appeared alongside his wife, on Fox News Channel’s “The Story with Martha MacCallum” tonight to address the sexual misconduct allegations that have put his confirmation at risk of unraveling. As we detailed earlier, Brett Kavanaugh defied his accusers on Monday when he said, in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), that he will “not be intimidated into withdrawing” his Supreme Court nomination and staunchly denied the accusations, calling them a “grotesque and obvious character assassination” and “a coordinated effort” to drive him out on the nomination.
Ahead of tonight’s interview, President Trump tweeted about the interview and reiterated that “this is an outstanding family who must be treated fairly!” And in tonight’s first interview since the allegation, Kavanaugh began assertively, saying: “I’m not going anywhere… “I want a fair process where I can defend my integrity, and I know I’m telling the truth,” the judge said. “I know my lifelong record and I’m not going to let false accusations drive me out of this process… I have faith in God and I have faith in the fairness of the American people.” In the interview, Kavanaugh emphatically denied Ford’s claim against him, telling McCallum that he was a virgin through high school and for “many years after.” “I did not have sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter. The girls from the schools I went to and I were friends.”
[..] Kavanaugh added that he was “not questioning and have not questioned that perhaps Dr. Ford at some point in her life was sexually assaulted by someone at some place but what I know is I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone.” Additionally, Judge Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, spoke publicly for the first time about the allegations that her husband is facing, and how their two daughters are dealing with the accusations against their father. “It’s very difficult to have these conversations with your children, which we’ve had to have.” “They know Brett and they know the truth and we told them at the very beginning of this process that this will be not fun sometimes, just remember, you know your dad.”
“I would take the Ramirez accusation as tantamount to a declaration of war by the Resistance. And as the old saying goes, all’s fair in love and war.”
The part that I find interesting in the New Deborah Ramirez accusation is this: “After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.” Six days of meditation, prayer, memory-wracking, attorney-prompting, and — no doubt — earnest and heartfelt coaching by Resistance memory-recovery shamans, overcame the effects of 35 years and, say, seven Jello-shots to retrieve the details of that long-ago encounter.
(No one mentioned bong-hits, at least not yet, but how could there not have been, on top of the drinking games?) But the real gold in the story comes in this revelation: “Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic, in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married.” Really? Maybe she should have gone to the weekly meeting of the Yale Freshman Women’s Math and Physics Circle instead of an apparently mostly male dorm party convened for the purpose of getting shitfaced drunk with the greatest possible efficiency. Did she not know what was going on there? Was she forced to stick around? Did the boys make her down those shots?
Now that all American womanhood has been faced, shall we say, with the image of the looming universal horrifying penis, all bets on the Kavanaugh nomination are off. But the gambit does raise the possibility that it will be answered by some rough justice from the conservative side of the field. It will be interesting to see in the weeks and months ahead how many Democratic house and senate members will be revealed as would-be rapists and sluts. I can’t imagine that none of them have secrets to hide. In fact, I would take the Ramirez accusation as tantamount to a declaration of war by the Resistance. And as the old saying goes, all’s fair in love and war.
With all the domestic squabbles, we’d almost forget China.
• China Says US Putting ‘Knife To Its Neck’, Hard To Proceed On Trade (R.)
A senior Chinese official said on Tuesday it is difficult to proceed with trade talks with the United States while Washington is putting “a knife to China’s neck”, a day after both sides heaped fresh tariffs on each other’s goods. When the talks can restart would depend on the “will” of the United States, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said at a news conference in Beijing.U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and retaliatory taxes by Beijing on $60 billion worth of U.S. products including liquefied natural gas (LNG) kicked in on Monday, unnerving global financial markets.
“Now that the United States has adopted such a huge trade restriction measure … how can the negotiations proceed? It’s not an equal negotiation,” Wang said, stressing the United States has abandoned its mutual understanding with China. China’s top diplomat also told business people at a meeting in New York that talks could not take place against the backdrop of “threats and pressure”, the Foreign Ministry said. Certain forces in the United States have been making groundless criticisms against China about trade and security issues, which has poisoned the atmosphere for Sino-U.S. ties and is highly irresponsible, State Councillor Wang Yi was quoted as saying, without naming anyone.
Only the defamation lawsuit. There’s much more to come.
• US Judge Suggests He May Dismiss Stormy Daniels Lawsuit Against Trump (R.)
President Donald Trump likely had a free-speech right to make a Twitter comment disputing allegations by adult film actress Stormy Daniels, a federal judge said on Monday, indicating he was inclined to dismiss her defamation lawsuit against Trump. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford and who has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, sued the president for defamation in April in federal court over the tweet. The lawsuit centers on Daniels’ assertion that a man approached her in 2011 in a Las Vegas parking lot and made a veiled threat after she agreed to talk about her alleged encounter with Trump to In Touch magazine.
Soon after Daniels released a sketch of the man she said threatened her, Trump, who has denied having an affair with Daniels, disputed her account on Twitter, saying: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” Daniels’ attorneys said the tweet portrayed her as a liar, but attorneys for Trump asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to dismiss the defamation lawsuit. “The question is whether the tweet by the president is protected communication or political hyperbole and non-defamatory on its face,” U.S. District Judge James Otero said at a hearing on Monday.
Otero cited certain protections from defamation Trump would have under the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of free-speech rights. “He’s a public official, he’s president of the United States, so it doesn’t get much higher than that,” Otero said. “It’s free speech by a public official on a matter of public concern.” Otero stopped short of issuing a formal ruling on the request to dismiss the lawsuit.
For better or for worse, tthe single market is a complex thing.
• UK-EU Flights To Be Grounded In Case Of No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)
Flights will be grounded if Britain crashes out of the EU next March unless an emergency aviation deal can be struck, the government has admitted. The latest batch of advice papers also warned food producers that pre-packaged products “would no longer be valid for the EU market”, without a separate EU business address. Ministers also told motorists that they would need to apply for a green card as proof of third party motor insurance cover when driving in the EU. And pet owners who want to take their dogs and cats abroad would face the significant inconvenience of having to register three months in advance.
Meanwhile, UK hauliers were warned they could be banned from the continent, because they could “no longer rely on automatic recognition by the EU of UK-issued community licences”. The Food and Drink Federation reacted with horror to the technical notices, warning they “lay bare the grisly prospect of a no-deal Brexit”. It urged Theresa May to stop “lecturing the EU” and seek to delay Brexit, by extending the Article 50 deadline, if it could not secure a withdrawal deal “imminently”. Layla Moran, a Liberal Democrat supporter of the anti-Brexit Best for Britain, said the threat to flights was “a bureaucratic nightmare and a farce”.
They’ve had two years to have unity on this. They’re as bad as the other side.
• Labour Confirms Remain Can Be Party’s Choice In New Brexit Referendum (Ind.)
Labour is embroiled in a row over the party’s approach to a Final Say Brexit referendum, following a split between two of the shadow cabinet’s most senior figures. Sir Keir Starmer, the party’s Brexit spokesman, was forced to confirm that remaining in the EU will be a potential option in a future referendum backed by Labour after John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, ruled the idea out. Amid a backlash Mr McDonnell rowed back on his comments, and later conceded at a meeting at the party’s conference in Liverpool that Labour could still back a new vote that would see the party stay in the EU.
It comes as Sir Keir will tell Labour conference on Tuesday that the party is set to oppose the deal Theresa May brings back from Brussels, having determined that it cannot meet his “six tests”. Another shadow cabinet minister, Barry Gardiner, also broke ranks to say that the idea the party will be able to secure a general election if Ms May’s plans fall apart was “looney tunes territory”. If the prime minister’s Brexit plans are rejected by parliament, and no election is forthcoming, then Labour’s new policy – arduously negotiated by Mr Starmer this week and to be approved on Tuesday – would see the party committed to a new Brexit referendum.
If you want to Make America Great Again, start with its natural world. It would be a lot less great without grizzlies and eagles and all the other riches.
• US Judge Orders Federal Protection Restored To Yellowstone Grizzlies (R.)
A federal judge on Monday ordered Endangered Species Act protections restored to grizzlies in and around Yellowstone National Park, halting plans for the first licensed trophy hunts of the bears in the region in more than 40 years. U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen in Missoula, Montana, sided with environmentalists and native American groups by overruling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision to strip the grizzlies of their status as a threatened species. The outcome caps one of the most high-profile legal battles over the Endangered Species Act in many years, rivaling previous disputes surrounding the gray wolf and northern spotted owl. The ruling came as the Trump administration is seeking to rewrite Endangered Species Act regulations that scientists say would erode wildlife protection for the benefit of commercial interests.
The Trump administration’s decision in June of last year to “de-list” the grizzly, formally proposed in 2016 during the Obama era, was based on agency findings that the bears’ numbers had rebounded enough in recent decades that federal safeguards were no longer necessary. The de-listing, welcomed by big-game hunters and cattlemen, had applied to about 700 Yellowstone-area grizzlies in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Environmentalists countered that treating those bears separately from other grizzly populations in Montana and elsewhere in the Lower 48 states was biologically unsound and illegal under the Endangered Species Act, and the judge agreed.
Grizzlies, which are slow to reproduce, number fewer than 2,000 bears across the Lower 48. That is far below an historic high of 100,000 before widespread shooting, poisoning and trapping reduced the bears’ population to just several hundred by 1975, when they were placed under federal protection.
REUTERS/Jim Urquhart/File Photo
We’re waiting for the first hundreds of people to drown because no ships are left to save them and no ports open.
• Aquarius Cannot Disembark Migrants In Marseille – French Minister (G.)
France is not ready to allow the Mediterranean rescue ship Aquarius to dock and disembark dozens of migrants at the port of Marseille, France’s finance minister has said. “For the moment it’s ‘no’,” Bruno Le Maire said when asked during an interview on BFM news TV channel if Paris was ready to respond positively to a request from charities for permission to dock with 58 people onboard in the southern French port. Under European rules, ships were supposed to get docking access at the nearest port, said Le Maire, adding that Marseille was not the nearest port.
Just ban the stuff alright.
• Monsanto’s Glyphosate Weedkiller Harms Honeybees, Research Finds (G.)
The world’s most used weedkiller damages the beneficial bacteria in the guts of honeybees and makes them more prone to deadly infections, new research has found. Previous studies have shown that pesticides such as neonicotinoids cause harm to bees, whose pollination is vital to about three-quarters of all food crops. Glyphosate, manufactured by Monsanto, targets an enzyme only found in plants and bacteria. However, the new study shows that glyphosate damages the microbiota that honeybees need to grow and to fight off pathogens. The findings show glyphosate, the most used agricultural chemical ever, may be contributing to the global decline in bees, along with the loss of habitat.
“We demonstrated that the abundances of dominant gut microbiota species are decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at concentrations documented in the environment,” said Erick Motta and colleagues from University of Texas at Austin in their new paper. They found that young worker bees exposed to glyphosate exposure died more often when later exposed to a common bacterium. Other research, from China and published in July, showed that honeybee larvae grew more slowly and died more often when exposed to glyphosate. An earlier study, in 2015, showed the exposure of adult bees to the herbicide at levels found in fields “impairs the cognitive capacities needed for a successful return to the hive”.
A small win.
• Glyphosate Industry Fails to Stop US Funding for Global Cancer Agency (SP)
In a massive victory for independent science, it was announced Sunday that the U.S. Senate and Congress appropriations committees have deleted text from a controversial Bill, which would have cut all the U.S. funding to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), after they challenged the chemical industry by classifying the world’s most used herbicide, glyphosate, as a probable human carcinogen in 2015. The ‘IARC rider’ text on page 110 (sec.229) of the draft Labor Health and Human Services FY19 Appropriations Bill was removed after negotiations. Currently, 25 Nations contribute to IARC’s total budget of about USD $50 million (about EUR 44 million), with 7.5% (USD $3.8 million) coming from the U.S..
Following IARC’s classification of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015, Monsanto and the American Chemistry Council launched a full-throttle attack on the international scientific body. IARC is an arm of the World Health Organization and funded by 24 governments, and predominantly by the NIH National Cancer Institute. [..] Enter glyphosate. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s best-selling weedkiller, Roundup, and is used on the majority of commodity crops in the United States because it is effective at controlling a variety of weed types. Any change in the safety determination of this chemical would shake up the messaging that the company has used for years.
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