There is a reason James Simons' RenTec is the world's best performing hedge fund - it spots trends (even if they are glaringly obvious) well ahead of almost everyone else, and certainly long before the consensus.

That's what happened with Deutsche Bank, when as we reported two weeks ago, the quant fund pulled its cash from Deutsche Bank as a result of soaring counterparty risk, just days before the full - and to many, devastating - extent of the German lender's historic restructuring was disclosed, and would result in a bank that is radically different from what Deutsche Bank was previously (see "The Deutsche Bank As You Know It Is No More").

Sure, most of the 24 candidates running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are really just vying for a place on the ticket as the vice presidential nominee, but one candidate has imploded so badly that he might not even be able to snag that dubious honor.

In a new poll from Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, a prominent survey that measures the mood of registered voters in America’s first primary state, former Rep. Robert “Beto” O’Rourke pulled in 0.0% of the vote.

We were so confused we had to call the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at the college to find out why O’Rourke’s name didn’t appear on the list at all.

“The question was open-ended and no one said his name,” said a spokeswoman at the Institute.

Republican Congressman Doug Collins (GA) challenged Speaker Pelosi on Tuesday as she spoke in favor of condemning Trump’s “racist” tweets from the House floor.

“There’s no excuse for any response to those words but a swift and strong unified condemnation. Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the president’s racist tweets. To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values, and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people. I urge a unanimous vote, and yield back the balance of my time,” Pelosi said.

Rep. Collins demanded that Pelosi’s remarks be “taken down,” in an extraordinary rebuke of the House Speaker Tuesday afternoon.

Rep. Collins’ challenge to Pelosi was bold and was the first of its kind in decades — his rebuke of the Speaker could actually result in Pelosi being barred from speaking on the House floor for the rest of the day.

Escalating tensions on Capitol Hill erupted into a contentious floor fight in the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke in favor of a proposed resolution condemning "racist" comments by President Trump -- even as Republican leaders stood steadfast behind the president.

When Pelosi's remarks turned personal, Georgia Republican Rep. Doug Collins rose to challenge her and demand that her words be "taken down." The extraordinary rebuke, the first of its kind involving a member of Congress and a speaker of the House in decades, theoretically could result in Pelosi being barred from speaking on the floor for the remainder of the day.

While in office, President Barack Obama said that poverty and crime alone are not justifications for asylum claims, comments that closely mirror the sentiment of the Trump administration.

“[U]nder U.S. law, we admit a certain number of refugees from all around the world based on some fairly narrow criteria. And typically, refugee status is not granted just based on economic need or because a family lives in a bad neighborhood or poverty. It’s typically defined fairly narrowly — the state, for example, that was targeting political activists and they need to get out of the country for fear of prosecution or even death,” Obama said in July 2014.

Yesterday, prosecutors revealed that Jeffrey Epstein kept a fake Saudi passport in his home’s safe along with diamonds and piles of cash. It also emerged last week that Epstein invested millions in a deal with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak acknowledged to the Daily Beast that he, like other world leaders, visited Epstein’s Island and that he was first introduced to Epstein by Shimon Peres, former Israeli prime minister and president.

Barak’s high-tech company financed by the arch sex trafficker is called Carbyne. The Israeli enterprise develops “call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services,” essentially it seeks total access to your phone, its GPS system and its camera. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. By now we know that Epstein was very excited by cameras.

The signs are mounting steadily now. As the Trump administration weaponizes the dollar in defense of American hegemony, it is prompting many other nations to find alternatives to the U.S. currency as the default medium of exchange. The long-term implications of this swiftly advancing trend, evident among allies as well as those Washington considers adversaries, cannot be overstated: At stake is the longevity of America’s global preeminence.

The just-concluded Group of 20 session in Osaka, Japan, was a dramatic demonstration of how quickly “de-dollarization” efforts are coalescing. And the pattern could not be clearer: The Trump administration’s incessant use of unilateral economic and financial sanctions against perceived enemies, which is almost certainly without precedent, is high among the reasons these efforts now gather momentum at a pace few in the financial markets or in official circles anticipated.

Iran announced last week they will be enriching uranium to 5% which is over the 3.67% limit set by the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action signed in 2015 under the Obama administration. Iran has every right to go over that cap, since the US pulled out of the deal over a year ago and reinstated crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

But if you look at headlines in the mainstream media, you would never know Iran was exercising its right as per the JCPOA.

In a tiff over whether Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his delegation would be permitted to enter the United States as part of a meeting of the United Nations and over whether they would be free to travel freely around New York City, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a whopper, one that might have even embarrassed Pinocchio. Expressing a desire to be invited to appear on Iranian television, Pompeo said that he would tell Iranians that “we care deeply about them, that we’re supportive of the Iranian people, that we understand that the revolutionary theocracy is not acting in a way that is in their best interest.”

Why, that’s just a lie, a plain old, downright, old-fashioned lie.

If you've ever wondered if the Pentagon has ever exposed the American public to ticks infected with biological weapons, you're not alone.

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) authored an amendment to the House version of the Fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would require the Defense Department Inspector General's Office to find out if the U.S. military experimented with using ticks and other insects as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975.

If such experiments took place, the amendment would require the inspector general's office to tell lawmakers if any of the ticks or other bugs "were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design."

An Israeli organisation has started a legal case in a bid to stop a mechanism set up by the EU designed to dodge US sanctions on Iran and salvage the nuclear deal.

Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center, an NGO dedicated to representing victims of terrorism, will file on behalf of two families a lawsuit against the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom reported on Monday.

INSTEX, which was launched in January and became operational on 28 June, was set up by Germany, France and Britain to help Iran bypass sanctions.

The United Nations told the United States it is concerned by tight travel restrictions on Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during his visit to New York this week, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said on Monday.

In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death from injuries suffered in police custody and the subsequent protests and rioting in Baltimore in 2015, state lawmakers passed a law mandating police agencies across Maryland report when officers use excessive force or injure someone and cases of officers’ criminal misconduct, among other data.

However, dozens of agencies — including the Baltimore Police Department — never did so. That’s resulted in extreme undercounting of such encounters in annual reports mandated by the law and collated by the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission.

In 2018, 42 of 148 agencies required to submit data did not, according to the commission.

“There was a misunderstanding here about which unit was responsible for submitting,” said Matt Jablow, a Baltimore Police spokesman, after The Baltimore Sun asked this week about the agency’s failure to comply with the law.

Troy Phillips has tried everything to piece together his brother's final moments and figure out if he received CPR. Rhode Island's secretive 911 laws have gotten in the way.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

This article was produced in partnership with The Public’s Radio, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. It was co-published with the Boston Globe.

Troy Phillips was repairing a propane filling station on Cape Cod one afternoon last October when his mother called, her voice frantic.

“Something happened to Scott!”

A team of Swiss researchers with bugs on the brain has created an army of simple robotic "ants" capable of some impressive feats. The takeaway from these 10 gram bots, which are inexpensive to make and surprisingly simple in design? Teamwork makes the dream work.

As described in a new paper in the journal Nature, the ants can communicate with each other, assign roles among themselves, and complete complex tasks and overcome obstacles together. That means that while simple compared to much more complex autonomous agents, these origami-inspired robots can solve complex challenges, such navigating uneven surfaces or, yes, moving comparatively huge objects.

The Trump administration stopped taxpayer dollars from going to abortion referrals at publicly funded family planning centers on Monday.

Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, sued the administration, along with 20 states and the District of Columbia, in an attempt to stop Health and Human Services, or HHS, from diverting Title X family planning funding going to abortions.

But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, with two judges appointed by Trump, rejected the plea.

“This is a devastating blow to the 4 million patients who obtain birth control, cancer screenings, and other essential care through Title X,” the organization tweeted.

Tucker Carlson elaborated Monday on what he has observed from the left side of the political spectrum, including the Freudian idea that “whatever they say you’re doing is precisely what they’re doing.”

“I really think Antifa was maybe the moment when I figured it out. The guys who are literally armed with steel bars and have black masks on are calling other people fascists,” Carlson said.

A friend of mine recently commented that if the current trend to reduce the study of history in schools to easily digestible politically correct soundbites that are being successfully pushed by social justice warriors continues, we will soon be limited to discussing how horrible slavery was, the Stonewall Inn riots and the so-called holocaust. Indeed, it seems that those who complain the loudest are the only ones listened to and no one complains more often or at greater volume than American Jewish groups intent on preserving the benefits that are derived from always being able to claim their perpetual victimhood.

World War II was by far the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history. Many people wondered whether all of the death and destruction caused by the war had been necessary.

The so-called Holocaust was used by the Allies to demonize Germany and prove that their war effort was necessary to defeat such an evil nation.

The remnants of what was once Hurricane Barry brought widespread flooding into southwestern Arkansas overnight Monday and early Tuesday.

Floodwaters rose over the hoods of cars in the parking lot of the Nashville, Arkansas, Police Department. A spokeswoman for the department told weather.com water was also getting into the building. A video showed a steady stream of water flowing by the Nashville City Hall and the road in front of it.

In Gurdon, Arkansas, water flowed into a handful of businesses along Elm Street.

Flooding at the Clark County Humane Society in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, killed at least one dog and others were in danger of drowning and hypothermia, Janie Allen, president of the board for the society, told Live Storms Media. Other dogs and puppies were swimming for their lives in their kennels.

Businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit on Monday that outed FOX News reporter Ellen Ratner was his source for the Seth Rich information.

This comes after Michael Isikoff’s report last week that labeled Butowsky as a Russian source.

Ed told The Gateway Pundit today that Ellen Ratner lied to Isikoff.
Ed provided The Gateway Pundit with a copy of his email with Ratner.

Butowsky added that he spoke with Isikoff off the record and he broke his trust by contacting Ratner.

Butowsky told The Gateway Pundit that after last week’s report he was forced to speak out.
Ed also says he has more evidence that Ratner was his source on the Seth Rich information.

Butowsky claims Ratner gathered the information on Seth Rich after contact with Wikileaks officials.

An Internet sleuth provided us some questionable ties related to Epstein and Barak Ehud. For the past 15 years there are numerous entities operating in both Ohio and NY related to the Wexner Foundation. The ties to Epstein seem to be limited to the early years and fairly straight forward.

For tax years 2001 through 2006, the tax returns for the Foundation list Jeffrey Epstein as a Trustee and the person with whom the corporate books are in the possession of (at the same address of the Foundation in Ohio). Additionally, for 2001 the Wexner Foundation only received one contribution of $9,588,560 and that contribution came from an entity named ARTS INTEREST TRUST with an address of C/O Jeffrey Epstein in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

Sailing through the Strait of Hormuz, an Emirates-based oil tanker has vanished (from the radar). With the strait a flashpoint for US-Iran tensions, is Tehran to blame?

The Panamanian-flagged oil tanker ‘Riah’ usually transits oil from Dubai and Sharjah to Fujairah, a trip of just under 200 nautical miles that takes a tanker like this just over a day and a half at sea. it reported its position off the coast of Dubai on July 7.

The MD Anderson Cancer Center here has ousted three senior researchers after the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, informed it that the scientists had committed potentially “serious” violations of agency rules involving confidentiality of peer review and the disclosure of foreign ties. The researchers are among five MD Anderson scientists that NIH cited in letters to the cancer center, which is part of the University of Texas (UT) system. MD Anderson officials say they invoked termination proceedings against three of the researchers, are still investigating allegations against one, and determined termination was not warranted for the fifth scientist.

The nerve centre at the heart of Facebook where users' photos and messages are stored has been revealed after cameras were allowed inside for the first time.

A new BBC Two documentary has revealed huge rows of servers and shelves full of cables and equipment at the social network's base in Silicon Valley, California.

The Horizon programme on at 9pm tonight follows staff trying to fix problems such as data leaks, fake news and hacks which have threatened to bring down the firm.

The Deep State within the CIA are doing all they can to obstruct President Trump from finding out the origins of the Russia Collusion sham.

President Trump is doing all he can to bring them to justice.

The Deep State within the government is corrupt, criminal and cowardly. The DOJ and FBI have obviously been run by Obama’s criminal Deep State. The State Department as well. Nearly every agency in Obama’s government was corrupted during the Obama years. The CIA is no exception and may even be the worse.

To gain an understanding of the corruption within the CIA we must step back and look at the past few decades. The CIA culture of dealing with abuses of power was to cover it up or use counter intelligence as a weapon to make or bury a case and target Americans directly or to use foreign intelligence or governments as surrogates.

August 5, 2018 marks the one-year anniversary of Ernst Zündel’s passing. He was essentially kidnapped from the U.S. and forced to remain in Germany. His wife, Ingrid Rimland, was unable to leave the U.S. to be with him. She risked jail time in Germany despite having no previous criminal convictions.

His crime? Ernst Zündel was deemed a “security threat.” Not because he was ever violent or ever incited violence, but because he created a legal precedent in which:

For the first time ever, “Holocaust” survivors and “Holocaust” historians were closely and critically questioned under oath about their claims and views.

Few Canadians realize that Zündel did them “a favor by wiping off the books [the] disgraceful False News laws” strangling free-speech.

“I don’t think it’s any coincidence that gold runs from $1285 to as high as $1445 around the time that all the news about Deutsche Bank started coming out” [the failure to merge with Commerzbank followed by the “good bank / bad bank” split announcement].

It was reported by Bloomberg that Deutsche Bank clients – mostly hedge funds – are pulling $1 billion in capital per day from the collapsing bank. Still no details have emerged on the how the “bad bank” holding company will be funded or what will go into it. What we do know is the original proposal for a bad bank was for $43 billion in bad assets. That number has bubbled up to a proposed $74 billion. In truth, no one knows for sure the degree to which DB’s derivatives holdings are radioactive. Disgraced former CEO, Anshu Jain, admitted that near the end of his failed tenure.

The media is working overtime to convince viewers that President Donald Trump was BFF’s with Florida billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. But former President Bill Clinton is the one who allegedly took over two dozen mysterious flights on Epstein’s private jets and reportedly ditched his Secret Service detail several times to go on escapades with the billionaire.

Epstein was arrested on Saturday in New York and charged with sex trafficking of minors.

Epstein had many powerful friends that he may turn on for leniency, which brings Bill Clinton into the spotlight.

Clinton flew many times on Epstein’s jet, which was dubbed the Lolita Express, and supposedly ditched his Secret Service detail on at least 5 of these trips.

Here’s more from Fox News:

Tomorrow (July 16), the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 to land astronauts on the moon and two weeks after the moon totally eclipsed the sun, it will be the moon's turn to undergo an eclipse of its own. The full moon, in Sagittarius, will pass partway through the southern part of the Earth's shadow resulting in a partial lunar eclipse.

This event favors the Eastern Hemisphere, known colloquially as the "Old World": Africa, Europe and western Asia. Most of South America will see the moon rise already within the Earth's shadow. Conversely, for central and eastern Asia and Australia, the eclipse will still be in progress when the moon sets during the dawn hours of July 17.

Unfortunately, North America will be completely shut out; the eclipse occurs during the daytime with the moon below the horizon.