United States

When news broke of the October 4 ambush and deaths of four elite Green Beret soldiers in Niger, the immediate reaction voiced among congressional leaders and echoed generally in the media was: we have troops in Niger? But the bigger questions of the US military's increasingly sizable footprint in Africa (or what has long been called our 'Shadow War') quickly disappeared from public debate, instead, in usual fashion the media quickly focused on myopic details of phone calls and whether Trump's handling of the aftermath was "presidential" enough. 

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Empires get stupider and more corrupt as they age..

As discussed earlier, nearly 54 years after the assassination of JFK, in a release that was greenlighted by the president himself last week, and which Trump is eagerly awaiting...

The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow. So interesting!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2017

A Case of Judicial Murder?

John Remington Graham
 
I have been asked many times why I have intervened in the federal prosecution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man who was convicted and sentenced to death in the Boston  Marathon bombing case where two brothers, on April 15, 2013, allegedly detonated pressure cooker bombs on Boylston Street in front of the Forum Restaurant that killed or maimed many people.

US equity futures and Asian shares are flat this morning with European shares treading water ahead of the ECB's policy meeting in which it’s expected to announce a tapering to its €60bn in monthly QE. On this busiest day of Q3 earnings season, companies set to report earnings include Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel, while we also get data on jobless claims and wholesale inventories.