Stephen K. Bannon's Blog, page 748

Musk: ‘Super Bad Feeling’ About Economy

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an internal company email viewed and reported on by Reuters that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and that the electric car giant needed to slash employment by around 10 percent.The email, which was reportedly titled “pause all hiring worldwide,” was sent on June 2 to Tesla’s top managers.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Tesla to verify the authenticity of the email but received no response by publication.
The message comes after Musk took the work-from-home phenomenon into his crosshairs, telling Tesla executives to get back to the office for a full 40-hour workweek or face the prospect of dismissal.
Musk’s Thursday email expressing reservations about the economy also comes amid signs of cooling in economies around the world, as soaring inflation is driving central banks to course correct away from pandemic-era easy money policies.
The Federal Reserve has laid out a case for hiking interest rates by 50 basis points at each of its next two meetings in June and July, though there …

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US Engaged in Cyber Operations Against Russia

The head of the U.S. Cyber Command and National Security Agency (NSA) confirmed that the United States conducted cyber operations after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum; offensive, defensive, [and] information operations,” NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone said in an interview published on June 1. That includes “offensive hacking operations” he said, without elaborating on the details.
Nakasone, who is a four-star general, said the operations were lawful and conducted with civilian oversight. His interview with Sky News is the first official confirmation that the United States is engaged in a digital conflict against Russia in its bid to support Ukraine.
Smoke rises during shelling in the city of Severodonetsk, eastern Ukraine, on May 21, 2022. (Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)“My job is to provide a series of options to the secretary of defense and the president, and so that’s what I do,” he told Sky News, a British news channel. It isn’t clear when the operations started or how many have taken place since the invasion started on Feb. 24.
“We remain vigilant every single day. Every single day. I think about it all the time,” he said. “This is why we’re working with a series of partners to ensure we prevent that, not only against the United States but against our allies as well.”
Nakasone also detailed how so-called hunt forward operations enabled the United States to track down hackers and find their tools before they could be deployed. In one such operation, according to Nakasone, U.S. military specialists were present in Ukraine near the date of the invasion.
“We went in December 2021 at the invitation of the Kyiv government to come and hunt with them. We stayed there for a period o …

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Putin clings to semblance of normality

Breadcrumb Trail Links PMN Business Author of the article: Reuters Mark Trevelyan Article content LONDON — Approaching the 100-day mark in a war that he refuses to call by its name, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man intent on conveying the impression of business as usual. As his army fought its way into the Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk this week, Putin was making awkward small talk in a televised ceremony to honor parents of exceptionally large families. Since the start of May, he has met – mostly online – with educators, oil and transport bosses, officials responsible for tackling forest fires, and the heads of at least a dozen Russian regions, many of them thousands of miles from Ukraine. Advertisement 2 Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content Along with several sessions of his Security Council and a series of calls with foreign leaders, he found time for a video address to players, trainers and spectators of the All-Russian Night Hockey League. The appearance of solid, even boring routine is consistent with the Kremlin’s narrative that it is not fighting a war – merely waging a “special military operation” to bring a troublesome neighbor to heel. For a man whose army has heavily underperformed in Ukraine and been beaten back from its two biggest cities, suffering untold thousands of casualties, Putin shows no visible sign of stress. In contrast wit …

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Cancer. What Happens if He Dies?

The U.S. intelligence community has spoken: Russian President Vladimir Putin was recently treated for “advanced cancer”. Inasmuch as America’s spies correctly predicted Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is no reason to disbelieve this assessment.What Putin’s illness means is another matter.
It may or may not make him more truculent, more fanatical, more violent. He may or may not die soon. His illness may or may not make him less competent to lead a country the size of Russia.
What we can state with certainty is that Russia’s elites know he’s ill and that a power struggle has already broken out or will soon break out. Who succeeds Putin is now the question that, willy-nilly, will inform all elite behavior and choice of policies.
We also know that replacing Putin while maintaining the system he constructed intact will be very difficult. Russia is fascist, and Putin is the hub that keeps the spokes and, thus, the wheel together. His departure, which may now be considered to be imminent, will create more than a power vacuum that his closest cronies will attempt to fill. It will shake to its foundations the …

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Chinese Fighter Jets Buzz Canadian Planes

A Canadian military plane was dangerously harassed by Chinese fighter jets during a recent mission in international airspace, the Department of National Defence (DND) said on June 1.The Royal Canadian Airforce’s CP-140 Aurora Maritime Patrol Aircraft was deployed to Japan and flew sorties between April 26 and May 26, as part of an international effort to support United Nations sanctions against North Korea.
In the short span of the deployment, DND says “several interactions” occurred between the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) aircraft and aircraft of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
DND said in these interactions the PLAAF did not adhere to international air safety norms, was unprofessional, and put the safety of RCAF personnel at risk.
“In some instances, the RCAF aircrew felt sufficiently at risk that they had to quickly modify their own flight path in order to increase separation and avoid a potential collision with the intercepting aircraft,” says …

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Yellen’s excuses as raging inflation slams America

Stocks continued to tank Wednesday as bond yields soared, implying yet more inflation ahead. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says she’s very sorry (but):

“I was wrong [a year ago] about the path that inflation would take,” she told CNN on Tuesday. Then came the excuses: “There have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I didn’t at the time fully understand.”

That is, she’s still not admitting that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion spring 2021 “COVID relief” package was all too likely to spark soaring inflation. She’s pinning the blame on those “unanticipated” shocks.

Yet former Treasury chief Larry Summers (along with some other top Democratic economists) was warning that dumping all that cash into a US economy already recovering from COVID (growth was 1.7% in the last quarter of 2020) risked bringing back inflation unseen since the early ’80s.

Yellen simply didn’t want to see it. Indeed, at her January 2021 confirmation he …

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Producer Price Inflation in Eurozone Soars

Producer price inflation in the eurozone surged to a record high in the year through April, though month-over-month data showed inflationary pressures edging down, as European Central Bank officials consider how fast and how much to tighten monetary settings to tame soaring prices.The E.U. statistics office Eurostat said in a June 2 statement (pdf) that the euro area’s producer price index, which tracks inflation before it hits consumers, rose by an annual 37.2 percent in April, the fastest pace on record.
Yet the month-over-month data showed a drop in the pace of producer price acceleration, suggesting that wholesale inflation in the eurozone may have peaked and a series of softer readings could be in the pipeline. In April, euro area producer prices rose by a monthly 1.2 percent after surging 5.3 percent in March, which was a record pace.
A worker deburrs a casting at the Siempelkamp Giesserei foundry in Krefeld, Germany, on April 21, 2022. (Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images)It comes as consumer price inflation in the 19 countries that s …

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BREAKING: 4 Dead In Mass Shooting At Tulsa Hospital

Four people were killed in Tulsa on Wednesday after a gunman — who was later found dead — opened fire on the second floor of a medical building, authorities in Oklahoma said.

“It was just madness inside, with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of people trying to get out of the building,” Tulsa police Capt. Richard Meulenberg told CNN.

The mass shooting is among the latest instances nationwide of first responders and civilians coming face-to-face with the threat of gun violence in public places. It comes more than two weeks after a racist assault at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a bloody attack at a church in California; and eight days after a heartbreaking massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Law enforcement received a call just before 5 p.m. Wednesday about a person with a firearm at the Natalie Medical Building, a physicians’ office facility on the campus of Saint Francis Hospital, Tulsa police Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish said at a news conference.

Responding officers who arrived within minutes “were hearing shots in the building, and that’s what directed them to the second floor,” Dalgleish said.

The gunman was found dead by police as they worked their way inside the building, Meulenberg said, and has not been publicly identified.

Police suspect the gunman’s fatal wounds were self-inflicted, and two firearms — described by Meulenberg as a semiautomatic rifle and a semiautomatic pistol — believed to have been used in the shooting were found next to him. Two of the deceased were found in the same room as the gunman, the police captain said.

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JUST IN: Justice Alito Blocks Major Ruling

A three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals decided last month that election officials should count mail ballots that were received with no dates on the envelopes but that were received on time in an election for county judge.

“Look, you have a federal Court of Appeals ruling in unmistakable terms that the date requirement is immaterial,” Democratic election lawyer Adam Bonin explained…CONTINUE READING»>

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Fed Can Only ‘Kill the Economy’

Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve have been on a crusade to navigate the U.S. economy to a soft landing rather than a hard crash as it struggles to fight 40-year high inflation while averting a recession.Can the central bank achieve this ostensibly difficult objective?
If the central bank’s track record is anything to go by, the Fed is “not omniscient,” says Judy Shelton, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and former Federal Reserve board nominee, in a wide-ranging interview with The Epoch Times.
According to Shelton, it will be challenging to prognosticate the lasting effects of pushing up the benchmark Fed funds rate to a neutral level after exerting tremendous influence on the economy for the last two years.
“I think it’s also hard to say what will be the impact and what will be the timing of the impact of ratcheting up interest rates to the po …

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