Piousbox

The foreign policy move to dismantle the so-called "dark fleet" of crude oil tankers moving Venezuela's oil around the world, through President Trump's gunboat diplomacy to secure the Western Hemisphere, was once again on full display on Friday morning.

Russia launched another massive overnight strike on Ukraine using its hypersonic Oreshnik missile as part of a large-scale assault said to be retaliation for the alleged Ukrainian attempt to drone strike Putin's residence last month.

Kiev was hit hard in the fresh missile and drone attack which set apartment buildings on fire and killed at least four people. Importantly, Ukrainian officials said a ballistic missile traveling at hypersonic speed hit an "infrastructure facility" near the far western city of Lviv.

Meta revealed this morning a slew of new agreements with key players in the nuclear power industry, in an urgent bid to provide clean energy for its rapidly expanding data center empire.

Ahead of today's jobs report, expectations were that the NFP number would show another rebound from the terrible Sept/Oct prints, but remain muted (or else spark fears about reheating and an end to the Fed's easing cycle). Well, that's precisely what we got moments ago when the BLS reported that in December the US gained 50K jobs, a modest miss to estimates of 50K, but smack in the middle of JPM's sweet spot range of 35K-75K (as previewed earlier) which would be best for the market.

Longtime Tulsi Gabbard supporters have wondered why she has seemed to be missing in action in terms of weighing in on Trump's militarily invading Venezuela to oust longtime socialist leader Nicolás Maduro, given that as a prior member of Congress before taking up the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position, she had been quite vocal against any move on Venezuela. 

By all accounts, protests and unrest have been spreading rapidly in Iran, now over a week-and-a-half into economic and anti-government protests which have begun to grind the country to a halt. On Thursday the demonstrations have disrupted life in the capital in a big way, and there are reports of nationwide internet and cellular outages.

An Alaska Airlines pilot who was universally praised as a hero after safely landing a Boeing jet after a door plug panel flew off shortly after takeoff is suing the company because he says the plane maker wrongly tried to blame him and the rest of the crew.

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump is asking the state of Georgia to reimburse $6.26 million in attorney fees and costs he incurred defending against his now-dismissed election interference case in the state.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents shot two individuals in the sanctuary city of Portland on Thursday evening, according to local media. The incident comes one day after the ICE-involved shooting of an "ICE Watch" left-wing activist in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

First, Trump short-circuited the Fed's rate-cut process. Now he is going after QE by launching his own version of it. 

Update (1858):

The New York Post reports that Renee Nicole Good was an anti-ICE "warrior" and part of a network of left-wing activists who worked to "document and resist" ICE operations in Minnesota.  

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In response to decades of corporate-poisoned nutrition advice, the Trump administration has unleashed updated federal dietary guidelines that torch added sugars, champion protein and healthy fats, and slam the door on ultra-processed junk fueling America’s chronic disease crisis.

The Trump administration withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations, conventions, and treaties that it said go against the country’s interests, the White House announced on Jan. 7.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that Hungary would not leave the European Union, which instead would "fall apart on its own" due to "leadership chaos" and said Brussels aimed to cut Hungary off from Russian energy supplies during a press conference on Monday. 

It didn't take long. Within hours of an ICE-involved shooting in the Minneapolis area, the Democratic Party's protest industrial complex moved into action, quickly creating conditions for coordinated demonstrations across multiple cities.

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

In a letter to members of the governing coalition that has so far only become known in fragments, Chancellor Friedrich Merz warns of a severe economic crisis and calls for reforms. Yet the circulating and quotable elements of the document from the Chancellery reveal no deviation whatsoever from the course already taken.