.@NHC_Atlantic cone w/ #Irma & how its changed over time. Trend back to the right and a wide cone still relaying uncertainty on future track
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“Devastating” Hurricane Irma Flattens “Most Solid” Buildings On Caribbean Island
“Devastating” Hurricane Irma Flattens “Most Solid” Buildings On Caribbean Island
“Irma is the kind of storm where you get thousands of lives lost. This is not going to be the big slow-motion flood like Harvey – this is a real, honest-to-God hurricane.”
– Chuck Watson, disaster modeler with Enki Research
Hurricane Irma, the most powerful Atlantic storm on record according to the NHC, raced across northern Caribbean islands on Wednesday with a “catastrophic mix of fierce winds, surf and rain”, ahead of what appears a virtually guaranteed Florida landfall at the weekend. While Irma precise trajectory remained uncertain, the latest NHC forecast sees the cone coming right on top fo the panhandle.
The eye of Irma, a Category 5 storm packing winds of 185 miles per hour (295 km per hour), moved away from the island of Barbuda and toward the island of St. Martin, east of Puerto Rico, early on Wednesday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami reported. It could hit Florida on Saturday. It is expected to bring strong storm surges and up to 20 inches of rain in some places.
“We are hunkered down and it is very windy … the wind is a major threat,” said Garfield Burford, the director of news at ABS TV and Radio on the island of Antigua, south of Barbuda. “So far, some roofs have been blown off” he added according to Reuters. Most people who were on Antigua and Barbuda were without power and about 1,000 people were spending the night in shelters in Antigua, according to Burford. “It’s very scary … most of the islands are dark so it’s a very, very frightening,” he said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Houston Warns Bridges And Roads Are “Starting To Fail”
Houston Warns Bridges And Roads Are “Starting To Fail”
As Tropical Storm Harvey heads back inland, slamming southwest Texas with another 15-25 inches of rain, Housting officials are reporting that the city’s critical infrastructure is starting to fail under the weight of the floodwaters, and may soon collapse.
According to Reuters, roads and bridges in Houston have started to buckle under the impact of the catastrophic flooding in parts of the city. According to Jeff Linder of the Harris County Flood Control District, one bridge had collapsed and some roads had been damaged by the torrential rains.
Worse, the damage is far from over. As reported yesterday, the water levels at two reservoirs to the west of the city, where more than 3,000 homes have been flooded, continue to rise. Meanwhile, Buffalo Bayou, the primary drainage system that runs through the city, is holding steady and may not recede for days, said Edmond Russo, deputy engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers. According to USGS data, the Buffalo Bayou has recorded a record 33 inches of rain, and another 20 is expected in the coming 48 hours.
Linder said the level of the Houston Ship Channel, which opens out into Galveston Bay was “at levels we’ve never seen before”, slowing the bayou’s ability to drain. Two major dams outside Houston have also begun to overflow, according to the BBC.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner confirmed that one police officer has been killed since the flooding began. The Houston police chief says the officer’s body was recovered Tuesday morning. He apparently died when floodwaters overcame his vehicle as he tried to get to his post.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Rome’s Transport System Faces “Meltdown,” On Brink Of Collapse
Rome’s Transport System Faces “Meltdown,” On Brink Of Collapse
New York City’s deteriorating subway has a rival for world’s most dysfunctional public transportation system. After only three months on the job, Bruno Rota, the head of Rome’s public-transit company has announced that he’s leaving his post, saying that the Italian capital city’s decaying transportation system should declare bankruptcy, according to Reuters.
Rota’s departure is an embarrassment for the anti-establishment five-star movement and one of its most high-profile politicians, Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi. Since taking office last year, Raggi’s administration has been paralyzed by internal tumult while the city’s infrastructure has continued to decay. The party’s failures in Rome suggest that it’s not prepared to govern, and may have contributed to Five-Star’s losses in a series of municipal elections last month. Meanwhile, the situation could hurt the party’s chances in next year’s general election.
Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi
“Bruno Rota quit Atac on Friday, just three months after taking charge of the Italian capital’s bus, metro and tram network, saying he was unable to salvage the firm and feared possible legal action tied to any eventual collapse.
“It is an appalling scandal,” said Rota, who was called down to Rome after helping to turn around the transport system in the northern city of Milan. “The situation is worse than you can imagine,” he told la Repubblica newspaper.
Rota’s dramatic departure has triggered yet another crisis for the city’s 5-Star administration, which won power last year in what was seen as a litmus test of whether the anti-establishment group was ready to run Italy.”
City officials are publicly criticizing Raggi, saying that Rome needs a “change in direction” after the city nearly adopted water rationing laws last week amid a worsening drought.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
There Is No Excuse For Janet Yellen’s Complacency
There Is No Excuse For Janet Yellen’s Complacency
Janet Yellen has been reported by Reuters as saying in London yesterday that “she does not believe that there will be a run on the banking system at least as long as she lives”:
“Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be,” Yellen said at an event in London. “Fed’s Yellen: Not another financial crisis in ‘our lifetimes’”
The only word I can use to describe this belief is “delusional.”
The only way in which her belief could be justified would be in financial crises were truly random events, caused by something outside the economy—or just by a very bad throw of the economic dice.
This is indeed the perspective of mainstream “Neoclassical” economic theory, in which Yellen was trained, and because of which she was deemed eligible—and indeed eminently suitable—to Chair the Federal Reserve.
This is the theory that led the OECD to proclaim, two months before the crisis began in August 2007, that “the current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years”, and that they expected that “sustained growth in OECD economies would be underpinned by strong job creation and falling unemployment.” (OECD, June 2007, “Achieving Further Re-balancing”).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fake News From the Fed
Fake News From the Fed
What you see in the media is mostly “fake news.”Reuters had this story recently:
Most Federal Reserve policymakers think the central bank should take steps to begin trimming its $4.5 trillion balance sheet later this year as long as the economic data holds up, minutes from their last meeting showed…
Provided that the economy continued to perform about as expected, most participants anticipated that gradual increases in the federal funds rate would continue and judged that a change to the Committee’s reinvestment policy would likely be appropriate later this year,” the Fed said in its minutes.
This is the public spectacle – where tiny and often trivial bits of real news are conflated with vast myths and illusions.
The Fed fiddles with short-term interest rates… President Trump tweets a threat to the Freedom Caucus… the GOP proposes a new health-care plan…
You can’t know what any of these “facts” mean without reference to a huge body of non-facts – beliefs, ideas, and prejudices, many of them absurd.
Remember, a “myth” is not necessarily untrue; it just can’t be tested or disproven.
And since reality is infinitely complex, and a myth can only reflect a small trace of it… no matter how attractive or “true” it is, the myth always leaves out more truth than it describes.
Critical Narrative
We make no pretense of ever knowing the “truth.”
That would be impossible. All we can do is try to identify the most ridiculous myths… and find the most useful one, the one we can believe without getting kicked in the pants.
Imagine you were a Jew in Germany in the 1930s… or a stock market investor in the US in 1929… or a merchant in Mosul, Iraq, in 2003.
In each case, there were plenty of ways to understand what was going on. But the critical narrative was: Time to get out of town.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Air China Suspends Flights To North Korea As Kim Vows “Merciless Response To Any US Provocation”
Air China Suspends Flights To North Korea As Kim Vows “Merciless Response To Any US Provocation”
In the latest escalation over what may be an imminent preemptive airstrike on North Korea by US warships now located just 300 miles away from the North Korean nuclear test site, moments ago China’s national airline, Air China, announced it was suspending flights from Beijing to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, from late on Friday, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said. It did not say why the flights, which operate on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, were being suspended.
In the report published on its website, CCTV did not cite a source while according to Reuters, Air China could not immediately be reached for comment after business hours. The last flight between the two cities took place on Friday, with the return flight to Beijing arriving in the early evening, the broadcaster said. Air China began regular flights between the two countries in 2008 but the flights were frequently cancelled because of unspecified problems, the broadcaster said. China is North Korea’s sole major ally but it disapproves of the North’s weapons programs, and its confrontations with the United States and its Asian allies, and it has supported U.N. sanctions against it.
Following repeated missile tests that drew international criticism, China banned all imports of North Korean coal on Feb. 26, cutting off the country’s most important export product. North Korea’s army vowed a ‘merciless’ response to any US provocation, the official news agency reported Friday, as tensions soar over Pyongyang’s rogue nuclear program.
Meanwhile, after warning that it was ready to “go to war”, on Friday North Korea’s army vowed a “merciless” response to any US provocation, the official news agency reported Friday. A statement of KCNA, which cited Washington’s recent missile strike on Syria, said the administration of President Donald Trump had “entered the path of open threat and blackmail against the DPRK”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Mattis “We’re Not In Iraq To Seize Anybody’s Oil”
Mattis “We’re Not In Iraq To Seize Anybody’s Oil”
In the latest distancing by Trump administration advisors from recent statements by the President, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit on Monday to discuss the war effort against ISIS, and said that the US military is not in Iraq “to seize anybody’s oil.”
Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, arrives in Baghdad, February 20, 2017
Speaking to a small group of reporters traveling with him, Mattis was quoted by Reuters as saying “I think all of us here in this room, all of us in America, have generally paid for our gas and oil all along and I’m sure that we will continue to do so in the future.”
On his first trip to Iraq as Pentagon chief, Mattis is set to assess the war effort against the Islamic State as Iraqi forces launch a new push to evict ISIS militants from their remaining stronghold in the city of Mosul. In Iraq, he is likely to face questions about Trump’s remarks and actions, including a temporary ban on travel to the United States and for saying America should have seized Iraq’s oil after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003. Trump told CIA staff in January: “We should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you’ll have another chance.”
Trump later clarified his position in an ABC interview. The president said ISIS would not have become a global threat if it hadn’t taken over Iraq’s oil industry when the country was left weakened by the war.
“We should’ve kept the oil when we got out. And, you know, it’s very interesting, had we taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS, because they fuel themselves with the oil. That’s where they got the money. They got the money… when we left, we left Iraq, which wasn’t a government.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Alabama, Tennessee, & Georgia Declare States Of Emergency As Gas Shortages Loom After Pipeline Leak
Alabama, Tennessee, & Georgia Declare States Of Emergency As Gas Shortages Loom After Pipeline Leak
As Native Americans protesters face arrest in North Dakota for blocking the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, TheAntiMedia’s Carey Wedler reports a gasoline pipeline spill is currently unfolding in the South. The leak has prompted Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal to declare states of emergency.
The Colonial Pipeline, which runs from Houston to New York, began leaking on September 9, spilling 250,000 gallons of gasoline, or 6,000 barrels. The pipeline was built in 1962, and the current leak in Helena, Alabama, is the largest one Colonial Pipeline has experienced in 20 years, Reuters noted.
AL.com reported that according to the Colonial Pipeline company’s spokesperson, Bill Berry, the pipeline could still be leaking:
“The leaking pipeline was shut down [last] Friday after the leak was discovered, but Berry said there may be additional gas still inside the pipeline. The leaking section of pipeline hasn’t been excavated yet due to safety precautions, so Berry said the condition of the pipeline and cause of the leak is still unknown.”
Hundreds of employees and contract workers face health risks from inhaling vapor as they work overtime to clean up the spill, which the company says is contained to a mining retention pond. AL.com reports “the leak was discovered at the inactive mine site by employees of the Alabama Surface Mining Commission.”
The governors of Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama have declared states of emergency, not due to environmental concerns, but over the gas shortage that will result from the leak. After Colonial Pipeline announced Thursday there would be a delay in restarting the pipeline because “work activity was intermittent overnight due to unfavorable weather conditions that caused gasoline vapors to settle over the site,” the price of gasoline futures rose six percent… even as crude futures prices tumbled…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Puerto Rico Defaults On $2 Billion In Debt Payments
Puerto Rico Defaults On $2 Billion In Debt Payments
As expected, Puerto Rico will default on about $2 billion in debt payments Friday, including $780 million in constitutionally-backed general obligation bonds, as governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has issued an executive order authorizing the suspension of payments. In addition, Garcia Padilla also declared states of emergency at the island’s biggest public pension – the Commonwealth’s Employee Retirement System – which is more than 99% underfunded, as well as the University of Puerto Rico and other agencies Reuters reports. The default will mark the first time a US territory has failed to pay on its general obligation bonds.
“Under these circumstances, these executive orders protect the limited resources available to the agencies listed in these orders and prevents that these can be seized by creditors, leaving Puerto Ricans without basic services,” Garcia Padilla’s administration said in a statement.
The suspension of payments comes just as the Senate rushed a bill to President Obama that was signed on Thursday, and the bill will now allow Puerto Rico to access a bankruptcy-like debt restructuring process for its roughly $70 billion in debt. As Bloombergexplains, the next phase will now be for the US appointed control board to begin the restructuring negotiation process. The step allows Garcia Padilla to use cash that would otherwise go to investors to avert cuts to schools, policing and health care that Garcia Padilla said would extract a heavy toll on the island where nearly half of the 3.5 million residents live in poverty.
While creditors will now be left to battle it out in the courts, the default will leave large insurers of Puerto Rico’s bonds on the hook for payments. As CNBC reports, Assured Guaranty, Ambac and National, a wholly owned subsidiary of MBIA, collectively have more than $800 million in exposure to the total payments due Friday.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Italy Granted “Extraordinary ” €150BN Bank Bailout Program To Prevent “Panic, Run On Deposits”
Italy Granted “Extraordinary ” €150BN Bank Bailout Program To Prevent “Panic, Run On Deposits”
As we noted today, the rumors of an Italian bank bailout, which started on Monday morning, and were promptly shot down by Merkel the next day, got louder after a Reuters report that the Italian government is considering more creative ways to inject liquidity into Italy’s banks. However that was just an appetizer to a main course, which came later today when as the WSJ reported citing a spokeswoman for the European Union’s executive arm that the “European Commission has authorized Italy to use government guarantees to create a precautionary liquidity support program for their banks.”
How did this happen so quietly under the table and without Merkel’s blessing? WSJ says that the program was approved under the bloc’s “extraordinary crisis rules for state aid.”
And here we thought that Italy’s banks are actually doing so very well. Oh wait, no we didn’t.
As the WSJ notes, the proposed “crisis” plan is the “other leg of an intervention plan considered by the government” namely, the direct capital injection into Italian banks that would add up to €40 billion in capital to the banking sector”, the one we profiled previously. It is also the plan that Merkel supposedly shut down before it got off the ground. However, Europe had a Plan B up its sleeve.
What are the details of this latest “crisis” program?
According to an EU official, the liquidity support program includes up to €150 billion ($166 billion) in government guarantees. The WSJ adds that the commission spokeswoman declined to comment on the amount of guarantees that were authorized, but said that the budget requested by the Italian government had been found to be proportionate. The Italian economy ministry declined to comment.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US Hacking, Spyware Targets Include Mass Media, Phone, and Energy Companies
US Hacking, Spyware Targets Include Mass Media, Phone, and Energy Companies
US corporate government wants to control and drain as much of the world as possible. Reuters, The Register, and others summarize some of its methods:
“The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives …. giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world’s computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.
Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran [a US corporate target since 1953], followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.”
These hacking and spyware operations date back “at least 14 years and possibly up to two decades”.
Other outlets note:
NSA Hackers Infected Hard Drives with Impossible-to-Remove Spyware
Spyware Linked To NSA Discovered In Hard Drives Across The World
The Only Way You Can Delete This NSA Malware Is to Smash Your Hard Drive to Bits
There’s no way of knowing if the NSA’s spyware is on your hard drive
China Furious After US Launches Trade War “Nuke” With 522% Duty
China Furious After US Launches Trade War “Nuke” With 522% Duty
Now that China’s brief infatuation with “rationalizing” excess capacity in its massively glutted (and insolvent) steel sector is over after lasting all of 2-3 months, China is back to doing what it did in late 2015 (and what it has always done) when as we reported, a surge in Chinese exports led to the first salvos in the trade war between China – the world’s biggest exporter of various steel products and is responsible for half the entire world’s steel output – and countries who are importing dumped Chinese products at the expense of their own steel and mining industries.
Nowhere has this trade tension been more obvious than in the UK, where in recent months angry, protesting steel workers have been demanding rising protectionist steps against a country they, rightfully, see as unleashing a global commodity deflation driven by out of control, and unprofitable by highly subsidized, production by Chinese steel mills.
The US was not left unscathed: we reported in December that “The Trade Wars Begin: U.S. Imposes 256% Tariff On Chinese Steel Imports” and since then things have progressively turned worse, finally culminating overnight with an outburst of anger from Chinese officials who, after attempting to flood not just the US but also the entire world with their commodity in general and steel in particular, exports…
… Pushing prices even lower…
…. have criticized U.S. anti-dumping penalties imposed on Chinese steel amid mounting complaints Beijing is exporting at improperly low prices to clear a backlog at home.
The numbers, however, do not lie and confirm that China is engaging in massive global commodity dumping.
Chinese exports hit a record 112 million tonnes last year, with rivals claiming that Chinese steelmakers have been undercutting them in their home markets. According to Reuters, in the four months to April, China’s steel exports have risen nearly 7.6% to 36.9 million tonnes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China Warns US: “Don’t Disturb” Hong Kong Social Order; Threatens “Bad Reaction”
China Warns US: “Don’t Disturb” Hong Kong Social Order; Threatens “Bad Reaction”
Over the past few months, tensions have been high between the U.S. and China. Events such as China denying USS John C. Stennis and its escort ships access to a Hong Kong port showed just how strained relations have become between the two countries, and with China’s recent comments saying that U.S. activity near the Fiery Cross Reef “threatened China’s sovereignty and security interests”, one would assume that things couldn’t get much worse.
Alas, that assumption would be wrong. As Reuters reports, China is now accusing the U.S. of trying to “disturb” social order in Hong Kong, something that Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said will “cause Chinese people to go on alert and have a bad reaction.”
Channel NewsAsia has more…
BEIJING: China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday accused unidentified people in the United States of trying to “disturb” social order in Hong Kong, after the U.S. State Department expressed further concern the territory’s autonomy was being eroded.The State Department made the comments in its latest report on the former British colony, released on Wednesday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that as Hong Kong was a part of China, no other country had a right to interfere in its internal affairs.“We also remind the United States that certain people on the U.S. side have always wanted to disturb Hong Kong, disturb its socio-economic development, disturb the normal order of its residents’ lives, and even use the Hong Kong issue to interfere in China’s internal affairs,” he told a daily news briefing.
“This can only be futile. The only effect it will have is to cause Chinese people to go on alert and have a bad reaction.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
America’s Biggest of All Big Lies (I)
ERIC ZUESSE | 05.05.2016 | WORLD
America’s Biggest of All Big Lies (I)
On April 26th, Reuters headlined from Romania, «‘We’re Not Here to Provoke,’ Say US Pilots on Putin’s Doorstep», and gave as an example: «‘We’re not here to provoke anybody, we’re here to work with our allies,’ says Dan Barina, a 26-year-old pilot on his first trip to a region where tensions have risen markedly since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Romania’s neighbor Ukraine two years ago».
How can it not be ‘provoking’, when Russia now faces a threat from Obama and America’s NATO alliance, that’s vastly worse than what America had faced from the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? That was just one missile-base, 90 miles from the US – not dozens of them, some right on Russia’s border. Are those American pilots idiots to believe their superiors’ absurd statements about what their mission is, or is insanity the explanation here – or, is there even some third explanation possible for this oblivious statement from the American pilot? Perhaps those soldiers and airmen are simply drowning in (or drunk with) US propaganda? They really believe that Russia is moving too close to NATO, not that NATO has already moved too close to Russia? Really? The Reuters report said that NATO countries were doing this to protect themselves from «an increasingly aggressive Russia». Wow. But that’s the line promoted by US President Barack Obama. And he’s accepted as a decent person not only by the millions of voters in his own Democratic Party (though not in the Republican Party, which blames him for everything except the truth: that he is governing so far to the right that they have to concoct false ‘leftist’ reasons to criticize him); but, he’s also respected even by the publics in Europe, where they suffer the flood of refugees from the invasions he leads.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Saudi Foreign Minister Repeats Warning To US Over Sept 11 Law
Saudi Foreign Minister Repeats Warning To US Over Sept 11 Law
The biggest financial and geopolitical story from mid-April was Saudi Arabia’s threat that should the US pass a bipartisan law which would take away immunity from foreign governments in cases arising from a “terrorist attack that kills an American on American soil” and specifically could hold the Saudi kingdom responsible for its role in the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, then the Saudis would retaliate by selling up to $750 billion in American assets.
Today, the Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, while speaking to reporters in Geneva after talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry which mainly focused on Syria, admitted this threat saying passage of the law would “erode global investor confidence in America” by which he was, of course, referring only to Saudi Arabia. However, to avoid another slap in the face of US foreign policy on the record, he denied that Saudi Arabia had “threatened” to withdraw investment from its close ally and instead called it a mere “warning.”
“We say a law like this would cause an erosion of investor confidence. But then to kind of say, ‘My God the Saudis are threatening us’ – ridiculous,” Jubeir hedged according to Reuters.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir talks to the media in
Geneva, May 2, 2016
“We don’t use monetary policy and we don’t use energy policy and we don’t use economic policy for political purposes. When we invest, we invest as investors. When we sell oil, we sell oil as traders.”
That said we are confident that Jubeir realizes very well that everyone else uses monetary and energy policy for political purposes – hence the Trasury’s brand new Friday watchlist for currency manipulators – which is why when he calls it “erosion of investor confidence” the world reads clearly between the lines.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
