U.S. investors cut their use of leverage in July, marking the first month since the onset of the pandemic that saw a reduction in the use of margin debt to buy securities like stocks, potentially a warning sign for markets buoyed by heavy use of borrowed money.
A group of restaurant owners and five small businesses filed a lawsuit Tuesday, Aug. 17, against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio over the city’s vaccine mandate targeting “certain establishments.” The lawsuit was filed in Richmond County Supreme Court.
In the course of hectoring the United States for its “bungled and embarrassing withdraw from Afghanistan” on Thursday, China’s state-run Global Times admitted Beijing has a rapacious interest in Afghanistan’s vast rare-earths mineral resources and snarled it was none of America’s business if China makes deals with the Taliban to get what it wants.
Over the past few weeks, France has extended COVID pass requirements to nearly all basic venues including bars, cafés, restaurants, cinemas, trains, stadiums, and gyms. Supermarkets are the latest addition to this list.
They were elementary and homemade at first before becoming commercialized and mass-produced, but plastic dividers became as commonplace during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as the paper masks that now litter city streets.
The idea that COVID countermeasures might include forced vaccination and vaccine passports, resulting in a segregated society where only those participating in the vaccine experiment would have human rights, was once labeled a wild conspiracy theory — but we are now heading into that dangerous territory.
