PURE $PECULATION

Ben Bernanke Says He Doesn't See Value in Bitcoin

Stephen Alpher
Mon, May 16, 2022

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told CNBC on Monday that he doesn't believe bitcoin (BTC) works as money, a store of value or digital gold.

"If bitcoin were a substitute for fiat money, you could use bitcoin to go buy your groceries," he said. "Nobody buys groceries with bitcoin because it’s too expensive and too inconvenient to do that." he added, noting how it would be impossible to price something like celery in bitcoin because there's too little stability in its value.

Occasionally known as "Helicopter Ben" for suggesting in 2002 that the Fed could simply drop money from helicopters to ward off deflationary conditions – a comment the cypherpunks who laid the groundwork for Bitcoin were no doubt well aware of – Bernanke addressed the digital gold case for bitcoin. "Gold has underlying use value," he argued. "You can use it to fill cavities. The underlying use value of a bitcoin is to do ransomware or something like that."

Turning to monetary policy, Bernanke, who was behind the original zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing, criticized the current Fed for not moving quickly enough to tighten monetary policy in the face of advancing inflation.

Under even a "benign scenario," Bernanke said he expects the economy to slow and unemployment to rise, even as inflation remains high. "You could call it stagflation," he said.

Luna Foundation Guard says its Bitcoin reserves are down to 313 from over 80,000, and it will use ‘remaining assets’ to pay back ‘smallest’ stablecoin holders

Taylor Locke
Mon, May 16, 2022, 8:09 AM·1 min read

The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), an organization that supports the Terra ecosystem, shared a breakdown of its remaining assets on Monday.

Last week, Terra’s stablecoin UST began to crash far below $1, and its sister token Luna unraveled to nearly zero. Amid the chaos, many investors were wondering where LFG’s billions worth of Bitcoin went, which it originally obtained to defend UST’s peg.

Now, after days of silence, LFG shared that it has 313 Bitcoin left, down from its original 80,394 Bitcoin reserve. LFG also noted it has a few other assets, including UST, Terra and Avalanche.

LFG is “looking to use its remaining assets to compensate remaining users of $UST, smallest holders first,” it tweeted on Monday. “We are still debating through various distribution methods, updates to follow soon.”

Over the weekend, figures in the crypto community also suggested Terra disburse funds to “smallholders” impacted by the crash. Among them is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

“Coordinated sympathy and relief for the average UST smallholder who got told something dumb about ‘20% interest rates on the US dollar’ by an influencer, personal responsibility and SFYL [or sorry for your loss] for the wealthy,” Buterin tweeted on Saturday.

He added that the “obvious precedent is FDIC insurance,” being “up to $250,000 per person.”

UST remains in the red, down 71% in the last week. It’s currently trading at 8 cents. Luna, down 100% in the last week, is worth nearly zero.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com


Crypto: Stablecoin storm spreads after billions of tether is cashed out


Brian McGleenon
Tue, May 17, 2022, 

A smartphone with Tether logo on it. Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Crypto's stablecoin storm spreads as $7.6bn of USD tether is redeemed in the past week. The cashout looks likely to continue on Tuesday with impact on all major tokens including bitcoin.

On Tuesday the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap, bitcoin and ethereum, rallied 3% in 24 hours, with BTC at $30,667 and ETH at $2,091.

The cash-out of tether (USDT-USD) by crypto investors has escalated since the LUNA/UST crash last Wednesday.

The dramatic crash saw the algorithmic stablecoin UST terra, which had been pegged to the dollar one to one, fall to a low of $0.1.

A stablecoin is supposed to be a stable safe haven for investors to park their profits amid the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.

However, cryptocurrency investors now find they have nowhere to go amid signals of further volatility.

No stablecoin seems safe at the moment, and the only option is to hold blue-chip cryptos, such as bitcoin (BTC-USD) and ethereum, or cash out of the whole ecosystem into a traditional bank account.

The crisis deepens as ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, has fallen about 60% from its November record.

Read more: Crypto live prices

According to technical analyst John Roque of 22V Research, ethereum (ETH-USD) could drop another 80%.

Ethereum currently stands at $2,074, but Roque's downside target is around $420.

However, both bitcoin and ethereum have risen by around 3% in value in the last 24 hours, which would suggest wary cryptocurrency investors are parking their money in these blue chips until the current 'stablecoin' storm resides.

The market cap of tether has been dropping considerably since the blow-up of the USDT terra algorithmic stablecoin.

Tether's market cap has fallen from $85bn before the 'stablecoin storm', to a current value of $76bn

USDT, or tether, should not be confused with UST, called terra, which was the algorithmic stablecoin that crashed last Wednesday.

Unlike the UST terra algorithmic stablecoin, USDT tether is backed by US dollars as collateral.

However, its reserves are a point of controversy and only a fractional amount of the $4 of tether in existence may be redeemed for actual US dollars.

On Monday, the New York Supreme Court rejected Tether’s petition to block the public from receiving documents detailing the composition of its dollar reserves.

The recent crypto-market crisis involving stablecoins has caused industry experts to call for strong regulation, especially of stablecoins.

Read more: 'Crypto lobby groups are dictating terms in Washington'

Speaking to Yahoo Finance, London-based fintech investor Viktor Prokopenya said: “Regulation will bring transparency to the market and end bad practices. Like all young technologies - crypto is only about a decade old, the industry has to grow up and out of its existing ways.

"The recent collapse of terra and tether and other stablecoins have shown a lack of transparency and an ironic ‘instability’ in a supposedly more ‘stable’ cryptocurrency."

The news comes as the UK Treasury is en route to legalise the use of stablecoins.

Last month HM Treasury tweeted: "Economic Secretary John Glen announced today that stablecoins will be brought into UK payments regulation.

"This places the UK financial services sector at the forefront of technology, creating conditions for stablecoin issuers and service providers to operate and invest."

Luna Foundation Guard has now dumped $2.4 billion from its Bitcoin reserves in failed attempt to defend TerraUSD peg


Woohae Cho—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Christiaan Hetzner
Mon, May 16, 2022, 8:51 AM·3 min read

Luna Foundation Guard, the second largest known holder of Bitcoin, liquidated almost its entire reserves last week worth billions in a failed attempt to defend the Terra UST stablecoin peg.

Ever since the collapse of UST and its sister governance token Luna, designed to maintain the peg through an algorithmic process of manipulating the latter’s money supply, the entire crypto community wanted to know just one thing: what happened to LFG’s prodigious Bitcoin holdings?

“Where is all the BTC (Bitcoin) that was supposed to be used as reserves?“ asked Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, head of crypto platform Binance. “Shouldn’t those BTC be ALL used to buy back UST first?”

Chain analysis firm Elliptical tracked movements in LFG's Bitcoin, concluding they had all been shifted to centralized exchanges Binance and Gemini, where the trail promptly ran cold.

https://twitter.com/CryptoHarry_/status/1526130321942794240?s=20u0026t=9FoQrf42lfejQNhtB7Sj7Q

On Monday, the crypto community finally got an answer, when LFG posted an update to its 91,000-plus followers in a long Twitter thread.

Of the 80,394 Bitcoin worth $2.4 billion it held as of May 7th just prior to Terra losing its dollar peg, only 313 are still held in reserve.

The rest were liquidated between May 8th and May 10th, when Bitcoin traded between $31,000 and $35,000.

'Heartbroken about pain'

For investors in Bitcoin, this could be bullish as it removes uncertainty hanging over the price amid fears a whale as big as LFG would dump its holdings to defend the peg.

After LFG's Bitcoin holdings surpassed Elon Musk's Tesla earlier this month, only Michael Saylor's Microstrategy, with its 129,218 Bitcoin in reserves, was known to hold more.

On Monday, Bitcoin fluctuated around the $30,000 mark.

https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1525970665504907270?s=20u0026t=9FoQrf42lfejQNhtB7Sj7Q

For Luna holders, however, Monday’s update suggests there is little remaining value left in the project apart from roughly $65 million in Avalanche, another $12 million in Binance tokens and the remaining $9.4 million in Bitcoin.

Reserves totaled $93.4 million, according to the most recent information from LFG.

On Monday, Binance founder CZ said his platform had locked up, or "staked", about $12 million in UST to validate transactions on the Terra blockchain.

He said he would ask the Terra project team "to compensate the retails users first, Binance last, if ever," in order to make the bulk of small retail investors that lost money whole again.

For Do Kwon, whose wife recently received police protection, there was little left to do but claim neither he nor any affiliated institutions try to earn profits by selling Terra UST and Luna during the collapse.

The South Korean native had gained a reputation for hubris, mocking critics that pointed to fatal flaws in the construction of his algo stablecoin. Only two months ago, he boasted his creation would eliminate one of Terra UST’s competitors, Maker Foundation’s Dai.

“I am heartbroken about the pain my invention has brought on all of you,” the self-described “Master of Stablecoin” posted to Twitter on Saturday.

https://twitter.com/mrdistortion_/status/1524334361289629696?s=20u0026t=9BOB61eHSAha-ewaNRlDBA

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

CAPITALI$M IS NOT DEMOCRATIC

Goldman Sachs pushed staff to return to the office. Now the Wall Street bank is giving executives unlimited time off

Nicholas Gordon
Mon, May 16, 2022,

Goldman Sachs emerged as one of the strongest advocates of a post-pandemic return to the office this year, but the fight for talent could be forcing the investment bank to reverse course and offer employees more time away from their desks instead.

In an internal memo seen by the Financial Times, the investment bank said it would offer junior staff a minimum of two extra days off each year. But senior staff will get an even bigger perk—one more commonly associated with Silicon Valley than Wall Street.

Starting May 1 partners and managing directors at Goldman Sachs can “take time off when needed without a fixed vacation day entitlement,” the memo said, as the investment bank gingerly follows tech firms like Netflix and Salesforce in offering staff unlimited time off.

Goldman Sachs declined to comment for this article. But forcing staff to take time away from the office is quite a U-turn for the bank, which desperately tried to get its staff back in the office as pandemic restrictions eased in the U.S.

In February last year, Goldman CEO David Solomon called remote work an “aberration." A month later, Solomon told Fortune that “part of [Goldman Sachs’] secret sauce is that [younger staff] come together and collaborate and work with people that are much more experienced than they are" adding that “for Goldman Sachs to retain that cultural foundation, we have to bring people together.”

Yet the bank has struggled to get its workers to comply with its "cultural foundation." Only half of employees showed up on the first day Goldman reopened its New York headquarters on Feb. 1, after closing the office for a month due to an Omicron-driven surge of COVID cases. And there are signs that Goldman’s return-to-office mandate may be affecting the bank’s ability to retain talent.

Junior bankers have reportedly complained about the bank's drive to get people back at their desks, and some have started interviewing for roles at tech companies that offer more flexibility, including Netflix, Google and Facebook. According to a Harris poll conducted for Fortune in February, about 50% of U.S. workers would accept a lower salary in exchange for an unlimited leave policy.

Other Wall Street banks are also struggling to get their workers back in the office. In April, JPMorgan said that it would allow half its workforce to work in hybrid or fully remote settings, despite CEO Jamie Dimon's earlier criticism of work-from-home arrangements.

However, experts warn that an unlimited paid time off policy could backfire if an office culture discourages taking a vacation, as workers do not have clear expectations of how much breaktime they actually get.

Goldman Sachs appears to have accounted for that. According to the memo, the bank will mandate that all staff take a minimum of three weeks off per year by 2023, including at least one vacation of a minimum five consecutive days.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Intel shareholders rejected the company’s executive pay program—putting the CEO’s promised $180 million pay package on the line


Ting Shen—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Sophie Mellor
Tue, May 17, 2022

Intel shareholders voted against the company’s executive compensation program last week, which included part of a $178.6 million payout to CEO Pat Gelsinger, according to a regulatory filing published Monday.

Around 1.78 billion votes, making up around 54.2% of shareholders of the chip-manufacturing giant, were cast against the executive compensation, while 932 million votes were made in favor. Around 577 million votes abstained or were broker nonvotes.

The vote is advisory and won’t take immediate effect, but it indicates that a growing number of stockholders are pushing back on hefty executive compensation packages at Intel, which beat first-quarter results targets, but forecast lower growth for the second quarter. The vote also puts keener scrutiny on CEO Pat Gelsinger and his $43.5 billion plan to revive Intel, which includes a €33 billion European spending spree to expand Intel’s presence across the bloc and ease the semiconductor chip shortage.

The filing revealed that Alyssa Henry, an executive vice president at Square and 57th richest self-made woman, according to Forbes, was kept on Intel's board of directors by a narrow margin. While 1.36 million stockholders voted to keep her on as an Intel director, 1.34 million voted to kick her off—a rare close tally in a shareholder vote.

“We take our investors’ feedback very seriously, and we are committed to engaging with them and addressing their concerns,” Intel said in a statement to Fortune. The company added that it has taken specific steps to address investor questions and to clearly link pay to performance, but added that "there is clearly more work to do.”

The company also said, "Intel’s Board of Directors will work with Alyssa Henry to address the over-boarding concerns raised by stockholders."
Executive pay pushback

This isn’t the first time shareholders have voted against executive compensation packages in recent months. Shareholders at AT&T, Phillips, and General Electric all voted against hiking CEO pay and executive compensation packages after poor results this year.

Proxy votes against executive pay at S&P 500 companies became more common last year, according to a report by As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group focused on ESG matters. After many companies released earnings with "questionable practices and metrics"—easing performance targets during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—shareholders voted to push back on executive compensation at record numbers.

In 2021, a record 16 companies had the pay of their executives rejected by more than half of their investors—up from 10 in 2020 and seven in 2019, according to the report.

In Intel's case, Gelsinger, who took over as CEO in February 2021, was hired to turn the company around and return it to its former glory. In the hopes of beating out rival AMD, Intel has been shoring up the company's presence and manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.

A lot is riding on this for Gelsinger. If all goes according to plan and Intel’s stock triples in five years, the new CEO would take home the entire $180 million pay package signed in 2021.

“The Compensation Committee believed that having 73% of the CEO’s new-hire equity awards contingent on achieving ambitious stock price growth was in the best interest of Intel and its stockholders,” Intel said in its proxy filing published in May 2022.

Gelsinger’s payout is far from guaranteed as things stand today. Intel's stock is trading lower than when Gelsinger took the helm, a situation that was not helped by the company’s first-quarter earnings report; Intel forecast its second-quarter revenue and profit would come in well below Wall Street expectations, citing weak demand in its largest market (PCs) and increased supply chain uncertainty due to COVID-19 lockdowns in China. Shares in Intel fell 4% on the news.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

JPMorgan shareholders vote disapproval of CEO Dimon's special payout



Tue, May 17, 2022
By David Henry

NEW YORK (Reuters) -In an unusual rebuke for Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, shareholders on Tuesday clearly disapproved of the special $52.6 million stock option award directors gave him last year to stay on the job for at least five more years.

In an advisory say-on-pay referendum, only 31% of votes cast endorsed JPMorgan executive payments for 2021, according to a preliminary count announced at the company's annual meeting.

Because of the special award this year two major advisory firms, from which investors take their cue when voting, had recommended "no" votes on pay.

Institutional Shareholder Services Inc and Glass Lewis & Co criticized Dimon's options as lacking performance criteria for vesting.

In eight of the last 12 years JPMorgan had won approval from more than 90% of votes cast in its annual compensation ballots.

Dimon, 66, will keep the award, but such votes are closely followed as a test of investors' attitudes toward executive pay and what payouts they will tolerate.

Average support for pay packages at S&P 500 companies was 88.3% in 2021, down from 89.6% in 2020 and 90% in 2019, according to consulting firm Semler Brossy.

In response to the vote, JPMorgan directors pointed out through a spokesman the special award was extremely rare and the first for Dimon in more than a decade.

Directors said before the vote that the special award would not be recurring and "reflects the board's desire for him to continue to lead the firm for a further significant number of years."

The board said before the vote it made the award in consideration of Dimon's performance, his leadership since 2005 and "management succession planning amidst a highly competitive landscape for executive leadership talent."

If Dimon, a billionaire, keeps working at the bank for five years the options will vest, although he could still receive them if he leaves to work for the government or to run for public office.

Stock from the options must be held until 10 years after being granted.

The award was separate from Dimon's usual annual pay package, which was up 10% to $34.5 million for 2021.

The board prevailed in its recommendations on all other issues. All directors, including Dimon, were re-elected with more than 92% of the votes cast, according to preliminary figures.

Two shareholder proposals on fossil fuel financing received only 11% and 15% of votes cast, consistent with weak support recently for initiatives at Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, as well as at big oil companies.

(Reporting by David Henry in New York. Additional reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bangalore.Editing by Nick Zieminski and Chris Reese)

Boeing found a new headquarters. But customers fear it has ‘lost its way’

05/17/2022

Boeing’s decision to transplant its corporate headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia, should have signalled a new chapter in the industrial giant’s history. Instead, the move has drawn criticism for taking management further from the company’s spiritual home, the commercial aircraft factories of Seattle, and closer to its defence operations.

Unions and industry experts have expressed disquiet, with some warning that the aerospace group is heading in the wrong direction just as it seeks to emerge from the tragic 737 Max crash crisis and setbacks on civil and military programmes that have dented investor confidence.

“It’s being perceived as an abandonment of the commercial aviation part of the company,” said Ray Goforth, executive director of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which represents more than 14,000 Boeing employees.

Workers heard “‘nobody’s going to come fix the problems — they’re focused on where they can get more money’”, he added. “The company seems to move from magic solution to magic solution.”

The location of Boeing’s headquarters is a sensitive subject. The group shifted its head office from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, four years after merging with McDonnell Douglas. Critics say executives became more focused on wooing Wall Street than engineering excellence. Boeing spent more than $40bn on share buybacks between 2013 and 2019.

Boeing said the move, to a site a mile from the Pentagon, would bring it closer to customers and stakeholders as well as engineering talent, as it seeks to attract new hires. The company’s defence business brings in more revenue than its commercial arm.

Four of the US’s five biggest aerospace and defence companies will now be based in the Washington DC suburbs as Boeing joins Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a US regulator that has increased its scrutiny of the company, is also located in the capital.

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The debate about the wisdom of the shift in headquarters has been overshadowed by poor first-quarter results, which highlighted the challenges facing the company. Boeing last month revealed $1.2bn in charges in the first three months of the year, including $660mn related to the production of two Air Force One jets, the US presidential aircraft.

On the civil side, the company announced a further delay to its wide-body 777X aircraft to 2025, projected to cost another $1.5bn. Boeing is also making slower-than-expected progress on clearing an order backlog of hundreds of 737 Max jets that built up during the aircraft’s global grounding after two crashes in 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, customer deliveries of the wide-body 787 Dreamliner remain on hold following quality control issues.

The bad news has weighed on its shares. Down 40 per cent since January, Boeing is the sole Big Five defence company stock to have fallen this year amid renewed investor enthusiasm for the sector in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The repeated delays have frustrated some of Boeing’s largest customers, many of which are seeking to expand jet fleets as passengers return to the skies following the loosening of coronavirus pandemic curbs.

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said on Monday that sweeping changes were needed to Boeing’s senior management, while in February American Airlines said it had been forced to rearrange its summer schedule “due to Boeing’s continued inability to deliver our 787-8 aircraft”.

To make matters worse, Boeing’s arch-rival Airbus has built up a commanding sales lead in the narrow-body segment of the market. The European plane maker recently announced plans to aggressively step up production of its popular A320 family of jets, including with a second assembly line in the US at its operations in Mobile, Alabama.

Boeing’s offices in Arlington, VA, which will be its new base. The move means four of the five biggest US aerospace and defence groups will be located in the Washington DC suburbs © Win McNamee/Getty Images

“Clearly Boeing, especially on the commercial side, is experiencing great challenges,” said John Plueger, chief executive of Air Lease, one of the company’s biggest customers, which is still waiting on about a dozen 787 jets. “In our view, given the history that we’ve had with Boeing in the past year to two, we are hopeful that we can get at least one 787 by the end of this year. I hope I am wrong, I hope we get many more.”

The move to Virginia would “strengthen ties with defence and hopefully with regulators like the FAA, and that is fine”, Plueger added. “But in our view, there is nothing like eyeballs directly on the production line.”

Some of Boeing’s other customers have gone further, with Dómhnal Slattery, boss of the world’s second-largest lessor, Avolon, telling an industry conference this month that the company had “lost its way”. It needed to “fundamentally reimagine its strategic relevance in the marketplace”, he said, adding that this would require “fresh vision, maybe fresh leadership”. 

The public rebuke is rare in an industry where disagreements are usually kept behind closed doors. Two other executives contacted by the Financial Times privately echoed the view that Boeing would benefit from fresh leadership and questioned its execution on key programmes. Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s chief executive and a long-term board member, promised greater transparency and a return to the company’s engineering roots when he took over from Dennis Muilenburg in 2019.

Boeing’s relentless production issues were “just the absence of leadership at the top”, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at AeroDynamic Advisory. He added that he was “baffled by the lack of a plan” for the company.

A person familiar with Boeing’s thinking insisted that management change was not needed to restore confidence. Boeing declined to comment on the matter.

Despite some customers’ frustration, the company has supporters and continues to win orders, including recently from Germany’s Lufthansa. Southwest Airlines chief Bob Jordan this year called Boeing a “terrific partner”. 

But the group’s decision to move its headquarters has amplified concerns over production and engineering.

“If you look at the history over the last quarters — they have pretty much taken charges on every one of their major programmes, both in defence and commercial. What they do isn’t easy, building these machines, but they seem to be having more difficulties than their peers,” said Ron Epstein, analyst at Bank of America, adding that a lot of the issues had to do with “engineering”.

A Boeing 707 version of the Air Force One jet used by President Ronald Reagan. Boeing this year revealed $660mn in charges relating to production of two of the US presidential planes. © George Rose/Getty Images

The company insists things have changed since the Max accidents. Calhoun last month defended the company’s culture on an investor call, saying: “I don’t attribute our certification issues and time lines to engineering shortfalls in any way.”

Boeing told the FT that it was taking “comprehensive actions to strengthen engineering excellence, enhance quality and drive stability and predictability through the business”. “We are a long-cycle business, and the transformative journey we’re on will be measured in years; not quarters or months,” it added.

Brian West, Boeing’s chief financial officer, said at a conference last week that the company was “on the verge of turning the corner”. 

Its key milestones, he added, were to deliver 787s, to deliver more 737 Maxes and to generate sustainable cash flow. “Those three things are the most important elements that we think about day in and day out. And I believe that as we move through the course of the year, we’re going to start knocking down these milestones,” said West.

Generating cash flow is critical if Boeing — which still has $45bn of net debt — is to have the resources to fund investments, in particular in new aircraft, as the industry faces pressure over its carbon emissions. Some analysts believe the company will need to raise equity sooner rather than later.

Other long-term watchers have suggested the company might have to demerge its commercial arm from its defence business to survive — an idea rejected by a person familiar with Boeing’s thinking, who said “absolutely not”. Boeing declined to comment on the suggestion.

The coming months will be crucial for the group to convince investors — and customers — it is meeting its milestones. “[We] have always been a huge supporter and buyer of aircraft from the Boeing company . . . It has to be a reliable partner. It has to be able to deliver the aircraft that we have on order,” said Air Lease’s Plueger.

Source: https://www.ft.com/cms/s/9df9d699-f49b-4151-8c4f-36cc488b17ac,s01=1.html?ftcamp=traffic/partner/feed_headline/us_yahoo/auddev&yptr=yahoo

20 years later, 'Frankenfish' are strong and spreading, but the anglers are getting craftier



SNAKEHEAD

Jason Nark
Tue, May 17, 2022, 

WOOLFORD, Md. - A dozen or so dead northern snakeheads lay stacked in slime and ice behind a general store in Woolford on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Fisherman Caz Kenny reached into the cooler to highlight some of the controversial fish's finer points, such as the sharp, gnarled teeth behind its ghastly mug.

Kenny, a lifelong outdoorsman, has been sounding the alarm for years about the invasive species, a powerful predator native to Asia and Russia that was first discovered breeding on the East Coast in a small suburban Maryland pond on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay 20 years ago. They've since spread south to Virginia, north to New Jersey and likely beyond.

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Kenny, 47, didn't filet the fish in the cooler behind the Woolford Store in Dorchester County, one of his hangouts, but he's seen his fair share of snakeheads splayed open and knows they're usually full of eggs and other animals. He rattled off a list, his voice a machine-gun staccato: minnows, bass, perch, crayfish, frogs, even baby ducks. "There's not one place here where they haven't had an impact," Kenny tells me as he hoists a thick eight-pounder from the cooler. "There's not a biologist around here that says we're okay."

Northern snakeheads were first seen in the spring of 2002 when an angler hooked one in a swampy pond behind a shopping center in Crofton, Md., about 30 miles from Washington, D.C.

When another was caught there and reported to Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, all aquatic hell broke loose, and the legend of the "Frankenfish" was born. Think of the "killer bee" scares of the 1970s and the media attention those received.

A Washington Post headline from July 2002 found that the "Freakish Fish Story Flourishes." This fish was able to gulp air and "walk." Horror movies were made - including one called "Snakehead Terror," starring the supermodel Carol Alt - and locals sold T-shirts.

How did the dreaded fish get here? Two snakeheads were released into the pond, The Washington Post learned, by a man who'd bought them from an Asian market in New York City, intending to turn them into soup.

For every outdoorsman like Kenny, who believes snakeheads will ultimately destroy local populations, there are others who have come to prize, even obsess over, the fish for its fighting prowess on the end of a fishing line. Many of those fishermen say they don't see that devastation in the places they fish. The two factions often mix it up in the half-dozen Facebook groups dedicated to snakeheads. (Full disclosure: I have caught a few dozen snakeheads over the years in New Jersey, and I've yet to kill one.)

Steve Kambouris, 38, a snakehead devotee from Dundalk, Md., believes the species will eventually be considered a nonnative game fish, something to market to sport fishermen, not a pest to eradicate. "I would say that anyone who says they are a trash fish hasn't caught one," Kambouris told me. "In terms of a sport fish, I can't think of any freshwater fish I would rather catch."

The biologists, of course, are more measured than both sides in their assessments. Twenty years, they say, is a blip on the biological timeline. "We should be concerned with invasive species because once they've become established, it's basically impossible to eradicate them, and control measures can be very expensive," says Steven P. Minkkinen, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When it comes to snakeheads, Minkkinen says, "the genie is out of the bottle."

Minkkinen pointed to one study, a before-and-after look at fish populations in the Blackwater River watershed after snakeheads were established in 2012. The river and its vast tributaries are just a few miles from the Woolford Store and have become a hub for snakehead fishermen from all over the country. The 2018-19 study replicated a fish study conducted in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in 2006-07 and found declines in other prey fish populations. "The loss of these prey species could be in part due to presence of an additional top predator like Northern Snakehead," the study's authors wrote.

Snakeheads are tough. They can breathe oxygen out of water for days, and they don't flop on their sides like most fish. Snakeheads slither. During big rains, they often push into adjacent waterways. When the snakeheads were discovered, officials poisoned Crofton Pond to kill them, but the Little Patuxent River runs just feet away, and it's likely some fish or eggs got out or were moved by birds and turtles. They later became established in the Potomac River.

Snakeheads can be sold commercially but are difficult to catch in large numbers because they prefer shallow water with heavy vegetation, which few boats with nets can get to. One of the more successful ways to kill them has been nighttime bowfishing - using a bow and arrow - on smaller boats equipped with bright lights.

Fishermen find snakeheads tough to hook, on account of their hard, bony mouths, and they fight like pit bulls to break loose, even when they're inside your kayak. That's why most of the snakeheads in Kenny's cooler had holes in their heads from arrows, knives or screwdrivers: from when fishermen administer the coup de grace, as if dispatching a zombie.

"Man, as long as they're wet, they can live for days," Kenny said.

Kenny, like state and federal wildlife officials, wants fishermen to eat the snakeheads they catch. He promotes events, such as the Cecil County Snakehead Fishing Tournament, in which the snakeheads have to be brought to a weigh station for measurements. Since it's illegal to transport a live northern snakehead, they have to be dead. A screwdriver through the head usually does it.

Kambouris, on the other hand, hosts online tournaments where anglers submit their measurements with photos before releasing the snakehead.

Kenny's final argument for killing snakeheads was a freshly cooked plate of breaded fish sticks on a table outside the store. He took a swig of an energy drink, then encouraged everyone - a fellow fisherman, the store owner, this reporter and a photographer - to dig in.

"It's like lump crabmeat," he told us.

Some fish are so ugly that mariners and marketers changed their names to make them more palatable for the seafood industry. Snakeheads, with their bulging eyes and penchant for oozing slime, haven't had such a makeover - but once you eat one, it barely matters. Their meat is as white and flaky as any cod or flounder, perhaps even better.

The plate was empty in a few minutes, and there's at least one more fisherman who might carry a screwdriver in his tackle box now.

- - -

Jason Nark is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a freelance writer.

Military takes UFOs seriously at congressional hearing: 

'We want to know what's out there'

Christopher Wilson

·Senior Writer

Tue, May 17, 2022, 

While the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years didn’t reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life, it did affirm that the U.S. military is taking sightings of unknown craft seriously as a national security threat.

A House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing convened Tuesday morning with a 90-minute public session that was followed by closed-door testimony later in the day.

“Unidentified aerial phenomena [UAPs] are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way,” Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., said at the beginning of the hearing, referring to the preferred technical term for unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

“For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” he added. “Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issues to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community.

“Today we know better,” Carson continued. “UAPs are unexplained, it’s true, but they are real. They need to be investigated, and any threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

The first congressional hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena” in over 50 years was held on Tuesday. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The hearing — the first on the topic since 1966, when congressman and future president Gerald Ford held one after a sighting in Michigan — was less focused on concerns about alien invasion and more on intelligence lapses that could lead to other nations having unknown technology about which the U.S. is not aware. That push included making sure pilots feel comfortable reporting anything they see.

“The intelligence community has a serious duty to our taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries such as China and Russia from surprising us with unforeseen new technologies,” said Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark. “This committee has an obligation to understand what you are doing to determine whether any UAPs are new technologies or not — and if they are, where are they coming from?”

In November, the Pentagon announced the new Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group program to help with tracking. It followed a June 2021 report documenting 144 observations dating back to 2004.

“We know that our service members have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena, and because UAP pose potential flight safety and general security risks, we are committed to a focused effort to determine their origins,” Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, testified at the hearing. “We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there. We get the questions not just from you. We get it from family, and we get them night and day.”

Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, testifies on Tuesday. (Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images)

Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the Pentagon's database of unidentified objects has grown to “approximately 400 reports.” He said that while there had not been any collisions between military craft and UAPs, there had been at least 11 near misses. Bray said the military had not picked up communication signals from the objects, nor had it tried to begin communications with them.

“Generally speaking, it appears to be something that’s unmanned, appears to be something that may or may not be in controlled flight, so we have not attempted any communication with that,” he said, noting that the military had not fired on any UAP, nor had it come across any wreckage “that isn’t consistent of being with terrestrial origin.”

While Bray said that most of the sightings that were still unexplained could be attributed to a lack of data, he conceded, “There are a small handful of cases in which we have more data that our analysis simply hasn’t been able to fully pull together a picture of what happened.”

The American fascination with and military interest in UFOs are both decades old. In his opening remarks, Carson referenced the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a classified program set up in 1952 that counted more than 12,000 UFO sightings over its 17-year existence, with hundreds still unexplained. A 2006 report of a disk hovering over O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was dismissed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a weather anomaly. The 1947 crash of a high-altitude balloon in Roswell, N.M., inspired generations of conspiracy theories about flying saucers. The unmanned craft was part of a top-secret program to monitor Soviet weapon tests.

Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, plays a video of an unidentified aerial phenomenon during the congressional hearing on Tuesday. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

In a March 1966 letter to two fellow congressmen, Ford wrote, “In the firm belief that the American public deserve a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFO’s and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on this subject.” The following month, Ford issued a statement saying that while some had “ridiculed” his call for a congressional investigation, they were a fraction of those who had given approval to look into a March event in which 40 people, including 12 police officers, claimed to have seen a cluster of UFOs.

In 2017, the New York Times published a story about how former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had pushed for funding for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigated unexplained aerial sightings. The program ran from 2007 to 2012.

“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” said Reid. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Microsoft Will Boost Pay and Stock Compensation to Retain Employees

Dina Bass
Mon, May 16, 2022,


(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. plans to “nearly double” its budget for employee salary increases and boost the range of stock compensation it gives some workers by at least 25%, an effort to retain staff and help people cope with inflation.

The move will mainly affect “early to mid-career employees,” the software giant said in a statement Monday.

“As we approach our annual total rewards process, we are making a significant additional investment this year to compensate our employees globally,” the Redmond, Washington-based company said. “While we have factored in the impact of inflation and rising cost of living, these changes also recognize our appreciation to our world-class talent who support our mission, culture and customers, and partners.”

In addition to contending with cost-of-living increases and a tight Seattle housing market, Microsoft is locked in a fierce battle for talent with companies like Amazon.com Inc., Google and Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc., as well as startups. Fields like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the metaverse and cloud computing have been especially competitive. Moreover, the pandemic has led many workers to relocate and reconsider employment options.

“Time and time again, we see that our talent is in high demand because of the amazing work that you do,” Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in a memo that was obtained by Bloomberg.

Microsoft’s salary package is composed of base salary, bonus and stock. The changes will apply to a substantial part of the company’s workforce, which stood at 181,000 as of June 30, 2021.

The stock increase will apply to employees at Level 67 in the company’s internal scale, or below, Nadella said. Level 67 is the last tier before an employee is made a company partner, putting them in a higher pay scale. The salary budget increases will vary by country and “the most meaningful increases will be focused where the market demands.”

The company didn’t discuss pay figures, so it’s hard to tell what the new compensation levels will translate to in dollar figures. But the Glassdoor website estimates that a new graduate working as a software engineer at Microsoft makes about $163,000.

Cross-town rival Amazon.com Inc. in February said it would more than doubling the maximum base salary it pays employees to $350,000 from $160,000 to cope with a competitive labor market.

Microsoft announced the changes as it nears the end of the fiscal year ending June 30. For the current fiscal year, the company had already put in place higher budgets for promotions and a special stock award meant to “recognize exceptional impact and support retention of our most competitive talent pools,” Nadella wrote.

Insider reported the company was considering the increases last week.

Chinese plane crash that killed 132 caused by intentional act: US officials

GIO BENITEZ, JOSH MARGOLIN and AMANDA MAILE

Tue, May 17, 2022

The China Eastern Airlines plane crash that killed 132 people is believed to have been caused by an intentional act, according to U.S. officials who spoke to ABC News.

The Boeing 737-800 passenger jet was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21 when it plunged into a mountainous area in Guangxi, China. All 123 passengers and nine crew members were killed.

MORE: 2nd black box found as investigators search for answers in China plane crash

The Wall Street Journal was first to report the news.

The officials who spoke to ABC News point to the plane's flaps not being engaged and landing gear not put down. The near-vertical descent of the plane, they believe, would've required intentional force.

PHOTO: In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, workers search through debris at the China Eastern flight crash site in Tengxian County in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, March 24, 2022. (Lu Boan/AP, FILE)

The plane slammed into the ground with such force that it created a 66-foot deep hole in the ground, according to Chinese officials.

Investigators also looked into one of the pilots' personal lives and background and believe he may have been struggling through certain issues right before the crash, ABC News has learned.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said all information on the investigation will come from their counterparts in the Civil Aviation Administration of China, but regulators and Boeing have not flagged any mechanical issues. Sources said Chinese investigators also haven't flagged any mechanical issues.

MORE: Black box analyzed for pilots' actions in China Eastern Airlines crash

"The NTSB will not be issuing any further updates on the CAAC's investigation of the China Eastern 5735 crash," the NTSB said in a statement. "When and whether CAAC issues updates is entirely up to them. And I haven't heard anything about any plans for them to do so."

The first black box, the cockpit voice recorder, was found on March 23, while the flight data recorder was found on March 27.

Early data showed the airliner plunged from 29,000 feet to 8,000 feet, leveled off and then went into a freefall. One video showed the plane nose-diving into the ground.

ABC News' Mark Osborne contributed to this report.

Chinese plane crash that killed 132 caused by intentional act: US officials originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

UPDATE 5-China Eastern crash probe eyes intentional action - sources

Tue, May 17, 2022,
(Adds social media action in China, no immediate China Eastern comment)

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON, May 17 (Reuters) - Investigators probing the crash of a China Eastern Airlines jet are examining whether it was due to intentional action taken on the flight deck, with no evidence so far of a technical malfunction, two people briefed on the matter said.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Tuesday that flight data from one the Boeing 737-800's black boxes indicated that someone in the cockpit intentionally crashed the plane, citing people familiar with U.S. officials' preliminary assessment.

Boeing Co, the maker of the jet, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) declined to comment and referred questions to Chinese regulators.

The Boeing 737-800, en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, crashed on March 21 in the mountains of Guangxi, after a sudden plunge from cruising altitude, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members aboard.

It was mainland China's deadliest aviation disaster in 28 years.

The pilots did not respond to repeated calls from air traffic controllers and nearby planes during the rapid descent, authorities have said. One source told Reuters investigators were looking at whether the crash was a "voluntary" act.

Screenshots of the Wall Street Journal story appeared to be censored both on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo and messaging app Wechat on Wednesday morning. The hashtag topics "China Eastern" and "China Eastern black boxes" are banned on Weibo, which cited a breach of relevant laws, and users are unable to share the story in group chats on Wechat.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China said on April 11 in response to rumours on the internet of a deliberate crash that the speculation had "gravely misled the public" and "interfered with the accident investigation work."

China Eastern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal said the airline had said in a statement that no evidence had emerged that could determine whether or not there were any problems with the accident aircraft. The Chinese Embassy declined to comment.

The 737-800 is a widely flown predecessor to Boeing's 737 MAX but does not have the systems that have been linked to fatal 737-MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that led to a lengthy grounding of the MAX.

China Eastern grounded its entire fleet of 737-800 planes after the crash, but resumed flights in mid-April in a move widely seen at the time as ruling out any immediate new safety concern over Boeing's previous and still most widely used model.

In a summary of an unpublished preliminary crash report last month, Chinese regulators did not point to any technical recommendations on the 737-800, which has been in service since 1997 with a strong safety record, according to experts.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a May 10 Reuters interview that board investigators and Boeing had traveled to China to assist the Chinese investigation. She noted that the investigation to date had not found any safety issues that would require any urgent actions.

Homendy said if the board has any safety concerns it will "issue urgent safety recommendations."

The NTSB assisted Chinese investigators with the review of black boxes at its U.S. lab in Washington.

Shares of Boeing closed up 6.5%.

A final report into the causes could take two years or more to compile, Chinese officials have said. Analysts say most crashes are caused by a cocktail of human and technical factors.

Deliberate crashes are exceptionally rare. Experts noted the latest hypothesis left open whether the action stemmed from one pilot acting alone or the result of a struggle or intrusion but sources stressed nothing has been confirmed.

In March 2015, a Germanwings co-pilot deliberately flew an Airbus A320 into a French mountainside, killing all 150 on board.

French investigators found the 27-year-old was suffering from a suspected "psychotic depressive episode," concealed from his employer. They later called for better mental health guidelines and stronger peer support groups for pilots. (Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington, Tim Hepher in Paris and Abhijith Ganapavaram in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Stella Qiu in Beijing; Editing by Leslie Adler, Marguerita Choy and Richard Pullin)