United States

Submitted by Tom Engelhardt via TomDispatch.com,

There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then there are the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let me concoct an example for you:

“Top American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up the fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly sending more U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington confirmed the second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.”

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) is criticizing the Obama administration as having tried to strong-arm a former senator who is pushing to declassify 28 pages of the 9/11 report dealing with Saudi Arabia.

 

In a dramatic development for the global nuclear balance of power, yesterday we reported that starting today, the United States would launch its European missile defense system dubbed Aegis Ashore at a remote airbase in the town of Deveselu, Romania, almost a decade after Washington proposed protecting NATO from Iranian rockets and despite repeated Russian warnings that the West is threatening the peace in central Europe.

One month ago, when we updated on the performance of Horseman Global, what until recently was the world's most bearish hedge fund with a record net short exposure of -98%...

... at least until Icahn Enterprises emerged with its even more gargantuan -149% net short...

... we cited fund CIO Russell Clark who observed the fund's dramatic -9.6% drop in the month of March, and made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere because he was confident that the move was nothing but a short squeeze, which - if anything - made Clark even more bearish.

After many prominent blow ups in the retail and consumer space in the past week, moments ago Nordstrom was the latest casualty of the US consumer's unwillingness to spend money when the company reported Q1 EPS of $0.26, missing consensus estimates of $0.46 by nearly half, and about a third of what the company earned last year despite relatively flat revenues of $3.25 billion which also missed expectations of $3.29 billion. Comparable sales dropped -1.7% on estimates of an unchanged print.