Jason Whitlock claims Colorado players rented out a strip club TWICE before heavy Alamo Bowl defeatColby Rogers shines as Memphis rolls past Ole Miss
Heartbreak as teen backpackers' bodies return home
Tragedy on the Runway: South Korea's Worst Aviation DisasterThe Mega millions jackpot lottery ticket is back bearing amazing news for Californians, as the biggest prize in this cycle has now been claimed, after a gas station in California's Cottonwood reported that the winning ticket was sold from their place, says a Barron report. ET Year-end Special Reads Take That: The gamechanger weapon's India acquired in 2024 10 big-bang policy moves Modi government made in 2024 How governments tried to rein in the social media beast Is there a new Mega Millions jackpot lottery winner? The Mega Millions lottery is held throughout the years, with billions in giveaway for winners whose lucky stars shine bright. And this time, it is the Californians who would be delighted that probably someone from their region will become a billion dollar winner after cashing out his Mega Million lottery ticket. Who has won the Mega Millions jackpot lottery? The winning ticket for the $1.22 billion jackpot was drawn on Friday, suggest reports, and the winning numbers for the top prize were 3, 7, 37, 49, 55, and 6. Each jackpot prize at Mega Millions jackpot starts off at $20 million and the amount keeps adding up until a ticket purchaser claims his win. However, the winner of this jackpot has yet to come forward, and they won’t be able to claim the prize anonymously, the California Lottery says. Mega Millions is widely popular across the US, and with this major winning of the billion dollars, which would be reduced a bit, due to taxes, the popularity of the lottery jackpot is expected to grow further in the year 2025, when more jackpots will be announced, come January. FAQs: How much was the prize for the New Year Mega Millions jackpot? For the New Year's eve, there was a $1.2 Billion Mega Millions Jackpot lottery ticket up for grabs, which has been sold at a gas station in California. Artificial Intelligence(AI) Java Programming with ChatGPT: Learn using Generative AI By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Basics of Generative AI: Unveiling Tomorrows Innovations By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Generative AI for Dynamic Java Web Applications with ChatGPT By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Mastering C++ Fundamentals with Generative AI: A Hands-On By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Master in Python Language Quickly Using the ChatGPT Open AI By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Marketing Performance Marketing for eCommerce Brands By - Zafer Mukeri, Founder- Inara Marketers View Program Office Productivity Zero to Hero in Microsoft Excel: Complete Excel guide 2024 By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Finance A2Z Of Money By - elearnmarkets, Financial Education by StockEdge View Program Marketing Modern Marketing Masterclass by Seth Godin By - Seth Godin, Former dot com Business Executive and Best Selling Author View Program Astrology Vastu Shastra Course By - Sachenkumar Rai, Vastu Shashtri View Program Strategy Succession Planning Masterclass By - Nigel Penny, Global Strategy Advisor: NSP Strategy Facilitation Ltd. View Program Data Science SQL for Data Science along with Data Analytics and Data Visualization By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) AI and Analytics based Business Strategy By - Tanusree De, Managing Director- Accenture Technology Lead, Trustworthy AI Center of Excellence: ATCI View Program Web Development A Comprehensive ASP.NET Core MVC 6 Project Guide for 2024 By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Marketing Digital Marketing Masterclass by Pam Moore By - Pam Moore, Digital Transformation and Social Media Expert View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) AI-Powered Python Mastery with Tabnine: Boost Your Coding Skills By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Office Productivity Mastering Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and 365 By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Marketing Digital marketing - Wordpress Website Development By - Shraddha Somani, Digital Marketing Trainer, Consultant, Strategiest and Subject Matter expert View Program Office Productivity Mastering Google Sheets: Unleash the Power of Excel and Advance Analysis By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Web Development Mastering Full Stack Development: From Frontend to Backend Excellence By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Finance Financial Literacy i.e Lets Crack the Billionaire Code By - CA Rahul Gupta, CA with 10+ years of experience and Accounting Educator View Program Data Science SQL Server Bootcamp 2024: Transform from Beginner to Pro By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Has the name of the $1.2 Billion Mega Millions Jackpot lottery ticket winner announced? No, the name of the latest Mega Millions Jackpot lottery ticket winner has not been announced yet as the person is yet to come forward. (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel )
MADISON, Wis. , Nov. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Accuray Incorporated ARAY today reported, as required by NASDAQ Listing Rules, equity inducement awards to Mike Murphy , the company's new Vice President, Corporate Controller. As a material inducement to Mr. Murphy joining the company, and in accordance with NASDAQ Listing Rule 5635(c)(4), the Compensation Committee approved granting Mr. Murphy an award of 150,000 restricted stock units covering shares of the company's common stock effective as of November 29, 2024 (collectively, the "Inducement Awards"). The Inducement Awards were made outside of the company's current equity plan, but are subject to terms and conditions generally consistent with those in the company's 2016 Equity Incentive Plan. Twenty-five percent of the restricted stock units subject to the restricted stock unit award will vest on each yearly anniversary of October 31, 2024 , subject to Mr. Murphy's continued service through each applicable vesting date. About Accuray Accuray is committed to expanding the powerful potential of radiation therapy to improve as many lives as possible. We invent unique, market-changing solutions that are designed to deliver radiation treatments for even the most complex cases—while making commonly treatable cases even easier—to meet the full spectrum of patient needs. We are dedicated to continuous innovation in radiation therapy for oncology, neuro-radiosurgery, and beyond, as we partner with clinicians and administrators, empowering them to help patients get back to their lives, faster. Accuray is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California , with facilities worldwide. To learn more, visit www.accuray.com or follow us on Facebook , LinkedIn , X , and YouTube . Media Contact Beth Kaplan Public Relations Director, Accuray +1 (408) 789-4426 bkaplan@accuray.com View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/accuray-incorporated-reports-inducement-award-under-nasdaq-listing-rules-302316426.html SOURCE Accuray Incorporated © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Authored by James Howard Kunstler, "A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above.” - Matt Taibbi, Racket News I would guess that you’re feeling as if anything might happen now. It’s hard to rule out even the possibility that we could all be vaporized before moving onto the next mundane chore of the day. The world order is dangerously in flux. America’s Woke-Jacobin “Joe Biden” regime was defeated in the 2024 election, but they were apparently just a front for the sinister entity we call the “blob” or the Deep State, which in recent years has consistently and garishly acted against our country’s interests. So, the blob abides, and it probably weaves schemes in the deep background of daily life even as a new government awaits. But if the Woke-Jacobin Biden-istas were tied-in with the so-called “globalist” enterprise centered around the EU bureaucracy, with assistance from the World Economic Forum’s network of zillionaires and bankers. . . well, that coalition looks rather broken now. It’s doing a hurt-dance. It’s on the run, a little bit. What is not broken for the moment — a tenuous moment — is the new Trump regime’s determination to correct the disorders of Western Civ, starting with the affairs of the USA, according to age-old reality-based norms of behavior and good-faith relations between the people and their government. Trust was broken and must be restored. The President-elect has assembled an extraordinary team of reformers, if they can get to their posts without subversion. And, of course, Mr. Trump himself has to evade further attempts to rub him out, to knock him off the game-board before he can take office, and then he must survive the months beyond his inauguration. So, you are correct to be nervous. Paradoxically, Mr. Trump has to initially manage the US government as if it deserves a sense of reassuring continuity, which, in many respects it does not deserve. So many institutions and relationships between them have been perverted and damaged. How do we pretend that the upper layers of management in any federal agency — the strata who really run things below the top “political” appointees — can continue in-place as if all that perversion never happened? The Department of Justice and the FBI are filled with lawyers and agents who abused their power egregiously and went to war against the American people. The agency’s work will just have to stop for a while. The nation can probably endure if investigations and prosecutions are suspended for sixty days while the personnel issues get sorted out — who goes and who stays. But what about the Defense Department and the CIA? The country must be able to defend itself. These departments are the lairs of the more dangerously entrenched blob actors. Both DOD and the CIA have come to be organized as racketeering operations. Both are involved in domestic money-laundering activities at the giant scale, and in rackets abroad — such as the many grifts around Ukraine, in which giant financial entities like BlackRock are partnered-in. (You know, for instance, don’t you, that BlackRock was poised to acquire control of Ukraine’s natural resource base, until Mr. Putin’s resolve ended that fantasy.) And the CIA is suspected of being deeply involved in the Mexican crime cartel operations, both around drugs and human trafficking. The imputations are sickening. The DOD and the CIA will fight desperately to preserve their perqs and projects, and to stay out of jail. But until now they have not really been challenged. The public health agencies, FDA, NIAID, CDC, NIH, and so on have become outright mafias, with labyrinths of money-laundering channels, government grant-grifting, and pharma phuckery, not least around the still-mysterious, homicidal Covid-19 prank, with the deadly mRNA vaccine program piggybacked onto it. Their nemesis, RFK, Jr., is coming on-board to oversee exactly what happened in these corrupt fiefdoms. If you have read his books about Dr. Anthony Fauci, you know that he is adequately prepared to discover what took US public health off-the-rails. Don’t forget, also, that the entire medical profession lies in a slough of dishonor for going along with the fake-and-deadly Covid-19 treatment protocols (intubation, remdesivir, midazolam, and morphine) that killed so many people needlessly. Plus, the doctors’ dishonest demonization of ivermectin and other viable treatments, plus the disgraceful, mendacious behavior of the medical journals in the whole filthy scam. Next, consider the rickety, cruel, Kafkaesque US health insurance system that is now all but running the doctors’ practices. It is an unholy mess. What can you do but wish Mr. Kennedy God-speed in beginning to unravel it all? Surely, a lot of people involved deserve to go to prison. For all you know, the heavyweights of blobdom might be plotting some sort of coup during the Holiday season to prevent Mr. Trump from taking power on January 20. Failure to mount a coup would actually signal some essential weakness in the blob’s own enterprise architecture. The blob has certainly tried everything so far up to an actual coup, that is, a sharp discontinuity in constitutional government — like, with tanks around the US Capitol and generals in the Oval Office. The blob’s other problem is that it has no powerful individual leader to rally behind, no one with charisma. It has only its multifarious tentacles — departments, agencies, offices, and operations — which Mr. Trump and his lieutenants can lop off in broad strokes. They can cashier generals, defund projects, shut-down offices and programs, send US Marshals into CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, to lockdown document archives while flushing out employees. Early on, the Trump team has got to assess the patriotism of individuals in these departments. Based on blob behavior of the past decade, no one’s fidelity to the constitution can be taken-for-granted. It will surely be necessary to begin open inquiries into the recent behavior of some prominent political figures in order to demonstrate a serious intent to reform. For just one example, Alejandro Mayorkas , the Homeland Security chief who threw the US Border wide open for four years, presents a probable cause case for treason. Perhaps the new Attorney General can convene a grand jury away from the blob-dominated DC federal court district, say in Texas where these crimes on the border were actually committed — crimes such as ordering the US Border Patrol to stand down while whole caravans waded the Rio Grande. Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to answer publicly for his coordination of a massive DOJ lawfare conspiracy. How exactly did Deputy US AG Matthew Colangelo end up in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office? Who green-lighted the harsh prosecutions of Jan 6 suspects by Matthew Graves, in particular their long pre-trial detentions in solitary confinement? Who in the White House confabbed with attorney Nathan Wade to manage the Fulton County case against Mr. Trump and eighteen other defendants? Why did Delaware federal attorney David Weiss allow the statute of limitations run out on Hunter Biden’s 2014 and 2015 tax evasion cases? Stuff like that. And, of course, FBI Director Christopher Wray needs to answer for the Jan 6 DNC / RNC pipe bomb caper, and the roles of “confidential human sources” in the Jan 6 Capitol riot — including the antics of the notorious Ray Epps. Plus, the three years of RussiaGate and his cavalier use of the FISA Courts. Please subpoena SC District Judge James Boasberg on that, too, while you’re at it. It will not take many inquiries like these to get the point across. The point will be that after many years of absence, consequence is back on the table for those who abuse power. During the transition — Nov 6 to Jan 20 — Mr. Trump has equivocated a bit about his intentions to bring back consequence in federal operations. On one hand he claims he’s “not interested in retribution,” while on the other hand he has named appointees such as Kash Patel at FBI and John Ratcliffe at CIA who are intimately acquainted with the illegal activities in those places and on-the-record as eager to set consequence in motion. It’s hard to imagine they will demur from getting answers about what has been going on and who is responsible, and take corrective measures. If he makes it through confirmation, it may be less difficult for a Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to straighten out the Pentagon. The military is much more explicitly hierarchical, and orders are orders. Generals and bureaucrats will be ordered out of the building. But then there are large dark pools of activity hidden from the public, things like DARPA and its many offshoots, that may be harder to penetrate. You must imagine that there are operations hidden even from the SecDef. We keep hearing that the Pentagon can’t pass an audit and can’t account for trillions of mis-spent dollars. Guess what? Someone (or many someones) can be court-martialed for that. Again: consequence returns. Suddenly things are done correctly. Perhaps even a lost sense of honor is restored. Who knows what Elon & Vivek’s DOGE group can accomplish? But there are hard limits in the fiscal whoppers like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and veterans benefits that won’t yield much. Blogger David Stockman, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that even firing three-quarters of all federal employees would only save about $700 billion in savings, which is not enough to avoid a debt death spiral. The carried debt alone could sink whatever else Mr. Trump seeks to accomplish, especially as it can morph into a lethal currency crisis at any time — a runaway inflation and / or collapse of the bond market that would put a lot of people and enterprises out of business, bringing on a new great depression. There’s always talk about “growing” our way out of debt. I doubt we will be able to do that in the proposed way, based on economic dynamics we’ll get to further below. In his first term, Mr. Trump made noises about defaulting on US debt. I think you will hear chatter about doing just that in the early days of 2025. Though it sounds horrendous, default will happen one way or another: either an honest repudiation of treasury paper ( Sorry, we just can’t make the payments anymore ), or by allowing currency collapse to do the dirty work for us ( Sorry, but our money is worthless . Here’s a billion dollars. . . enjoy the bagel you get for it ). Much of the rest of the world is in similar straits debt-wise, especially Europe and China. The Bretton Woods system for regulating world money has been brain-dead for many years. It’s not hard to imagine something replacing it, including the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency (with all its exorbitant privileges). It remains to be seen what role, if any, cryptocurrencies might play in world trade. Many people are wowed by Bitcoin’s journey above $100,000 lately. I’m still not persuaded that it’s anything but a classic bubble in a speculation that represents nothing — except maybe the electricity expended in processing the math attached to its “creation.” A blogger friend makes this interesting point: What will matter is that one Bitcoin transaction is equivalent to about a month of electricity for the average US household. As Bitcoin grows, energy “consumption” grows exponentially. Note, I said CONSUMPTION, NOT PRODUCTION. If you believe in infinite cheap energy fueled by infinite free money and debt, then all the power to you! No pun intended. . . . — Wendy Williamson For all the “wow,” Bitcoin still lacks the principal properties of true money. It’s not a practical medium of exchange (buying stuff), it’s not a useful store of value (with its periodic crashes and zooms), nor a reliable index of prices (ditto). To me, it looks like a fugazy that has made a small number of people very rich within a limited window of history. Naturally, the people who got rich, who converted their Bitcoins into villas, yachts, and shares of Nvidia, are infatuated with Bitcoin and the phenomenon of crypto. If there is one thing that might characterize the new times we are entering, it will be the recognition that real things have more value than fake things. We have been traumatized by fakery, and going forward great effort will go into identifying it. Our survival depends on being able to discern the fake from the real. Does the world really need a certified universal money agreement? Nothing like Bretton Woods existed until eighty years ago, and it came into being only because the USA so dominated the globe after a ruinous war in Europe and Asia it could command the world’s obedience — at least the parts that weren’t communist. Before that, currencies, monies, and commodities existed, of course, and people took calculated chances trading in them. Usually, but not always, one nation’s currency dominated for a while, as the pound sterling did before World War Two. But paper currencies are a relative novelty. The US only started using paper money in the 1860s. When “money” was mostly gold or silver coin, exchange rates were easy to determine by the purity and weight of a coin. When paper entered the scene, bankers, speculators, and merchants had to do their own due diligence to discover whether X-tons of iron ore, tons of coal, or wheat were worth trading for X-amount of yen, deutschmarks, pounds sterling, and dollars. Those quandaries birthed hedging in currency and commodity trades — a device now wildly perverted, deforming the dynamics of risk and price discovery in everything. We are probably headed back into that world of diverse monies with inherent risks, part and parcel with a multi-polar world of regional hegemons. The US dollar can no longer act as the universal collateral guaranteeing all transactions. Hence, the trade in debt, bonds, and borrowing re-acquires layers of risk absent for a long time. Government borrowing — issuance of sovereign bonds — necessarily declines in that milieu as moral hazard reappears in financial affairs and governments can no longer promiscuously float their spending on debt. Other countries have already discontinued their purchases of US Treasury paper. Where will the customers for US debt come from? (Answer: nowhere.) It’s just another way that nations and their people are forced to get real in a new disposition of things. For now, it has probably been demonstrated that central bank digital currencies are unlikely to work. (Nigeria’s eNaira program, the world’s first large-scale experiment in CBDCs flopped miserably.) Along with the tyrannical surveillance issues, too many citizens rely on transacting business in cash, and if the cash turns no-good, they will find other instruments for transacting, perhaps even things as crude and straightforward as gold and silver, with no counter-party risk, no leverage, and no bullshit attached. To me, though, reversion to hard currency would imply a devolution to far less-complex economies and much lower standards of living. All that runs counter to the current excitement about technological advances compensating for declining systems of modernity — derived from the 20th century religion of endless, limitless progress — creating evermore available (fake) capital. These are the expectations for Artificial Intelligence, advances in “green technology” (especially enhanced electric batteries), next-generation nuclear power, and energy tech not yet achieved but dreamed about such as atomic fusion and zero-point energy. For now, the primary resource of our economy remains oil. All other technologies, including nuclear and “green” tech, still require oil for the production of their hardware and maintenance. US oil production reached an all-time high in late 2024 at 13.6million barrels a day — way higher than the old, pre-fracking era “peak oil” figure of 10-million b/d from 1970, and superficially impressive. Fracking has made all the difference the past two decades, but it is not a permanent installation in the human condition. The continuing production increase has come from enhanced drilling techniques even while the supply of tier-one “sweet-spots” in the Permian Basin of West Texas has markedly declined — and the Permian Basin is the last redoubt of economic shale oil (oil economically worth recovering) in the USA. Mr. Trump has promised loudly and often to “Drill, baby, drill.” Aggressive drilling and opening remaining frontiers like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil production could extend America’s oil abundance on the short end, but there are no meaningful “exploration” prospects left in North America beyond that. We’ll be fooling ourselves. It’s been a nice ride, but the end is in sight. In the Permian Basin, the best drilling locations are increasingly rare as the more productive areas have been exploited. Production In the Permian has declined by 15-percent since 2020, according to data from Enverus . Break-even costs are rising. New well productivity per lateral foot is declining. ZIRP is bygone and the cost of capital (interest on borrowed money) is up with inflation. From 2009 to 2020 — the ZIRP years — investors flocked to shale oil stocks since they couldn’t make a buck on bonds. But the shale producers had trouble making money, even though they produced a lot of oil. Many went bankrupt. After that, investors grew shy about investing in shale oil. Going forward, the capital might not be there for these capital-intensive operations. With the old oil — say, conventional oil in Oklahoma, 1950, where you just banged a pipe in the ground and oil gushed out — the cost of drilling a well was around $500,000 per well (in today’s money). They produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. Shale oil wells cost between $6-million to $12-million per well, with horizontal drilling and fracking (utilizing vast amounts of water trucked-in, plus chemicals and fracking sand to keep the fractures open). The shale wells produce far less per day than the old conventional wells and they decline by over 50-percent in one year. After three or four years, they’re done. Do you see the difference? Higher oil prices are required to justify new capital expenditure. Yet day-by-day the declining American middle-class steadily loses its ability to pay more for oil and individuals and households go broke under the strain of higher prices. The overall dynamic of our economy starts to wobble. Fewer people can qualify for car loans, which is mainly the way American acquire cars. Car-makers are stuck with excess inventory. Eventually the car-makers’ business model fails. And, by the way, it ought to be clear by now that we will not transition from oil-based cars to all-electric cars — surely not at the same scale of mass ownership. Electric cars just cost too much. What happens when mass motoring becomes incrementally less mass, less democratic, something only for the well-off? Answer: It stops. It becomes a focus of resentment and rage. It loses its government subsidies (highway repair, etc). It also leads to the demise of America’s premier living arrangement: suburbia. I have written about this quandary for years. It has been hanging over America’s head, and we are unable to imagine how it plays out — mainly because of the titanic sunk-costs involved. We’ve invested so much of our historic cumulative wealth in building the infrastructure for this living arrangement that letting go of it is unthinkable. Yet, it is already becoming severely dysfunctional. And, of course, as that happens, its components — the tract houses, the strip malls, the office parks — will lose their value, meaning that it will become ever-harder for many people to successfully cash out of it and move elsewhere. And even so, where would that elsewhere be? That problem is exacerbated by the ruinous condition of American cities and their future trajectory. Many US cities have already failed outright — Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo etc. They are abysmally governed and falling to pieces. They are filled with purposeless humanity, lost souls, dangerous criminals, and ever-fewer places of employment. Even the arguably still-successful cities — New York, Boston, Miami — have attained a scale of operation that is not sustainable, not consistent with the resource and capital scarcities to come. They will have to contract, drop services, lose population — and the process will be very messy. Eventually, they’ll be smaller, but they still occupy some of the best geographical sites, so they will not disappear altogether. The contraction will take a long time to resolve. For the present, that leaves the thousands of small towns across America that have been drained of vitality and investment for decades. Despite the damage, they have two big virtues: they already exist at a scale more congenial to redevelopment in a resource-and-capital constrained time; and many of them are geographically proximate to places where food can be grown for their own support. We will discover that this is where the action will move to. This is where much of the remaining population will resettle as the giant cities and suburbia enter their epic decline. The “Golden Age” euphoria is palpable in these weeks before the Trump inauguration . Wall Street is in a rapture imagining a renaissance of corporate enterprise as a punitive regulatory regime lifts. But, just as gigantic cities tend to fail on the issue of scale, the economy as a whole is in need of reorganizing at a finer grain of enterprise. Gigantism itself, gigantic corporations with their tropism for monopoly, have become increasingly ruinous for communities, households, and individual lives in our time. Americans need more autonomy in their economic lives. The trouble is, we might have to get there the hard way — via a general crash of things organized at too large a scale, which would force the necessary rebuild at a smaller and more local scale. This implies a coming second great depression. It’s not hard to imagine such a crash occurring in the first year of a Trump regime. For one thing, there are surely nefarious parties and persons who would like to see it happen, who might even seek to engineer a financial train wreck for revenge against Mr. Trump and his followers. Anyway, a severely overvalued stock market is begging for correction. Ditto the housing market (and the over-valued collateral it represents) that so much of finance rests on. Too many banks are insolvent. The debt quagmire ensures that government can’t rush to the rescue as it has in past emergencies to bail out the banks without destroying the dollar. You might also wonder about the proposition laid out in David Rogers Webb’s book, The Great Taking , about the meticulously planned scheme for central bankers to seize much of the collateral in the world, meaning all your stuff. Sounds a little grandiose and preposterous, perhaps, but the fact is that the regulatory authorities of Western Civ have rewritten the banking rules stealthily over the years so that anyone with a bank account is now considered just a low-order creditor whose assets can be taken in the event of a banking emergency. Your savings are just labeled “collateral,” and your “ownership” of the assets is not what you thought it was. The scam seems fantastic, but the rules are in place, waiting to be sprung. Mr. Webb’s concise 99-page book is available free as a pdf HERE . Of course, a global implosion of equity and bond markets would be the end of financial life as we’ve known it, and none of the abstract chatter about banking rules takes sufficient account of the grotesque social disorder that would attend such an event, so any Great Taking might end up being beside the point — the point being that everyone is broke, no one can transact, and things get awfully dire. But we get a bit ahead of ourselves going up that path. So, let’s return to things we know about. Mr. Trump’s proposed economic reforms have inescapable overtones of contraction. Paring down the federal government workforce may have many benefits, but it would likely cause a depression in the DC Metro area as jobs are massively eliminated, and the economic damage would radiate through the rest of the country as departments are trimmed and shut down, and the money flowing out of them stops. The effect of a tariff campaign could hurt American business in the short term. Import replacement is a laudatory goal, but it’s liable to be a rough road getting there. Supply lines will break. People and businesses will not get the things they need to do produce goods. It takes time and capital to set up new factories. The tendency will be to run production with robots as far as possible — so, where will the people earn a living? Robots will not become consumers . You must also wonder more generally whether it’s really possible to reenact the industrial orgy of the mid-20th century. Detroit will not be what it was in 1962. “Joe Biden” leaves behind an economy already auguring-in, concealed by monumental federal spending of money created out of thin air in the months leading up to the 2024 election to cover-up the failing private US economy. Also, all of the official reporting about jobs in 2024 was fake in order to juice the election for the party in power. US Government outlays for the year were $6.752 trillion against revenue of $4.919 trillion. Government can’t solve the problem of mass joblessness by giving everybody government jobs, and Mr. Trump is not philosophically aligned to that sort 20th century Big Government action. Anyway, too many jobs today are crap jobs toiling for merciless companies who mistreat their workers, so the very meaning of work has been degraded to a new kind of slavery. Plus, too many Americans do not work at all, but subsist on government hand-outs or on crime. How does this change? First, it doesn’t change without the nation going through a period of disorder, discontinuity, and distress. When it does change, the change will be systemic and emergent. It will not come from any top-down government or managerial process. It emerges from the circumstances that reality presents — specifically, the need for people to support themselves, to make themselves useful to their fellow humans, which relationships form into networks of business and work that become a social ecology, a community. So, the second Trump term could usher in a period of deep economic hardship as we try to figure out how to remake an American economy and rebuild those local ecologies of business. Can Mr. Trump assume a role anything like Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s? A paternal voice speaking directly to the people and offering them reassurance in a troubled time? They are obviously very different personalities. Also, the lingering political opposition to Mr. Trump is far more noxious on the Left than anything FDR faced from the Right in 1933. Today’s Left is still functionally insane, sunk in Marxian-Woke delusions, race-and-gender animus, and an intemperate libido for power, all of it boding ill for political stability. Americans are used to relying on faceless, distant authorities to take care them, to solve their problems: Social Security, Disability, Medicaid, insurance companies, courts. It all works very poorly now, and before long a lot of it may not work at all. We will have to take care of each other. There have never been so many single-person households as there are now. Loneliness and anomie are epic. When the Boomers are gone, that will likely be the end of nursing home care and assisted living at the cost of many thousands of dollars-a-month. The Boomers’ replacement generations are not nearly as wealthy. They missed the window for being able to buy McMansions that could be liquidated for millions to support end-of-life care. We’ll probably see the rise of households made of unrelated people. But the default setting for humans is the family and the extended family. Some human relations that were common in earlier eras of history, and absent in our time, could return. A little over a century ago, ten percent of the people employed in America were household servants, including what were then middle-class households. Today, only the very wealthy have servants. What hasn’t changed is that people need a place and a purpose, and a purposeful place in a household is not necessarily a bad deal in a civilized society. We just haven’t experienced it in many decades and many Americans would probably find the proposition ridiculous. Yet too many have no place in society and nothing to do, including activities that might be considered duties to one another. Many towns in the 19th century had institutions called the Poor Farm. Sounds terrible, perhaps, but it was a way of providing a place and real duties for people who had nowhere else to go and nothing to occupy them. It was generally organized as a local charity. Residents were expected to work to their ability, raise their own food in gardens, take care of livestock, do laundry and cleaning chores. Today, that might be considered “cruel,” but really, is it as bad as just letting many thousands camp-out on the streets, sunk in drug addiction? What it requires is the political will to organize useful, properly-scaled institutions around these needs. To get there, we must drop a lot of ideological pretenses. We face very serious problems with agriculture organized at the gigantic scale, utilizing multi-million-dollar machines (usually mortgaged), giant loans to put in crops, huge “inputs” of chemicals and fertilizers. That is probably coming to an end, too, despite the current techno-narcissistic fantasies of Agribiz. We’re probably going to need more human beings working directly on farms, smaller farms, with fewer giant machines, less borrowed money for putting in crops, and fewer chemical inputs. Which is to say, we’re probably going to see a larger percentage of the population at work growing our food than has been the case for a long time. I suppose it’s hard to grok our society becoming reorganized so differently, of reviving ways of living and working together that are consistent with human nature, proven over time, but considered out-of-date now. Obviously resurrecting relations like these requires major changes in our national psychology. Today, it is impossible to persuade a lot of citizens that they need to do something useful for a living. Or, to look at it differently, that there might be activities to fill their days that would interesting, satisfying, and rewarded with pay — rather than just loafing, getting high, and watching canned entertainment. Today, we lack countless occupational niches in society that used to allow people of very different abilities to find a place and a purpose, especially, now, people of low ability. If I am correct that the macro trend is to re-scale our economy and re-localize it, those places and purposes can return. It will probably also require a return of the eternal verities, too, as a means of managing social relations: truth, beauty, liberty, brotherly love, trust, fairness. . . conditions and behavior that we should at least agree to aspire to in a common culture worthy of our allegiance. I doubt that the incoming Trump administration sees things developing in the direction of downscaling, decomplexifying, and localizing. Rather, they seem to expect ever more grandiose enterprise, at least in what’s known as the private sector, even while they pare down government. But, really, everything in the everyday life of this nation will have to scale down and happen differently. We’re going to need fewer giant entities like Walmart and more local commercial networks of small businesses geared to local communities. As you may have inferred, I believe that circumstances will deliver us to that new disposition of things in any case, whether political leaders agree or not. If Mr. Trump is wise, he will recognize the trend and go with the flow. As I write, governments are falling all over the place. Olaf Scholz cannot form a governing coalition in Germany. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s ruling faction lost bigly in snap elections last summer with no clear majority for any coalition, and also in the EU parliamentary elections. Both countries are using lawfare to defeat their opponents. Mr Scholz’s and his allies are trying to outlaw the rising opposition Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) party, especially after the AFD showed growing strength in state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia. The Paris prosecutor’s office is trying to nail Marine LePen on embezzling EU funds to pay staff salaries in her National Rally Party. Germany, the largest economy in the EU, has been busy committing suicide for the past decade. The country shut down its nuclear power reactor fleet entirely and went all-in for a “green” energy program (wind and solar) that has fallen far short of being able to supply its needs. It had just gotten ready to receive a reliable supply of cheap Russian natural gas in 2022 when somebody — probably the USA — blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines. Joe Biden declared in so many words that he was going to “stop” the Nord Streams months earlier, so why not believe him? The Germans just rolled over for what would normally be construed as an act-of-war against it, by a NATO ally no less. Consequently, overnight Germany’s advanced industrial economy, its automakers, chemical companies, machine tool-makers, became uncompetitive in global markets and the German economy entered a slow death spiral. Europe is now supposed to be happy to get American liquified natgas, which is much more costly to transport and offload than Russian pipeline gas would have been. France was only marginally better off with its robust nuclear energy production to supply electricity, but it, too, lost access to cheap Russian natgas needed for industry and home heating. Meanwhile, the other nations of the EU have all to one extent or another joined the European suicide pact. The EU has been at war against its own farmers for years for reasons that appear completely insane — perhaps driven by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum. The regulatory architecture of the European Commission is crushing business under its “green” energy and climate change mitigation agenda. Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV) unexpectedly won the most seats in the last election, but not an outright majority, and could not form a working coalition. Wilders did not become prime minister —the job was assigned instead to one Dick Schoof, a career bureaucrat who most recently ran the Netherlands’ Intel service. Canada, entered political limbo in mid-December when Deputy Prime Minister and Finance chief (and WEF board member) Chrystia Freeland suddenly resigned and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looked like he was fighting for his political life in parliament. Mr. Trudeau had only days before made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for talks with Donald Trump, who mocked him most severely down there, calling Canada “our fifty-first state” and referring to Mr. Trudeau as “governor.” The Canadian dollar has been tanking since then and stands at 69 cents to the US dollar as I write. Mr. Trudeau will be gone early in the new year at the latest. He’ll be replaced by the Conservative party leader, Pierre Poilievre, who demonstrates an ability to think straight. The European Union regulatory overlayment has become an intolerable burden for the EU member nations. The EU seemed like a good idea at the time, and for many years basic operating principles like a common currency (the Euro) and the Schengen Agreement (free movement of member state citizens and goods across national borders) made daily life easier. But in recent years the EU bureaucracy adopted a set of insane polices: the programmatic destruction of farms and farmers; mass unregulated immigration from third world failed states; and antipathy to petroleum resources for the sake of debatable climate change. Aggravating all this is the unelected EU Commissioners’ lack of accountability to the public. Other technical issues, such as the EU’s lack of fiscal control over individual members and the problems that causes for bond issuance appear irresolvable. Once before, in 2012, financial turmoil has threatened the EU’s existence. But that crisis — the collapse of Greece and its ramifications — got “papered over” with bail-outs and accounting fraud. Now, Europe enters an era not just of critical financial imbalances, but of severe dislocations in the on-the-ground economy of real production. The flood of migrants continues and their aggressive antagonism to age-old European culture is on the rise with calls for Sharia law and a European caliphate. It’s getting to look like a tragi-farcical reenactment of the Mohammedan conquests of the Middle Ages. It’s draining EU members’ treasuries while they go broke from de-industrializing. And countless humiliations are heaped on the people: mass murders, beheadings, constant insults, street violence all over and, just last week, the Christmas market murders in Magdeburg. It’s at a breaking point. As Europe watches Mr. Trump successfully commence deportations, Europe will eventually follow — but not before a tumultuous period in early 2025 when rebellion sweeps away Leftist governments. The European Union could be swept away with them. Borders will harden, national currencies might return, and drastic realignment awaits. The United Kingdom looks like a lost cause due to the utter collapse of the conservative party, leaving Labor temporarily alone on the field, with the monumentally incompetent PM Keir Starmer in charge and an all-out Orwellian regime severely abusing the indigenous British people while it coddles hostile immigrants. That will not last a whole lot longer. Starmer will be chased out in the first half of 2025, just as Liz Truss (remember her?) got dumped in 2022. Waiting to enter at stage-right is Nigel Farage, a genuinely charismatic leader who is destined to become Britain’s Trump. After successfully leading the Brexit charge, he sojourned in the political wilderness like Churchill did between 1929-39. Now he leads the Reform UK Party, which is in the process of utterly eclipsing the broken Tories. Look for Farage to make his move quickly in 2025. Then there is the woeful situation in Ukraine. I’ve written about it often and will recapitulate it as succinctly as possible: The Ukraine War was an American neocon project to destabilize Russia and probably an attempt to gain control of its resource assets. Mr. Putin refused to get rolled and fought back. It has been a hugely costly disaster for Ukraine in blood, capital, and infrastructure. Not a cake-walk for Russia, either. But Mr. Putin will probably attain his objectives, which are: annexation of Donbas and Crimea and establishment of what’s left of Ukraine as a neutral, non-member of NATO. Mr. Trump is eager to end what he calls “this stupid war.” The catch is, how can he settle it expeditiously without appearing to capitulate? Mr. Putin will not budge from retaining Crimea and the Donbas provinces (“oblasts”). That is the condition for even entering talks. The humiliation associated with this project should be all Joe Biden’s, and in some respects certainly will be when his family’s entanglements and machinations are fully exposed, as they are certain to be. Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will solve the puzzle by pretending to negotiate over the port of Odessa, which will eventually be awarded to the rump Ukraine so it can have access to the sea for its essential grain shipments. They’ll tussle for a while over that but it will be all for show. The war will end. Ukraine will finally hold elections and Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be cast out like a dog that has peed on the rug too many times. I doubt he will survive the year. Both America and Russia pony up money to rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, but not much more. The world will come to understand exactly what happened. NATO will be a shadow of what it was, if it does not collapse altogether due to the rising political upheavals all over Europe. I am not on the bus with the mob shouting about Israel as a perpetrator of “genocide.” Our own General Sherman put it succinctly 160 years ago: War is hell . Hamas should not have started one on October 7, 2023. For that, the Palestinians got hell. Hamas fighters should not have (literally) dug itself in amongst the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, with its labyrinth of war tunnels that the Israelis had to destroy if there would be any end to the strife emanating out of them. The essential problem in that corner of the world is that the region cannot support the huge and still-growing populations of most of the Arab states in it. It is mostly desert. The fantastic wealth of the oil age combined with other circumstances, such as the increase in grain production, to grow these populations. Tragically now, all that has reached a limit and things are going in the other direction: toward collapse. This slow-motion collapse expresses itself in political friction, mass migration, violence, and religious zealotry. The Jihadis are serious about murdering non-Muslims. Considering the action in Europe lately, the truculence of Muslim migrants towards their hosts there, it’s obvious that Jews and Christians are on equal footing as targets. The population Israel of Israel is 9.4 -million. The total population of Palestinians worldwide is estimated to be around 14.8 million as of mid-2024. This includes Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within Israel, and in the diaspora across various countries. The population of countries adjacent to — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria — is 145-million. Much of that Arab population subscribes to annihilating the state of Israel, and declares as much publicly all the time. Is Israel not supposed to take those threats seriously? Considering these odds, are you shocked and offended that the United States is an ally of Israel? Do you think that the United States has no strategic interest in any counter-balance to opposing interests in the Middle East? Grow up. The American Woke-Marxists want you to think that this relationship is illicit, unjust. They want you to hate the Jews and hate Israel. You’d better ask yourself: who do these Woke-Marxists serve? Not our interests, not American interests. Israel has managed to make its tiny desert country blossom over the past seventy-five years while also building a manufacturing and tech economy. Due to the constant threats against it, much of the wealth generated by that economy must be directed into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). It is quite an accomplishment for this tiny state to stand-up against so many enemies. They have won two major wars against them in modern times as well as many periodic border clashes, intifadas, and skirmishes. Their enemies are deeply resentful and probably jealous of Israel’s economic success. The Oct 7, 2023, rape, torture, and murder attack by Hamas prompted Israel to mount an existential defense against an obdurately and garishly murderous enemy. Israel won the Gaza Strip territory from Egypt in the 1967 War. In 2005 it turned over governance of Gaza to the Palestinians. Among other things, the Palestinians could have turned Gaza’s twenty-five-mile-long beach-front into a premier Mediterranean resort. Instead, the Hamas government used the international aid funds they received to build miles and miles of war tunnels. Bad choice. They used Gaza as a launching pad for missile attacks and intifadas. More bad choices. 10/7/23 was a crossed red line. Now there is no more Gaza. The civilians will have to find somewhere else to go, and if their Arab neighbors won’t take them, then blame their Arab neighbors. They have been cast out for atrocious behavior. The Jihadis’ publicists want you to think that Israel has behaved badly. No doubt, the action by the IDF in Gaza was brutal. War is hell. In war, everywhere and always, soldiers act savagely. Americans did, at times, in Vietnam and Iraq. It is the reality of war. One lesson is that wars should not be started casually. Israel’s motive in this war is to put the war parties of its enemies out-of-business. It is close to succeeding now, with Hamas scattered, Hezbollah cut off from its sponsor, Iran, and Assad gone in Syria. Israel accomplished this with the “Joe Biden” regime pretending to support both sides in the conflict and finally having less influence than ever over the outcome. This is where things stand in December, 2025, but it is a very lively game-board, and there is much potential for new action and the entry of other players, which we’ll turn to now. Well, that was fast! Took twelve days (Nov 27 to Dec 8). Phhhhht!!! Assad, gone (to Russia). How’d that happen? Begin with the population problem I cited above: the region is poor. Expanding population against a contracting resource base will create great political and social stresses. Syria’s population grew dramatically from 7-million in 1972 to 22-million in 2022. Syria is a large country with distinct territories. Its easternmost region bordering Iraq and Turkey, Jazira, with the city of Raqqah, straddles the Euphrates River, a grain-growing corridor that used to feed the Syrian people. Many years of drought and botched irrigation projects have wrecked farming there. That was one factor in the mass migrations to Europe the past decade. Altogether, 6-million Syrians have fled the country since the Arab Spring in 2011. Jazira is also the location of Syria’s oil, which was grabbed by the US in 2019 when the country was racked by civil war. The region is a cultural crossroads, with a significant Kurdish population, bleeding over to Greater Kurdistan into Iraq and Turkey. Long story short: Assad’s Syria was badly weakened by food shortages, revenue shortage, and long-running civil war. He could barely pay his Army, and when the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel forces pushed across the country this fall, his soldiers melted away. HTS has its origins in al Qaeda, and al Qaeda has its origins in the US intel blob and its neocon strategists. You can be sure that the US was involved in rooting out Assad. As we have seen before, these kinds of operations tend to be double-edged swords, which end up stabbing America in the back later on. In this case, imagine that by chasing Assad out we may have succeeded in turning Syria into Jihad Central of the Middle East. As soon as HTS was in control of Damascus, the capital, Israel sent its air force in and destroyed every military target, airfield, tank park, munitions depot in Syria so that it would not fall into the hands of Hezbollah, Israel’s Iran-backed enemy. Israel controls a small area of southern Syria near the Golan Heights. Israel had already done severe damage to Hezbollah earlier this year by methodically killing off its leadership, one-by-one. The exploding pager op also did enormous operational damage to Hezbollah. For now, Israel benefits from broken Syria. Iran has lost its geographical conduit for arms supply to Hezbollah. The HTS forces are Sunni and Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, is Shia, with all the built-in conflict that implies. All of a sudden, Iran has lost its influence in this region adjacent to Israel, the enemy it declares it wants to “wipe off the map.” The Turks were involved in the Syrian regime change, too. Turkey currently hosts millions of Syrian refugees from the chaos of the Syrian civil war. The Kurds in Syria are also a problem, linked to the PKK, a terrorist terror group inside Turkey. Turkey’s pugnacious president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pivots between its alliance with NATO, its off-and-on strategic relations with Russia, and the Arab world with its cultural affinities. Turkey is a disgruntled NATO. For decades, it was openly and often derided by other nations in the west as “the sick man of Europe.” Yet, it controls the entrance to the Black Sea, which has always been a problem for Russia — they have gone to war several times — though Russia engages in development projects in Turkey these days. Don’t forget, Turkey’s Ottoman Empire controlled all of the Middle East and North Africa from the 16th into the early 20th century and its influence ranged into Europe as well. This was the time long before oil wealth juiced the Arab world. Populations were sparse then across what was then called The Holy Land. The indigenous Arabs still wandered the desert on camels and lived in tents. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in the First World War, and what you see on-the-ground over much of the region are artificial boundaries created by the British after the war for administrative efficiency. Mr. Erdoğan may harbor ambitions for Turkey to once again play a larger role in world affairs. It has the region’s largest standing army. For now, Turkey and Erdoğan enjoy somewhat enhanced regional influence. The counter to him has been the US’s penchant for creating failed states via CIA involvement with rebel and Jihad movements. Mr. Trump has dropped the hint that he’s inclined to keep the US involvement in Syria to a minimum. He begins his administration with a declared aversion to all the world’s current wars. I’d forecast the HTS government not being able to control much of the country and a continued arc toward failed nationhood, with friction and violence between many of the different groups still residing there. I doubt Israel wants to try to control it, since it is an obvious quagmire. Russia appears to be bowing out of direct involvement, too, but is rumored to be negotiating with HTS to maintain its presence at the Khmeimim Air Base and the Tartus Naval Base. The macro trend in many parts of the Middle East is a return to pre-modernity. The last hundred years of jet planes and Range Rovers will look like a strange, anomalous blip in history. Whatever is going on in China, her leaders like to play the long game, looking ahead decades, fifty and a hundred years, while everyone else struggles to strategize from month to month. It doesn’t mean that China comes out a winner, though. Some of that long game is just hubris and pretense. China has plenty of problems. It developed into an industrial colossus overnight, and now the global techno-industrial economy it found such a big role in is wobbling, especially in Europe, which puts a huge strain on China’s export-oriented system. Its financial architecture has always been janky because CCP is so entangled with the banks, bourses, and giant business enterprises — and if it doesn’t like how things are going, the Party just pretends that everything’s great. Nothing can be allowed to challenge the CCP’s dominance. Eventually things break, though, and the Party has to create some new narrative to explain the breakage. Lately there are rumors of mass layoffs, and of many young people leaving the cities to return to the countryside. The population is skewed to the elderly, due to the many years of China’s one-child policy. There is, of course, the disastrous real estate bubble which continues to destroy the savings of households, since many Chinese did not trust banks or stock and bond markets, and instead invested in enormous apartment complex property development projects have been failing one after another. The CCP’s response has been to screw down CCP control over the people and their activities ever-harder. The party fears its own people and no regime has a guarantee to go on forever. Expect turmoil there in 2025 as economic depression creeps across the global economy. America’s problems with China over trade and manufacturing are likely to be eclipsed in 2025 by the gross intrusions and subversions that China has been allowed to make in US institutions and our economy with the assistance of the “Joe Biden” administration . The Chinese have infiltrated America’s research universities, telecommunications (especially the hardware for cell phones and 5-G microwave transmission), US Intel, and the corporate sector, stealing intellectual property and our manufacturing secrets. And, of course, China has deeply involved itself in elected officialdom — the Biden family’s grifting operations and Rep Eric Swalwel’s romance with the spy Fang-Fang, among the most notorious. Senator Diane Feinstein employed a Chinese spy as her limo driver and go-fer for twenty years, including the years 2009 to 2015 when she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. You can be sure that Congress is well-larded with Chinese money and the influence it buys. Expect to find out a lot more in 2025. It is one of the things that binds elected officials so tightly to the DC blob. Two other matters involving China require urgent attention and the waiting Trump admin is already talking about them. One is China’s large, recent purchases of US land, both prime farmland and real estate around US military bases. It looks like they are going to be ejected from these holdings, with or without compensation is not known yet. We might see inquiries as to how these purchases were allowed to happen. The second issue is the number of Chinese nationals, especially men of military age, who came across the border along with the millions of other illegal aliens that “Joe Biden” allowed into the country with zero vetting. In fiscal year 2023 — Oct 1, 2022 to Sept. 30, 2023 — that number was about 24,100. In fiscal year 2024 it was 24,400. You should assume that US intel knows something about some of them, but not most of them, and what they are up to here. Several Chinese “police stations” — that is, offices set up in US cities to control Chinese migrants in the US — have been discovered and busted the last several years. And then there was the case of the Chinese high-altitude “weather balloon” (actually suspected of being a military surveillance balloon) that the “Joe Biden” admin allowed to sail completely across the USA from the Pacific to the Atlantic before shooting it down offshore of the Carolinas. These Chinese activities around the USA in aggregate suggest a kind of stealth warfare aimed at eventually getting control of the North American continent and its resources. This would be consistent with fifty-to-a-hundred-year long-range strategic thinking. And it was apparently working pretty nicely until the elections of 2024. It should be pretty alarming, but somehow the alarm bells have not gone off until a couple of months ago. Questions, anyone? I’d forecast that the US and China will not go to war with China over Taiwan in 2025. It is too much of a losing proposition for all concerned. Both China and the USA will be preoccupied with domestic problems and trade negotiations in the year ahead. Keep your eye on Argentina and its president, Javier Milei. Argentina was the world’s seventh-wealthiest nation in the early 1900s, and from 1930s on, after many coups, the country slid into chronic decline, badly aggravated by the long-running dictatorships of Juan and Eva Peron, and followed buy decades more revolving military coups, Peronista governments, and neoliberal finance mischief that left the resource-rich nation broke. Enter Javier Milei (Mee-lay) in 2023 as Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” president, who ran the promise to “take a chain saw” to the parasitical bureaucracy. In year one of his admin (essentially 2024), Milei got rid of 35,000 government employees and balanced the budget for the first time in decades. Inflation is finally falling. The Argentine people have awakened from the successive Peronista / neoliberal zombie comas they have been in for decades. Prediction: in 2025 Argentina sets the pace for the revolution in Western Civ government. Melei has another successful year in downsizing oppressive, useless bureaucracy. He begins a pioneering national nuclear power program. Argentina begins to emerge as a major player on the world stage. El Salvador is ruled, shall we say, by the eccentric and very interesting President Nayib Bukele-Ortiz (known simply as Bukele), now in his second term. His campaign against gang violence that made El Salvador such a savage place has produced spectacular results. His new “Terrorism Confinement Center” is one of the largest and most modern prisons in the world. It was built to house 20,000 inmates. He has arrested an estimated 86,000 hardened gang-aligned criminals. El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world — which is what happens after allowing criminal gangs to hold the country hostage for decades. From 2022 to 2023, the murder rate fell by approximately 69-percent. (Data for 2024 is not complete.) Mr. Bukele enjoys a 91-percent favorable rating among voters. In 2021, El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal tender alongside the US dollar. Mr. Bukele’s “Bitcoin Law” requires businesses to accept Bitcoin in transactions. (As I said above, Bitcoin as “money” is deeply problematic.) The government itself has been purchasing Bitcoin as a long-term investment strategy. The verdict is out as to how Mr. Bukele’s fate might be chained to Bitcoin. For now, he has managed an epic turnaround in a country that had been lost to anarchy and crime for virtually all its previous existence. Forecast: El Salvador will continue to thrive due to Mr. Bukele’s Napoleonic organizational skills, even if Bitcoin falters. That is all I have for you in this end of year forecast for the year to come. I will be amazed to hear if any of you read this document to its bitter end. For each of you personally: do your best to lead purposeful, ethical lives in 2025. Refrain from trying to push other people around. Take care of your own bidness. . . And, above all, stay calm and cheerful!KINGSTON, Jamaica – The United Independents’ Congress of Jamaica (UIC Jamaica) has called for a speedier ruling in the case of its leader Joseph Patterson who is challenging the constitutionality of his 2021 arrest and charge over a public protest during the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The optics is one of the prime minister using the courts to silence his political opponent and slow the rise of Jamaica’s official third registered political party,” claimed the UIC in a press release Thursday signed by its caretaker for Westmoreland Eastern Winston Wright. Patterson was among several persons arrested during a public march organised by the UIC in downtown Kingston. They were demonstrating against mandatory COVID-19 vaccines – despite no such mandates being given by the Jamaican government – and demanding the resignation of all 63 members of parliament. The UIC head subsequently brought a constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court alleging that his arrest was unlawful and a violation of his rights. “The Andrew Holness-led administration overstepped its bounds when it used the police force to assault, arrest and jail him and others during resistance to their improper response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the UIC release stated. “These unconstitutional actions occurred in Kinston at the UIC’s Freedom March on September 22, 2021, which Mr Patterson led as President of Jamaica’s third officially registered political party,” the UIC continued. “The Constitutional Court, after delaying Mr Patterson’s hearing for nearly three years, heard the case eventually and gave its assurance of a ruling by July 31, 2024, but has to date still not delivered a verdict. Clearly, this is justice delayed and justice delayed is justice denied!” The party claims the case is expected to be precedent-setting as it challenges the colonial era Public Order Act and seeks to clarify the powers of the prime minister’s national emergencies. Patterson is reportedly still required to regularly appear before the lower courts in Half Way Tree and Mandeville as he is still on bail which affects his livelihood as an internationally Chartered Professional Accountant. The release says he was initially denied station bail by the police “which was apparently acting on cues from what appears to be a very vindictive and tyrannical Government which misused the police as part of its effort to impose the will of its foreign masters on the people of Jamaica.” Immediately following the incident, the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) had said via Facebook, “The police have arrested the main organiser of the protest, Joseph L Patterson, following his non-compliance with the provisions under the Public Order Act. Jamaican laws require that individuals organizing public marches must get a permit from the police. No permit was sought and none was granted.” The statement was accompanied by a video of Patterson being firmly pulled away from the protest into a police vehicle. Citing what it said has been the relatively speedy progress of a case brought before the court by the prime minister, the UIC has alleged double standard. “Jamaicans have all seen where Mr Holness was able to bring his case before the Supreme Court in less than 90 days while Mr Patterson had to wait some 1, 000 days, nearly three years for his case to be heard. The Chief Justice (Bryan Sykes) needs to explain this glaring bias,” the UIC said.
It didn't take Syracuse first-year coach Fran Brown long to figure out the key matchup for Saturday afternoon's Atlantic Coast Conference game visiting Miami. "Syracuse has a really good quarterback," Brown said of Kyle McCord, "and Miami has a really good quarterback (Cam Ward)." With a win on Saturday, the No. 6 Hurricanes (10-1, 6-1 ACC) can clinch a berth in the league championship game against SMU. Miami is a 10 1/2-point favorite for Saturday's game. Syracuse (8-3, 4-3) has reached eight wins for just the fourth time since 2002, going 8-5 in 2010 and 2012 and 10-3 in 2018. However, the Orange haven't defeated a Top-10 team since knocking off Clemson in 2017. Miami leads the nation in scoring (44.7), and the Hurricanes will count on perfect passing conditions in Syracuse's dome. That could be huge for Ward, who leads the nation with 34 touchdown passes, ranking second in passing yards (3,774) and fourth in passing efficiency. Ward's top target is wide receiver Xavier Restrepo, who needs just 21 yards to reach 1,000 for the second straight season. Restrepo also ranks tied for seventh in the nation with 10 TD receptions. Ward has some other top targets, including 6-foot-4, 245-pound tight end Elijah Arroyo, who is a walking mismatch because of his size and speed. He leads Miami with 18.5 yards per reception. Hurricanes wide receivers Isaiah Horton and Jacolby George have combined for 12 TD passes, and Sam Brown has added two more. Each of them has more than 500 receiving yards this season. Miami's running game features battering ram Damien Martinez (739 yards, 5.5 average, eight TDs); versatile Mark Fletcher Jr. (499 yards, 5.7 average, six TDs); and game-breaking freshman Jordan Lyle (361 yards, 8.6 average, four TDs). Defensively, Miami's big-play man is safety Mishael Powell, who ranks second in the ACC with five interceptions. "He's all about winning," Miami coach Mario Cristobal said of Powell. "He's a smart, self-starting team player." On special teams, Miami kicker Andres Borregales ranks second in the ACC with 97 points. He is 52-for-52 on extra points and 15-for-16 on field goals. Meanwhile, McCord ranks No. 1 in the nation in passing yards (3,946) and tied for seventh in TD passes (26). McCord, a transfer from Ohio State, has also set Syracuse's single-season record for passing yards. In last week's 31-24 win over Connecticut, McCord passed for a career-high 470 yards. However, McCord is just 46th in the nation in passing efficiency, due in part to his high total of interceptions (12). Syracuse also has three of the top six pass-catchers in the ACC in terms of yards: tight end Oronde Gadsden II (810) and wide receivers Jackson Meeks (801) and Trebor Pena (743). Gadsden, who is from the greater Miami area, has had three straight 100-yard games. He is the son of former Miami Dolphins wide receiver Oronde Gadsden. Syracuse's run game is led by LeQuint Allen, who has rushed for 819 yards, a 4.3 average and 12 TDs. The issue for Syracuse could be its defense, which ranks 13th in the ACC in points allowed (27.8). Miami's defense is fourth (22.3). Even so, Syracuse coach Brown said he's excited about this matchup. "I heard Miami is going to come deep," Brown said of Miami fans. "It's going to be intense in the stands. It's going to be intense on the field. I think this is a game everyone wants to see." --Field Level Media
Mongolia’s Parliament Chair on 100 Years of Constitutional DemocracyPublished 4:08 pm Saturday, November 23, 2024 By Jim Gazzolo After a strong opening quarter, the Cowgirls lost their shooting touch. Then they lost their patience on offense before finally losing their game. Utah Tech, behind Aaliyah Ibarra’s 36 points off the bench, rallied from an early deficit to knock off McNeese State 79-69 Saturday afternoon inside the Legacy Center. Shooting 30 free throws to McNeese’s eight, the Trailblazers improved to 3-3 while the Cowgirls fell to the same record. “We only had one good quarter and you have to have four,” said McNeese head coach Lynn Kennedy. The Cowgirls got off to a fast start, leading 25-20 at the end of the first quarter behind some hot shooting. That was after taking a 22-20 lead with 3:25 left on Azjah Reeves’ layup. However, the Blazers closed quickly which was a sign of things to come. “I thought we settled the last three quarters,” said Kennedy. “We were not attacking like we should have. We have to be better and have to compete.” A strong second quarter for both teams kept things interesting as the Trailblazers led 48-46 at the half. However, McNeese really struggled from there as both teams had problems in the third quarter. Utah Tech led 61-60 heading into the fourth quarter. That’s when the Cowgirls went from cold to fridged, missing their first nine shots from the field. That allowed the Blazers to pull away, outscoring McNeese 13-1 over the first four minutes of the fourth quarter. Ibarra was the key as she came into the game averaging just over six points a game. “Give her credit, she came to play,” said Kennedy. “We didn’t have anybody step up to guard her though. I don’t want to take anything away from her.” Kyla Davis led McNeese with 16 points while Mireia Yespes finished with 13, all coming in the first half. The Cowgirls will try to break their three-game losing streak at home Wednesday night against St. Thomas University of Houston, Texas.
Saturday, December 28, 2024 Hawaii’s pristine beaches are a magnet for travelers worldwide, but they’re also susceptible to the raw power of nature. On Friday, high surf warnings led to the closure of numerous beaches across Kauai and Hawaii Island, affecting both local residents and the influx of tourists drawn to the islands’ scenic beauty. These measures were implemented to ensure public safety as the Pacific Ocean unleashed waves of remarkable magnitude, creating hazardous conditions along the shores. The picturesque north shore of Kauai, renowned for its serene beaches and dramatic landscapes, is under a high surf warning. Beaches from Ka‘aka‘aniu Beach, also known as Larsen’s Beach in Moloa‘a, to Kē‘ē Beach along the Na Pali Coast are closed to the public. Authorities have emphasized the importance of avoiding these areas as entering the water poses severe risks, including injury or death. For the latest travel news, travel updates and travel deals, airline news, cruise news, technology updates, travel alerts, weather reports, insider’ insights, exclusive interviews, subscribe now to the daily TTW newsletter . The closures have not deterred the bravery and diligence of lifeguards, who are working tirelessly to prevent accidents. Nearly 3,500 preventative actions were carried out on Friday alone, highlighting the severity of the conditions. Visitors are strongly advised to adhere to warnings and stay clear of the shorebreak. On Hawaii Island, beaches such as Kahalu‘u, Magic Sands, and Mahukona Wharf are closed under directives from the Hawaii County Civil Defense Agency. The closures reflect the dangerous nature of the surf, which has the potential to overwhelm even experienced swimmers and surfers. Despite the closures, the allure of massive waves continues to draw hundreds of visitors, particularly to Oahu’s North Shore. The spectacular sight has left many in awe, including tourists like Kunta Nagda from Texas, who described the waves as an unforgettable experience. For others, like Stephanie Shields of Ohio, seeing the ocean’s raw power firsthand has been a transformative experience. The high surf has also been a boon for Hawaii’s surf contests. Following the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational, which captivated audiences with extraordinary waves, the Da Hui Backdoor Shootout in Memory of Duke Kanahamoku is set to hold its opening ceremony at Pipeline on Saturday. Organizers and participants are expressing gratitude for the exceptional surf conditions, attributing the waves to the Hawaiian god of water, Kanaloa. For the latest travel news, travel updates and travel deals, airline news, cruise news, technology updates, travel alerts, weather reports, insider’ insights, exclusive interviews, subscribe now to the daily TTW newsletter . For locals, these events are more than just competitions; they are deeply rooted in Hawaiian culture and spirituality. Witnessing the massive waves is not only a thrill but also an opportunity to honor the ocean’s majesty and its significance in Hawaiian heritage. As of Friday night, the National Weather Service reported that high surf warnings remain in effect for the north- and west-facing shores of Niihau, Kauai, Oahu, and Molokai, as well as the north-facing shores of Maui and west-facing shores of Hawaii Island. These warnings are expected to continue until at least 6 a.m. Saturday. These forecasts underscore the dangers of entering the water during such conditions. The combination of powerful waves, strong currents, and unpredictable surges can endanger even those standing on the shoreline. For the latest travel news, travel updates and travel deals, airline news, cruise news, technology updates, travel alerts, weather reports, insider’ insights, exclusive interviews, subscribe now to the daily TTW newsletter . The dangers posed by these high surf conditions extend beyond the water. Beachgoers are warned to exercise extreme caution as large breaking waves can sweep across beaches, coastal benches, and lava flows. This can lead to significant impacts on coastal properties, roadways, and other infrastructure. For many tourists, the high surf presents a rare opportunity to witness the Pacific Ocean’s untamed beauty. “You hear about it, but until you’re here and see it firsthand, it’s a totally different story,” said one visitor, encapsulating the awe shared by many. While the closures and warnings are vital for safety, they also contribute to a deeper appreciation of Hawaii’s natural power. For the latest travel news, travel updates and travel deals, airline news, cruise news, technology updates, travel alerts, weather reports, insider’ insights, exclusive interviews, subscribe now to the daily TTW newsletter . Hawaii’s high surf warnings highlight the delicate balance between nature’s majesty and its dangers. As beach closures and safety measures take precedence, both locals and visitors are reminded of the respect and caution required to coexist with the ocean’s immense power. For those fortunate enough to witness these waves, the experience is unforgettable, blending wonder with the sobering reality of nature’s might. Travelers to Hawaii in such conditions should prioritize safety while cherishing the unique memories created by the awe-inspiring Pacific Ocean. Read Travel Industry News in 104 different regional platforms Get our daily dose of news, by subscribing to our newsletters. Subscribe here . Watch Travel And Tour World Interviews here . Read more Travel News , Daily Travel Alert , and Travel Industry News on Travel And Tour World only.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump is telling the Supreme Court that he can make a deal that will resolve the national security dispute over TikTok and preserve the video site for 170 million Americans. All the justices need to do, he says, is to stand aside and suspend a pending law that could shut down TikTok on Jan. 19, the day before Trump takes office again. "President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform," his attorney said in a friend-of-the court brief filed Friday night. His plan might work, at least to buy more time. The justices had agreed to make a fast-track decision on the potentially momentous issue involving social media and free speech. "I think the court is likely to see great benefit in issuing a stay and little downside," said University of California, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. "The case poses a novel and very difficult First Amendment issue. Never before has the government tried to ban a medium of communication, but there also is a history of judicial deference to national security claims." Before Trump's intervention, TikTok appeared to face a difficult fight in the court. The House and Senate had passed legislation by large bipartisan majorities requiring the platform to separate itself from its Chinese owner or to shut down in this country. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in April. And by its terms, it was scheduled to take effect in 270 days. Although the justices are not shy about striking down federal regulations, they are wary of overturning an act of Congress, particularly one that is based on threats to national security. The U.S. appeals court in Washington cited national security when it upheld the law earlier this month. In a 3-0 decision, the judges said the law did not target speech or expression. Rather, lawmakers were convinced the Chinese parent company could gather personal data on millions of Americans, the judges said. If the law took effect on Jan. 19, Apple, Oracle and other U.S. companies could have faced large civil fines if they continued to work with TikTok. Trump's attorney D. John Sauer filed a friend-of-the-court brief that differed in tone and substance from all the others. Rather than weigh in on the First Amendment question the justices had agreed to decide , he explained why Trump was better-suited to decide it. "Through his historic victory on November 5, 2024, President Trump received a powerful electoral mandate from American voters to protect the free-speech rights of all Americans — including the 170 million Americans who use TikTok," he wrote. "Moreover, President Trump is one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history." Noting that Trump has 14.7 million followers on TikTok, Sauer argued that the president-elect is well-positioned "to evaluate TikTok's importance as a unique medium for freedom of expression, including core political speech." He also wrote that as the founder of another social-media platform, Truth Social, Trump has "an in-depth perspective on the extraordinary government power attempted to be exercised in this case — the power of the federal government to effectively shut down a social-media platform favored by tens of millions of Americans." "In light of these interests — including, most importantly, his overarching responsibility for the United States' national security and foreign policy — President Trump opposes banning TikTok in the United States at this juncture, and seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office." In 2020, Trump had voiced alarm over TikTok because of its Chinese ownership. Lawmakers later heard classified briefings that convinced them the foreign ownership posed a danger. But by the time the law won approval, Trump had switched sides. He said he believed TikTok helped him win the support of young voters. "TikTok had an impact, so we're taking a look at it," he told reporters two weeks ago. "I have a little warm spot in my heart." A year ago, his attorney Sauer drew criticism from some legal experts for boldly asserting that Trump as a former president had an absolute immunity from criminal charges for his official acts while in office. But in July, he won a 6-3 ruling from the Supreme Court that gave him and Trump what he had sought. Sauer is now set to represent Trump and his administration before the Supreme Court as U.S. solicitor general. He did not say precisely what the court should do now, only that it "should consider staying the statutory deadline to grant more breathing space" to the incoming administration and that one provision in the law allowed for a 90-day extension before it took effect. The court asked for responses to the competing briefs by next Friday. It scheduled two hours of argument for Jan. 10. It's not certain the justices will readily comply with Trump's request. Two weeks ago, former Trump attorney Noel Francisco filed an appeal on TikTok's behalf urging the justices to put the law on hold for a brief period. But the justices brushed aside that suggestion and said they would decide whether divestiture law violated the First Amendment. "I am skeptical Trump's intervention will make a difference," said Alan Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota law professor who has written about the pending law. He noted that the Supreme Court denied TikTok's request to stay the law because it did not think TikTok could meet the requirements for a stay: a reasonable chance of winning on the merits. "Trump's argument does not change that," he said. "It may be bad luck for TikTok (and Trump) that the law goes into effect the day before inauguration, but such is life." ©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com . Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.ST. LOUIS — Jason Zucker scored a tiebreaking power-play goal with 9:30 remaining and the Buffalo Sabres notched their third straight victory by beating the St. Louis Blues 4-2 on Sunday. Jiri Kulich extended Buffalo’s lead with a breakaway goal that went between Blues goalie Jordan Binnington’s legs with 3:41 to play. Tage Thompson had a goal and an assist against his former team as the Sabres won in St. Louis for just the second time in 12 years to sweep the season series. Zucker had a goal and an assist, and Jack Quinn had two assists for Buffalo. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen stopped 35 shots. Brayden Schenn and Nathan Walker scored for the Blues. Binnington had 12 saves. Buffalo scored on two of its first three shots, including its first of the game. Takeaways Buffalo: After a 13-game losing streak (0-10-3), the Sabres have scored 17 goals while winning three straight. St. Louis: The Blues, who are tied for an NHL-low five power-play goals at home, went 0 for 4 with the man advantage. Key moment After Walker pulled the Blues even with 14:04 left in the game, rookie Zack Bolduc took a cross checking penalty midway through the third period that led to the decisive goal. Key stat The Sabres had scored on only six of 43 road power plays (14%) this season before going 2 for 3 on Sunday. Buffalo ranked 27th out of 32 NHL teams. Up next The Blues play Chicago in the Winter Classic on Tuesday at Wrigley Field. Buffalo will play at Dallas on Tuesday night.
WESTPORT, Conn., Nov. 26, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Portage Biotech Inc. (“Portage” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ: PRTG), a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company with a portfolio of novel multi-targeted therapies for use as monotherapy and in combination, today reported its financial results for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2024. “We are continuing to explore multiple strategic alternatives to further unlock shareholder value. These may include finding a partner for one or more of our assets, a sale of our company, a merger, restructurings (both in and out of court), a company wind down, further financing efforts, or other strategic actions,” said Dr. Ian Walters, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Portage. “The ADPORT-601 trial is paused for further patient accrual pending additional financial resources, and we are analyzing the data. We also continue our collaborations with numerous experts to further understand the biology and utility of our product candidates,” continued Dr. Walters. Financial Results for the Quarter Ended September 30, 2024 The Company incurred a net loss of approximately $1.4 million during the three months ended September 30, 2024 (the “Fiscal 2025 Quarter”), compared to a net loss of approximately $5.2 million during the three months ended September 30, 2023 (the “Fiscal 2024 Quarter”), representing a $3.8 million decrease quarter-over-quarter. Operating expenses, including research and development (“R&D”) costs and general and administrative (“G&A”) expenses, were $1.6 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter, down from $5.9 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter, a decrease of $4.3 million, as detailed below. R&D costs decreased by approximately $3.5 million, or approximately 83%, from approximately $4.2 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to approximately $0.7 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. The decrease was primarily attributable to the winding down of clinical trial costs (principally CRO-related), which decreased by approximately $1.6 million, from $2.0 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to $0.4 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter, as activities ramped down throughout the period since we made the decision to pause enrollment in our sponsored clinical trials in the third and fourth quarters of Fiscal 2024. Manufacturing-related costs decreased by $0.9 million, from $1.0 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to $0.029 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. These decreases reflect the winding down of clinical activity and manufacturing-related costs resulting from our decision to discontinue our sponsored clinical trial for the iNKT program and pause further patient accrual to our sponsored adenosine program. R&D non-cash share-based compensation expense decreased from $0.4 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to nil in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. Payroll-related expenses decreased by $0.1 million, from $0.37 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to $0.24 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter, due to the resignation of two employees in January 2024. Additionally, consulting fees decreased by approximately $0.2 million from $0.25 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to $0.03 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter, to reflect the decrease in activity period-over-period. Finally, licensing fees decreased by approximately $0.1 million due to licensing fees paid to the licensor of certain intellectual property utilized in the iNKT clinical trial in Fiscal 2024 Quarter compared to nil in Fiscal 2025 Quarter as the iNKT clinical trial was discontinued in the latter half of Fiscal 2024. G&A expenses decreased by approximately $0.8 million, or approximately 48%, from approximately $1.7 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to approximately $0.9 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. Professional fees decreased by $0.4 million, from $0.8 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to $0.4 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. Payroll-related expenses decreased by $0.1 million from $0.2 million in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter to $0.1 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. The decrease in professional fees and payroll-related expenses is due to the accrual of the monthly fees and payments for the entire second quarter in the first quarter for a consultant and employee in connection with certain Retention Agreements entered into on July 22, 2024. Additionally, G&A non-cash share-based compensation expense decreased by $0.2 million due to the continued vesting of stock options, partially offset by recording all share-based compensation expense as G&A expenses as the result of the discontinuation of the iNKT trial and the pause of further patient accrual in the adenosine program. Finally, directors’ fees decreased by $0.1 million in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter, compared to the Fiscal 2024 Quarter, as all directors, except for two directors who resigned in April 2024, waived their fees in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter. The primary reasons for the quarter-over-quarter differences in the Company’s pre-tax items of income and expense were the $0.9 million net gain from the settlement and release of obligations and liabilities under the Master Services Agreement between iOx and Parexel partially offset to some extent by the $0.7 million non-cash loss from the change in the fair value of certain warrants accounted for as liabilities, issued in connection with a private placement offering in October 2023, both in the Fiscal 2025 Quarter, and a non-cash loss from the increase in the fair value of the deferred purchase price payable to the former Tarus shareholders and the deferred obligation for the iOx milestone, totaling $0.1 million, in the Fiscal 2024 Quarter. As of September 30, 2024, the Company had cash and cash equivalents of approximately $1.8 million and total current liabilities of approximately $0.9 million. About Portage Biotech Inc. Portage is a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company with a portfolio of multi-targeted therapies to extend survival and significantly improve the lives of patients with cancer. The Company has made the decision to discontinue its sponsored trial for its the invariant natural killer T-cell (iNKT) program and pause further patient accrual to its sponsored adenosine trial program (ADPORT-601 trial) for its potentially best-in-class adenosine antagonists PORT-6 (adenosine 2A inhibitor) and PORT-7 (adenosine 2B inhibitor). The Company is exploring strategic alternatives, which may include finding a partner for one or more of its assets, a sale of the company, a merger, restructurings, both in and out of court, a company wind down, further financing efforts or other strategic actions. For more information, please visit www.portagebiotech.com or find us on LinkedIn at Portage Biotech Inc. Forward-Looking Statements All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical facts, including without limitation, statements regarding about the Company’s information that are forward-looking in nature and, business strategy, plans and objectives of management for future operations and those statements preceded by, followed by or that otherwise include the words "believe," "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "estimates," “will,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “continue,” or similar expressions or variations on such expressions are forward-looking statements. For example, statements regarding the Company's plans to continue exploring strategic alternatives, which may include finding a partner for one or more of its assets, a sale of the company, a merger, restructurings (both in and out of court), a company wind down, further financing efforts, or other strategic actions, the Company’s expectation to replace one patient in the ADPORT-601 trial, and the Company’s plans to continue its collaborations with numerous experts to further understand the biology and utility of its product candidates are forward-looking statements. As a result, forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, including, but are not limited to: the Company's plans and ability to develop and commercialize product candidates and the timing of these development programs; the Company's clinical development of its product candidates, including the results of current and future clinical trials; the benefits and risks of the Company's product candidates as compared to others; the Company's maintenance and establishment of intellectual property rights in its product candidates; the Company's ability to obtain financing in the future to cover its operational costs and progress its plans for clinical development, its estimates regarding its capital requirements, and its ability to continue as a going concern; the Company’s estimates of future revenues and profitability; the Company's estimates of the size of the potential markets for its product candidates; its selection and licensing of product candidates; and other factors set forth in “Item 3 - Key Information-Risk Factors” in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year ended March 31, 2024 2024 and “Business Environment – Risk Factors” in the Company’s Management’s Discussion and Analysis for the Three and Six Months ended September 30, 2024 filed as Exhibit 99.2 to the Company’s Form 6-K. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them as actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. The forward- looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, except as required by law. FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Investor Relations: ir@portagebiotech.com Media Relations: media@portagebiotech.com ---tables to follow--- PORTAGE BIOTECH INC. Condensed Consolidated Interim Statements of Operations and Other Comprehensive Income (Loss) (U.S. Dollars in thousands, except per share amounts) (Unaudited) PORTAGE BIOTECH INC. Condensed Consolidated Interim Statements of Financial Position (U.S. Dollars in thousands) (Unaudited)
It would be easy to argue against making New Year’s resolutions. They’re hard to keep and, often, too narrow in focus. In a rapidly changing world, why would we think that something we value in January will still hold true in June? Yet, despite those risks, my 2025 New Year’s resolution feels instinctive and solid. A little background is required. My parents supported their family through a small corner grocery store. As their children, we were the unpaid hired hands who would do odd jobs to help my parents and assist customers in whatever ways they asked. My parents were the kind of grocers one could only dream of having. Kind, generous, willing to let customers buy on credit, willing to hear them share way more information about their lives than my parents truthfully wanted to hear. The attitude at Utica Grocery was summed up in an edict my father frequently told us: “What goes around, comes around.” By this, he meant if we treated people with respect and dignity, we could expect the same back. Be kind, and people will be kind to us. Be charitable, and people will extend a helping hand. It was what my parents modeled daily, and we, as their children, learned. So why, in 2025, am I hearing my dad’s message so loudly? I fear it is because of what we’ve become. We seem very me-centered. We’ve grown cynical. Generosity of spirit — helping people in non-material ways — can be hard to spot. Our patience continues to dwindle. I realized I was having a “patience problem” when I recently began to learn the game of Mahjong. Picking up the game was my way of preparing for some eventual retirement. It’s intended to help me connect with others when I’m not at the dog park, attending synagogue, or at my desk writing. Many research studies have confirmed the value of social connections as we age. So I’m sitting at the Mahjong table, and one of the players is taking a very long time to choose which tiles to drop. In fairness to him, he was a chief financial officer and is preternaturally precise and strategic in thinking through his moves. But now, our Mahjong game has slowed to a crawl. I become antsy. While I could have engaged in self-talk and said, “Everyone is learning, and everyone’s pace is different. Cool your jets,” I didn’t do that. Instead, I said, “Jack, you know we learn by making mistakes, so don’t be afraid to make some. Plus, we have only 20 more minutes. At this rate, we might not finish the game.” The other two players at the table smiled when I said this. They were getting impatient, too, but they had more self-restraint. I parked this observation about my impatience until later when I thought back to my dad, who epitomized patience and kindness. Even better, on issues far more consequential than playing Mahjong, my dad had a habit of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Were he sitting at the Mahjong table, I can imagine my dad saying, “I bet Jack is going to teach us something really important. We’re lucky he’s so thoughtful.” Imagine that? Imagine having the instinct to give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s a far cry from our world today, where we brood about people gaming the system or feel despair about hypocritical leaders, or wonder whether scientists still offer objective truth. The list is endless, and the mental toll it takes to always be on the lookout for behavior we can call out is deflating. Maybe my dad was onto something. Changing our lens and viewing the world with a bigger heart and a more open mind can yield positive effects. We might find that when we give people the benefit of the doubt, they live up to our expectations. And giving really is more fun than receiving. Optimism might become a new norm, and along with it might come better mental health, more resilience and an overall improved quality of life. All I had to do was remind myself of my father’s words: “What goes around, comes around.” And just like that, my 2025 resolution is born. Lead with positivity and kindness, and it will help me believe in our future, in what may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jill Ebstein is the editor of the “At My Pace” series of books and the founder of Sized Right Marketing, a consulting firm. Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!
Wokeness is in retreat, but its stench will be hard to eliminate. Consider the curious case of the bone-headed “Nasdaq diversity rules” — edicts by the stock market giant to force every company that “lists” there to choose a board of directors that stresses intersectionality — racial, sexual and gender diversity — as opposed to competence. Sure, diversity is a worthy goal, but demanding outcomes in hiring through practices such as Diversity Equity and Inclusion is the most counterproductive way to run a business that woke mankind ever thought of. Forcing it on corporate boards as Nasdaq has been doing since 2020 is particularly scary. And now it’s illegal. Boards perform a vital function of oversight of public companies, and the C-suite. Making sure the CEO isn’t robbing the place blind is what the law — established through the Depression-era Securities and Exchange Act — demands from directors. Nasdaq turned decades of corporate law on its head at the height of the so-called social justice movement. It came at a particular hysterical time in American history, when the left tried to convince the country it was inherently racist because of the police killing of an ex-con named George Floyd as he was resisting arrest. That was then. These days, sanity is returning and woke is in retreat. Courts are ruling that DEI is illegal. The Fifth Circuit federal court did just that, telling Nasdaq it will have to end the insanity. Yes, the ruling is a sign wokeness is dying. But it’s not quite dead. The rules will likely find an afterlife because of a quirk in the disclosure system, and the way the securities regulators might interpret the court finding, The Post has learned. Reminder: Nasdaq, like its main competitor, the New York Stock Exchange, is a stock market; it wasn’t created to serve as a lefty NGO. One of its functions is to make sure people can buy and sell shares, in an orderly fashion, of the companies that “list” to trade there. Another is to ensure that listed companies follow basic corporate-governance rules that protect investors, including hiring competent directors. Under CEO Adena Friedman, Nasdaq joined the social justice movement that was all the rage in 2020. She demanded that listed companies stock their board with directors who were not the target of progressive ire during that eerie time, aka straight white men. “Each Company, except as described below in, must have or explain why it does not have, at least two members of its board of directors who are Diverse, including at least one Diverse director who self-identifies as Female; and at least one Diverse director who self-identifies as an Underrepresented Minority or LGBTQ+,” the Friedman-led Nasdaq said in its edict. As I point out in my book on progressivism run amok, “Go Woke Go Broke; The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America,” the idiocy of this rule isn’t confined to the very real fact that it’s illegal by any fair reading of the securities laws or various civil rights acts. There are also very real studies with control groups, margins of error, etc., that show that there’s no link between performance and diversity. Plus, this rule doesn’t apply to all those Chinese companies that Nasdaq lusts for to pay its listing fees. Companies hailing from one of the world’s most oppressive regimes — that are literally controlled by the repressive Chinese Communist Party — get a free pass. No members of the persecuted Uyghur minority need apply, according to Friedman & Co. Chinese listings can get away with placing a couple of women from the CCP to be directors. Nasdaq has argued to me the rules weren’t totally mandatory — though it always reserves the right to reject a listing. It also stressed that the rules were about disclosure, which sounds quaint until you realize that companies are supposed to disclose stuff investors care about like earnings, not their social justice preening. On top of that, the disclosure part had an interesting compulsory element. A company board’s diversity data, listed in its public disclosure filings, could be easily downloaded on the SEC’s website known as EDGAR. This enabled powerful social activist groups with ties to the lefties who run the Biden White House — the Human Rights Campaign, the Center for American Progress — to jump into the debate and pressure companies to up their diversity game as a de facto woke enforcement staff of the Nasdaq. Then something brilliant happened. Someone sued. Not Nasdaq, but its regulator, the equally woke Securities and Exchange Commission, which approved the measure. The lawsuit argued that stock markets weren’t created as political tools of the left. A federal court agreed. Case closed, right? Not quite. The mandates could live on in a perverse way because of the disclosure system that each public company must comply with. The way the people at the Nasdaq explained it to me, the rules were legal until the courts ruled they weren’t. That means the EDGAR system likely continues to keep a record of thousands of companies that compiled the useless and illegal data the Nasdaq asked for, they tell me, even after the Nasdaq is supposed to vacate the mandates in early February. They could be around well into perpetuity for the likes of the Human Rights Campaign to enforce their brand of social justice, securities lawyers I speak to say. As one corporate lawyer told me: “Just think how dumb it was to have a stock exchange telling companies what slots you have to fill while giving the Chinese a pass. Then they will just sit there, which is even dumber.”
No. 22 UCLA edges No. 14 Gonzaga in another classic between rivals