TV News LIES

The Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 40,000 points on Thursday for the first time ever, signaling a strong endorsement of the health of the U.S. economy.

The trigger that drove the market to a historic high was new data released Wednesday showing annual inflation easing after three consecutive months of higher-than-expected reports.

For investors the news of cooling inflation was a huge relief. Stubborn inflation has been one of the top challenges for an economy that otherwise is doing remarkably well.

The question now is whether these gains in the markets can be sustained. The Dow eventually gave up its earlier gains and ended down slightly at 39,869 points.

Here are three things to know about where things stand in stock markets.

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Hundreds of police officers in riot gear launched a crackdown on a pro-Palestinian demonstration on Wednesday at the University of California, Irvine, arresting 50 people and threatening students and faculty with batons and munitions.

Campus police and officers from across the region descended on the southern California public university after students with a Gaza solidarity encampment occupied a campus lecture hall. Photos and footage from the protest show sheriff’s deputies and other police officers grabbing students, pointing “less lethal” weapons at them and arresting students and at least one tenured professor with zip-ties.

Law enforcement officers cleared the encampment, which had been in place for more than two weeks and removed demonstrators from the building. The arrests at UC Irvine in Orange county mark the latest militarized responses to protesters in California and in campuses across the US. The crackdown follows a violent police raid and mass arrests at UCLA earlier this month.

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A public university in California has placed its president on leave for “insubordination” after he agreed to student demands for an academic boycott of Israel.

Mike Lee was suspended from Sonoma State University following an announcement on Tuesday that the liberal arts college north of San Francisco had agreed with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to become the first US university to refuse to work with Israeli academic institutions.

“None of us should be on the sidelines when human beings are subject to mass killing and destruction,” Lee said in a message to students announcing the move.

But following a swift backlash from pro-Israel groups and the wider California state university system, Lee apologised for agreeing to the boycott, saying that it “marginalised” other students and caused harm.

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Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in downtown Austin in 2020, was freed from prison Thursday within an hour of Gov. Greg Abbott signing a pardon proclamation.

In a series of rapid-fire developments in a less than two-hour span, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry be pardoned on the murder conviction. Abbott then granted the full pardon to Perry, leading to his release from the Mac Stringfellow Unit in Rosharon, about 20 miles south of downtown Houston.

Perry, 36 at the time of his April 2023 conviction, may also be able to apply to have his record expunged, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday batted away a challenge to how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded, keeping the Obama-era agency in place and sustaining a regulation from 2017 that cracked down on payday lenders.

Instead of subjecting the bureau to annual budget fights on Capitol Hill like most of the government, the CFPB is funded through the Federal Reserve − an effort to shield it from political pressure. Critics said the arrangement violated the Constitution and the principle that Congress alone wields the power of the purse.

The 7-2 decision was a victory for the Biden administration which had asked the court to overturn a conservative appeals court decision invalidating the funding mechanism.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said funding doesn’t have to come through the congressional appropriation process. An appropriation, he wrote, “is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes.”

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• The Ukraine peace summit planned by Switzerland has so far drawn delegations from more than 50 countries, the Swiss president, Viola Amherd, has said. Russia has not been invited, but Switzerland says it might be if Moscow had not repeatedly stated it is not interested. The Ukrainian government has said Russia does not negotiate in good faith anyway.

• Amherd said she was in discussion about whether Switzerland might step aside from receiving a Patriot missile defence system that is due from the US, so Ukraine can get one sooner.

• The Ukrainian presidential office has said additional reinforcements were being deployed in the Kharkiv region, including army reserve units. Heavy enemy fire prompted repositioning of some troops in the Kupiansk direction to the east of Kharkiv city, the general staff said on Wednesday. Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president, has postponed all his upcoming foreign trips, underscoring the seriousness of the threat his soldiers are facing. The Ukrainian military said troops fell back from areas in Lukyantsi and Vovchansk near Kharkiv “to save the lives of our servicemen and avoid losses”, Peter Beaumont writes.

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