Russia Has No Reserves Left As Ukrainian Troops Surround A Key Eastern Town

May 27 was a dark day for Ukraine. That was the day Lyman, the last free town north of the Donets River in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas River, finally fell to Russian forces. Capturing Lyman helped the Russian army to consolidate its position in Donbas and secure supply lines across the region.

Lyman was a domino. As it fell, it knocked down Severodonetsk, the last free city east of the Donets. And as Severodonetsk fell, it toppled Lysychansk, its twin city on the opposite side of the river.

Nearly four months later, the dominos are falling in the opposite direction. A Ukrainian counteroffensive that kicked off east of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city 100 miles northwest of Lyman, in a heady two weeks has liberated a thousand square miles of northeast Ukraine.

Fleeing a dozen eager Ukrainian brigades, Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast —including the once-elite 1st Guard Tanks Army—have fled east across the Oskil River, leaving behind hundreds of vehicles and potentially thousands of casualties.

The Ukrainians’ momentum, weighted by aggressive air and artillery support, has carried them a short distance across the Oskil and south toward Lyman. Now several of Kyiv’s brigades—a mix of paratroopers and territorials—also are closing on Lyman ... from the opposite direction.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/09/18/russia-has-no-reserves-left-as-ukrainian-troops-surround-a-key-eastern-town/?sh=332ef1573126

GA-GOV: HOT MIC: Brian Kemp open to banning contraception

During public appearance at the University of Georgia last week, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) expressed his openness to ban contraception depending on “where the legislatures are.”

“You could take up pretty much anything but you got to be in the legislative session to do that,” Kemp said in comments provided by a Democratic source on the condition of anonymity. “I think, I’d have to check and see because there are a lot of legalities.

Kemp already signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country in 2019, which bans all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Cardiac activity can usually be detected in an embryo around six weeks of pregnancy, when most women do not even know they are pregnant yet.

Since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in June and gave the power to regulate the procedure back to the states, Republican lawmakers have been accelerating their anti-abortion policy with talks of contraception bans.



https://heartlandsignal.com/2022/09/15/hot-mic-brian-kemp-open-to-banning-contraception/

Holy Shit

Why College Students May Need Renter's Insurance

College students who are already shopping for laptops, textbooks and other campus gear may want to add something else to their list: renter’s insurance.

The insurance can help pay for personal property that is stolen or damaged by accidents like fires from cooking. It offers liability coverage to help cover medical and legal costs if someone is injured at your place or someone’s belongings are damaged. And some policies pay for a hotel and meals, if a calamity leaves the property unlivable.

Students may not think they have much gear, but replacing clothes, furniture and electronic gadgets adds up. A stolen backpack with a laptop, tablet and textbooks can easily total $3,000, said John Fees, co-founder and managing director with GradGuard, which markets student renter policies.

Students living in dorms may have partial coverage through their parents’ homeowner policies, said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. This “off-premises” coverage, however, is often less than the homeowner policy’s benefit limit — say, 10 percent. If the policy covered belongings up to $100,000, the coverage for the dorm room would be $10,000.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/your-money/college-students-renters-insurance.html

Trump's Former Accounting Firm Begins Turning Over Documents to Congress

WASHINGTON — Mazars USA, the longtime accounting firm for former President Donald J. Trump that cut ties with him and his family business this year, has begun turning over documents related to his financial dealings to Congress.

After a yearslong legal fight, the House Oversight Committee has received a first trove of documents from the firm, which recently entered into a legal settlement agreeing to produce a range of financial documents from several years before Mr. Trump took office and during his early presidency. Mazars said in February it could no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial statements it had prepared for the Trump Organization.

More tranches of documents are expected to follow.

“They have sent us a number of documents,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the committee, said in an interview Saturday. “We’re reviewing them.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/us/politics/mazars-accounting-trump-documents.html

Cracking Down on a Wall Street Trend: E.S.G. Makeovers

In early 2018, Goldman Sachs gave one of its decades-old mutual funds a makeover.

It had been invested in the stocks of large European and Japanese companies across many industries, but suddenly it became the Goldman Sachs International Equity ESG Fund. Its new investing mandate: choose foreign companies with the best reputations on environmental, social and governance policies.

E.S.G.-fund makeovers have become the trend du jour on Wall Street: BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, WisdomTree, Putnam and MassMutual have all done it. Over the past five years, about 90 mutual funds and E.T.F.s have undertaken similar revamps, according to the mutual fund rating firm Morningstar. And Wall Street firms have started up hundreds of brand-new E.S.G. dedicated funds — seeking to cash in on growing investor demand for such investments.

Overall, there are currently 588 sustainable funds and E.T.F.s in the United States, according to Morningstar — an increase from 203 in 2017. The assets in them have grown to $296 billion from $70 billion.

But what may have seemed like a harmless marketing move is now causing some eyebrow raising: Securities regulators are starting to question whether their do-gooder claims are real or fraudulent, at the same time that regulators are seeking to enact new rules and guidelines for what constitutes an E.S.G. investment product or strategy.




https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/business/dealbook/esg-wall-street.html

Wall Street Rush Into Single-Stock ETFs Takes Risky Foreign Turn

Wall Street watchdogs already concerned about the risks of single-stock ETFs won’t like what’s coming next: funds offering exposure to individual foreign shares unbound by US listing standards.

Issuers have filed plans for at least 129 ETFs targeting non-US companies in the past month, most of which don’t have depository receipts trading on American exchanges. That generally means the underlying firms don’t have to meet the same financial reporting standards as a US-listed business.

It raises the prospect of American investors gaining easy access to foreign companies whose finances may not be fully transparent -- putting people at risk of making ill-informed trades.

“It seems problematic to allow exchange trading on products that contain nothing but unvarnished exposure to companies that can’t normally be traded on those exchanges,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. The US tends to have more stringent rules than other countries, and those standards “are designed to ensure that companies offer adequate disclosure of a company’s profits, losses and risks,” he said.

The proposed funds are still under review, meaning the US Securities and Exchange Commission could yet block them. However, it’s unclear whether that will happen. Regulators were vocally unhappy with the very idea of single-stock exchange-traded funds, but didn’t prevent the launch of the first products in July. Since then, about two-dozen have debuted.





https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-17/wall-street-rush-into-single-stock-etfs-takes-risky-foreign-turn?srnd=premium&leadSource=uverify%20wall

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