Well, President Donald Trump said he will decide today on the potential agreement with Ira n. However Iran's Foreign Ministry said today that the nuclear issue was not negotiable . Plus, Iran's semi-official Fars news agency indicated what Trump is saying is a mixture of truth and lies.  And what about Lebanon? Stock market? Stocks rose in afternoon trading on Wall Street Friday, adding to the all-time highs they set a day earlier.     The S&P 500 rose 0.2% Friday. The index is coming off six gains in a row and is headed for a ninth straight winning week, which would be the longest such streak since 2023. Jeff Bezos' Blue Horizon exploded on its pad in Florida yesterday .   Watch the explosion .   No injuries or deaths, but a costly loss, for their only pad has been destroyed.   Amazon was expecting this rocket to take 48 satellites into space on the next launch.  That's now cancelled.   Did you know that there are...

Well, with incredible swiftness yesterday,  both houses of the U.S. Congress passed that controversial Epstein file release legislation . The House vote was 427 to 1.  Louisiana Republican Representative Clay Higgins cited his concern about innocent people being hurt. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer brought up the bill on the floor of the Senate under a procedure called unanimous consent.  He had checked with the Republican party about this process, which allows no debate and no amendments, got concurrence and succeeded.  There was no congressional vote, so no one in the midterm election will get tainted. This measure is now on President Donald Trump's desk, and he has said he will sign it. The bill requires Attorney General Pam Bondi to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell no later than 30 days after the law is enacted.   T he bill gives Bondi th...

On this record 43rd day of the government shutdown,  the House, after a 54-day recess, will finally vote to restart .  President Donald Trump will sign this legislation. However, this  Epstein matter has returned . Sure Trump knew about Epstein and underage girls,  but did The Donald also participate? It was in Trump's first term that this brouhaha gained notice, and you would think that any documents of his involvement were deleted then. So any demands for more details from the White House now, as is being demanded by Democrats, will not provide any condemning information.  But why, then, is this being withheld? Then again,  maybe Elon Musk found something,  or the Biden administration somehow snuck away incriminating evidence. I asked Google AI to count the number of Epstein "survivors," and the feedback was more than 1000.  However, the  Miami Herald  only identified around 80 underage victims between 2001 and 2006.  These surviv...

 I get a bit into bitcoin today to reflect how volatile it can be. Yesterday,  President Donald Trump threatened new 100% tariffs on China. The  U.S. stock market tumbled , with the Dow Jones Industrial dropping 879 points, or 1.9%.  The broader S&P dropped 2.71%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slid 3.56%. Gold rose 1.5%.   Read my posting of yesterday on how just this commodity could trigger a collapse of the USA and World . In particular,  cryptocurrencies Bitcoin ( almost a 10% decline ), Ether ( 14.2% ) and Solana ( 20% ) led the sinking , bringing total liquidations to $14.28 billion, the largest in crypto history.  One of Trump's executive order to allow digital assets to be included in 401(k) plans led to  Bitcoin  soaring to a record high of $124,000 last week.   When to capitalize (b)itcoin?  When referring to the protocol, technology or network.  But lowercase bitcoin is used as a unit of currency....