The US May Have Shot Down a Small Hobby Balloon With a Sidewinder Missile

The Great Retreat: Beijing's Digital Currency Ambitions Are Faltering Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), For years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has positioned the digital yuan (e-CNY) as the ultimate weapon of financial totalitarianism. It was intended to be the crowning achievement of the surveillance state. With a programmable, traceable digital currency, Beijing thought it would finally break the back of private payment giants like Alipay and WeChat Pay. Signage of the Chinese digital currency is seen near a coffee store in the New Actuation Fintech Center...

House Votes To Extend Surveillance Powers Until April 30 The US House of Representatives on Friday passed a bill extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) - which was notoriously abused so spy on the 2016 Trump campaign, and has been used for "backdoor searches" targeting Americans. Friday's vote - via unanimous consent after a longer five-year reauthorization pushed by Republicns failed to advance - extends Section 702 until April 30.  The short-term measure now moves to the Senate, which faces a looming deadline: the current authorization expires April 20....

Record Share Of Home Sellers Cut Listing Prices In February: Report A record share of home sellers cut their listing prices in February as competition for homebuyers necessitated steep price reductions, an April 9 report by real estate platform Redfin said. About 34.2 percent of sellers reduced their listing prices in February, up from 31.5 percent in the same month a year earlier, according to Redfin’s analysis of MLS data. That was the highest February share since the firm began tracking MLS records in 2012. The sellers who cut their listing prices reduced...