Welcome to The Conservative Cave©!Join in the discussion! Click HERE to register.
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
2:29PARIS — The gunman who was disarmed by passengers on a train in France two days ago looked weak and malnourished and said he had only meant to rob people, a lawyer who interviewed him after the attack said on Sunday."(I saw) somebody who was very sick, somebody very weakened physically, as if he suffered from malnutrition, very, very thin and very haggard," the lawyer, Sophie David, told BFMTV.David said the 26 year-old Moroccan expressed surprise when he was told that European authorities suspected him of being an Islamist militant."He is dumbfounded by the terrorist motives attributed to his action," said David, who described him as her client. She said he was barefoot and wearing only a white hospital shirt and a boxer shorts for the interview at a police station in Arras, northern France, where the train stopped after the incident.The man, named by French and Spanish sources close to the case as Ayoub el Khazzani, told David he found the Kalashnikov he was carrying in a park near the Gare du Midi rail station in Brussels where he was in the habit of sleeping."A few days later he decided to get on a train that some other homeless people told him would be full of wealthy people traveling from Amsterdam to Paris and he hoped to feed himself by armed robbery," David said. Two people were wounded in the struggle to subdue Khazzani aboard the high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday. Three young Americans, one of whom suffered knife wounds, were among the passengers who stopped the gunman.French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve did not name Khazzani, but said the man in custody had been "identified by the Spanish authorities to French intelligence services in February 2014 because of his connections to the radical Islamist movement."
Tonight's report at the Associated Press in the wake of Wall Street's disastrous day isn't quite an Animal House moment — "Remain Calm! All Is Well!" — but it's more than fair to say that the wire service's Matthew Craft and Bernard Condon allowed quite a bit of wishful thinking into their writeup. In late June, I noted that the AP's Ken Sweet asked a very important question about China ("IS THERE A POINT WHERE I SHOULD GET WORRIED?"), and failed to answer it. He also claimed that "The biggest concern is whether the drop in China's stock market will cause the country's economy to slow." The headline and opening sentence in tonight's AP dispatch attempted to maintain that false appearance (bolds are mine): US STOCKS TUMBLE ON GLOBAL SLOWDOWN FEARSGrowing concerns about a slowdown in China shook markets around the world on Friday, driving the U.S. stock market to its biggest drop in nearly four years.The question isn't whether there's a slowdown in China and elsewhere. The questions are how severe it is and how long-lasting it will be. To be clear, this isn't about whether the economies of Mainland China and other countries are contracting (yet). It's a question of whether their growth is seriously trailing expectations held by investors and policymakers just a short time ago.People with their eyes open should have already noticed, as I did in June, that many others have been contending that growth has been slowing in China since April, if not earlier.In today's report, the AP pair included several other highly questionable or contradictory contentions. Here are just a few.First, concerning China:Traders have been worried about slowing growth in China and its potential impact on the U.S.In this sentence, slowing growth is accepted as a matter of fact — not a "fear" or "concern." Beyond that, even though he wouldn't say so in his actual writeup, the headline at Ken Sweet's June dispatch read: "Chinese stocks drop, but impact in US is seen as limited." On Friday, the Shanghai stock market closed just a fraction of a point above its July 8 low. The effect on the U.S. stock market, and likely the U.S. economy, has hardly been "limited."Jeremy Zirin, head of investment strategy at UBS Wealth Management (said), "But there doesn't seem to be any signal that the weakness abroad is slipping into the U.S. economy," he said.The U.S. economy has plenty of its own weakness, and doesn't need more. While the consumption-driven calculations which lead to Gross Domestic Product are still positive, several underlying hard-number indicators relating to production and sales most certainly are not. Here's just one:
