Europe

Less than a month after a damning report emerged that a high-ranking police officer has alleged that his seniors tried to strike the word rape from an internal police report after the mass sexual assaults in Cologne over New Year, Germany is gripped in a new sexual assault scandal involving refugees. Eighteen German women have filed police complaints saying they were sexually assaulted at a musical festival in Darmstadt. Police arrested three refugees from Pakistan at the scene after three of the women immediately reported their attacks.

Spending rose (thanks to higher costs for energy) and everything else was dismal... and then Brexit moved into the lead - Inconceivable...

Following the flash crash in China overnight...

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union — in terms Americans can understand.

Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United States, and a high court whose decisions overruled those of the U.S. Supreme Court?

 

The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister has said that the increase in NATO’s military presence near Russia’s borders will not go unanswered. “The Russian side has repeatedly stated that the buildup of the NATO military presence near Russian borders violates the spirit of the basic Russia-NATO pact and cannot be left unanswered by our country,” Aleksey Meshkovan told an international conference in Moscow. RT reports: The comments came soon after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg spoke at Warsaw University, where he said that the bloc planned to station even more military forces in Europe.

By now it is a well-known fact that corporations have no real way of generating organic profit growth in this economy (the recent plunge in Q1 EPS was a stark reminder of just that), so they are relying on two things to boost share prices: multiple expansion (courtesy of central banks) and debt-funded buybacks (also courtesy of central banks who keep the cost of debt record low), the latter of which requires the firm to generate excess incremental cash.