United States

Tropical Storm Harvey made its second landfall near Cameron, La. on Wednesday after slamming Houston with a staggering 50 inches of rain, the largest rainfall ever recorded in the Continental US. Given the unprecedented devastation, which will likely leave large swaths of Houston, America’s fourth-largest city, uninhabitable for weeks if not months, storm-watchers have scrambled to revise their initial forecasts for damages.

It's groundhog day as S&P futures, European and Asian shares all rise overnight, while the dollar is set to .

Regulators in the US, Europe and Asia who’ve sought to crack down on bitcoin – many of these regulators are also proponents of a “cashless society” – have been dealt a stunning setback by an unlikely defender of the pioneering digital currency: The US Department of Homeland Security.

To wit, one anonymous DHS source told CNBC that bitcoin has become “a lot more legitimate” than many believe.

Authored by Nomi Prins,

Since late 2007, the Federal Reserve has embarked on grand-scale collusion with other G-7 central banks to manufacture a massive amount of money. The scope and degree of this collusion are historically unprecedented and by admission of the perpetrators, unconventional in approach, and - depending on the speech - ineffective.

In a surprise move that few analysts expected, the US led anti-ISIS coalition operating in Iraq and Syria has bombed parts of the ISIS convoy previously given safe passage out of Lebanon as part of a controversial deal brokered early this week with the Lebanese Army and its allies. Coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillan had previously warned that, “We will take action where necessary; those would be absolutely lucrative targets.” And it now appears the US coalition followed through by attacking the vehicles as they traveled across Syria to the Islamic State stronghold of Deir Ezzor.