Politics

Just three days after Turkish warplanes killed at least 20 US-backed Kurdish fighters along the Turkey-Syria border as well as several Kurdish peshmerga troops on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq, footage posted by Syrian activists showed the US has deployed troops and APCs in the contested region, in a move that could potentially drag the US in a conflict where it already finds itself mediating between two so-called US ally forces in the proxy war against Syria.

The French government released a report blaming the Syrian government for this month’s chemical weapons incident.

The report states:

According  to  the  intelligence  obtained  by  the  French  services,  the  process  of  synthesizing  sarin,  developed  by  the  Scientific  Studies  and  Research  Centre  (SSRC)  and employed by the Syrian armed forces and security services, involves the use of hexamine as a stabilizer.

 

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Just when you thought it was safe to sink into a tall glass of beer as US government shutdown was avoided, South Korea's Yonhap News reports that the South Korean military has confirmed that North Korea has test-fired another ballistic missile.

(URGENT) N. Korea test-fires a ballistic missile: S. Korean military. https://t.co/Lm8Pl8mz0V

— Yonhap News Agency (@YonhapNews) April 28, 2017

For the past two days everyone has been scrambling to try to figure out the reasoning behind Trump's latest flip-flop on NAFTA.  Speculation and rumors behind the controversial flip, which is sure to annoy some of his most ardent supporters, have ranged from Trump being convinced by Wilbur Ross that it would result in massive jobs losses in key battleground states to very convincing calls directly to Trump from Mexican President Pena Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  But, a new revelation from the Wall Street Journal seems to suggest that former Goldmanites Gary Coh

With global equity markets enjoying the biggest weekly inflow since the election on what BofA described was rising expectations of a Trump tax deal, the obvious question is "what is the probability of the Trump tax deal getting done." And, as it turns out, that is also the wrong question, because as Morgan Stanley shows, the outcome from Trump's tax proposal is not binary. In fact, there are nine distinct possible results, depending on how the various binomial outcomes pan out.