Things to Keep an Eye On
Lots going on in Rome, feds losing evidence in Jan 6 cases, Missouri child-care software, Barbara Koln, Israel prepares to liquidate Gaza, KKR in DOJ crosshairs, Tim Ballard, Kathy Hochul
Updates from Rome
This week Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals to be appointed at the next consistory in December. Among them are the first Millennial cardinal, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Australia. Here’s Euronews with the list of names:
Among those named by history’s first Latin American pope were the heads of several major dioceses and archdioceses in South America. They are the archbishop of Santiago del Estero in Argentina, Vicente Bokalic Iglic; the archbishop of Brazil's Porto Alegre, Jaime Spengler; the archbishop of Santiago, Fernando Natalio Chomali Garib; the archbishop of Guayaquil, Ecuador, Luis Gerardo Cabrera Herrera; and the archbishop of Lima, Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio.
That stands in sharp contrast to the lone new cardinal from North America: the archbishop of Toronto, Francis Leo.
Showing the universality of the church around the world, Francis also tapped the archbishop of Tehran, Monsignor Dominique Joseph Mathieu, and the bishop of Bogor, Indonesia, Monsignor Paskalis Bruno Syukor. They both belong to the Franciscan religious order and are two of the four new Franciscan cardinals.
In addition to Syukor, Asia gets two more cardinals: Monsignor Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the archbishop of Tokyo, and Monsignor Pablo Virgilio Sinogco David, the bishop of Kalookan in the Philippines.
On Friday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky met with the pope. A number of people commented on how they seemed fairly frosty with each other, and Francis gifted him with a bas-relief with the inscription “peace is a fragile flower.” It seems like the Ukraine war is winding down. Also earlier last week the pope met with three of the U.S.-based liberal cardinals.
SILVA: DOJ is losing video recordings that could be used in Jan 6 cases
From HeadlineUSA, the relevant recording has been deleted by an informant, according to the DOJ:
The Justice Department has blamed an FBI informant for deleting video he took during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill uprising—footage that was sought by a Jan. 6 protestor as part of his criminal defense.
The DOJ’s disclosure about the FBI informant’s missing video came in a Thursday court filing in its case against Jan. 6 protestor William Pope, who’s representing himself. Pope sought footage taken by FBI informant and ex-Proud Boys member James Ehren Knowles of him entering the Capitol.
Pope initially requested the footage from the DOJ in February, and prosecutors eventually said on Sept. 17 that no such footage exists. Three days later, Pope filed his own response, explaining that the footage from must exist—because Knowles was seen on CCTV footage recording as he entered the Capitol, and because Knowles testified during last year’s Proud Boys trial that he indeed recorded.
MORLEY: Whistleblower claims CIA has more evidence on Oswald in Mexico
Worth keeping an eye on:
“It was labeled ‘Oswald in Mexico,’ or ‘Oswald in Mexico City,’ and it was dated September 1963,” the visitor recalled.
The detail is significant. If the CIA possesses film or video that depicts JFK’s accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City, it would rewrite the JFK assassination story. The CIA has long denied it obtained any photographic imagery of Oswald during a visit to Cuban and Russian diplomatic offices six weeks before JFK was shot and killed in Dallas.
Big problems in Missouri child care software
The main contractor appears to have donor ties to some of Missouri’s politicians:
Our investigation uncovered something else: a money trail. The head of one of the state’s key contractors, World Wide Technology, has ties to Missouri politicians. Public records show the company’s founder donated about $230,000 this year to political action committees supporting Republican candidates and state officials, including Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe and Governor Mike Parson, according to data from the Missouri Ethics Commission data, confirmed by University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Anita Manion and others with campaign finance expertise.
Mx: The Kardashians’ mob ties
A great deep dive:
Every major shift in power allows for an ascension of someone who has been waiting in the wings, often regardless of their past transgressions, because the overall benefit to society/stability of a system is deemed more essential than individual accountability. The Kardashians are too public facing to be the final boss of the ruling puppeteers of pop culture. Robert Kardashian, an underling of Irving Azoff, played a significant role in expediting the Kardashians to cultural prominence.
The importance of the Kardashians’ relationship with Irving Azoff in their ascent to becoming America's First Family of Reality TV cannot be overstated. Today, Azoff remains one of the most influential figures in the music industry. He is currently central to the DOJ’s antitrust case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, despite having stepped down from leadership in 2012.
Allianz says Millennials are the most screwed-over generation
A lifetime of permanent war, economic crisis after economic crisis, and unstable employment will do that:
Baby boomers are the wealthiest generation to have ever lived, a new report from Allianz has found, courtesy of affordable housing and strong equity markets providing huge returns on savings.
Millennials, on the other hand, have been the “biggest loser” in the wealth race, courtesy of “crisis after crisis,” the company’s 2024 Global Wealth Report reveals.
Barbara Koln takes a seat in Austrian parliament with Freedom Party
She is the head of the Friedrich Hayek Institute in Vienna, a neoliberal think tank, but has politically thrown her lot in with right-wing populism. Hardly shocking these days, but a lot of libertarians considered this sort of thing uncouth for a long time:
Wer ist die FPÖ-Expertin für blauen Dunst? Barbara Kolm. Und das kam so: Im März 2018 diskutierte der Gesundheitsausschuss des Parlaments ein Rauchverbot in der Gastronomie. Die FPÖ brauchte jemanden, der dagegen sprach. Also lud der FPÖ-Parlamentsklub Kolm als Expertin in den Ausschuss. Die aus Tirol stammende Freiheitliche leitet das "Austrian Economics Center" und das "Hayek Institut", zwei neoliberale Thinktanks. Und sie argumentierte, dass ein Rauchverbot nicht nur die Freiheit und die Eigentumsrechte massiv einschränken, sondern auch noch einem Viertel der Angestellten in der Gastronomie den Job kosten würde.
Israeli government prepares to liquidate Northern Gaza
This is the second time they’ve ordered it evacuated, and the plan, according to 972, is different this time:
The date is October, November, or December 2024, or maybe early 2025. The Israeli military has just launched a new operation throughout northern Gaza — “Operation Order and Clean-up,” we’ll call it. The army orders the temporary evacuation of all Palestinian residents north of the Netzarim Corridor “for their personal safety,” explaining that “the IDF is expected to take significant action in Gaza City in the coming days, and wants to avoid harming civilians.”
The order is similar to the one the military issued on Oct. 13, 2023 to the more than 1 million Palestinians living in Gaza City and its environs at the time. But it’s clear to everyone that this time, Israel is planning something else entirely.
Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant remain tight-lipped about the real goals of the operation, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, as well as other ministers on the far right, declare them openly. Here, they cite a program that the “Forum of Reserve Commanders and Fighters,” spearheaded by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, proposed just a few weeks ago: ordering all residents of northern Gaza to leave within a week, before imposing a full siege on the area, including shutting off all supplies of water, food, and fuel, until those who remain surrender or die of starvation.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is offering carrots to keep Netanyahu within bounds for striking Iran. The thought of using a stick or two remains unthinkable. Netanyahu also cancelled Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s trip to the U.S. this week.
Gallant and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had a call later this week, and today it was announced a small group of U.S. military personnel are deploying to Israel.
Wendell Berry essay, “Against Killing Children” in Christian Century
The whole thing is worth reading, here are two grafs:
Meanwhile, we Americans along with the people of several other nations are “protected” by our stockpiles of nuclear weapons—from which we are protected in truth only by the world’s rulers’ fear, so far, of using them. So far as I know, the accumulation and dispersal of these weapons cannot be openly opposed by a political or governmental insider. Only an outsider, such as Kennan came to be, can speak in opposition. Kennan devoted a good part of his life to demonstrating over and over again the sheer absurdity of these weapons. He was eminently prepared by intelligence, learning, and experience for this argument. He died in 2005. Who are his successors?
I am sure that he has successors. I believe that there always will be people sane enough and compassionate enough to trouble themselves in behalf of peace. I am not a politician or a journalist, and so my sense of the state of things is somewhat impressionistic. My impression is that Kennan has no successor as distinguished and capable as he was. My further impression is that there is in the United States no peace establishment. We have a war (or “defense”) establishment, involving a huge annual outlay of money, a huge arsenal of military technology, a huge staff of officials and bureaucrats, and a huge payroll. But we have no secretary of peace, no department of peace, no academy or curriculum of peace. If a war breaks out, provided it is not one of our own, our leaders offer as a way of restoring peace mainly a supply of the most advanced weapons to their preferred side. It’s not clear that anyone tries to compute the worth of destroyed lives or of destroyed dwellings or of damages to the human infrastructure and the natural world. Nobody weighs these damages against the worth of the proposed victory.
Former head of BLM Atlanta sentenced to prison for money laundering
This was 10 days ago:
The former head of Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlantahas been sentenced to prison on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.
WTVG reports that Tyree Conyers-Page, also known as Sir Maejor Page, was sentenced to serve 42 months in prison in Ohio on Thursday.
Argentina presses on against Opus Dei
Opus Dei houses in Argentina are being raided by their equivalent of the FBI, and the pope has taken control of the Torreciudad shrine.
AirBNB in Portland
The company isn’t being entirely clear with the city about just how much of this is going on, though in many markets there are good reasons to assume it’s having a major inflationary effect on prices. This Oregonian story is detailed:
The city of Portland has failed to effectively police illegal Airbnb listings in the year since The Oregonian/OregonLive exposed the scale of the problem, and some of the leading contenders to become mayor have dodged questions to explain what they’ll do to ensure better compliance if elected.
Last September, the newsroom found that amid an ongoing housing crisis, Portland’s much-hyped effort to regulate short-term rentals had devolved into chaos. Unlicensed rentals proliferated. Unprocessed permitting paperwork swamped regulators, whose enforcement program was understaffed and lax. And the city was yet again at loggerheads over what data needed to be shared by Airbnb, the online rental giant that dominates the business.
DOJ scrutinizing KKR
This suggests a much tougher approach to private equity:
KKR & Co. and the Justice Department are sparring over a push to hold the firm’s top executives more accountable for disclosures related to takeovers, as US authorities deepen their scrutiny of the private equity industry.
The high-stakes fight stems from a federal investigation into whether KKR withheld information in its filings to government agencies about the competitive impact of mergers and acquisitions. To settle the probe, antitrust enforcers want the famed buyout firm to agree that their co-chief executive officers could be held personally liable for future lapses, according to people familiar with the matter.
When you’ve had a totally inert FTC for many years, and it suddenly kicks into gear, there’s going to be a ton of illegal activity spotted and dealt with in a short time, which is what’s happening. Basically a lot of the Mason school anti-antitrust people were fronting for some really stuff.
Crypto evidence factory loses its CEO
They say it’s temporary:
Michael Gronager, co-founder and CEO of Chainalysis, has taken a personal leave of absence from the company. The blockchain analysis outfit isn’t sharing why but says the development is temporary.
According to The Block, which first reported the news, Chainalysis President and COO Sari Granat, who joined the outfit in 2022, is acting as interim CEO.
Ten-year-old, New York-based Chainalysis quickly developed a reputation as a “crypto detective,” working on behalf of the U.S. government and corporate clients. A year ago, Chainalysis laid off slightly more than 15% of its staff of 900, with plans to focus more squarely on government contracting, according to The Block.
There was also a big indictment this week over wash-trading in the crypto markets.
Tim Ballard sues his accusers
Ballard was involved in the fake Mormon sex trafficking movie that had alleged sex traffickers involved in its production. Now he’s suing the women who have accused him of sexual assault. The one involving Miss Utah seems to have been him actually trying to seduce her under the guise of preparing her to be a prop in his sting operation:
Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), has filed a defamation lawsuit against Miss Utah 2004.
He says Amy Morgan Davis lied when she accused him of sexual assault.
Now both sides are releasing text messages to bolster their cases.
Davis initially sued Ballard in 2023 under the pseudonym “MK” to hide her identity.
She was one of six women who filed lawsuits against Ballard for sexual misconduct.
NY Post scoop: Kathy Hochul to revive casino bid
One by one of her biggest donors:
Gov. Kathy Hochul will go to bat for Mets owner Steve Cohen – one of the Democrat’s biggest donors – to help revive the billionaire’s all-but-dead bid for a coveted New York City casino license, The Post has learned.
Hochul plans to introduce legislation in the 2025 state budget that would broaden the permitted uses of city parkland for a gambling complex, a source close to the situation told The Post.