Europe

A prominent 47-year-old hedge fund trader was killed when he jumped from a luxury apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in an apparent suicide, authorities told the NY Post.

Kevin Bell, most recently head of Credit Risk at Arrowgrass Capital, jumped from a ninth-floor kitchen window at the Apthorp building on West End Avenue near West 79th Street around 7:20 a.m. He landed on scaffolding that was set up in front of the building and was pronounced dead at the scene.

This is a savage assault upon Merkel, delivered with fierce Marine Le Pen -- who called Germany a 'servant to America.' I've never seen anything quite like it, frankly. It bordered on sabre rattling before a declaration of war.

Le Pen emphatically rejected the subjugation and 'vassilisation' of Europe by Germany -- declaring her intentions to break off from it -- representative of an 'intelligent protectionism', individual liberties and defense of safety and identity.

Trump is the perfect court jester for the time, a clown sent into the three ring circus to cheer society’s forlorn and make them forget, at least temporarily, the hopelessness and banality of their existence. He could not have won in the past, and will not win in the future, but dumb luck and serendipity---plus the Democrat’s foolhardiness in selecting their most polarizing candidate ever---allowed him to seize his brief moment in time and exploit it.

Via Federico Pieraccini of The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The best-case scenario has come about, which is to say the end of a world facing the specter of a mushroom cloud. With Hillary Clinton's defeat, we avoided a nuclear denouement stemming from a direct clash with Russia in Syria and an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine. Unfortunately the good news ends here.

 

Via Jeff Thomas of InternationalMan.com,

The image above is of the 18th-century home of friends in Colonia, Uruguay. Today, sitting on their back patio on the Rio de la Plata, I looked out at a small yellow buoy in the harbour that marks the final resting place of the Lord Clive, a large, 60-gun British warship from the 18th century.