Baltic Dry Index. 912 -06 Brent Crude 52.02
Freedom
is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George
Orwell.
We open today with Germany making
a leadership power grab in the rump-EU. Stung by President Trump’s demand that
continental Europe pay its minimum share of NATO contributions, and alarmed at
the prospect on an imminent Brexit, on Sunday Chancellor Merkel adopted a bunker
approach to the rump-EU’s future. It will be German led, and apparently it will
be military outside of NATO. Quite how the other rump-EU nations feel about
this development, isn’t yet apparent, but they don’t seem to have been
consulted. A Berlin led continental Europe, must be prepared to take on all
comers.
Increasingly, it
looks from London, that in the rump-EU, it will be the German way, uber alles. Germany
can point at Greece, to any of the lesser states of the rump-EU in the event of
any dissent. In Italy, ex-Prime Minister Renzi, already seems to be
surrendering.
Below, the new law
from Bunker Berlin.
People
sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do
violence on their behalf.
George
Orwell.
After summits with Trump, Merkel says Europe must take fate into own hands
Europe can no longer completely rely on its allies, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel said on Sunday, pointing to bruising meetings of G7 wealthy
nations and NATO last week.
Merkel did not mention by name U.S. President Donald Trump, who
criticized major NATO allies and refused to endorse a global climate change
accord, but she told a packed beer tent in Munich that the days when Europe
could completely count on others were "over to a certain extent".
"I have experienced this in the last few days," she
said. "And that is why I can only say that we Europeans must really
take our fate into our own hands - of course in friendship with the United
States of America, in friendship with Great Britain and as good neighbors
wherever that is possible also with other countries, even with Russia."
"But we have to know that we must fight for our future on our own,
for our destiny as Europeans," Merkel said.
The two-day G7 summit in Italy pitted Trump against the leaders of
Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Japan on several issues, with
European diplomats frustrated at having to revisit questions they had hoped
were long settled.
The American tycoon-turned-president backed a pledge to fight
protectionism at the end of the G7 summit on Saturday, but refused to endorse
the climate pact, saying he needed more time to decide.
----At the NATO summit on Thursday, Trump intensified his accusations
that allies were not spending enough on defense and warned of more attacks such
as this week's Manchester bombing unless the alliance did more to stop
militants.
Turning to France, Merkel said she wished President Emmanuel Macron
success, adding to applause: "Where Germany can help, Germany will help,
because Germany can only do well if Europe is doing well."
More
Italy's Renzi suggests next election be synchronized with Germany's
Former prime minister Matteo Renzi suggested on Sunday that Italy's next
election be held at the same time as Germany's, saying this made sense
"from a European perspective".
Germany will vote on Sept. 24. Elections are due in Italy by May 2018,
but speculation is mounting that Italians could head to the polls in the
autumn.
President Sergio Mattarella, the only figure with the power to dissolve
parliament, has said elections should only be held after parliament has passed
a new electoral law to harmonize voting systems for the Chamber of Deputies and
the Senate.
Renzi, leader of the ruling center-left Democratic Party (PD), said in
an interview with the newspaper Il Messaggero that his party "would not
ask for early elections, but is not afraid of them either".
After regaining the leadership of his PD party in late April, Renzi has
favored early elections. He told Il Messaggero that it may be possible to reach
an accord on a voting system modeled alongside Germany's proportional model, as
suggested by former center-right prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
"In theory yes, but we must be cautious," Renzi said.
"The German system would be a step forward in overcoming the current
stalemate, but it's not a solution to all problems. Having a coalition in power
is very risky."
Renzi, who stepped down as prime minister in December after Italians
rejected his constitutional reform, said last week he would try to negotiate
with other parliamentary factions to reach a deal to discuss at a PD executive
meeting on May 30.
The possibility of a victory for the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement,
which recent polls put neck and neck with PD at around 30 percent, has made
Italy the biggest risk for the euro zone in the eyes of investors.
More
Elsewhere, China, a
non-member of the G-7 and uninvited, was unimpressed by events at the G-7. In
other China news, China's economy still seems to be slowing.
China 'strongly dissatisfied' with G7 statement on East, South China Seas
China is "strongly dissatisfied" with the mention of the East
and South China Sea issues in a Group of Seven (G7) statement, and the G7
allies should stop making irresponsible remarks, a Chinese foreign ministry
spokesman said.
China is committed to properly resolving disputes with all nations
involved through negotiations while maintaining peace and stability in the East
China Sea and South China Sea, spokesman Lu Kang said in a statement on Sunday.
China hopes the G7 and other nations would refrain from taking
positions, fully respect the efforts of countries in the region in handling the
disputes, and stop making irresponsible remarks, Lu said.
In their communique on Saturday, G7 leaders said they were concerned by
the situation in the South China Sea and East China Sea. They also called for a
demilitarization of "disputed features".
China has a dispute with Japan over a group of uninhabited islets in the
East China Sea.
Beijing's extensive claims to the South China Sea are also challenged by
Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as Taiwan.
More
Early China Data Shows Slowdown Biting Amid Credit Tightening
Bloomberg NewsThe international-investor optimism that dominated in the earlier part of the year is now souring, as curbs on leverage push up the cost of domestic borrowing. Small and medium-sized companies are also reporting dented confidence, and sentiment among sales managers and in the steel market worsened.
A surprise cut in China’s debt rating by Moody’s Investors Service last week may mark a turning point for the world’s second-largest economy, as momentum weakens following a better-than-expected expansion in the first quarter. Yet the gloom shouldn’t spread too far, with consumers still spending, factory-gate prices gaining and home prices defying predictions of a hard landing.
Here’s what May’s earliest indicators show:
More
In commodities news,
the OPEC meeting dead cat bounce seems to have ended.
Oil falls as U.S. drilling undermines drive to tighten markets
Oil prices fell on Monday as a relentless rise in U.S. drilling
undermined an OPEC-led push to tighten supply.
Trading activity will be subdued on Monday due to public holidays in
China, the United States and Britain.
Brent crude futures were trading down 15 cents, or 0.3 percent, at
$52.00 per barrel at 0253 GMT.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 17 cents, or
0.3 percent, at $49.63 per barrel.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and some non-OPEC
producers agreed last week to extend a pledge to cut production by around 1.8
million barrels per day (bpd) until the end of the first quarter of 2018. But
the decision did not go as far as many investors had hoped and led to a heavy
sell-off.
An initial agreement, in place since January, would have expired in June
this year.
"The immediate market reaction to the May 25 OPEC decision is
indicative of the weaker-than-expected impact production cuts had on bloated
global crude stocks over H1 2017," BMI Research said in a note.
Despite the ongoing cuts, oil prices have not risen much beyond $50 per
barrel.
Much of OPEC's success will depend on output in the United States, which
is not participating in the cuts and where production has soared 10 percent
since mid-2016 to over 9.3 million bpd, close to top producer levels Russia and
Saudi Arabia.
U.S. drillers have now added rigs for 19 straight weeks, to 722, the
highest amount since April 2015 and the longest run of additions on record,
according to energy services firm Baker Hughes Inc.
Almost all of the recent U.S. output increases have been onshore, from
so-called shale oil fields.
Even
if the rig count did not rise further, Goldman Sachs said it estimates that
U.S. oil production "would increase by 785,000 bpd between 4Q16 and 4Q17
across the Permian, Eagle Ford, Bakken and Niobrara shale plays."
More
Decisions can only be reached in Europe if
France and Germany agree.
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed
Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance
Ministers. Confessed liar. European Commission President. Scotch connoisseur.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Below, a hacker shows how to make life miserable at
the NSA. Then again, he might not be telling the whole truth. Could he be an
NSA plant? They wouldn’t do that, would they?
Date of Publication:
02.24.17. 02.24.17
Famed Hacker Kevin Mitnick Shows You How to Go Invisible Online
If you’re like me, one of the first things you do in the morning is
check your email. And, if you’re like me, you also wonder who else has read
your email. That’s not a paranoid concern. If you use a web-based email service
such as Gmail or Outlook 365, the answer is kind of obvious and frightening.
Even if you delete an email the moment you read it on your computer or
mobile phone, that doesn’t necessarily erase the content. There’s still a copy
of it somewhere. Web mail is cloud-based, so in order to be able to access it
from any device anywhere, at any time, there have to be redundant copies. If
you use Gmail, for example, a copy of every email sent and received through
your Gmail account is retained on various servers worldwide at Google. This is
also true if you use email systems provided by Yahoo, Apple, AT&T, Comcast,
Microsoft, or even your workplace. Any emails you send can also be inspected,
at any time, by the hosting company. Allegedly this is to filter out malware,
but the reality is that third parties can and do access our emails for other,
more sinister and self-serving, reasons.
----The least you can do is make it much
harder for them to do so.
Most web-based email services use encryption when the email is in
transit. However, when some services transmit mail between Mail Transfer Agents
(MTAs), they may not be using encryption, thus your message is in the open. To
become invisible you will need to encrypt your messages.
Most email encryption uses what’s called asymmetrical encryption. That
means I generate two keys: a private key that stays on my device, which I never
share, and a public key that I post freely on the internet. The two keys are
different yet mathematically related.
----So how would encrypting the contents of your email work?
The most popular method of email encryption is PGP, which stands for “Pretty Good Privacy.” It is not free. It is a product of the Symantec Corporation. But its creator, Phil Zimmermann, also authored an open-source version, OpenPGP, which is free. And a third option, GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), created by Werner Koch, is also free. The good news is that all three are interoperational. That means that no matter which version of PGP you use, the basic functions are the same.
When Edward Snowden first decided to disclose the sensitive data he’d copied from the NSA, he needed the assistance of like-minded people scattered around the world. Privacy advocate and filmmaker Laura Poitras had recently finished a documentary about the lives of whistle-blowers. Snowden wanted to establish an encrypted exchange with Poitras, except only a few people knew her public key.
Snowden reached out to Micah Lee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lee’s public key was available online and, according to the account published on the Intercept, he had Poitras’s public key. Lee checked to see if Poitras would permit him to share it. She would.
Given the importance of the secrets they were about to share, Snowden and Poitras could not use their regular e‑mail addresses. Why not? Their personal email accounts contained unique associations—such as specific interests, lists of contacts—that could identify each of them. Instead Snowden and Poitras decided to create new email addresses.
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?
Three-dimensional graphene: Experiment at BESSY II shows that optical properties are tuneable
Date:
May 24, 2017
Source:
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie
Summary:
An international research team has for the first time investigated the optical
properties of three-dimensional nanoporous graphene at the IRIS infrared
beamline of the BESSY II electron storage ring. The experiments show that the
plasmonic excitations (oscillations of the charge density) in this new material
can be precisely controlled by the pore size and by introducing atomic
impurities. This could facilitate the manufacture of highly sensitive chemical
sensors.
Carbon is a very versatile element. It not only forms diamonds,
graphite, and coal, but can also take a planar form as a hexagonal matrix --
graphene. This material, consisting of only a single atomic layer, possesses
many extreme properties. It is highly conductive, optically transparent, and is
mechanically flexible as well as able to withstand loads. André Geim and
Konstantin Novoselov received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery
of this exotic form of carbon. And just recently, a Japanese team has been
successful in stacking two-dimensional graphene layers in a three-dimensional
architecture with nanometre-sized pores.
Tuneable plasmons
A research team operated by a group at Sapienza University in Rome has
now for the first time made a detailed investigation of the optical properties
of 3D graphene at BESSY II. The team was able to ascertain from the data how
charge density oscillations, known as plasmons, propagate in three-dimensional
graphene. In doing so, they determined that these plasmons follow the same
physical laws as 2D graphene. However, the frequency of the plasmons in 3D
graphene can be very precisely controlled, either by introducing atomic
impurities (doping), by the size of the nanopores, or by attaching specific
molecules in certain ways to the graphene. In this way, the novel material
might also lend itself to manufacturing specific chemical sensors, as the
authors write in Nature Communications. In addition, the new material is
interesting as an electrode material for employment in solar cells.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: 20,941 +149 Up. NASDAQ: 6,048 +190 Up. SP500: 2,384 +152 Up.
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