United States

A powerful Senator – a member of the Armed Services and Judiciary Committees, the Subcommittee on Defense of the Appropriations Committee, and Formerly on the Select Committee On Intelligence (Lindsey Graham) – asked the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

• If the government was spying on him

• Whether his identity had been “unmasked”

• And whether this information could be used for blackmail by politicians who didn’t like him

The counsel for the intelligence agency refused to respond:

Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning,

Ben Bernanke’s successors at the Fed and other global central banks still don’t get it.

Emmanuel Macron has been in office for barely two months, and already some are out for his blood. As CNN reports, a man has been charged with plotting to assassinate French President Emmanuel Macron on Bastille Day during a visit by US President Donald Trump. Investigators said the man planned to attack Macron on July 14, during a parade on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, where Trump is set to be a guest of honor.

And so, three months after the US State Department famously flip-flopped, when first at the end of March Rex Tillerson said at a news conference that “the longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people" adding that "our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out" only to follow one week later with Tillerson's warning to Russia that "coalition steps are underway to remove Assad" which in turn segued into the first US attack on Syrian soil with the launch of no less than 59 cruise missiles, the US has done it again and according to Foreign Policy,

The state of US manufacturing at any given moment is supposed to be simple: it is either expanding, or it is contracting. Except, of course, when it is doing both.

We wont bore readers with details (we did that earlier), and instead will just present two headlines with some supporting data, from two different sources discussing the sector which, with all due respect to the US services sector, still accounts for well more than half of the S&P's net income.