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originally posted by: Imbackbaby
originally posted by: Jorge1986s
originally posted by: crankyoldman]
What does this mean?
.
Unfortunately, most people on this website aren't ready to have a mature, factual discussion about the nature of this realm we occupy. They would prefer to mock and marginalize those capable of seeing through the lies and dogma of the currently shared "scientific" consensus of the origin of humanity in the mainstream.
well said, bang on.
originally posted by: Thoughtful2
a reply to: FlyingFox
Ruminate- Water Towers. Quite awhile ago I wrote about 'watch the water' roof top water towers in cities like New York that were not maintained or inspected during Covid.
Central banks of Hong Kong and UAE recently met in Abu Dhabi to find ways to work together, with both jurisdictions positioning themselves as nations friendly to crypto.
In their meeting, the banks agreed to strengthen cooperation on crypto regulations (which they refer to as “virtual assets”). The two authorities say they’ll now establish a joint working group.
They discussed ways to make cross-border trade easier and explored how UAE companies can use Hong Kong’s financial infrastructure platforms to access markets in Asia and mainland China.
Improving cross-border payments is a key priority for the G20. At the 2023 Digital Monetary Institute symposium in London, Tommaso Mancini-Griffol, deputy division chief of monetary and capital markets at the International Monetary Fund, said that Libra, Facebook’s attempt at a global currency, delivered a ‘collective shock’ to the public sector. He highlighted the inadequacies of cross-border payments: high costs, low speed and inadequate transparency.
One of the most promising solutions to these problems is the interconnection of central bank digital currency systems. This is an attractive concept because of the global surge in CBDC development. It is hoped that, as these state digital payments systems emerge, the work of creating a seamless cross-border payments system to bridge the gaps will already have been done.
D360 Bank, Saudi Arabia’s innovative new digital bank is pleased to announce its partnership with Thunes, a global cross-border payment infrastructure platform.
This collaboration will “empower D360 Bank’s customers in Saudi Arabia to make fast and cost-effective B2B business payments and international remittances worldwide.”
Nelson emphasised Thunes’ commitment “to supporting Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and working closely with local partners to ensure exceptional customer experiences by enabling instant borderless payments worldwide for retail and business customers.”
Saudi Arabia’s youthful, mobile-first society – “one of the most digitally-savvy in the world – is contributing to a rapid change in payment preferences.”
Two-thirds of Saudi Arabia’s population “is under the age of 35, and Saudi Arabia ranks third globally in smartphone usage at 24.2m users, with almost three-quarters of the population using smartphones.”
Tether (USDT), the stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, has reached an all-time high (ATH) market capitalization exceeding $83 billion, demonstrating its continued market dominance.
In a tweet shared on June 1, Tether, the company operating the platform tether.to surpassed its previous market cap high of 83.2 Billion set in May 2022.
In response to this announcement, Binance CEO, CZ, responded to Tether’s Tweet to highlight Binance USD (BUSD), a stablecoin issued by Paxos and endorsed by Binance.
Taken together, the regulatory intervention and the dominance of Tether in the stablecoin market reflect the growing importance of compliance and regulatory oversight in the industry.
Citypay.oi added USDT as payment option for users in over 600 locations including restaurants, shops and hotels in the Caucasian country of Georgia, Tether tweeted. CityPay.io linked to Binance Pay, the payment arm of the world’s largest crypto exchange, allowing purchases with cryptocurrencies earlier this year, Binance tweeted.
Tether’s investment is in line with a new plan to allocate a part of its excess profits to purchase bitcoin (BTC) and venture into infrastructure, payments and communication projects. The company reported almost $1.5 billion in net profit for the first quarter. Earlier this week, Tether also announced an investment in sustainable energy production and bitcoin mining in Uruguay.
The United States’ debt ceiling is one step closer to being raised, but Larry Fink says trust in the U.S. dollar is being eroded, which could be good news for Bitcoin.
According to a May 31 report by Reuters, Fink told the attendees of a Deutsche Bank financial services conference that he expects at least two more interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve in the coming months, claiming that he’d seen “no evidence” of overall inflation being reduced.
Josh Gilbert, a markets analyst with eToro, told Cointelegraph that the debt ceiling drama brings Bitcoin into the spotlight once again, as investors may seek finite-supply safe haven assets outside the constraints of the current financial system.
“The debt ceiling deal once again highlights Bitcoin’s utility because it’s essentially a break away from the traditional financial system. Given its finite supply, it’s free from the issues that the U.S. government is facing right now,” he said.
Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial has ditched all U.S. Treasury bonds from its USD Coin (USDC) backing reserves as part of precautionary measures to protect from a potential fallout from the looming U.S. debt ceiling showdown.
The Circle Reserve Fund, managed by global investment giant BlackRock, held all of its $24 billion of assets under management in overnight repurchase (repo) agreements as of May 30, according to the fund’s website.
This is a significant change since the end of April, when the fund held more than $30 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds, according to Circle’s monthly attestation. The last Treasury bond worth $4 billion among the fund’s holdings matured on Tuesday, the fund’s website showed.
Concerns about the American banking system’s health yet again sent the stock market tumbling Wednesday, as one major index posted one of their weakest May returns of the millennium.
Headlining the skid were bank stocks: All 10 of the largest U.S. banks by market capitalization dropped 1% or more in Wednesday trading, losing nearly $24 billion in value.
Investors’ loss of faith in bank stocks came after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation revealed bank deposits fell 2.5% during the first three months of 2023, the largest decline since regulators began tracking the metric 39 years ago.
Shares of large and mid-sized U.S. banks sharply underperformed the broader market on Wednesday with the S&P 500 Banks Index closing down 2.0% while the benchmark S&P 500 Index fell 0.6% with worries about commercial real estate loans in focus among bank investors.
Ross Perot Jr., whose family is one of the largest independent property developers in the country, warned of a looming real estate recession if banks don’t start lending again.
“If the industry can’t get a construction loan, real estate will have a recession,” Perot said in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “The key to commercial real estate today will be banking.”
For weeks, analysts have been sounding the alarm over the potential for a resolution of the debt-ceiling standoff to lead to a sudden drain in market liquidity.
Here’s the situation: The Treasury has spent 2023 maneuvering to keep the U.S. government below its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling. As a result, the Treasury General Account — think of it as the U.S. government’s checking account at the Federal Reserve — has been drawn down from around $580 billion earlier this year to less than $40 billion as of May 30.
Once a debt-ceiling deal is signed into law by President Joe Biden, the Treasury Department will move to fill that account back up. That means hitting the market with a deluge of short-term Treasury bills. How that affects liquidity will depend in large part on who ends up buying those bills.
Macy’s, Costco and other big chains say shoppers are pulling back at their stores and changing what they buy. That could be a red flag for the US economy.
In times of economic struggles, Americans tend to change their shopping habits. The “lipstick effect,” where people will continue splurging on smaller items such as candles and cosmetics, but delay larger purchases, is one example. Costco executives have also spotted other consumer spending changes in their warehouse clubs’ sales lately.
Retail giant Target suffered another financial setback after JPMorgan downgraded its stock as its market value plummeted by $14 billion, amid backlash to its controversial LGBTQ Pride product release.
Goldman Sachs Group is warning investors of a sharp slowdown in its investment bank from the bumper gains a year ago, as the bank hunkers down in the face of an “extraordinarily challenging” economic backdrop.
“We are now embarking on additional targeted action with our headcount,” Goldman president John Waldron said at a conference hosted by AllianceBernstein Holding. “We are preparing for a tougher environment.”
JUST NOW: Iowa voter tells Trump "we have lost people because you supported the jab."
Trump responds by praising the COVID mRNA shots, doesn't acknowledge any of the adverse effects.
"I was able to do something that nobody else could have done...There's a big portion of the country that thinks [the jab] was a great thing."
Ron DeSanctimonious: "Each vaccine administered brings a sense of relief and increased hope and optimism."
With the annual BRICS summit arriving in August, South African BRICS Ambassador, Anil Sooklal said European countries have requested membership in the bloc. Speaking amid the foreign relations ministers meeting in South Africa over the next two days, it was revealed that countries from Europe, as well as Latin America and Asia, have submitted official requests.
There have been reports of several Latin American and Asian countries interested in joining the bloc. Yet, this is seemingly the first time that countries from Europe have expressed interest in joining the collective. Additionally, Sooklal stated that the discussion on expansion has already begun.
Thailand is a part of the ASEAN bloc, which contains nine other Southeast Asian countries. These countries’ leaders’ recently signed a declaration to stop using the U.S. dollar for international trade and aim to promote their local currencies instead. The move bolsters the power of ASEAN nations’ local currencies and leads the U.S. dollar into a gradual decline. This objective, of course, coincides with the mission of BRICS to push de-dollarization.
BRICS nations asked the bloc’s specially created bank to provide guidance on a how a potential new shared currency might work, including how it could shield other member countries from the impact of sanctions such as those imposed on Russia.
The foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa convened in Cape Town earlier Thursday to discuss how the bloc can win greater global influence and to challenge the US. While they didn’t reach firm conclusions, the use of alternative currencies was among the prominent talking points.
A trove of photos from Hunter Biden's laptop has been made available to the public through a new website that launched Thursday.
The website — BidenLaptopMedia.com — will house almost 10,000 photos spanning from 2008 to 2019 and took months to complete, Garrett Ziegler, the founder of nonprofit Marco Polo, told Fox News Digital.
"It's taken us a couple of months to, one, go through the photos, about 10,000 of them, and redact the genitalia on the photos," Ziegler, a former Trump White House aide, said of the contents found on the laptop once owned by President Biden's son.
"The number one thing we're about… is truth and transparency," he said. "If the American people want to know what their first family is like, they're going to get it. And we're not going to be taking out photos that paint the Bidens in a good light."
Ziegler also noted that several photos containing private information were redacted — including images containing Social Security numbers, banking information and credit card numbers. Additionally, multiple nude photos of Hallie Biden, the widow of Beau Biden, were redacted.
Of the many photos found on the laptop, Ziegler provided Fox News Digital with two never-before-seen photos from the laptop. One photo showed Hunter Biden cozied up to his then-lover Zoe Kestan in 2018. The other image — featuring an array of drugs and a condom wrapper sitting on a table — was from a text message conversation Hunter had with Hallie Biden — the widow of Beau Biden and former lover of Hunter Biden — the same year.
We have 7 servers running on BidenLaptopMedia.com... to handle the massive amount of attention we knew this site was going to attract. In the first hour, we served over half-a-million hits smoothly, then the attacks began, and haven't let up all day. We have no intention of going anywhere, as this site — like BidenLaptopEmails.com... — is a historic record of the Biden Laptop, and it will be kept up and running until the end of time.
Two weeks before ending his life, Jeffrey Epstein sat in the corner of his Manhattan jail cell with his hands over his ears, desperate to muffle the sound of a toilet that wouldn’t stop running.
Epstein was agitated and unable to sleep, jail officials observed in records newly obtained by The Associated Press. He called himself a “coward” and complained he was struggling to adapt to life behind bars following his July 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges — his life of luxury reduced to a concrete and steel cage.
Nearly four years later, the AP has obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents related to Epstein’s death from the federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act. They include a detailed psychological reconstruction of the events leading to Epstein’s suicide, as well as his health history, internal agency reports, emails, memos and other records.
Taken together, the documents the AP obtained Thursday provide the most complete accounting to date of Epstein’s detention and death, and its chaotic aftermath. The records help to dispel the many conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s suicide, underscoring how fundamental failings at the Bureau of Prisons — including severe staffing shortages and employees cutting corners — contributed to Epstein’s death.
Shortly before he hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell, Jeffrey Epstein penned a letter from behind bars to another high-profile pedophile, Larry Nassar — but the note was never received by the disgraced US gymnastics team doctor.
Epstein’s unopened letter to Nassar, who spent decades sexually abusing young girls, was discovered weeks after his suicide in the mail room of the since-shuttered lockup with a “return to sender” notice.
“It appeared he mailed it out and it was returned back to him,” the investigator who found the letter told a prison official by email. “I am not sure if I should open it or should we hand it over to anyone?”
Jeffrey Epstein continued meeting dozens of young women after his sex crimes conviction with up to seven girls visiting him in a single day, his private calendars reveal.
And the teeth-obsessed pedophile – who had a dentist's chair in his Florida home and another on his Caribbean island – often sent the women to a Manhattan orthodontist, the documents show.
The revelations are part of the tranche of documents handed to the government of the US Virgin Islands as part of its investigation into his sex trafficking operation.
On one day alone, Epstein had three sets of 'meetings' with two young women, followed by a final one at 7.30pm with a lone female – reaching a total of seven girls in five hours.
Among the names in the calendars were numerous Russians, models and a woman who later sued his estate saying he took her virginity and forced her into a sham marriage to keep one of his associates in the country.
While the exact nature of the 'appointments' was unclear, the way the women were described – their first name only followed by a phone number – was identical to how his victims were listed in the section of his Black Book of contacts titled 'massage'.
Andrew has been the one taking the heat for his friendship with Epstein in the wake of his sexual abuse lawsuit that he settled in 2022, but Ferguson’s involvement appears to go much deeper than initially reported. Perhaps that is why Ferguson has been so willing to support her ex-husband and call for the public to forgive him and move on. It’s as if we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg with Epstein’s royal ties to Prince Andrew.
Dick Cavett was scheduled to dine with Jeffrey Epstein in February 2012.
Their mutual friend Woody Allen, Soon-Yi Previn, and a Bill Gates advisor were also listed as attendees.