In other news, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied that the White House is sending "mixed messages" by sanctioning and then delaying sanctions on Huawei twice over. The message seems to change every week, or whenever Trump gets a bug up his ass about something or other.
Meanwhile, North American corporations increased the number of robots they bought in the second quarter of the year by nearly 20 percent while most other business investment is down.
Finally, the European Union has flatly rejected British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's demand to remove the Irish border backstop and they say Johnson has not actually proposed a real alternative.
But the European Commission, the EU executive which has led Brexit negotiations with London, dismissed the proposal in Johnson's letter that the backstop could be replaced with a "commitment" to find "alternative arrangements".
"The letter does not provide a legal operational solution to prevent the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland," commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud told reporters.
"It does not set out what any alternative arrangements could be, and in fact it recognizes there is no guarantee that such arrangements will be in place by the end of the transitional period."
I laughed harder at this than any normal person probably should.
It's deeply ironic that Boris Johnson and his cohorts want the EU to find all the solutions for them given that they're, you know, leaving the EU because the EU is terrible or whatever.