Baltic
Dry Index. 1172
+25
Brent Crude 51.66
LIR
Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
The
big day has arrived. In the red corner on home turf, President Trump.
In the blue corner, representing, the Clintonistas and Obamaites,
Chancellor Merkel of the EUSSR. Lacking her legions of dangerous
immigrants, today’s meeting in Washington is expected to be
something of a damp squid. The real showdown is expected to come at the coming G-20 meeting, where it's going to be something like 19:1.
Germany Treads Carefully Toward Climate Confrontation With Trump
by Joe Ryan and Brian Parkin
16 March
2017, 19:39 GMT 17 March 2017, 04:01 GMT
The
German government will release next week a plan for the Group of 20
economies to address climate change, taking a cautious step toward
confronting U.S. President Donald Trump on an issue that puts him at
odds with most world leaders.
The 23-page draft, obtained by
Bloomberg News, outlines how the most prosperous nations can lead by
example, cutting their own greenhouse-gas emissions, financing
efforts to curb pollution in poorer countries and take other steps to
support the landmark Paris climate accord.
The plan appears to tread carefully.
It makes no mention of cutting coal production, which Trump has vowed
to increase, nor does it address automotive fuel standards, which he
plans to review. And while the plan is expected to be distributed to
all G-20 nations, Germany hasn’t
scheduled formal meetings for environment ministers, avoiding the
risk of a clash over global warming.
“The Germans are trying to find a
way to move their climate change and energy agenda, and at the same
time not raise red flags for President Trump,” John Kirton,
co-director of the University of Toronto’s G-20 Research Group,
said in an interview.
With Angela Merkel scheduled to meet
Trump Friday in Washington, Nina Wettern, a spokeswoman for the
Federal Environment Ministry, said Germany’s chancellor remains
committed to using the summit meeting to promote efforts to combat
global warming. “Climate protection is a core issue of Germany’s
G-20 presidency,” Wettern said by email.
More
Thu
Mar 16, 2017 | 7:01pm EDT
EU consumer authorities to take on Facebook, Google, Twitter
European
consumer protection authorities will ask social media companies
Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc and Twitter Inc to amend their terms of
service within one month or possibly face fines, a source familiar
with the matter said on Thursday.
The
companies proposed some ways to resolve the issues and discussed them
with the authorities on Thursday, the person said, adding that the
meeting was constructive. The source was not authorized to speak to
the media and requested anonymity.
U.S.
technology companies have faced tight scrutiny in Europe for the way
they do business, from privacy to how quickly they remove illegal or
hateful content.
The
authorities sent letters to the companies in December saying that
some of service terms broke European Union consumer protection law
and that they needed to do more to tackle fraud and scams on their
websites.
According
to the letters seen by Reuters, some of those terms include requiring
users to seek redress in court in California, where the companies are
based, instead of their country of residence.
Other
issues include not identifying sponsored content clearly, requiring
consumers to waive mandatory rights such as the right to cancel a
contract, and an excessive power for the companies to determine the
suitability of content generated by users, according to the letters.
In the
case of Alphabet's Google unit, the concerns were about its social
network Google+.
Google
and Facebook were not immediately available for comment. A spokesman
for Twitter declined to comment.
The
authorities are being supported by the European Commission and could
impose fines if they are not satisfied.
The
authorities also proposed setting up a standard communication channel
to notify the companies of content deemed illegal and the action
requested, according to the letters.
Noting
the exceptionally heavy rains in Peru, and a growing drought in Africa, we wonder if a new El Nino has
formed in the Pacific, and if so, how strong will it be?
Residual heat from last El Niño could spark new one this year
"As
all El Niño researchers know, no two El Niño or La Niña episodes
are exactly the same," said climatologist Bill Patzert said.
By Brooks
Hays | March 15, 2017 at 10:48 AM
March
15 (UPI) -- For climate scientists and meteorologists, predicting the
emergence of El Niño and La Niña is one of their most difficult
tasks. Currently, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif., are trying to do just that.
Their
latest analysis of sea levels in the Pacific Ocean -- along with
several climate models -- suggests a new El Niño could emerge with
the help of heat left behind by the last warm water event.
Sea level maps populated by data from
the Jason-3 satellite mission show a bulge of high seas surrounding
Hawaii, a band of warm water leftover from the last El Niño.
The last El Niño formed in 2015 and
grew to an impressive size, influencing global weather patterns. It
reached full strength in January of 2016, but faded in the spring.
The pattern's warming influence remained, however, and scientists
believe its residual heat prevented a full-blown cooling pattern.
"Did the warm bulge suppress the
trade winds in the eastern and central Pacific, muting the conditions
required for a full-blown La Niña to form?" JPL climatologist
Bill Patzert asked
in a news release. "As all El Niño researchers know, no two
El Niño or La Niña episodes are exactly the same."
The El Niño and La Niña phenomena
are the warm and cool phases of what's known as the El Niño Southern
Oscillation, which is part of a larger ocean temperature pattern
called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The PDO alternates between
warm and cool, or positive and negative phases, in irregular periods
of 5 to 20 years. PDO phases strongly influence the ENSO pattern.
Patzert and his colleagues are
currently modeling PDO patterns in an effort to determine whether the
remnants of the last El Niño will grow into a new cross-Pacific band
of weather-altering warm water.
For now, the Pacific sits idle in
what Patzert calls a "La Nada" state, a neutral phase,
neither exceedingly warm nor cool. But that could change, depending
on if and when PDO patterns shift.
More
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The
bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today,
more on America’s “deep state” at war with President Trump.
Nothing good comes from this.
Thu
Mar 16, 2017 | 9:13pm EDT
McDonald's deletes Trump tweet, says Twitter account compromised
McDonald's
Corp quickly
deleted a tweet sent from the company's handle slamming President
Donald Trump on Thursday and said its official Twitter account had
been compromised.
The tweet,
which was copied and shared widely before being deleted, came a day
after the Twitter accounts of a number of major news organizations,
chief executives, government agencies and other high-profile users
were hijacked.
"Based
on our investigation, we have determined that our Twitter account was
hacked by an external source. We took swift action to secure it, and
we apologize this tweet was sent through our corporate McDonald's
account," McDonald's spokeswoman Terri Hickey said in a
statement.
Corporate
accounts are attractive targets due to their large followings and the
media attention that errant tweets can attract. Twitter Inc allows
for two-factor authentication, a security feature that would deter
many attempts to seize an account.
Twitter
declined comment on Thursday citing "privacy and security
reasons".
The tweet
sent from @McDonaldsCorp on Thursday morning read: "@realdonaldtrump
You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love
to have @BarackObama back, also you have tiny hands."
Trump did
not respond to the incident on Twitter.
High-profile
Twitter accounts were hijacked on Wednesday to send anti-Nazi
messages in Turkish in the midst of a diplomatic spat between Turkey,
the Netherlands and Germany. Twitter said on Wednesday that the
source of that attack was a third-party app,
whose permissions have since been removed.
Trump, one
of the more fast-food friendly presidents in recent years, had
tweeted pictures of himself eating food from McDonald's and other
chains during the U.S. election campaign. A 2002 ad campaign featured
Trump and the chain's Grimace mascot promoting an "amazing"
$1 deal for McDonald's since-discontinued Big N' Tasty burger.
The
incident came as McDonald's is bolstering its digital capabilities
with mobile and kiosk ordering to help modernize the 60-year-old
chain.
Analysts
said the hack raised questions about security at Twitter, but was
unlikely to do much damage to the restaurant chain's brand.
More
Technology Update.
With
events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene,
I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is
converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s
future from the 21st
century onwards? DC? A quantum computer next?
Ultrashort light pulses for fast 'lightwave' computers
The researchers, including
engineers at the University of Michigan, showed that they could
control the peaks within the laser pulses and also twist the
light.
The method moves electrons faster
and more efficiently than electrical currents -- and with reliable
effects on their quantum states. It is a step toward so-called
"lightwave electronics" and, in the more distant future,
quantum computing, said Mackillo Kira, U-M professor of electrical
engineering and computer science who was involved in the research.
Electrons moving through a
semiconductor in a computer, for instance, occasionally run into
other electrons, releasing energy in the form of heat. But a
concept called lightwave electronics proposes that electrons could
be guided by ultrafast laser pulses. While high speed in a car
makes it more likely that a driver will crash into something, high
speed for an electron can make the travel time so short that it is
statistically unlikely to hit anything.
"In the past few years, we
and other groups have found that the oscillating electric field of
ultrashort laser pulses can actually move electrons back and forth
in solids," said Rupert Huber, professor of physics at the
University of Regensburg who led the experiment. "Everybody
was immediately excited because one may be able to exploit this
principle to build future computers that work at unprecedented
clock rates -- 10 to a hundred thousand times faster than
state-of-the-art electronics."
But first, researchers need to be
able to control electrons in a semiconductor. This work takes a
step toward this capability by mobilizing groups of electrons
inside a semiconductor crystal using terahertz radiation -- the
part of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and
infrared light.
More
Another
weekend and a
near Spring Equinox weekend at that. Almost equal day and equal
night. An opportunity for me to try to get familiar with all my new
upgraded programs and computer. At 67, a dinosaur, to all the
excellent Technical Agent help I’ve received all week from
Microsoft
Support. I wonder how the CIA missed them. Have a great weekend
everyone.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA:
20,812 +133 Up.
NASDAQ:
5,825 +120 Up.
SP500:
2,364 +115 Up.
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