Yield-Chasing Investors Buying Entire Neighborhoods
June 9th, 2021
Via: Wall Street Journal:
A bidding war broke out this winter at a new subdivision north of Houston. But the prize this time was the entire subdivision, not just a single suburban house, illustrating the rise of big investors as a potent new force in the U.S. housing market.
D.R. Horton Inc. built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who’s Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December sale. The winning $32 million bid came from an online property-investing platform, Fundrise LLC, which manages more than $1 billion on behalf of about 150,000 individuals.
The country’s most prolific home builder booked roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class—an encouraging debut in the business of selling entire neighborhoods to investors.
“We certainly wouldn’t expect every single-family community we sell to sell at a 50% gross margin,” the builder’s finance chief, Bill Wheat, said at a recent investor conference.
El Salvador Becomes First Country to Adopt Bitcoin as Legal Tender
June 9th, 2021Via: New York Post:
El Salvador on Wednesday officially became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender.
President Nayib Bukele announced on Twitter just after 2 a.m. ET that the Central American country’s legislative body voted in favor of the so-called Bitcoin Law — making the digital currency the nation’s official legal tender, along with the US Dollar.
The law received 62 out of 84 votes, according to Bukele, Latin America’s youngest president.
“The purpose of this law is to regulate bitcoin as unrestricted legal tender with liberating power, unlimited in any transaction, and to any title that public or private natural or legal persons require carrying out,” the law reads.
That means prices for goods and services across the country can now be shown in bitcoin, taxes can be paid with the crypto, and transactions in bitcoin will not be subject to capital gains tax, the law says.
Living in Mexico’s Kill Zone
June 9th, 2021Via: Al Jazeera:
“Secure” Messaging App Used by Criminals Operated by FBI
June 8th, 2021Via: AP:
Criminal gangs divulged plans for moving drug shipments and killings on a secure messaging system secretly run by the FBI, law enforcement agencies said Tuesday, as they unveiled a global sting operation they said dealt an “unprecedented blow” to organized crime around the world.
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The seeds of the sting were sown in 2018 when law enforcement agencies took down a company called Phantom Secure that provided customized end-to-end encrypted devices to criminals, according to court papers. Unlike typical cell phones, the devices don’t make phone calls or browse the internet — but allow for secure messaging. As an outgrowth of the operation, the FBI also recruited a collaborator who was developing a next-generation secure-messaging platform for the criminal underworld called ANOM. The collaborator engineered the system to give the agency access to any messages being sent.
How the Wealthiest Americans “Sidestep” Federal Income Tax
June 8th, 2021Via: ProPublica:
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.
Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.
The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.
Pfizer Skipped Critical Testing and Cut Corners on Quality Standards, Documents Reveal
June 8th, 2021Via: The Defender:
New documents obtained by TrialSite News suggest routine quality testing issues were overlooked in the rush to authorize use of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine, and that U.S. and other governments are conducting a massive vaccination program with an incompletely characterized experimental vaccine.
Regulatory documents revealed Pfizer didn’t thoroughly examine biodistribution and pharmacokinetics issues relating to its vaccine before submitting the vaccine to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for review.
In fact, in key studies — called biodistribution studies, which are designed to test where an injected compound travels in the body, and which tissues or organs it accumulates in — Pfizer did not use the commercial vaccine (BNT162b2) but instead relied on a “surrogate” mRNA that produced the luciferase protein.
According to TrialSite News, the EMA reviewers shared this explicit admission: “No traditional pharmacokinetic or biodistribution studies have been performed with the vaccine candidate BNT162b2.”
Pharmacokinetics refers to the study of what the body does with a drug and the drug’s movement throughout the body — the time course of its absorption, bioavailability, distribution, metabolism and excretion.
Regulatory documents also show Pfizer did not follow industry-standard quality management practices during preclinical toxicology studies of its vaccine, as key studies did not meet good laboratory practice (GLP).
Tiny Animal Revived After 24,000 Years Entombed in Siberian Permafrost
June 8th, 2021Via: New Scientist:
A tiny animal called a rotifer has been revived after spending 24,000 years frozen in permafrost. It is the longest a rotifer has been observed to survive in such extreme cold.
While simple organisms like bacteria can often survive millennia in permafrost, “this is an animal with a nervous system and brain and everything”, says Stas Malavin at the Pushchino Scientific Center for Biological Research RAS in Russia. It isn’t quite a record – nematode worms have purportedly been revived from permafrost after 30,000 years – but no rotifer has been known to endure for so long.
Malavin and his team drilled into permafrost near the Alazeya river in north-east Siberia, Russia, in 2015. They found a single rotifer, a worm-like creature less than a quarter of a millimetre long. When the researchers warmed it up and gave it food, it became active. It also reproduced, because it is a bdelloid rotifer that can clone itself without the need for a sexual partner.
Apple in Talks with CATL, BYD Over Battery Supplies for Its Electric Car
June 8th, 2021Via: Reuters:
Apple Inc is in early-stage talks with China’s CATL and BYD, about the supply of batteries for its planned electric vehicle, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
Former FDA Commissioner Claims Fauci Briefed World Leaders That Coronavirus Could Have Escaped from Wuhan Lab
June 8th, 2021Via: Daily Mail:
The former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, has said Dr. Anthony Fauci told world leaders in the spring of 2020 that the coronavirus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
U.S. researchers around that time still were considering whether the virus came from a lab break, and Fauci told the health leaders gathered that the newly identified strain of the coronavirus ‘looked unusual,’ according to Gottlieb.
The disclosure from the former FDA chief comes as an increasing number of mainstream scientists and media figures no longer are parroting the line from the Chinese Communist Party that the virus came from a bat.
Even President Joe Biden has ordered government agencies to investigate the possibility that it might have come from a lab.
Now, Gottlieb says Fauci last year at least considered that COVID-19 could have come from a lab – before closing ranks around the idea that it occurred naturally.
How Did FBI Get Private Key to Bitcoin Wallet Used by Pipeline Hackers?
June 8th, 2021Via: Bloomberg:
In the digital world, though, it’s a simple matter to then transfer those Bitcoins to another address. And another. And another. This is done to obscure a trail and mask the flow of funds, kind of like money laundering. By May 27, the FBI had identified at least two dozen different Bitcoin addresses used in the distribution. Then, finally, most of it, 69.6 Bitcoins in total, was funneled back to one last address.
It’s here that the feds pounced — and where the story gets murky.
Somehow, they had the private key for this last address. Most cryptography works on a public-private key protocol. The public key can be thought of as similar to an email address, and the private key the password. Except these passwords are extremely long and almost impossible to guess.
Law enforcement agencies don’t like to share their tradecraft, so how the FBI managed to get the key to this stash isn’t yet public. There’s a chance that the FBI hacked the hackers, or that someone else did and passed the key to the Bureau. Or maybe an informant handed it over.
There’s also the possibility that this final address didn’t actually belong to the hackers, but to a cryptocurrency exchange.
