Saturday, November 8, 2025
From the Financial Times: “US companies’ earnings are growing at the fastest pace in four years
Mohamed El-Erian
Mohamed El-ErianFinance, Economics Expert
From the Financial Times: “US companies’ earnings are growing at the fastest pace in four years…
Median earnings growth year-on-year across the Russell 3000 index — a benchmark for the entire US stock market — hit 11 per cent in the third quarter, up from 6 per cent in the previous three months, according to Morgan Stanley. That is the fastest growth rate since the third quarter of 2021.”
'How Americans Want AI To Support Them'
Three years after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there’s little remaining doubt that artificial intelligence, or AI as it’s usually referred to, will change our lives in many ways.
In some ways, it already has.
For example, people are searching the web differently, often relying on AI summaries instead of scrolling through and clicking on search results. That is, if they even use a search engine anymore and don’t just ask a large language model like ChatGPT instead.
The potential for AI tools to make our everyday lives a little easier here and there is virtually limitless, but what do people actually want AI to help them with?
Statista's Felix Richter reports that, according to a recent survey by Statista Consumer Insights, 3 in 10 Americans want AI to act as a personal assistant to them, which it is already capable of.
Especially tools baked directly into smartphones and thus able to aggregate information from various apps have the potential to be very effective personal assistants that help with scheduling, reminders and communication.
Other forms of AI support that Americans are keen on include automating everyday tasks, helping with work tasks as well as health and wellness tips.
Looking at the list, it’s clear that AI is already capable of doing all of these things.
For many people it’s just a matter of finding the right tool or workflow to take full advantage of AI tools and their countless possible applications.
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/how-americans-want-ai-support-them
'Honda issues recall for 400K Civics after finding wheels 'may detach from vehicle''
More than 400,000 Honda Civics were recalled after the automaker discovered that a manufacturing issue may cause wheels to come off the vehicle while moving.
Honda announced the voluntary recall on Friday, impacting roughly 406,000 cars sold in the U.S. with model years from 2016-2021.
The issue, stemming from a supplier error, "could cause the wheel nuts to loosen and detach," the company said.
"Due to a manufacturing process error by a supplier, the steel lug seat inserts in aluminum accessory wheels may not have been installed (pressed) into the nut seating surface," Honda said in a press release.
"During normal vehicle operation, the lug nut seating surface may deform, which could cause the wheel nuts to loosen and detach," it continued.
Honda said this "could result in the wheel separating from the vehicle, increasing the risk of a crash or injury."
The automaker urged owners of affected vehicles to take their cars to an authorized dealer for a free inspection. If needed, the dealership will replace the wheels at no cost.
Honda said it has not received any confirmed reports of crashes or injuries due to the faulty wheels.
Judges, Democrat Prosecutor Protect Far-Left Activist Who Doxxed & Stalked Stephen Miller
Two judges and a Democrat prosecutor are protecting a far-left activist who doxxed top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, then showed up to his house - forcing Miller to evacuate his family to a military base.
The case began on Sept. 11, when the suspect, 66-year-old Barbara Wien, was spotted posting flyers in Miller's Arlington neighborhood which included a photo of Miller with a red circle and a cross through it and read "NO NAZIS IN NOVA," according to court records. The flyers included Miller's home address and a QR code linked to the Instagram account of an activist group - Arlington Neighbors United for Umanity (ANUFH).
Wien also cased Miller's home - making eye contact with his wife Katie Miller, and allegedly making an "I'm watching you" gesture according to a frame grab from a Secret Service surveillance video. This was 24 hours after Charlie Kirk was assassinated - and enough to think Wien had violated Virginia's law against doxxing and a similar federal statute. In response, the FBI sought a warrant for Wein's phone.
Yet late Wednesday, Magistrate Judge Lindsey Vaala denied the FBI's petition for a warrant to search Wein's phone a move the Justice Department plans to appeal, Axios reports. The agency wants to examine Wein's phone to see if she lied to investigators, or may be part of a larger group that might pose a risk to Miller and his family.
- When police seized Wien's phone Oct. 1, she spoke with FBI officials who then alleged that she misled investigators, according to a court filing described to Axios. Based on that, the FBI asked for another search warrant, which Vaala denied.
- Vaala contributed to the presidential campaigns of Presidents Obama and Biden before her appointment to the bench in 2022. -Axios
After Vaala denied the request, the Millers went to Virginia State Police - which took the case to judge Judith Wheat, who authorized the warrant on Oct. 1 - which state and federal law enforcement officials say reflects how routine the request was (and how absurd Vaala's denial was) - yet Democrat prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti threw a fit, demanding that the Wheat limit the warrant, which she then did in order to limit the search and the sharing of information with the FBI.
"A prosecutor is usually on the same team as the investigators trying to make a case. But in this case, it's the opposite. She's been stymying the investigation, it appears," said Richard Cullen, counselor to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who was brought into the case along with Virginia's Attorney General Jason Miyares' office (via Axios).
"In all my years, I've never seen anything like the way this case is being handled," said one investigator involved in the case.
Of note, Dehghani-Tafti's Facebook page is riddled with anti-Miller postings, and she follows ANUFH - of which Wien is a member. Dehghani-Tafti told Axios that she has "performed my duties with integrity and objectivity, and I continue to do so. I have acted in every way to uphold the rule of law."
"The position of the judge and the justice system in Northern Virginia is, Stephen Miller deserves this, so it shouldn't be investigated," a senior administration official told the outlet.
Of note, Miller's family isn't the only one that's been evacuated from their house - as several admin officials have been housed on bases amid increasing threats from left-wing political violence. As Axios notes further:
- Other high-level Trump administration officials also have been moved to bases, a sign of the GOP leaders' alarm about angry protests, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the assassination attempts on Donald Trump.
- "A lot of administration officials feel it's a problem that you have to live in Virginia or D.C. or Maryland. But the criminal justice system will not protect you and your family," a White House official said.
Bukele was right...
The False Temperature Claims That Underpin The COP30 Alarmist Agenda
by Chris Morrison via DailySceptic.org,
The next two weeks of COP30 will see three favourite climate scares relentlessly broadcast to promote the fast-fading hard-Left Net Zero fantasy.
They are:
breaching a 1.5°C global ‘threshold’ leading to runaway temperatures;
human-caused tipping points producing unimaginable natural disasters;
and attribution of single-event bad weather to the use of natural hydrocarbons.
The 1.5°C figure is a meaningless number invented by politicians and activists to concentrate Net Zero minds; tipping points are climate model codswallop; and ditto attribution crystal ball-gazing.
None of them are backed up by credible scientific evidence and observation.
Which of course is why political elites have trashed the scientific process of inquiry, banned and cancelled any dissenting discussion and declared the matter ‘settled’.
The foundation scam is temperature. The world is said to be warming dramatically, leading to tipping points and worsening extreme weather. Changes are said to be occurring at unprecedented rates and are caused primarily by humans increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. In fact the temperature rise is small, about 1°C over 200 years (making allowance for all the fake temperature estimates and urban heat-ravaged measurements) and similar rises are commonplace in both the historical and paleo record. The recent ‘hottest evah’ rises have been seen in the past – sudden changes in temperature are caused by sudden local events such as volcano eruptions. As it happens, the underwater Hunga Tonga volcano released vast quantity of water vapour into the upper atmosphere in 2022, a ‘greenhouse’ warming event that would have been helped along by a recent strong El Niño oscillation. Recent accurate satellite measurements show the overall global temperature has been falling during 2025.
Don’t take my word for all this natural movement. Professor Mark Maslin is a Professor of something termed Earth Systems Science at UCL and one of the authors of a recent tipping point report timed for COP30. This particular computer model-based bilge suggested that warm water corals may already be crossing their “thermal tipping points”, despite the fact that coral has been around for hundreds of millions of years and survives in waters between 24-32°C. This would appear to be the same Mark Maslin who as a humble geography lecturer in 1999 wrote a paper that said possibly most of the large climate changes involving movements of several degrees occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, “and perhaps even a few years”. These days he whines that “Earth is already becoming unliveable”, while climate change politics helps build “a new political and socio-economic system”. In 2018, he was one of a number of eco-activists who signed a letter to the Guardian saying they would no longer “lend their credibility” by debating climate science scepticism.
No wonder people like Maslin – needless to say a BBC regular on all learned climate Armageddon matters – walked away from climate science debate.
Tying CO2 levels to rising temperatures to make Left-wing political capital relies on observations from just a few recent years. Widen the observations out to hundreds and then hundreds of millions of years gives a different picture. Sometimes temperatures rise and fall at the same time as CO2, sometimes not. Sometimes even CO2 levels rise before the following temperatures, more often than not they don’t. The simple explanation that warming gases such as CO2 become ‘saturated’ once they pass certain concentrations, with heating falling off a logarithmic cliff, is a scientific hypothesis or opinion, but it has much to offer when past observational evidence is considered.
Let us consider some of these observations starting with the long term record over 600 million years. The graph below shows wide temperature-CO2 divergence.
Over 600 million years it is difficult to observe any general lockstep connection between temperature and gas. It might, however, be noted that over 600 million years, CO2 has generally been declining in the atmosphere to the near denuded levels seen today. As we have seen over the last 40 years even small rises in CO2 lead to significant planet-wide biomass growth. All that CO2 was good for the dinosaurs who roamed the Earth until 66 million years ago, with levels more than three times higher than today. The little extra has also been good for humans since recent crop yields have soared and helped to alleviate naturally-occurring world famine.
These records of course are very long term and are compiled from proxies with accuracy only to a few thousand years. In the more immediate record we find additional and conclusive proof that CO2 is not the main climate thermostat. Temperatures in medieval times were similar to today, possibly slightly higher in the Roman period and often 3-4°C higher in the Holocene thermal maximum around 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. During these periods, CO2 was remarkably stable around 260 parts per million, a mark that is in fact dangerously low to sustain life on Earth. The notorious Michael-Mann-1,000-year temperature ‘hockey stick’ removed the linking problem by abolishing the medieval warming period and the subsequent little ice age that ran up to around 1800.
Remarkable recent scientific evidence has emerged to suggest that abrupt rises in temperature have been a feature of the global climate going back to the iceless Jurassic period over 150 million years ago. Dramatic temperature changes based on 1,500-year cycles, as the younger Maslin can testify, have been known to have occurred in Greenland and the North Atlantic. But a group of French scientists led by Slah Boulila from the Sorbonne found large temperature hikes going back millions of years across the globe. The scientists noted warming up to 15°C within a few decades, “pointing to abrupt and severe changes in Earth’s past climate”. The 1,500 year cycles are often called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events after the scientists who discovered them. Some scientists have downplayed the initial DO findings and suggested the short term temperatures rises of around 1.5°C were caused by specific northern hemisphere oscillations of ice sheets and surrounding waters.
However, the French scientists note: “The 1,500-year cycle is documented in both hemispheres, in other oceans and in continents.” Their work is said to support the global nature of DO-like events, and in particular that their potential primary cause is independent of ice sheet dynamics. Meanwhile, scientific evidence continues to grow indicating much higher temperatures a few thousand years ago. One recent paper found the plant Ceratopteris had grown 8,000 years ago at 40°N in northern China, suggesting winter temperatures 7.7°C higher than today. Another found types of molluscs surviving in the Arctic Svalbard 9,000 years ago that indicated temperatures were 6°C warmer.
The current Net Zero fantasy rests on catastrophising tiny temperature rises that frankly are not even measured properly, demonising CO2 boosts that are helping Earth return to a more healthy biosphere and atmospheric balance, inventing ‘tipping points’ using junk computer models and insulting the intelligence with untestable tales claiming humans are making the weather worse.
And they call us sceptics the ‘deniers’.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/false-temperature-claims-underpin-cop30-alarmist-agenda
Nektar New Data from Rezpegaldesleukin Study
Statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in mean ACQ-5 scores were reported at week 16 versus placebo in patients who had atopic dermatitis and a history of asthma
Extended dosing with rezpegaldesleukin q2w supports 24-week induction period for planned Phase 3 studies with improvement across major efficacy endpoints from Week 16 to 24, including EASI-75, EASI-90, and vIGA-AD
Data from long-term maintenance portion of REZOLVE-AD with 52 weeks of treatment expected in Q1 2026 from REZOLVE-AD study
Top-line Phase 2b data for rezpegaldesleukin in alopecia areata to be reported in
Rezpegaldesleukin is a first-in-class IL-2 pathway agonist and regulatory T-cell (Treg) biologic currently being studied in a Phase 2b study in moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis (REZOLVE-AD) and a separate Phase 2b study in patients with severe-to-very-severe alopecia areata (REZOLVE-AA).
"Given that approximately one in four patients with atopic dermatitis also have asthma, improving asthma symptoms is a significant consideration in clinical treatment decisions," said lead author Dr.
The Phase 2b REZOLVE-AD trial enrolled 393 patients with moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis, of which 99 patients also reported having a history of asthma with ACQ-5 data available at both baseline and week 16. A pre-planned analysis in the study evaluated scores from a validated Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ-5) at baseline and at the end of the 16-week induction period. For the patients reporting a history of asthma, all three rezpegaldesleukin doses demonstrated an overall reduction in mean observed ACQ-5 scores at week 16 with two dose arms (24 μg/kg q2w and 24 μg/kg q4w) achieving statistical significance (p<0.05) as compared to placebo. Patients in the placebo arm reported an overall worsening of mean ACQ-5 scores.
Improvements were more pronounced in patients with only partly controlled or uncontrolled asthma.
https://www.fidelity.com/news/article/default/202511081745PR_NEWS_USPR_____SF19518