United States

US Vice President Joe Biden said that Washington recognizes the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is as much of a threat to Turkey as ISIS. Speaking alongside the Turkish prime minister during a press conference in Istanbul, Biden voiced his support for a Turkish crackdown, saying Kurdish militants and IS are ‘terror groups plain and simple’ He told reporters that ISIS was “not the only existential threat to the people of Turkey, the PKK is equally a threat and we are aware of that” Turkey has however been criticised over its campaign against Kurdish militants.

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Unlike Goldman's cross asset strategists, whose six Top Trade recommendations for 2016 have gotten destroyed three weeks into the year, with half of them already stopped out as we showed yesterday, the bank's chief equity strategist David Kostin has been notably more accurate in his predictions, with his conservative 2015 year end target of 2000 on the S&P almost exactly where the stock market ended.

Since then stocks have taken a sharp leg lower, with the S&P dropping as much as 15% from its all time high, half the average post-war recession drawdown.

The last time a "epic" blizzard was supposed to slam New York City almost exactly one year ago, it ended up being an even more epic dud. This time, however, winter storm Jonas was no false alarm as millions of Americans across the Eastern Aeaboard woke up this morning to as much as two feet of snow, flooding, no electricity, strong winds, or all of the above.

Russia have announced that they have added former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to its terror watchlist, after the Federal Security Service (FSB) discovered that one of the Clinton campaign’s top monetary contributors is a suspected ISI agent who funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorist groups in the Middle East.  Hillary Clinton’s addition to the terrorist sponsor watchlist makes her the highest ranking US official to be put on the list.