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Austin’s Lady Bird Lake has recently gained public attention after the discovery of a fourth body there, raising fears of a possible serial killer.

The victim, John Christopher Hays-Clark, 30, was pronounced dead on-site after multiple 911 callers reported an unresponsive person in the water on Saturday at about 1:20 p.m.

Remarkably, the other three victims, a man whose identity remains unknown, and Jason John, 30, and Jonathan Honey, 33, had all been found in the same body of water this year. However, police have ruled out the possibility of foul play in any of the cases.

Police have declared no visible signs of trauma on any victims. In addition, they point to the fact that there are many access points to Lady Bird Lake, which close at 10 p.m., as a humble reminder to the public to avoid entering the area at night.

Even though the police have yet to find a link between the four deaths in Austin’s lake, suspicion still lingers. The members of the highly-active Facebook page, “Lady Bird Lake Serial Killer / Rainey St Killer,” express their doubts about the lack of similarities shared among the victims.

John Kelly, a renowned criminal profiler and psychotherapist who has interviewed multiple serial killers, suggests that it is worth looking into whether or not the Austin victims have anything in common. According to reports, the four deceased, aged between 30 and up, were witnessed around Rainey Street moments before their bodies were found in their final resting place, the lake.

The police have yet to find substantial proof that a serial killer is behind the events in Austin’s lake, but investigations are still ongoing. The Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office is working on determining the cause of death of Jonathan Honey.

13-year-old Jacob Stevens of Ohio tragically lost his life after engaging in the “Benadryl Challenge,” a dangerous TikTok stunt in which participants take a large dose of antihistamines to induce hallucinations.

According to his father, Justin, Jacob was home last weekend with friends when he overdosed on the pills, and his body could not handle it, leading to his passing six days after being put on a ventilator.

Justin Stevens, Jacob’s father, spoke to ABC 6, describing his son’s death as being the “worst day of his life,” and warned parents to take extra care in monitoring their children’s activity online, highlighting that other young people have lost their lives to the same challenge.

Johnson & Johnson, the Benadryl manufacturer, and the Food and Drug Administration both issued public service announcements in response to the tragedy, calling for greater awareness of the dangers of the challenge. Recognizing the potential dangers posed by social media,

Justin’s devastation is compounded by the fact that his son’s friends had filmed him taking the pills intended to give him social media clout. It is a grim reminder of the dangers of social media and the power it has to affect young people’s lives.

The death of Jacob Stevens serves as a somber reminder of the potential risks of using social media. It emphasizes the need for extra protections, including age restrictions on over-the-counter medications and tighter regulations on the use of social media by young people.

A terrorist shot and wounded two men who were driving by in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Shimon HaTzakih, aka Sheikh Jarrah, on Tuesday morning.

(Video courtesy CCTV)

The post WATCH: Terrorist fires at Jews in Jerusalem from point blank range appeared first on World Israel News.

New exhibits at Russia’s military history museum aim to stir patriotic fervour. But will they work?

OPINION: With the party isolated in a room full of peace negotiators, momentum is growing for Stormont’s reform

How does the world’s largest cartel of arms producers solve the issues with the precision of their weapons? Well, more weapons! With the Kiev regime potentially acquiring thousands of additional JDAMs, US MIC contractors get even more billions of American taxpayers’ dollars.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities made the request after three years of Israeli appeals for intervention.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A UN committee has demanded that the Palestinian Authority (PA) find the two Israelis being held hostage in the Gaza Strip and ensure they receive proper medical care, Haaretz reported Monday.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities became involved two weeks ago after three years of requests for intervention by the families of Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who both suffer from psychiatric disabilities and entered Gaza on their own in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

The Committee also asked that the PA send them a report on their actions within six months, the article said.

Although the Committee has no power over the PA, the Hebrew University’s International Human Rights clinic , which is acting as the go-between for the families and the UN body, suggest that this international spotlight may help get the prisoners released.

“We hope international agencies like the Red Cross, the UN representative in PA territory and states in the region will use this decision as leverage for pressuring the Palestinian Authority to do whatever it can,” said clinic director Dana Yaffe.

“Up until now the PA has taken no action on this matter. No investigation, no sanctions. They don’t see themselves as responsible. Now we can say that they have been found to be responsible.”

Although the Islamist Hamas organization overthrew the PA government in Gaza in 2007 and has been ruling there ever since, Ramallah’s authority officially extends to all areas Israel ceded to it in the Oslo Accords.

The PA has previously blamed Israel for its inability to investigate the prisoner issue. After the al-Sayed family appealed to the PA in 2021, its UN delegation responded, “If reports about Hisham being held in occupied Gaza by non-state groups are correct, this is a result of the ongoing occupation and the failure of the international community to end it.”

Both Israel and the self-declared “State of Palestine,” which has the status of a UN observer state, are signatories to the treaty that obligates countries to ensure the rights of disabled people.

To date, Hamas has never allowed any outsiders to visit the captives. In January it released an undated video of a man it purported was Mengistu, who asked, “How much longer will I be here in captivity after so many years of pain and suffering?” Last June, the terror group released a video of a man it said was al-Sayed, lying in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask over his face, after saying it would prove the captive’s condition was deteriorating.

Jerusalem considered both moves to be attempts to pressure Israel for a prisoner swap.

The terror group has ignored other international requests to see the captives. The International Committee of the Red Cross was denied access, even after its president, Peter Maurer, made the appeal personally in a 2017 visit to Gaza.

At the time, the Red Cross said that it “consistently” urges the terror organization to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law and release its live prisoners as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers it snatched during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Lt. Hadar Goldin and St. Sgt. Oron Shaul.

The post UN Committee demands the PA assist Israeli hostages in Gaza appeared first on World Israel News.

Economic data doesn’t suggest that the US economy is in a recession, but Americans’ on-the-ground experiences tell a different story. Extreme income inequality can explain the discrepancy between the economic data and the real-world belt tightening.

A resident of South Gate, California, wheels home a load of free meals for her family of five. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

In 2022, Marla, a thirty-two-year-old retail store manager in Chicago, began to feel the first signs of an economy under strain. As COVID stimulus benefits dried up and prices surged, her wages became harder to live on. Her credit card debt increased, and she fell further behind on student loan payments, all while higher interest rates made borrowing more difficult. When asked about her outlook, Marla discussed her fears for the future. Would she ever be able to own her own home? And could she afford to have kids while her economic life remained so uncertain?

Experiences like Marla’s, which were shared by millions of Americans last year, often accompany an economic downturn. But a glance at economists’ preferred benchmarks for a recession seemed to reveal an economy that was still robust. This includes strong consumption figures and the appearance of tight labor markets. And although there has certainly been an increase in financial market volatility as well as a wave of equity sell-offs and job cuts in the tech sector, key indexes do not obviously indicate an economy on the brink of a recession.

What is going on with the American economy? Why do the traditional indicators that capture the country’s economic health stand in such stark contrast to the lived experiences of so many people, including the 32 percent of American adults who are falling behind on debt payments and the 25 percent of US parents who have struggled to afford food or housing in the last year.

A closer look at the US economy reveals a country with bifurcated economic experiences. Indeed, it is ultimately America’s historically high levels of wealth and income concentration that can best explain the dissonance between aggregated economic figures and middle- and lower-income Americans’ daily realities.

Regardless of whether the United States falls into recession in 2023, the economy is clearly in a precarious state. The reliance on credit among American workers masks signs of economic distress. Poor job quality, in addition to the anti-competitive and anti-worker domination of local industries by national or multinational firms, makes labor market tightness less predictive of labor bargaining power. And the overrepresentation of the top 10 percent of American earners in the financial system makes that system deeply unrepresentative of the “real” economy.

In other words, as American inequality increases, the data that economists traditionally rely on to declare a recession becomes increasingly skewed, concealing weaknesses in the economy. And such weaknesses do exist. Worse than unsustainable, American inequality is a time bomb that will wreak havoc on the economy if it is not contained.

Glass Half Full

The National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) is tasked with announcing whether or not a recession is taking place, and it does so by studying a diverse set of macroeconomic conditions. So far, NBER hasn’t announced that the United States is in recession. Although there was a very brief “technical recession,” defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, in 2022, NBER does not consider an actual recession to be taking place. During those two negative quarters, GDP was heavily impacted by volatile inventory and net export swings. Both growth and consumption have remained relatively steady.

In addition, the consensus among most mainstream economists is that the job market is robust, despite a slight cooling in recent months and waves of layoffs in finance and tech. Job openings fell in February, dropping below ten million for the first time in nearly two years. (For reference, there were seven million openings in February of 2020, just before the pandemic.) But broadly speaking, most economists agree that labor markets remain strong. The diffusion index from February similarly showed that industries were still growing, but that the rate had fallen considerably. And the March jobs report showed that job growth fell only slightly to about 230,000 while the labor force size increased, indicating a strong labor market despite signs of cooling.

The nature of US growth, consumption, and labor markets has prompted many economists and figures in the financial sector to articulate a cautiously sanguine view of the US economy. For instance Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, commented that “looking ahead, the positives are huge” and that consumer balance sheets are in “great shape.”

But general optimism about US economic dynamism is hard to reconcile with the economic realities facing millions of Americans. Recent figures point toward the damaging combination of COVID stimulus provisions ending as well as inflation, including an expected 7.9 percent increase in food prices in 2023. These elements have decreased workers’ real (inflation adjusted) wages, prompting a rise in economic distress.

US household debt is currently sitting at a record $16.9 trillion. And this debt is increasingly concentrated among millennials and younger Americans.

One quarter of adults are now struggling with food security (food spending declined 5.5 percent from January to May 2022). Child poverty has increased, as the COVID emergency boost to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were cut for the program’s forty-two million recipients. Two-thirds of Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck; about 11 percent are underemployed; 57 percent of Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense. Homeless shelters have seen their waiting lists double or triple. And nearly 40 percent of low income households have trouble paying for medical care.

As key signals of economic distress have risen, so too has household debt. Currently 20.5 million Americans are behind on utility payments, and 25 million are behind on credit card, auto loan, or personal loan payments. These are the highest numbers since 2009, and both mortgage and credit card debt underwent their largest quarterly increase in twenty years. In total, US household debt is currently sitting at a record $16.9 trillion. And this debt is increasingly concentrated among millennials and younger Americans.

In direct contrast to Dimon’s optimism, the current signals of distress for US households indicate worsening balance sheets and increasingly difficult economic conditions.

The Inequality Mask

Looking more closely at both data and economic history tells us a very different story than what corporate economists and bankers would have us believe. Indeed, the dissonance between widely reported macroeconomic figures and the experience of working-class Americans can be explained by three factors: first, anti-worker policies and events; second, the role of inequality in making the bottom brackets more susceptible to income shocks; and third, the use of cheap credit to supplement for income.

On the first point, over the last half-century a combination of technological change and outsourcing has eroded many middle-income jobs, leading to a polarization of wages in the United States. Meanwhile, unionization rates have fallen significantly, and many firms developed anticompetitive approaches to exerting control over local regional labor markets and suppressing workers’ ability to change jobs (noncompete agreements, for instance).

The entanglement of these elements partly explains why economist Thomas Philippon has found a rise of monopsony dynamics in US labor markets, where workers have lost economic power and experienced suppressed real wages. And so, even in a “tight” labor market that appears healthy, firm domination and anticompetitive practices make lower-wage workers’ experiences more akin to what we might see in a “loose” market, where finding work is difficult and negotiating higher real wages is a challenge.

High levels of inequality that have emerged in part from these economic shifts also mean that a majority of Americans are far too vulnerable to the risk of a sudden shock to their incomes. In 2022, such a shock came in the form of a higher cost of living due to supply-driven inflation, which spurred central banks to increase interest rates. As economic conditions worsen, millions of Americans have insufficient income and savings to weather the storm. Consequently, they struggle to make ends meet.

As economic conditions worsen, millions of Americans have insufficient income and savings to weather the storm.

This is where cheap credit comes in. It has been well established by several social scientists that beginning in the 1970s, the United States underwent a substitution of World War II–era and Great Society welfare benefits in favor of access to cheap credit. This policy shift — not coincidentally occurring in tandem with a conservative backlash to civil rights and the neoliberal embrace of free-market economics — has played a crucial role in worsening income and wealth inequality, both by increasing consumption and therefore profits for corporations and by redistributing extra money from borrowers to lenders in the form of interest.

Meanwhile, it effectively “paved over” the United States’ vast socioeconomic inequalities, making it appear that Americans are capable of shouldering greater financial burdens through their reliance on debt. Economist Adair Turner shows that this has created a self-perpetuating cycle of widening inequality, where debt growth increased inequality, which forced Americans into further debt to finance their cost of living, and so on.

Understanding this history can also help explain exactly why Dimon is wrong about lower-income Americans’ balance sheets. Today, the bottom 90 percent of Americans remain net “dissavers” (debtors), while virtually all savings and capital are concentrated in the top 10 percent of households by wealth. And we are currently seeing the fastest pace of debt accumulation over a three-year period since the 2008 crash.

Risky Business

This erosion of worker power and rise of inequality is not just unfair; it’s damaging to the entire country. It is widely accepted now that high inequality decreases real “equilibrium” interest rates, since cheap credit becomes necessary for low- and middle-income households to finance their expenses. And this can produce a frothy and highly speculative financial system, where bubbles frequently emerge (see most of the tech sector and almost all of crypto).

As the capacity for financial risk-taking increases, the danger of financial crises grows. When recessions do happen, the vulnerability of millions of working-class Americans forces the US government to step in and effectively transmute private household debt into public debt through stimulus provisions — but the selectively limited appetite for public debt among many US federal policymakers frequently means such stimulus fails to adequately protect working-class Americans. This can help explain why economists, including those at the International Monetary Fund and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, have repeatedly found that inequality makes recessions deeper and longer-lasting while also limiting economic growth.

Regardless of whether the United States falls into recession, it is worth being skeptical of the explanatory power of the aggregated figures commonly reported in mainstream media. The Wall Street Journal commented on April 7 that the March jobs report “isn’t comforting to workers since they are falling behind inflation, but it’s good news for the Fed.” Given the vulnerability of millions of Americans and the tendency for high inequality to worsen recessions, that optimism appears misplaced.

In the coming weeks and months, we are likely to hear many more commentators articulating the idea that the economy is strong according to traditional metrics, ignoring the ways high inequality masks deep systemic weaknesses and risk. Rather than exhaling a premature sigh of relief, we should ask what the current regime of higher interest rates and inflation means for the families that are now struggling to pay for food and housing. And we should reevaluate our understanding of “economic health” beyond rudimentary analysis of job postings. Ultimately, we should look instead toward what matters most: whether we are building an economy where people have the opportunity and tools to live decent, dignified lives.

The de-dollarisation process has started and cannot be reversed.

In Renfield, Nicholas Hoult is a delight as Dracula’s much-abused personal assistant. But even Nicolas Cage as the Count himself can’t keep the movie on track.

Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage star in Renfield. (Universal Pictures)

Renfield, a comedic spin-off of sorts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, focuses not on the count himself but his frazzled, long-suffering servant played by Nicholas Hoult (The Great, The Favourite). Here, Hoult’s lowly Renfield has finally had enough of his toxic work under his boss Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and has even started attending group therapy sessions to deal with his codependency issues. Applying wimpy therapy jargon to the satanic blood-feasting dominance of the world’s most ruthless vampire generates a number of very funny scenes, and both lead actors bring their all to their roles.

It’s no surprise that Cage, reveling in the bleeding edge of performance style that goes way back to his early roles in films like Birdy (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Moonstruck (1987), and Vampire’s Kiss (1989), makes an enthusiastically campy meal of playing the Dark One. Decked out in his cape, top hat, cane, and ornate jewelry, he swanks into rooms full of dull, scared, dressed-down contemporary Americans and stuns them all with his aristocratic grandiosity and mesmerizing way of chewing on full sentences as he speaks them. That’s before his eyes turn red and he bares his fangs and goes “full Cage” on the gonzo line, “L-l-l-let’s eat!”

Cage has also made it clear he’s got a big thirst to play the role again, so this movie counts as something of an audition for future work.

As for Hoult in Renfield’s title role, he’s been a gem of an actor since childhood, holding his own opposite Hugh Grant, Rachel Weisz, and Toni Collette in About a Boy (2002), a romantic comedy. He really ought to be a bigger star by now. He’s handsome and effortlessly charming with wicked comic timing, and he can play drama beautifully as well. He’s got it all, including a major role in Robert Eggers’s upcoming remake of Nosferatu, in which he plays Thomas Hutter. (That’s the Jonathan Harker character in the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. It was changed to Thomas Hutter in F. W. Murnau’s legendary unauthorized 1922 adaptation, Nosferatu, in order to avoid copyright infringement.) Hutter’s the hapless solicitor who goes to Dracula’s castle to close the deal on a nice piece of property in London, which will unfortunately place Dracula’s new home quite near to Hutter’s own, where his wife lives, a romantic-looking young woman whose “lovely neck” Dracula admires.

To further complicate the tangle of adaptations, in Renfield there’s a great black-and-white sequence showing us how R. M. Renfield was first recruited by Dracula back in the nineteenth century. It’s essentially footage from the old Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning, but with the faces of Cage and Hoult digitally transferred onto those of Dracula/Bela Lugosi and Renfield/Dwight Frye. In the 1931 film, it’s Renfield who goes to Dracula’s castle to close the deal, rather than Harker. Renfield escapes as a weak partial vampire and a raving lunatic, soon committed to an asylum where he lives on the blood of insects, raves about the coming of Dracula, and awaits further orders from his boss.

These early scenes are the best in the movie, though Renfield returns to form again at the very end as soon as Renfield returns to group therapy. It’s the broad middle that sags with too-damn-much plot and tiresome business, and perhaps that’s one reason why the film is doing badly with the same ticket-buying public that’s racing out to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie instead.

There’s a lot of guff about a zealous cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) who’s trying to bring down the Lobo crime family in corrupt New Orleans, a crime family led by the bumbling son Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) of a formidable old-world mother Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Rebecca’s incorruptible policeman father was murdered by the Lobos, and this traumatic event has estranged Rebecca from her sister Kate (Camille Chen) while . . .

You see what I mean? Blah blah blah, who cares? There had to be some better way to get Awkwafina and Nicholas Hoult together as an odd couple fighting Dracula shoulder-to-shoulder, but sadly screenwriter Ryan Ridley and director Chris McKay (Robot Chicken, The Lego Batman Movie) couldn’t think of it.

Given this sinking under narrative weight, the action scenes are a welcome relief. They’re cartoonishly gory, and generally played for comedy. This Renfield isn’t a gibbering weakling as in the 1931 Dracula. He gets supernatural strength from eating bugs and thinks nothing of beheading somebody with a bar tray or ripping off their arms and using them as weapons to beat others to death. An elderly couple walked out of the screening I was attending early on, mid–fight-scene — so be warned! Geysers of blood!

The comedy gold is all in the Renfield-in-group-therapy premise, which makes fabulous sense, really. After all, Count Dracula already represents the vampiric relationship of the aristocratic elite to the working classes, regularly draining peasants out in Romanian hills and then moving on to the London upper middle class. At any rate, it’s an easy leap to make Dracula a kind of ultimate abusive boss, with unbeatable power over a lowly personal assistant, even one who’s been in enough therapy sessions that he thinks he’s ready to “take his power back.” There’s nice commentary on the terribly weakened condition of American labor when everyone in group therapy assumes Renfield is talking about just another ordinary capitalist boss, not a supernatural monster.

“You feel like he could destroy you with just a snap of his fingers, don’t you?” commiserates one working stiff.

“He wouldn’t even need to snap his fingers,” says Renfield, and everyone in the group nods understandingly.

If only the plot had spun out from that ingenious scenario, there would’ve been no need for the strenuous addition of cops and crime families. Why couldn’t Awkwafina have been in group therapy too, another of the downtrodden turning to psychiatry and twelve-step programs and the self-care industry for help?

Before it veers off, Renfield is right on the cusp of a nicely rollicking satire of the huge distance between the monstrous material conditions we need addressed, and the sad emotional maladjustments therapy is prepared to address. So many of us who’ve been in therapy know perfectly well that it can’t possibly deal with our main problems, which are all about economic injustice — working too hard and long for too little pay. As a direct result, we’re perpetually exhausted, sick, and depressed. Fix all the immense glaring social problems and the therapy numbers would be guaranteed to drop like a rock.

But we’re so overburdened, we’ve got to go somewhere, talk to someone. These days, we’re all eady to process our trauma, challenge our own negative self-talk, and learn to care for our inner child.

That’s all fine, no doubt. But what we really need is to quit our horrible jobs and leave this insane nation designed for the pleasure and prosperity of a not-altogether-dissimilar class of bloodsucking vampires. When Renfield hits those notes — and it does quite often — it’s a pleasure that, sadly, resonates with far too many of us.