Day: September 5, 2023

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A former chairman of the right-wing Proud Boys group was sentenced on Tuesday to 22 years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump trying to overturn the former president’s election defeat.

Enrique Tarrio was convicted of charges, including seditious conspiracy, for his role in planning the storming of the Capitol, when thousands of supporters of the Republican then-U.S. president violently tried to stop Congress from certifying the results of an election that Trump falsely claimed had widespread fraud.

Federal prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly to impose a 33-year prison sentence on Tarrio, who was not present at the Capitol on the day of the violence because another judge had ordered him to stay out of Washington. Prosecutors said he helped direct the attack from Baltimore.

Tarrio’s attorneys had asked for a substantially shorter sentence.

Kelly last week sentenced another far-right Proud Boys leader, Ethan Nordean, to 18 years, less than the 27 years prosecutors had sought. Oath Keepers militia founder Stewart Rhodes in May was also sentenced to 18 years. Nordean and Rhodes had previously been tied for the longest sentence handed down in the case.

More than 1,100 people have been arrested on charges related to the Capitol assault, and of those at least 630 have pleaded guilty and at least 110 have been convicted at trial. Five people, including a police officer, died during or shortly after the riot and more than 140 police officers were injured. The Capitol suffered millions of dollars in damage.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was tapped to investigate broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has charged Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, for trying to keep himself in power.

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SoftBank Group’s (9984.T) Arm is seeking a valuation of more than $52 billion in its initial public offering, the chip designer said on Tuesday as it begins marketing for the biggest U.S. stock market flotation of the year.

SoftBank is offering 95.5 million American depository shares of the United Kingdom-based company for $47 to $51 apiece and is looking to raise up to $4.87 billion at the top of the range, Arm said in a regulatory filing.

The valuation that Arm is chasing now represents a climb-down from the $64 billion valuation at which SoftBank last month acquired the 25% stake it did not already own in the company from its $100 billion Vision Fund.

Yet even with this more modest valuation ask, SoftBank would fare better than its $40 billion deal to sell Arm to Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), which it abandoned last year amid opposition from antitrust regulators.

Jamie Mills O’Brien, portfolio manager at British fund manager Abrdn, said he found SoftBank’s valuation ask in the IPO “more palatable than initially discussed.”

“We are watching closely how the company handles the relationship with its China business – alongside any further impacts from the technology ‘war’ between China and the United States,” he said.

The Japanese conglomerate will own 90.6% of Arm’s ordinary shares after the offering closes, the company said, adding that it will not receive any proceeds from the IPO.

Arm has signed up many of its major clients as investors in its IPO, including Apple (AAPL.O), Nvidia (NVDA.O), Alphabet (GOOGL.O), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), Intel (INTC.O) and Samsung Electronics (005930.KS).

The company said the ‘cornerstone investors’ have separately indicated an interest in buying a combined $735 million of the ADS being sold.

Arm’s listing, the biggest in New York since Rivian (RIVN.O) in late 2021, is expected to buoy the IPO market globally and fuel other startups toward going public as its success would signal the return of investor appetite for technology companies.

It will also be a milestone for SoftBank, as it taps several marquee technology names as investors to drum up support for the company whose designs power more than 99% of the world’s smartphones.

Reuters first reported on SoftBank’s proposed price range for the IPO on Saturday. Sources also said it could possibly raise this range before the IPO prices, should investor demand prove strong.

Arm, whose client list includes the world’s biggest tech giants, generates a big share of its revenue through royalty fees based on either the average selling price of the customer’s Arm-based chip or a fixed fee per chip.

For the year ended March 31, Arm’s sales fell to $2.68 billion, hurt mainly by a slump in global smartphone shipments.

Unlike most loss-making but high-growth tech companies that debut with lofty valuations but later plummet below list price, Arm is profitable. This is expected to significantly reduce investor anxieties, analysts have said.

Sara Russo, senior analyst at Bernstein, said it is early days for Arm to benefit from the boom in artificial intelligence but the space represents an area of potential growth for Arm.

Analysts have said Arm can potentially ride on Nvidia’s coattails, which has been the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom with the stock surging more than 230% year-to-date, as its chips must be coupled with energy-efficient central processing units (CPUs) – Arm’s specialty.

Arm was founded in 1990, as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer, and VLSI Technology.

Its shares traded on the London Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq from 1998 until 2016, when it was taken private by SoftBank in a deal that valued it at $32 billion.

Barclays (BARC.L), Goldman Sachs (GS.N), JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N), and Mizuho Financial Group (8411.T) are the lead underwriters for the offering.

If the underwriters exercise their right to buy shares in Arm in full as part of ‘greenshoe option’, it would take the IPO amount to be raised to $5.2 billion.

Arm, which has tapped a total of 28 banks for the IPO, has not picked a traditional “lead left” bank and will split underwriter fees evenly among the top four banks.

Arm expects to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ARM”.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as his nominee to be ambassador to Israel, picking a high-profile political figure for the post at a time of tense relations between the two countries.

Lew, who must be confirmed by the Senate, will face a complicated political situation, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushes through a judicial overhaul opposed by many Israelis and the Biden administration.

He would succeed Ambassador Tom Nides in the post.

The Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, welcomed the announcement in remarks as the Senate reopened after its August recess.

“Mr. Lew is precisely the person for the job of ambassador to Israel we need,” Schumer said.

Schumer gave no timetable for a vote on Lew’s confirmation, which would take place after a hearing and vote in the Foreign Relations Committee.

In addition to serving as Treasury secretary, Lew under former President Barack Obama was a White House chief of staff and deputy secretary of state for management and resources.

Lew was director of the Office of Management and Budget in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet from 1998 to 2001. In both the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations, Lew served on the National Security Council.

Earlier, as special assistant to Clinton, he was an architect of the national service program, Americorps.

If the local media reported that there was a real life T-rex at the county zoo, and you went down there and found out that the media had made the whole thing up, you wouldn’t walk away saying “That’s why I don’t trust zoos.” You’d walk away muttering about the fact that the media had lied to you for the sake of ratings.

This just seems obvious, right? If you figure out you’re being lied to, you’re angry at the people who lied to you, right? That’s why it’s always so confusing to me when I point out that the media is lying to us about what the polls even say, and most of the replies are “That’s why I don’t trust the polls!”

The polls, as we keep seeing, have their own problems. When you omit junk polls and average all of the legitimately conducted polls together, it can give you an accurate and strategically valuable picture of what’s going on.

Take, for instance, the current polls between President Joe Biden and criminal defendant Donald Trump. Out of the eighteen most recent polls listed on RealClearPolitics, Biden is ahead in fourteen of them, Trump is ahead in two of them, and two of them are tied. Okay, that feels like a pretty accurate summation of where things stand. Biden hasn’t really done any reelection campaigning yet, Trump’s trials haven’t even begun, and yet Biden is already doing well enough that Trump is only head in two out of eighteen polls.

But throughout the holiday weekend, the entire mainstream media (on both sides) endlessly hyped just the scant polls that have Trump ahead, while omitting the numerous polls that have Biden ahead. There’s a word for this: lying. Imagine if the sports media pulled this kind of crap. Imagine if ESPN “covered” a football game by showing the red team scoring two touchdowns, while leaving out the four touchdowns that the blue team scored, and then launched into a narrative about how shocking it is that the red team is dominating. When you found out later that the blue team actually won the game 28-14, you’d conclude that ESPN simply lied to you about the football game. You wouldn’t say “That’s why I don’t trust football games.”

Of course ESPN doesn’t do that kind of thing, because too many audience members would just look up the real score, see that they’d been lied to as part of some weird attempt at drumming up ratings, and never watch ESPN again. Yet the political media tells precisely these kinds of lies about the polls every single day. They tell you about just the handful of outlier polls that show an unlikely and shocking outcome, while lying to you about the fact that most of the polls show the opposite outcome. And yes, that kind of lie of omission is a lie. MSNBC lies to you about the polls. CNN lies to you about the polls. Every major media outlet lies to you, constantly, about the polls.

It doesn’t matter if you think pollsters know what they’re doing or not. It doesn’t matter if you think polling is useful or not. The story here is that the media is lying to you about what the polls even say. And not just this past weekend. The entire media lies to you about the polls all the god damn time.

When you hear the media quoting the polls, the proper response is to remind yourself that the media constantly lies about what the polls even say, and look them up for yourself. Once you look at a polling aggregation site and you see what the polls actually say, only then should you react to the polls. And when you see that the media has once again lied to you about what the polls even say, you should then go nuclear on those media outlets and reporters for trying so hard to mislead you.

The most maddening part about trying to discuss the polls is that, even before getting to the worthiness and accuracy and value of the polls themselves, far too many people can’t get past the fact that the media is always lying about what the polls even say. If you figured out that the sports channel was always lying to you about what the game scores even were, you wouldn’t sit there and have a reaction based on those fake scores. You’d look up the real scores and have a reaction to that – and then you’d never watch that sports channel again. The same should go for the media’s disgusting habit of simply lying to you, all day, every day, about what the polls even say. Instead of giving up on the polls, try giving up on the media outlets who lie to you about the polls.

The post The media is flat out lying to you about what the Biden-Trump polls even say. Stop blaming the polls. Start blaming the media. appeared first on Palmer Report.

United Airlines (UAL.O) said it has ended an hour-long nationwide ground stop after a system-wide information technology issue on Tuesday forced it to hold all aircraft at departure airports.

“We have identified a fix for the technology issue and flights have resumed. We’re working with impacted customers to help them reach their destinations as soon as possible,” United said on social platform X.

The issue did not impact flights that were already airborne and were able to continue to destinations as planned.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said earlier it had issued the ground stop at United’s request. According to FAA records, the ground stop lasted just over an hour.

FlightAware, a flight tracking website, said United had canceled seven flights and delayed 301 flights, or 11% of its flights Tuesday.

Airline ground stops because of computer issues are uncommon but not unprecedented. In April, Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) said a technology failure caused a one-hour nationwide stoppage of its flights.