Big Tech can't seem to go one month without becoming involved in some new data privacy scandal, but this time, Google parent Alphabet has outdone itself.

Yesterday, WSJ broke a story about a deal between Alphabet and Ascension Health System, a Catholic non-profit that operates hospitals and nursing homes in 21 states and Washington DC. Ascension has more than 2,600 facilities, but its data - including critical patient data - is presently spread across 40 data centers in more than a dozen states.

But thanks to a deal between the two organizations that spawned Google's "Project Nightingale", all of that data are being moved into Google's cloud, and Google engineers are working on a system that they say could revolutionize how doctors use patient health data to make diagnoses.

One day after Trump's long-awaited NY Economic Club speech proved to be a dud, with the president having nothing positive or "optimistic" to say about the China trade deal instead slamming the Fed again for not cutting rates to negative, the investing public today will focus on Fed Chair Powell's testimony in Congress in which he lays out his own take on things.

Until then, however, US futures and global stocks are a sea of red after Trump threatened to “substantially” increase tariffs if China failed to agree a trade deal and said there may also be tariffs to come for other countries “that mistreat us”, while European stocks followed Asia into the red following a subdued start, with Hong Kong tensions also denting sentiment.

Violent protests continued in Hong Kong for a third day on Wednesday, crippling transport links and clogging roads, and prompting many major companies in the city, including HSBC and BNP Paribas, to instruct employees to stay home from work to avoid the risk of physical harm.

And in anticipation of more violence tomorrow,the Hong Kong Education Bureau has said that all kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools and special education needs schools will cancel class on Thursday for safety reasons, according to an official statement. Most universities in Hong Kong have suspended classes until next week or converted them to online-only for the rest of the semester. And after the clashes from earlier this week, more than 80 mainland Chinese students have been evacuated for their own safety.

A crisis is emerging across three continents as extreme weather conditions and disease are beginning to bite the farming industry leaving world banks warning the 2020s are set to be a decade of dramatic economic and social upheaval as another billion mouths will need to be fed. Meanwhile, Europe is losing 1000 small farms a day, due to a crop decline leading to price rises. Officials are using the word 'disaster' to describe the widespread crop failures happening all over America. In Asia pork prices this year have almost doubled after a quarter of the pig population has been slaughtered due to swine fever.

Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to human beings. I saw these distortions among my rich classmates as a scholarship student at prep school and at Harvard University, an institution designed, like all elite schools, to perpetuate the plutocracy. Living in privilege spawns callousness, even cruelty, to those less fortunate and feeds a bottomless greed.

Now It Is The Elite That Are Feverishly ‘Prepping’ For The Collapse Of Society — Top Economists Predict The Housing Crash Is Coming! Prepare For The Imminent Economic Collapse And Stock Market Crash Worse Than 2008, The Disaster Is Here – Elite Will Soon Prevent You Accessing Your Own Money!’

Update (Nov. 11): The murder crisis in Baltimore City could set a record this year.

The current homicide count is 296 as of Sunday afternoon, following a fatal shooting Saturday morning.

In the next week, the murder count could breach 300 for the fifth year in a row.

With 57 days left in the year, the city could record the most murders ever, would need to break 344 homicides, a record that was set in 2015.

Councilman Leon Pickett, who represents Baltimore's seventh district, told CBS 13 Baltimore that the murder crisis is "unacceptable."

"Let's be clear that one murder in our city is too much," Pickett said. "The fact that we're yet again approaching almost 300 murders is unacceptable. Everybody needs to rise up and express the outrage that should be with city approaching that.

Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Two days before Bolivian president Evo Morales was pushed out by the country’s military, Mark Weisbot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research penned a warning about what was happening, and what might unfold, in a Nation article titled, The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia.

He noted:

Multilateral organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) have a certain perceived impartiality because they are, in theory, controlled by a diverse group of nations. But sometimes a great power can wield a disproportionate influence. It could theoretically be a coincidence that both the Trump administration and the OAS have tried—without offering any evidence—to discredit Bolivia’s national election in the past couple of weeks. But it’s more likely that this dangerous, ugly, and destabilizing operation is being pushed by Washington.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is on an official visit in Athens Monday has signed 16 agreements in sectors including agriculture, energy, ports, and tourism aimed at increasing Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in the European Union, reported Bloomberg.

President Xi met with political leaders in Athens Monday, after the Prime Minister of Greece Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited China last week.

Beijing is planning on significantly boosting Chinese investment in Greece, which could lay the groundwork for a new superhighway of trade between Europe and China.

I suppose that by now everyone has heard of Trump’s offer to send the American military to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” which he asserts can be done “quickly and effectively.”

If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of the world. They don’t know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War, detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton’s incursion – the list could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as invaders. Which they would be.

The World Food Program warns Haiti is approaching famine like conditions, with more than 1 in 3 people in the country of 11 million in need of urgent assistance.

A food assessment in October finds 1 million of the nearly 3.7 million people suffering severe food shortages in Haiti are facing an emergency and are on the brink of famine.

The World Food Program reports food insecurity in Haiti's rural areas has increased by 15% since the last analysis, in December. For the first time, the assessment shows 850,000 people in the capital Port-au-Prince are suffering severe hunger, with many not sure when they will eat again.

To compound this dramatic situation, WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel said humanitarian agencies' efforts to reach people in need have been hampered by security problems during the past seven weeks.

Instead of reducing the number of troops as promised, Trump approved an expanded “military mission,” supposedly to “secure” Syrian oil.

Trump Expands Military Mission in Syria Aiming to Control Oil Fields https://t.co/LcPtAiBmmc

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) November 8, 2019

The Donald is completely irrelevant.

“At a US government-funded think tank at the forefront of shaping Washington’s interventionist designs, an American official succinctly laid out the continued-regime change strategy,” writes Ben Norton for The Grayzone.

The “think tank”—the neocon infested Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is funded by clueless American taxpayers.

There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing rioters and the US government, but you’d hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines.

Market strategists have repeatedly warned about the potential fallout from the collapse of retail sales in China, a trend that has already led to a recession in global auto sales, while Chinese factory output has also declined. But the economic doldrums facing the world's most populous country didn't stop Chinese consumers from posting a massive tab on Alibaba's Singles Day. In fact, according to CNBC, it was the largest haul in the 11-year history of Singles Day.

Across all of Alibaba's sales platforms (a group that includes both Alibaba's main website, the consumer-focused Tmall, and others), gross merchandise value (GMV) surpassed last year’s 213.5 billion yuan record (nearly $30.5 billion) on Monday afternoon local time, and kept rising through the rest of the day. At the close of the 24-hour Singles Day shopping event, sales surpassed last year's 213.5 billion yuan to log more than 215 billion yuan (or $30.7 billion) of purchases, BBG reports.

Long Island's Peter King has become the 20th House Republican to announce that he will not seek reelection in 2020.

King, a former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, made the announce in a post on his Facebook page. In his post, the 14-term Congressman said he's tired of spending 4 days a week in Washington, and would like to spend more time at home in Seaford.

For instance, a new report sheds light on 53 million Americans, or about 44% of all US workers, aged 18 to 64, are considered low-wage and low-skilled.

Many of these folks are stuck in the gig economy, making approximately $10.22 per hour, and they bring home less than $20,000 per year, according to a Brookings Institution report.

An overwhelmingly large percentage of these folks have insurmountable debts if that are student loans, auto loans, and or credit card debt. Their wages don't cover their debt servicing payments as their lives will be left in financial ruin after the next recession.

While the top 10% of Americans are partying like it's 1999, most of whom own assets, like stocks, bonds, and real estate, are greatly prospering off the Federal Reserve's serial asset bubble-blowing scheme and President Trump's stock market pumping on Twitter.

Today's artificial economy isn't working for everyone as the wealth inequality gap swells to crisis levels.

The high speed train is dead, long live the high speed train.

Less than a year after California Gov. Gavin Newsom brought California's dreams for a LA to San Fran bullet train crashing down, when he said in February that he is ending the state’s hugely expensive and hopelessly quixotic high-speed rail line fiasco (which would have been completed in 2033 at a staggering cost of $77 billion), California is about to unleash another high speed train project, and this one is even more idiotic.

The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank) has authorized a $3.2 billion tax-exempt, fixed-rate revenue bond issuance to help DesertXpress Enterprises, an affiliate of Virgin Trains USA, build a high-speed train from Victorville, California, to Las Vegas. The new XpressWest service, at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour, will take about 90 minutes one way.