News of the World

[kyonides]

Navy Renames Two Ships to Erase Ties to Confederate History

The U.S. guided-missile cruiser Chancellorsville, which was homeported in San Diego for many years, has been renamed Robert Smalls, honoring a Civil War-era maritime pilot who commandeered a Confederate ship in 1862 and turned it over to the Union forces.

Smalls was born a slave and went on to become a mariner, a businessman, a publisher and a congressman who represented South Carolina, the state where he was born.

The decision to make the change was due to its former name, which was in honor of the Battle of Chancellorsville, an event that resulted in heavy casualties, according to the American Battlefield Trust.

Per the website, it was considered “Gen. Robert E. Lee’s greatest military victory.  It was the last battle for Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, who was mortally wounded by friendly fire.”
...
Right now, the vessel is forward deployed in Japan.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro announced the renaming of the USNS Maury, an ocean survey ship that will be called the USNS Marie Tharp, per Military.com.

“This renaming honors Marie Tharp, a pioneering geologist and oceanographic cartographer who created the first scientific maps of the Atlantic Ocean floor and shaped our understanding of plate tectonics and continental drift,” Del Toro stated.
...
The ship’s former name was after Confederate naval officer Matthew Maury, “who is considered the father of the science of oceanography,” the outlet continued.

SVB International Fallout: UK and EU Lenders Lose
£30 Billion Overnight as ‘Panic’ Spreads

...the Bank of England stepping in to take over the insolvency process for the British arm of SVB to protect the deposits of British firms tied to the bank.

Since Friday, the Stoxx Europe 600 banks index, which also includes leading British lenders, saw a mass sell-off in the wake of the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the largest American bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. In total, the European-UK banking index saw a one-day decline of 3.8 per cent, with €33.5 billion (£29.6/$35.6 billion) being wiped off their balance sheets.

Some of the United Kingdom’s largest banks saw their shares fall significantly, with HSBC declining by 4.6 per cent, Lloyds Banking Group falling by 3.3 per cent, and shares in NatWest going down by 2.5 per cent, The Times of London reports.
...
“We have been engaging with the UK government including Treasury and No 10 [British Government] about the potential impact and I know that work has been going on overnight on policy options,” he added.

...the Bank of England... announced in a late-night statement on Friday evening that it is planning to use its bank insolvency scheme to put the British branch of SVB into resolution, which would allow for depositors to receive up to £85,000 in the coming days from the government’s deposit insurance programme.
...
The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation had described SVB as being in “sound financial condition” before the run on the bank, which saw customers withdraw some $42 billion, resulting in the bank having a negative cash balance of $958 million.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer Urged Viewers to Buy Shares of Silicon Valley Bank Last Month

“The ninth-best performer to date has been SVB Financial. Don’t yawn,” [Mad Money's host Jim] Cramer told viewers during a February 8 episode of Mad Money about Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company.

Cramer, touting that the bank was “less dependent upon private equity and venture capital offerings,” listed it in ninth place among his “biggest winners of 2023 … so far,” along with other stocks such as Meta, Tesla, Warner Bros., Norwegian Cruise Line, and NVIDIA.

“This company is a merchant bank with a deposit base that Wall Street has mistakenly been concerned by,” Cramer said on-air.

The CNBC host noted that the stock was the “fourth-worst performer of 2022,” but it was worth buying because “the stock is so cheap” and “being a banker to these immense pools of capital has always been a very good business.”
...
When Cramer made the remarks on-air, SVB Financial was trading at $320.40 a share.

Roughly one month after Carmer’s remarks, trading in shares of the parent company was halted for pending news on Friday after premarket price indicators plunged by 63 percent.

Stringent Gun Control Failed to Prevent
Alleged Attacker Shooting, Killing Six in Germany

According to Reuters, Germany’s “anonymous tip-off” law was triggered in January, when authorities received a call warning the 35-year-old would-be attacker was showing “suspicious behavior.”

Police officers visited the individual’s home on February 7, 2023, but were not persuaded that he posed a threat to himself or anyone, nor that he was suffering from mental illness.
...
The University of Sidney’s GunPolicy.org observed that Germany’s gun controls are categorized as “restrictive.” In addition to license requirements for gun ownership, would-be gun owners must pass a background check that looks at “extremist affiliations, criminal, mental health, and addiction records.”

Reuters noted that the alleged 35-year-old attacker “had no criminal record or any links to terrorism prior to the attack that would have automatically prevented him from owning a gun.”
...
Six innocents were shot and killed at a Hamburg Jehovah’s Witness Hall Thursday around 9 p.m.

UK Govt Considering Wuhan Lab Leak
After Previously Claiming Proximity to Outbreak ‘Entirely Coincidental’

Earlier this week it was revealed that pandemic-era health secretary Matt Hancock’s memoirs were stripped of mentions of his belief that COVID-19 may well have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology by the Cabinet Office of the British government, which has the right to review books from top-level government officials prior to publication to prevent potentially sensitive information from being released.

“It’s just too much of a coincidence that the pandemic started in the same city as the lab, which – by the way, is a full 40 minutes drive from the wet market originally linked to the outbreak,” Hancock had written in one of his references to a possible lab leak in the original version of his book.

Justifying removing the ex-health secretary’s lab leak commentary, the Cabinet Office said it was the governmnet’s position that the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the initial outbreak was “entirely coincidental” — despite prominent figures such as former MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove having long supported the idea, and warning the government should “rethink how it treats its relationship with China”.