“JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, was Epstein’s bank of choice between 1998 and 2013, well after Epstein’s Florida prosecution for soliciting prostitution with a minor. That relationship has been under a newfound spotlight after Epstein survivors and the Virgin Islands sued JPMorgan Chase late last year, claiming that it ‘facilitated, sustained and concealed’ Epstein’s abuse,” the outlet added.

JPMorgan has denied the allegations from the U.S. Virgin Islands and filed a counteroffensive against Staley, claiming he “concealed his personal activities” with Epstein.

Staley and Epstein exchanged roughly 1,000 emails between 2008 and 2012. Newly unsealed information reveals an odd exchange between Staley and Epstein, where they make references to Disney characters, according to Fox News.

“These women were trafficked and abused during different intervals between at least 2003 and July 2019, when Epstein was arrested and jailed, and these women received payments, typically multiple payments, between 2003 and 2013 in excess of $1 million collectively,” according to the unsealed passages.

Whether or not Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg really is about to arrest Trump this week, as has been reported, over trumped-up hush-money charges relating to a one-time assignation 17 years ago with porn star Stormy Daniels, Friday’s leak from the court could not have come at a better time for President Biden. 

The story that the first former president in American history would be charged with a crime, fingerprinted, put in a holding cell and maybe even perp-walked to humiliate him before the world is a dream come true for salivating Trump-haters. 

But, more significantly, the story took the spotlight off the bombshell bank records released the previous day by the House Oversight Committee, showing $1,065,000 had been funneled from a Chinese energy company, through Biden intimate Rob Walker, to four immediate family members of Joe Biden: his son Hunter, brother James, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his late son Beau, who also is Hunter’s former lover. 

Also listed as a recipient of the Chinese money, which was doled out to the four Bidens in regular small increments between March 6 and May 18, 2017, was an as-yet-unidentified family member, listed only on bank wires as “Biden.” 

Vice President Kamala Harris is preparing to campaign extensively when President Biden launches his much-anticipated re-election bid, despite concerns in the Democratic Party that her performance in office, criticized by some as uneven, has made her a liability.

Ms. Harris plans to visit urban centers of swing states to persuade Black voters, young people and other liberal constituencies to re-elect Mr. Biden, according to people familiar with discussions about her campaign efforts. She will lead the administration’s advocacy for abortion rights, tout the administration’s climate investments and echo Mr. Biden’s pledge to protect Medicare and Social Security. 

Joe’s shared some questionable content on Twitter —and was checked by the community.

According to a Fox News report, President Joe Biden shared a dubious “fact” on Twitter about how much America’s billionaires pay in taxes —and Twitter was having none of it.

“Look, I think you should be able to be a billionaire if you can earn it, but just pay your fair share,” Biden’s tweet read. “I think you ought to pay a minimum tax of 25%. It’s about basic fairness.”

Community notes flew in with this helpful gem: “This is incorrect. Avg income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6%. Top 1% of taxpayers paid a 25.99% avg rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1% avg rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers. It increased from 20.1%/2019 to 22.2%/2020”

Additionally, the world’s richest man and Twitter CEO himself, Elon Musk, weighed in on the claim, saying “I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average! I also paid more income tax than anyone ever in the history of Earth for 2021 and will do that again in 2022. @CommunityNotes, is the 3% number cited above accurate?”

Among the thousands of businesses that will face some form of financial compensation following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), recipients of federal bailout money will include mainstream media outlets, social media companies, and the business interests of several Democratic elected officials across the country.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, while SVB was most well-known for having numerous tech companies among its clients, the bank also did business with several mainstream media outlets as well. Two examples are BuzzFeed and Vox. On Monday, BuzzFeed revealed to its investors that, of the $56 million in cash that the company held at the end of 2022, the majority of it was being held at SVB. The news capped off a disastrous year for BuzzFeed, as 2022 saw the company lose an estimated $201.3 million, as well as the firing of 40 percent of its newsroom staff, and its stock price plunging by 90 percent.

Vox also admitted to banking with SVB prior to its collapse, though it would not reveal the exact amount. A Vox spokeswoman claimed in a statement that the company does not expect “any significant impact,” and has instead simply faced a number of “logistical issues such as the temporary suspension of accounts and company credit cards.” Vox Media is the parent company of numerous other left-wing media publications, including the titular Vox, New York Magazine, Polygon, and the Verge.

Speaker McCarthy at House GOP gathering says that he doesn’t believe anyone should protest if Trump is arrested/prosecuted and that Trump doesn’t either. (Trump earlier truthed “Protest!”) He said he has not spoken with the former president.

After a bunch of repeated tests, it became clear to me that if you ask ChatGPT to deliver a complete application, it will fail. A corollary to this observation is that if you know nothing of coding and want ChatGPT to build you something, it will fail.

Nearly 800,000 people signed up to join the North Korean military in a single day, the country’s state-run media claimed Saturday. The North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun says 800,000 students and workers signed up to fight the U.S. on Friday, just one day after North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the sea between South Korea and Japan. The total number included many North Koreans who sought to re-enlist, the paper noted.

“The soaring enthusiasm of young people to join the army is a demonstration of the unshakable will of the younger generation to mercilessly wipe out the war maniacs making last-ditch efforts to eliminate our precious socialist country, and achieve the great cause of national reunification without fail and a clear manifestation of their ardent patriotism,” the state-run newspaper wrote.

According to Fox News, The North Korean military operates on a conscription system, with males required to serve for 10 years and females required to serve for 3 years.

Some rural communities in Michigan are not at all pleased with the latest moves by their Governor to allow Chinese-run companies to start building facilities in their areas.

Fox News reports that Governor Whitmer will allow these plans to go forward.

Residents are concerned about the recent rising tensions between China and the United States. Recent footage from a town hall meeting in Green Charter Township and Big Rapids in a rural Michigan county shows that more than 100 residents showed up to express their outrage at the proposal to allow Chinese-owned companies to move forward with plans to build factories in their area.

85 per cent of respondents polled on Donald Trump’s own Truth Social website think protesting against his arrest would be risking a January 6-style set-up, despite Trump himself telling them to go out and demonstrate.

On Saturday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday, citing “illegal leaks” from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation regarding payments allegedly made to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election campaign.

Although many legal observers say the potential indictment of Trump is a political show trial and that in any other scenario the payments would represent nothing worse than a misdemeanor, Democrats remain desperate to prevent Trump from running for president again.

Leftist ‘thinker’ Sam Harris declared last week that conservatives should not be allowed to voice their opinions on issues such as the war in Ukraine, climate change, or vaccine safety.

Making the remarks on a podcast, Harris’ argument is that conservative commentators are making a living out of “not caring” and thus should not be allowed to influence anyone else’s opinion.

“We’re swimming in a sea of misinformation, where you’ve got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others, who should not have an opinion on these topics,” Harris proclaimed.

He continued, “There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change, or the war in Ukraine, or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right?”

The announcement of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin is shaking Western war plans. After presenting a peace project, the Chinese government now demonstrates that it is considering Russian interests in the conflict as relevant, which is why the country’s president decided to go to Moscow. As well known, peace and Russian interests are inadmissible points for the Collective West, which is why an important American official has already publicly declared that any Chinese peace proposal must be automatically rejected by Ukraine. The case shows quite clearly that the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev is just a proxy for NATO, not having the capacity to decide sovereignly whether or not to negotiate an agreement.

According to John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, any Chinese ceasefire proposal must be considered unacceptable after Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow. Kirby believes that the Chinese gesture and conversations with Putin in person before Zelensky demonstrate that Beijing is writing a peace proposal that takes into account only Russian interests, possibly seeking to ensure the preservation of Russian territorial gains so far. That, for Kirby, would make any dialogue unfeasible.

More than that, the spokesperson sees the growing Russian-Chinese cooperation as an attempt to end the “rules-based order” and reverse the legacy of post-WWII international society. According to him, Russia and China “don’t like” the order built by the “US and its allies” and want to rewrite the world according to new guidelines with the current partnership being a part of this process.

If you asked Torsten Slok a week ago how the economy was going to fare this year, he would have told you he was expecting a no-landing scenario, whereby the Federal Reserve would tame inflation without triggering a downturn.

But all has changed following the collapse of three US banks over a matter of days. The chief economist of Apollo Global Management now says he’s bracing for a hard landing. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss his changing views.

China imported more gold from Switzerland last year and stepped up gold purchases from Russia, according to the latest import data releases.

Swiss exports of gold to China were at four-year highs in 2022, with China taking in 524 tonnes of gold worth around $33 billion. This is a massive increase from 354 tonnes reported in 2021 and the most since 2018, according to Swiss customs data.

China is the world’s number one gold consumer, followed by India, with a focus on retail investment and jewelry demand.

In a separate dataset published by Russia’s customs agency over the weekend, China also increased its purchases of Russian gold. China bought 6.6 tons of gold from Russia in 2022, which is an increase of 67% from 2021, local Russian media reported.

China’s central bank also stepped up gold purchases at the end of last year, buying 30 tons of gold in December, which followed its November purchase of 32 tons of gold — the People's Bank of China's first officially recorded purchase since September 2019. China's gold reserves now total 2,010 tons.

Credit Suisse, which was the second largest bank in Switzerland, and considered a “too big to fail” bank, has failed.

Swiss authorities rushed through a deal late Sunday in an attempt to prevent a whole-scale stock market crash before trading started in Asia, along with futures trading in the U.S.

The deal involved a forced fire sale to its rival bank, the largest bank in Switzerland, Swiss National Bank (SNB), which included both bailout money from Switzerland’s Central Bank for SNB, along with a bail-in of AT1 bonds with Credit Suisse used to fund seniors’ pensions, which will be completely wiped out.

The failing 167-year-old Swiss usury branch of private central banking known as Credit Suisse is swimming in scandals, many of them horrendously appalling, that date back many years.

Despite only just recently capturing headlines for its likely soon collapse, the ongoing stock selloff of the company actually began back in March 2021 following the collapse of the United Kingdom’s Greensill Capital and the United States investment fund Archegos, both to which Credit Suisse had exposure.

The Greensill Capital collapse shaved $10 billion off of Credit Suisse’s books, while the Archegos collapse trimmed another $5.5 billion in losses. The latter company’s manager, in case you did not know, had previously pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

That same year, Credit Suisse entered a guilty plea in the U.S. over the so-called “tuna bond fraud.” The failing bank also received a criminal conviction in Switzerland last year for failing to stop a money-laundering scheme involving a Bulgarian cocaine trafficking ring.

As the U.S. reflects on the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter, new details from a prominent Texas politician could upend the narrative surrounding one of the defining moments of his presidency: the Iran hostage crisis. According to reporting from The New York Times, former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes claims that a high-ranking member of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign took him on a secret diplomatic tour of the Middle East in a bid to damage Carter’s re-election campaign by convincing Iran not to release its 52 American hostages until after the election. “History needs to know that this happened. I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more,” said Barnes, 85. After holding the hostages for 444 days in a standoff that derailed Carter’s presidency, Iran finally released them minutes after Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981. Congressional investigations into collusion between the Reagan campaign and Iran did not find evidence of wrongdoing at the time, but Barnes’ account has the potential to shed light on the much-debated episode, which has become known as the “October surprise.”

According to TheBlaze, The EPA waited a month before ordering dioxin testing near the toxic Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Pace Analytical, an independent lab based in Indiana, released a report on whether there were dangerous concentrations of chemicals in soil samples from East Palestine.

The Guardian reported, “Regulators establish the toxicity of dioxins in a soil sample by calculating the ‘toxicity equivalence’ of all dioxins in the soil compared with the most toxic dioxin compound, called 2,3,7,8 TCDD. East Palestine soil showed levels of ‘2,3,7,8 TCDD toxicity equivalence’ of 700 parts per trillion (ppt).”

Since 1998, the EPA determined that dioxin soil concentrations of less than 1,000 parts per trillion (ppt) were safe for residential areas and between 5,000 ppt to 20,000 ppt in commercial and industrial soil. Anything above those levels would trigger a cleanup.

However in 2010, the EPA proposed drastic reductions in what concentration of dioxin the agency determined to be safe based on the “best available peer-reviewed science.” The concentration of dioxins in the East Palestine soil samples is as much as hundreds of times greater than the threshold from the EPA’s safety recommendation from 2010.

The white-coloured humanoid "Garmi" does not look much different from a typical robot -- it stands on a platform with wheels and is equipped with a black screen on which two blue circles acting as eyes are attached.

But retired German doctor Guenter Steinebach, 78, said: "For me, this robot is a dream."

Not only is Garmi able to perform diagnostics on patients, it can also provide care and treatment for them. Or at least, that is the plan.

Garmi is a product of a new sector called geriatronics, a discipline that taps advanced technologies like robotics, IT and 3D technology for geriatrics, gerontology and nursing.

About a dozen scientists built Garmi with the help of medical practitioners like Steinebach at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence.

'Too small to fail.'

In the past 48 hours, two banks – Credit Suisse and First Republic - got massive cash infusions to stabilize their foundations, which had begun to shiver and shake after the collapse of two U.S. regional banks, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last Friday and New York's Signature Bank on Sunday.

Credit Suisse, a 167-year-old financial institution, secured a $54 billion dollar loan from the Swiss National Bank (SNB) - Switzerland's version of the Federal Reserve.

Apparently, the SNB thinks Credit Suisse, which ranks among the world's largest wealth managers, is too Swiss to fail, and that its collapse could cause ripples through the entire financial industry.

Concerning, but fair enough. Credit Suisse is an international banking giant. But California-based regional bank First Republic is not.

CNN anchor Erin Burnett has admitted evidence that members of President Biden's family received over $1million from various accounts linked to son Hunter's Chinese business associates 'doesn't look good' for the First family. 

During a recent episode of CNN's 'Erin Burnett OutFront,' the host touched on the subpoenaed financial records, which were obtained by the House Oversight Committee.

The records show that money from the president's troubled son was funneled to several members of the Biden clan including James Biden, and Beau Biden's widow Hallie Biden.