Baltic Dry Index. 1337 -07 Brent Crude 55.00
People
sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do
violence on their behalf.
George
Orwell.
We open today with
what looks suspiciously like a new form of terrorism starting. But by whom?
State sponsored, as in USA retaliation for Russia’s alleged interference in
last year’s US election, or ISIS/Al Qaeda as a chaos prelude to something more?
If state sponsored, we are unlikely to get a follow up wave of bombings or
vehicle attacks, since that would provide Russia with a casus belli for war, if
they ever found out which state sponsored it. If a non state act of terrorism,
follow up bombings or vehicle attacks are all too likely, especially if the
authorities or public get complacent with hoax bomb threats.
Sadly, we are all
too likely now to get copy cat bomb threats across the west.
45,000 Evacuated Across Russia After Wave of Bomb Threats
By Stepan Kravchenko
13 September 2017, 14:50 GMT+1 13 September 2017, 16:48
GMT+1
Nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated from airports, schools and
government buildings across Russia, including an iconic department store on Red
Square, amid a wave of fake bomb threats that officials called unprecedented.
“There’s never been anything like this before, it’s 100 percent
organized telephone terrorism,” Frants Klintsevich, deputy head of the Defense
Committee in the upper house of parliament, said in a telephone interview. “The
only goal is to set off destructive processes, to sow panic.”
In Moscow, the hoaxes led to the clearing of the GUM shopping complex,
across Red Square from the Kremlin, as well as several other major malls,
universities, hotels and train stations. Sheremetyevo airport, the capital’s
busiest, tightened security after a threat, Interfax reported. The official
Tass news agency, citing an unnamed security-service source, said more than
50,000 people had been evacuated in the capital after about 100 threats.
That came a day after 45,000 people had been evacuated Tuesday from 205
buildings in 22 cities across Russia in similar hoaxes, RIA reported. Many
were city halls, schools and other official buildings, according to local news
reports. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred questions on the issue to the
security services. The Interior Ministry and Security Council declined to
comment.
Threats and evacuations outside the capital also were reported today, in
cities ranging from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Far East, across Siberia,
to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Three shopping malls in Moscow also were
cleared after calls reporting bombs, Tass reported. Police were also
investigating threats at several train stations. RIA said a total of 190
buildings in 17 cities were affected.
The anonymous calls came from Internet dialing systems and couldn’t
easily be traced, official news agencies reported. Initial reports indicated
the evacuations might have been some kind of exercise.
“It’s possible this could be preparatory work for a serious terrorist
attack,” Klintsevich said.
In markets news, did
we just double top?
September 14, 2017 / 1:59 AM
Asia stocks step back from decade high as China posts rare data miss
TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian stocks inched down from 10-year highs on Thursday following a burst of Chinese data which was largely weaker than markets expected, while the dollar held steady ahead of U.S. inflation data due later in the day.
Spreadbetters expected European stocks to start slightly
higher to a touch lower, forecasting Britain's FTSE .FTSE
to open up 0.1 percent and Germany's DAX .GDAXI
and France's CAC .FCHI
to each open 0.15 percent lower.
China’s fixed-asset investment, factory output and retail
sales all grew less than expected, reinforcing views that the world’s
second-largest economy is gradually beginning to lose steam in the face of
rising borrowing costs.
That took some of the shine off China’s surprisingly robust
growth in the first half of the year, which has helped fuel stronger global
demand, particularly for commodities, but analysts do not see a risk of a sharp
slowdown in its economic momentum.
The Australian dollar, often used as a liquid proxy of China-linked
trades, pared gains after the China readings but was still up 0.25 percent at
$0.8007 AUD=D4
after a much stronger-than-expected jobs report.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan
.MIAPJ0000PUS edged down 0.1 percent after rising to its highest since 2007 the
day before. China stocks .CSI300
dipped into the red after the data, giving up modest early gains.
Japan's Nikkei .N225
eased 0.2 percent, while the broader TOPIX .TOPX
briefly brushed a two-year high as the yen weakened. Reaction to reports of
North Korean threats to "sink" Japan were so far limited.
“Foreign investors’ short-covering seems to have run its
course, while China’s weak data soured market sentiment,” said Norihiro Fujito,
a senior investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.
More
China's Slumping Cement Output Is a Better Guide to Real Economy
14 September 2017, 06:24 GMT+1
Want to know what’s really going on in China’s economy? Look no further
than falling cement output.
It dropped 3.7 percent in August from a year earlier, mainly driven by
declining infrastructure investment. On a more stable three-month moving
average measure, cement output still shrank from a year earlier.
Cement has minimal inventory and thus better reflects real demand than
steel, where production ramps up when prices are high, according to Larry Hu,
head of China economics at Macquarie Securities Ltd. in Hong Kong.
"It means the real economy isn’t as hot as what we see from the producer price index or the steel price," Hu said. "If you want to look at the real economy, cement provides better guidance."
The August drop in cement output was the steepest since 2015. Steel production, though, rose to a record while property development investment remained steady. Real estate sales and new construction though continued edging down, contributing to less demand for cement.
In hacking news, the
Equifax hacking scandal grows like Topsy. Were/are any of other credit-rating businesses
affected? Just how secure is this industry? What happens if 143 million users
data gets deliberately corrupted?
Experian Says Still Waiting for Explanation From Equifax
By Sarah Ponczek
Equifax Inc.’s lack of transparency about its massive data breach makes
it difficult for the credit-rating firm’s competitors to check the security of
their own information, according to Experian Plc.
“We don’t have a conclusive statement from Equifax,” Alex Lintner,
Experian’s president of consumer information services, said Tuesday in an
interview. “We’re trying to get one about what happened, so we can double-,
triple-, quadruple-check whatever equivalent we have.”
Atlanta-based Equifax last week reported a cyberattack that may have
affected 143 million people -- or about half the U.S. population -- revealing
Social Security numbers, driver’s license data and birth dates. Experian, which
collects similar customer information, said it has confidence in its underlying
security and technologies.
----TransUnion, another Equifax rival, said Monday it conducted a review and doesn’t believe it’s vulnerable to the same type of assault that hit Equifax. Chief Financial Officer Todd Cello told investors at a conference in New York that his company uses the same software as Equifax, but has made sure it’s up to date.
Unlike banks, Equifax and the other credit-rating firms don’t have multiple government agencies monitoring them. They are supervised only by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which requires that banks go through credit bureaus for consumer data even as lenders increasingly rely on proprietary models for data.
More
We close for the day
with follow up hurricane news. Hurricanes are wealth negative, no matter what
some “dismal scientists” theorise.
September 13, 2017
Officials: 5 dead, 115 evacuated at Hollywood nursing home
HOLLYWOOD, FLA. (WSVN) - Police have evacuated several people from a
Hollywood nursing home, where at least five people have died.
According to Hollywood Fire Rescue and Police, 115 people were evacuated
Wednesday morning at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, located at
1200 N 35 Ave., due to intense heat and no power. Broward County Mayor Barbara
Sharief confirmed five people have died, but it remains unknown whether the
deaths are related to the heat.
The mayor added that three deaths occurred at the nursing home, and two
deaths took place as they were transported to a nearby hospital.
Hollywood Police Chief Tom Sanchez said, “Right now the building has
been sealed off. We’re conducting a criminal investigation inside. We believe
at this time they may be related to the loss of power in the storm. We’re
conducting a criminal investigation, not ruling anything out at this time.”
As a precautionary measure, Sanchez said he assigned officers to check
the other 42 nursing homes throughout the city to make certain they’re properly
taking care of the elderly.
More
Florida swelters and asks: When will power and AC be back?
September 13, 2017 3:32 AM
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
In a state built on air conditioning, millions of Florida residents now
want to know one thing: When will the power come back on?
Hurricane Irma's march across Florida and into the Southeast triggered one
of the bigger blackouts in U.S. history, plunging as many as 13 million people
into the dark as the storm dragged down power lines and blew out transformers.
It also shattered the climate-controlled bubbles that enable people to live
here despite the state's heat, humidity and insects.
Those who evacuated ahead of the hurricane are returning to homes
without electricity and facing the prospect of days or even weeks with little
to ease the late-summer stickiness.
---- On Tuesday, the company announced that it expected to have the lights back on by the end of the weekend for the east coast. Customers living in the hard-hit neighborhoods in southwest Florida, where damage was much more extensive, were expected to get power restored within 10 days.
---- Any disaster that wipes out electrical service hits especially hard in the South, where tens of millions of Americans rely on the cocoon of comfort provided by air conditioning. Without it, many cities could barely exist, let alone prosper. When the lights go out in Florida, the muggy, buggy reality can be jarring even to longtime residents.
There were signs on social media that some people were growing angry and
tired of waiting. Others steeled themselves for an extended period without
electricity.
Standing in front of a produce cooler at a reopened Publix grocery store
in Naples, Missy Sieber said the worst thing about not having electricity is
not having air conditioning.
"It's miserably hot," Sieber said. "I don't mind standing
in line here."
There's no immediate cool-off in sight. The forecast for the next week
in Naples and Miami, for instance, calls for highs in the upper 80s (lower 30s
Celsius) and lows barely falling below 80 degrees (27 degrees Celsius).
Humidity will hover between 70 and almost 80 percent.
More
Cities Swimming in Raw Sewage as Hurricanes Overwhelm Systems
By Jennifer A Dlouhy andAri Natter
13 September 2017, 09:00 GMT+1
Hurricane Harvey took aim at one of the nation’s most industrial regions,
releasing a stream of toxic
pollutants from chemical plants, refineries and Superfund sites in Texas.
But when its bigger sister Irma slammed into Florida, environmental alarms rang
over a different kind of discharge: raw sewage.Millions of gallons of poorly treated wastewater and raw sewage flowed into the bays, canals and city streets of Florida from facilities serving some of the nation’s fastest-growing counties. More than 9 million gallons of releases tied to Irma have been reported as of late Tuesday as inundated plants were submerged, forced to bypass treatment or lost power.
Such overflows, which can spread disease-causing pathogens, are happening more often, as population shifts and increasingly strong storms strain the capacity of plants and decades-old infrastructure. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated last year that $271 billion is needed to maintain and improve the nation’s wastewater pipes, treatment plants and associated infrastructure.
"There’s no sewer system in the world that can be built that’s completely leak proof," said Nathan Gardner-Andrews, chief advocacy officer for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. Plants generally are designed to handle twice their normal capacity, but "when you get some of these rain events and you’re talking four to six to eight inches of rain in an hour, the engineering is such that you cannot build a system to hold that capacity."
A treatment facility in Clearwater, Florida discharged 1.6 million gallons of wastewater into a creek, according to filings with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. The incident, which occurred after a power line snapped, was just a trickle compared to a 30-million-gallon discharge of raw sewage after Hurricane Hermine caused a pump failure in 2016, said David Porter, the city’s public utilities director.
That scene was replayed across the state this week, as electrical outages caused lift station pumps to stop running in St. Petersburg and Orlando, prompting at least 500,000 gallons of overflows. A pipeline broke in Miramar, Florida, sending sewage spilling across a parkway as contractors hunted for the rupture. And operators of a Miami-area wastewater treatment plant blamed a power outage for 6 million gallons of sewage released into Biscayne Bay.
Late Tuesday, there was no visible sewage or garbage in the Biscayne Bay water along Brickell, Florida, but in nearby Bayfront Park, the air was heavy with a foul odor.
As wastewater treatment lagged, utilities across the state warned residents to boil water before drinking it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it has deployed specialists to Florida to help get wastewater systems back online.
Estimated releases of untreated and poorly treated wastewater tied to both Irma and Harvey are expected to continue climbing. Even Hurricanes Hermine and Matthew -- modest by comparison to this season’s double whammy -- forced the release of some 250 million gallons of wastewater without full treatment between Aug. 31 and Oct. 15, 2016, according to a report by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
More
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today the once great nation of the Republic of South Africa. Now headed
towards a Zimbabwe like existence as the Banana Republic of South Africa. Can
Africa ever be saved from itself?
South Africa’s Richest Man Calls President Zuma’s Policy ‘Theft’
By Corinne Gretler and Dylan Griffiths
13 September 2017, 12:29 GMT+1
South Africa’s richest man Johann Rupert said “radical economic
transformation,” the policy championed by the country’s President Jacob Zuma to
reduce racial inequality, is no more than theft.
“Radical economic transformation is just a code word for theft,” Rupert
said on the sidelines of Richemont’s annual general meeting in Geneva on
Wednesday. “That’s what’s happening there. They’re raiding the state’s coffers.
And it’s public knowledge.”
South Africa’s former graft ombudsman alleged in a November report that Zuma allowed members of the wealthy Gupta family, who are in business with his son, to influence cabinet appointments and the award of state contracts. And a study released in March by a team of academics concluded that Zuma, the Guptas and their allies had orchestrated “a silent coup,” securing control over key positions in the state, enabling them to allegedly steal billions of rand. Zuma and the Guptas deny wrongdoing.
A trove of leaked emails dubbed the ‘Gupta Leaks’ have formed the basis for a raft of stories by South African media that have alleged corruption linked to the Guptas and government officials.
Zuma’s spokesman Bongani Ngqulunga said he was in a meeting when called for comment.
Bell Pottinger LLP, the U.K. public-relations firm founded by an adviser to Margaret Thatcher lost clients and staff over its controversial work for the Gupta family in South Africa and was expelled from the U.K.’s PR trade body last week. It was slammed for stoking racial tensions by mounting a campaign targeting so-called white monopoly capital, and filed for administration on Tuesday. Its targets included Rupert, who has a net worth of $8.2 billion.
“They were hired to deflect attention from the public anger against what’s happening to the state’s finances,” said Rupert. “That was their role.”
Bell Pottinger was formerly the public relations company for Richemont, the maker of Cartier jewelry and IWC Schaffhausen timepieces.
Zuma’s second and final term as president is due to end in 2019, but his political clout is waning as he prepares to relinquish the leadership of the ANC in December and, depending on who replaces him, he could be forced to step down early. The party’s new leader will also be its presidential candidate in the next elections.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, a former labor union leader who helped draft the nation’s first democratic constitution and made a fortune in business, is favored by many investors. His main rival is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the former chairwoman of the African Union Commission and Zuma’s ex-wife.
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?
Graphene based terahertz absorbers
Printable graphene inks enable ultrafast lasers in the terahertz range
Date:
September 12, 2017
Source:
Graphene Flagship
Summary:
A terahertz saturable absorber has been created using printable graphene inks
with an order of magnitude higher absorption modulation than other devices
produced to date.
Graphene Flagship researches from CNR-Istituto Nanoscienze, Italy and
the University of Cambridge, UK have shown that it is possible to create a
terahertz saturable absorber using graphene produced by liquid phase
exfoliation and deposited by transfer coating and ink jet printing. The paper,
published in Nature Communications, reports a terahertz saturable
absorber with an order of magnitude higher absorption modulation than other
devices produced to date.
A terahertz saturable absorber decreases its absorption of light in the
terahertz range (far infrared) with increasing light intensity and has great
potential for the development of terahertz lasers, with applications in
spectroscopy and imaging. These high-modulation, mode-locked lasers open up
many prospects in applications where short time scale excitation of specific
transitions are important, such as time-resolved spectroscopy of gasses and
molecules, quantum information or ultra-high speed communication.
"We started working on saturable terahertz absorbers to solve the
problem of producing a miniaturized mode-locked terahertz laser with thin and
flexible integrated components that also had good modulation" said
Graphene Flagship researcher Miriam Vitiello from CNR-Istituto Nanoscienze in
Italy.
Graphene is a promising saturable absorber as it has intrinsic broadband
operations and ultrafast recovery time along with an ease of fabrication and
integration, as first demonstrated in ultra-fast infra-red lasers by Flagship
partner University of Cambridge. In the terahertz range, the present paper
exploits graphene produced by liquid phase exfoliation, a method ideally suited
to mass production, to prepare inks, easily deposited by transfer coating or
ink jet printing
"It was important to us to use a type of graphene that could be
integrated into the laser system with flexibility and control" said
Vitiello "Ink jet printing along with transfer coating achieved
that."
Using mode-locked lasers to produce ultra fast pulses in the terahertz
range can have interesting and exciting uses. "These devices could have
applications in medical diagnostics when time of flight topography is of
importance -- you could see a tumour inside a tissue" said Vitiello.
Frank Koppens, of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain, is the
leader of the Graphene Flagship's Photonics and Optoelectronics Work Package,
which focuses on developing graphene-based technologies for imaging and
sensing, data transfer and other photonics applications. "This is a new
discovery with immediate impact on applications. Clearly, this is a case where
graphene beats existing materials in terms of efficiency, scalability,
compactness and speed" he said.
More
Sipping scotch all day, He hated Mrs May, And
simply got drunk and drunker.
Anon.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August
DJIA: 21,948 +215 Up. NASDAQ: 6,429 +266 Up. SP500: 2,472 +174 Up.
am Linda Peters. Thanks for sharing your details ignore the comment.
ReplyDeleteISIS / Al-Qaeda have offered to do more as a chaos? If the state is sponsored, we do not want to make a follow up of the bomb or vehicle attack, since Russia will be given a casus belli for the war. Around 100,000 people were removed from Russia's airports, schools and government buildings, an Icon department store in Red Square, which are in serious threats of fake bombs, which officials called undemocratic.
An anonymous security source quoted source, saying that more than 50 thousand people were removed in the capital in the capital. "It means the real economy isn’t as hot as what we see from the producer price index or the steel price," Hu said. "If you want to look at the real economy, cement provides better guidance." Those who evacuated ahead of the hurricane are returning to homes without electricity and facing the prospect of days or even weeks with little to ease the late-summer stickiness.
http://onedaytop.com/cilla-musical-magnificent-venture-concentrate/