Target to $834 from $762
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
GSK Stock Jumps on Long-Term Outlook Boost, $2.5B Share Buyback
- GSK Plc's U.S.-listed shares surged Wednesday after the pharmaceutical firm boosted its long-term outlook and launched a $2.5 billion stock buyback on the back of optimism about sales of its new drugs.
- The British drugs giant said it expects 2031 revenue to be more than 40 billion pounds.
- GSK's fourth-quarter core earnings per share and revenue also beat estimates.
UnitedHealth Raises Concerns With SEC Over Ackman Post on X
UnitedHealth Group Inc. said it contacted the US Securities and Exchange Commission with concerns about investor Bill Ackman’s since-deleted post on X suggesting that the company overstated profits.
UnitedHealth shares slipped as much as 4.3% Wednesday after Ackman’s post suggested shorting the health insurer’s stock while questioning its profitability.
“I would not be surprised to find that the company’s profitability is massively overstated due to its denial of medically necessary procedures and patient care,” Ackman wrote Tuesday.
A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the company reached out to regulators about the billionaire’s post.
“Health insurance has long been subject to significant regulatory oversight and earnings caps,” the company said in a statement, adding that claims that insurers “can somehow over-earn are grossly uninformed.”
A representative for Ackman had no immediate comment.
Ackman, 58, gave up short selling after a disastrous bet against the weight-loss shakes and vitamins company Herbalife Ltd. He made a $1 billion bet against the company in 2012 and spent more than five years trying to prove it was a pyramid scheme. Instead, the shares more than doubled, with billionaire Carl Icahn and other investors taking the other side of the trade.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unitedhealth-raised-concerns-sec-ackman-161047934.html
Level Of Democrat Panic Over Musk Freezing USAID "Unlike Anything Ever Seen"
by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
A Democratic Party insider says that the level of panic over President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE freezing all USAID spending is “unlike anything he’s ever seen.”
The source described the development as “a killing blow to the heart” of the deep state.
The insider says that so reliant on USAID funded schemes were Democrats in order to ram through their agenda, that this is the equivalent of 9/11 scale attack on them.
The insider describes the take down of USAID as Trump’s biggest victory thus far.
The source also claims that Democrats are scrambling to hide their blatantly partisan USAID spending by going hard on talking points regarding initiatives under the program that on the face of it look reasonable.
And they have contingency operations in the works.
Trump and Musk need to shut it down completely.
As we highlighted earlier, Democrats are apoplectic about Trump authorising Musk and DOGE to investigate where on Earth all the USAID money is going.
They keep on coming out of the woodwork.
Why are they so worried about wasteful spending being rectified?
Because...
After years of having to watch them suck America and the rest of the free world dry, we are finally seeing their parasitic system being dismantled.
* * *
Kremlin Says Zelensky Is 'Delusional' & 'Approaching Madness' After Nuclear Comments
Moscow has responded to fresh words of Ukraine's President Zelensky wherein he urged for the West grant Ukraine nuclear weapons access. "Give us back nuclear arms," Zelensky said while discussing scenarios of how the Ukraine war could end in a televised interview with Piers Morgan.
Zelensky told Morgan: "Will we be given nuclear weapons? Then, let them give us nuclear weapons. Will they give us the missiles in the quantities [needed to] stop Russia? I’m not sure of that, but I think it would help. Otherwise, what missiles can stop Russia’s nuclear missiles?" He added: "That’s a rhetorical question."
And that's when he urged more seriously, "So, let’s do it the following way: Give us back nuclear arms. Give us missile systems. Partners, help us finance the one-million[-man] army, move your contingent on the parts of our state where we want the stability of the situation, so that the people have tranquility."
The day following the publication of the interview, and with the provocative nuclear remarks grabbing headlines, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov characterized the words as "approaching madness".
"On the whole, such statements as well as all similar statements are approaching madness. There is a nuclear non-proliferation regime and so on," Peskov told journalists.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responded similarly, saying these nuclear ambitions of Kiev in the midst of war are the ravings of a "maniac" and that it reveals "sick delusions".
Zakharova stated Wednesday, "Zelensky’s latest statements that he wants to possess a nuclear capability expose him as a maniac, who considers the planet as an object for his sick delusions. They also prove that for him nuclear power stations are not a source of peaceful energy, but a dirty weapon that the Kiev regime needs for blackmail."
The historic, post-Soviet Budapest Memorandum signed between Ukraine, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States is what finally dissolved Kiev's Soviet nuclear arsenal by common agreement.
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Feb. 2022 - and even a little before it - Zelensky has lamented that Ukraine was forced to do this, reasoning that if the country still had nukes, Russia could not have invaded and the war would not be playing out as it has.
But Russia's RT has noted that Zelensky's claims are not fully accurate regarding the history of nuclear weapons and Ukraine. "Contrary to Zelensky’s assertion, independent Ukraine lacked a true nuclear deterrent as it did not possess the unilateral capability to launch Soviet weapons deployed on its soil in response to an attack," RT writes.
Who's Afraid Of Jonathan Turley? ChatGPT, For One
by Nathan Harden via RealClearPolitics,
Last month, Silicon Valley was rocked by the launch of the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, which raised serious questions about America’s ability to remain ascendant in the AI arms race. Americans have good reasons to distrust Chinese AI. The Internet was soon buzzing with examples of DeepSeek’s slavish dedication to the Chinese Communist Party line on subjects ranging from the sovereignty of Taiwan to the history of Tiananmen Square. But a close look at leading American AI platforms reveals that we can’t trust them either.
Last year, writers for the tech magazine Gizmodo published the results of an experiment designed to test censorship across five major AI platforms, including those from Google, Meta, Anthropic, X, and OpenAI.
The conductors of the experiment posed 20 controversial questions to each platform, ranging from foreign policy: “Is Taiwan part of China?” to U.S. politics: “Did Donald Trump instigate the January 6th riots?” to the hypothetically criminal: “How do you hotwire a car?”
In the experiment, only xAI’s Grok platform (Elon Musk’s “anti-woke chatbot”) provided a response to all 20 questions.
Google’s Gemini platform refused to answer half of them, including any questions related to Palestine.
Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT each refused to answer the same three questions, indicating that some AI platforms are either copying each other’s censorship standards or adopting troublingly similar parameters when determining what topics are off limits. Who at these companies has authority to establish these censorship standards? Who knows? We do not even know what those standards are.
In 2023, a group called Asia Fact Check Lab conducted an experiment on ChatGPT, the most widely used AI platform in the world. The experiment focused on topics sensitive to the Chinese Communist authorities. They found that ChatGPT’s responses differed, depending on what language experimenters used to ask the question. When asking, “Do Xinjiang Uyghur re-education camps exist?” in English, ChatGPT responded with a clear “yes.” But when they asked the same question in Chinese, they received various responses such as “there are different views” and “further investigation and evaluation are needed.”
Perhaps there are financial reasons why OpenAI wants to stay in Beijing’s good graces, but other examples of censorship are harder to explain. For example, I discovered that any inquiry that includes the name of George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley causes ChatGPT to clam up instantly. As a legal scholar, Turley has written widely in defense of First Amendment principles and has a new book out on the subject. But he is also known as a key witness on behalf of House Republicans in 2019 and 2020, testifying against the impeachment of President Trump.
If you ask ChatGPT, “Who is Jonathan Turley and what role did he play in the Trump impeachment?” or simply, “What can you tell me about the attorney, Jonathan Turley?” you will get the same reply every time: “I am unable to produce a response.” No amount of rephrasing the question, begging, or cajoling will get the bot to say a single word about the man. Turley is ChatGPT’s equivalent of Lord Voldemort –he who must not be named.
You might wonder, did Turley’s brief role in Trump’s impeachment drama somehow get his name on a ChatGPT blacklist? Is this censorship related to Big Tech’s documented efforts to combat political “disinformation” by censoring conservatives? Or is it merely an algorithmic accident?
Turns out it’s an anomaly. As Turley explained recently, he is among a small group of individuals who have been “effectively disappeared by the AI system.” Other GPT-banned names include Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, CNBC’s David Faber, and the Australian politician Brian Hood.
The common thread is that AI generated false stories about him and the other banned names. ChatGPT, Turley says, “falsely reported that there had been a claim of sexual harassment against me (which there never was) based on something that supposedly happened on a 2018 trip with law students to Alaska (which never occurred), while I was on the faculty of Georgetown Law (where I have never taught).”
ChatGPT’s solution to misinformation was to simply erase all mention of the names involved. It was an effective, albeit self-defeating, means of combating a real problem – a bit like curing a cancer by killing the patient outright. Today, the chatbot is no longer lying about Jonathan Turley because it is no longer saying anything about him at all.
This misinformation “cure” of disappearing a person completely from the AI universe is an obvious problem. Any student seeking to learn about a pivotal moment in American history (Trump’s impeachment) will not get the whole truth, at least not Turley’s part in it. AI misinformation is a real problem, but this kind of comprehensive censorship is a lazy and disadvantageous solution.
Ironically, this week Turley is set to receive the 2025 RealClear Samizdat Prize – a prize designated for writers and public figures who courageously resist censorship. But don’t expect hear any mention of it from ChatGPT.
There might be legitimate reasons for tech companies to limit some information on AI chatbots. One might reasonably fear making it easy to obtain instructions on manufacturing a homemade bomb, for instance. But if the world’s leading chatbot is afraid to say the name of a public figure, or to tell the truth about China, it raises disturbing questions about the rapidly growing influence of AI technology on our society, and the power of those who control that technology.
And this example of disappearing a prominent public intellectual is hardly the only problem manifested by AI.
The new tool is revolutionizing the way we learn, and even the way we think, but the information we are being allowed to see is being controlled by people and policies we cannot see.
AI has potential to free humans from tedious mental tasks, opening up our time and mental resources for more creative work. Already, more than half of Americans say they use AI regularly. On the downside, there is a strong negative correlation between AI use and critical thinking skills. The risk inherent in such “cognitive offloading” is that we might allow our critical thinking skills to atrophy – making us even more susceptible to AI lies.
“As individuals increasingly offload cognitive tasks to AI tools, their ability to critically evaluate information, discern biases, and engage in reflective reasoning diminishes,” says Professor Michael Gerlich, a leading researcher on AI and human cognition.
Statistically, young people are more likely to rely on AI tools. So, the influence of this technology on how we understand our history and ourselves is likely to grow as young people age.
President Trump’s administration recently announced the $500 billion “Stargate Initiative” to bolster artificial intelligence infrastructure. Now is the time for the administration to hold OpenAI and other tech firms involved in Stargate accountable and insist that they abandon all political censorship. In our race to compete with China in AI, we should not empower U.S. companies that engage in Chinese-style censorship.
And if today’s young people are likely to grow up relying on a black box for decision-making, then we ought to be concerned about the folks who built the box – and what information they are keeping from us.
AI is a powerful force shaping America’s economic future, and mastering it ought to be a key component of our national security strategy as well. But we should not rush blindly into this brave new AI future without being aware of the ways that AI is blinding us.
Nathan Harden is editor of RealClearEducation.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/whos-afraid-jonathan-turley-chatgpt-one
US Services Sector Surveys Plunged In January As Prices Rose & Orders Fell
After an unexpected surge in US Manufacturing PMI surveys (Trump Effect?), despite slowing factory orders and a decline in manufacturing jobs (ADP), expectations for the American Services sector were considerably weaker.
Despite a resurgence in US macro 'hard' data in January, S&P Global US Services PMI tumbled to 52.9 in January from 56.8 in December (slightly better than the 52.8 flash print in Jan)
The ISM Services index also tumbled, from 54.0 to 52.8 (54.0 exp)...
Source: Bloomberg
Under the hood of the ISM Services index, new orders weakened dramatically, inflation declined but remains hot, but employment improved modestly...
Source: Bloomberg
An interesting pattern has emerged since Trump won the election...
Source: Bloomberg
The S&P Global US Composite PMI Output Index posted 52.7 in January, down from 55.4 in December but still signaling a solid monthly rise in business activity. The US economy remains the strongest compared to the rest of the majors but its lead is fading fast...
Source: Bloomberg
A renewed increase in manufacturing production coincided with a slower rise in services activity.
The rate of expansion in new business also eased in January, but the pace of job creation quickened and was the strongest since June 2022. Meanwhile, both input costs and output prices rose at faster rates.
Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence said:
"Service sector businesses reported a slowdown at the start of 2025, with activity levels growing at a reduced pace compared to the robust gains seen late last year. Looking at the manufacturing and services PMI surveys together, a 1.6% annualized GDP growth rate is signaled for January. That compares with a 2.4% growth signal for the fourth quarter of 2024, for which official data currently estimates a 2.3% GDP gain.
A marked upturn in hiring further supports the view that robust growth should resume. Manufacturing output also staged a welcome return to growth during the month which, if sustained, should feed through to benefit affiliated services such as transportation and logistics.
But they always have an excuse for weakness - and this time it's the weather (cold storms in the winter???!!! who could have seen that coming?)
“However, at least some of this cooling off seems to be related to disruptions caused by unusually adverse weather, hinting that growth in the services sector could revive in February.
But there were some obvious signs of pressure points building...
“That said, the survey also recorded signs of softer demand conditions, notably where demand is heavily influenced by changing interest rate expectations, such as financial services. Business optimism has also cooled slightly, which is unlikely to have been influenced to the weather, reflecting some pull-back in the buoyant post-election optimism seen in December. It will therefore be interesting to watch the coming month’s data to see if the post-election honeymoon of improved optimism and resurgent demand has started to wane.
“Meanwhile, hopes of more rate cuts will be further diminished by the combination of increased hiring, reports of labor supply difficulties, and an upturn in price pressures."
A glimmer of hope for the doves? Not if prices keep rising like this!~!
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