People helping sloths cross the road is not a new genre of video. You've probably seen the "I Believe I Can Fly" clip from many years ago. But this one adds a delightful new wrinkle.
Back in October 2018, Bloomberg reported that some motherboards made by Supermicro had malicious components on them that were used to spy or interfere with the operation of the board, and that these motherboards were found on servers used by Amazon and Apple. Now it's time to look at how things shook out.
Our rediscovery of this critically endangered species raised a couple of questions. Where had it been hiding for 30 years? And, given the abundance of apparently suitable habitat on the island, why was it restricted to one location?
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich had a blast swinging around nunchucks after the state repealed their ban — though they're still technically illegal.
Throw it back to simpler times when you were obsessively connected to simpler devices: this New BittBoy Retro Gaming System lets you store a wide variety of games you can play on-the-go through a micro SD card, so you can play your favorite games at any time.
The Alabama Senate approved a measure on Tuesday that would outlaw almost all abortions in the state, setting up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the case that recognized a woman's constitutional right to end a pregnancy.
With the 7 Pro, OnePlus is declaring that it's no longer just a middle-weight boxer. It wants to challenge Apple and Samsung in the heavyweight class. It has created a phone that has certainly earned a chance to take on the champions — but is also substantially cheaper.
Researchers have uncovered yet another flaw in the deepest guts of Intel's microscopic hardware. This time, it can allow attackers to eavesdrop on virtually every bit of raw data that a victim's processor touches.
Some of the burden on city dwellers' mental health can be traced to social problems such as loneliness and the stress of living cheek-by-jowl with thousands or even millions of other people. But there's something about the physical nature of cities that also seems to put a strain on the emotional wellbeing of their inhabitants.
Amazon Prime members get perks every day with two-day shipping, access to Prime Video and Music, and more. Outside of those consistent benefits, Prime members also get to take advantage of special deals and discounts.
If you like watching TV but don’t like paying for cable, you’ve got to jump on the Fire TV train. And if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can save up to $50 on Fire TV devices right now.
The Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Cube turn your TV into a smart device and basically eliminate the need for a cable package. They bring you streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Showtime, and Prime Video and give you voice commands to check the weather, listen to the news, control smart home accessories, and more. Read more...
Ultimate Ears is the brand to buy when it comes to durability and portability, immediately recognizable by the sleek cylindrical shape that offers 360-degree sound. You were probably already considering buying one, so here's your sign: The Ultimate Ears Megaboom 3 is on sale for $30 off at Amazon, making it just $169.99. With Prime shipping. Oh yeah.
It’s impossible not to come across at least ten people with a pair of AirPods stuffed into their ears on a daily basis (or maybe you’ve spotted a few laying on the train tracks during your morning commute). Their popularity has skyrocketed, and they’ve basically become the most coveted Bluetooth headphones in today’s technological zeitgeist. And that isn’t for no reason — users swear by their convenience, sound quality, and style (they also come with the benefit of carrying the Apple name).
You can save $20 on a pair of your own Apple AirPods over on Amazon right now — the deal is so good that they keep selling out and restocking on a consistent basis. Read more...
War is a hell that reveals darkness in our hearts. Hate plus power makes a heady cocktail that turns people into monsters. Atrocities are committed by hotheads convinced of their own righteousness, and someone somewhere is always shocked that their child could have participated in a massacre.
None of this is news to anyone with a passing interest in human history, but it is apparently something we all need to keep re-learning, over and over. The latest lesson has arrived in the form of Game of Thrones Season 8 episode 5, "The Bells." Or, if we're going to name it Friends-style, The One Where It Becomes Clear This Was Never A Game. Read more...
When it comes to deals, it's the gaming consoles, TVs, smartphones, and laptops that naturally take centre stage. Those are the rock stars of the tech world, and demand attention when discounted. It's not always the flashy stuff that you actually need the most though. Sometimes you need to invest in the basics.
AmazonBasics offers everyday items like audio cables, batteries, and HDMI cables to support your devices, as well as essentials for the home like kitchen utensils and bed sheets. Basically, all the stuff you kind of forget about, but couldn't do without.
You can now save up to 20 percent on electronics and office products from AmazonBasics, with extension cables, carrying cases, headsets, USB cables, protective covers, and much more available at reduced rates. The store has everything you need, all in one place. Read more...
Furry friends are special. So special in fact that a lot of you are kind of obsessed, and it shows. Don't think we don't notice the massive stack of photos on your instagram profile, with love hearts of every colour underneath each snap of your kitty or pooch. We see it, and we support it.
Your obsession might not be totally healthy, but it's too late to go back now. You might as well take it to the next step, and invest in a GPS pet tracker, so you can keep tabs on your precious little baby in real-time.
We could talk to you about how the Oral-B SmartSeries 6500 electric toothbrush is the world’s first of its kind with Bluetooth connectivity. We could also tell you how it has five cleaning modes, and provides real time brushing guidance with pressure sensors that light up if you brush too hard. We could tell you all this, but that would be missing the point.
All of the above is true, but what's more important than all that is the price. This smart device is usually listed at £229.99, but is available for just £64.99 until midnight on May 15. That is a frankly staggering discount of £165. You don't regularly see a 72 percent reduction in list price, so you need to make your move when you do. Read more...
Summer is on its way, and that means you need to get your garden in order. Don't panic just yet though, because we can help.
We have tracked down the best deals on garden furniture, with heavily discounted tables, chairs, benches, and lounge sets. If the idea of venturing outside sounds unpleasant, then we have also lined up the best 4K TV deals, so you can stay safely inside.
Elsewhere in this deals round-up, you can find discounted Apple iPhones, MacBooks, Sony speakers, Braun shavers, and much more.
These are the best deals from across the internet for May 15.
Best of the best
Take your pick from this selection of the very best deals, including electric toothbrushes, shavers, speakers, smartphones, and laptops. Read more...
The first launch window is from a 10:30 p.m. ET Wednesday until 12:00 a.m. Thursday. Failing that, a second launch window opens at 10:30 p.m. ET Thursday and closes at 12:00 a.m. ET Friday.
The livestream of the mission will start about 15 minutes before liftoff, and you can watch it below. Read more...
Boosted is known for its electric skateboards and longboards, but now the California-based company is getting into scooters.
The company's first electric scooter, the Boosted Rev, is built to get you where you're going even if you don't have a car. With a 22-mile range on a single charge, enough power to take on 25 percent-grade hills, and a top speed of 24 mph, it feels more like a vehicle than a toy or gadget. It can fold up if you take the train and then scoot home from the station, making it perfect for just about any situation.
It's a hefty scooter at 46 pounds with wide tires, especially compared with the two-wheelers from scooter-sharing companies Bird and Lime. Read more...
HP's newest gaming laptop embeds a mini LED touch screen above the keyboard so you can view other applications while you play your favorite games.
The Omen X 2S is the world's first dual-screen gaming laptop, according to HP. The device's main screen comes in at 15 inches, but in the event you'd like to chat over Twitch or access Spotify while you game, you can easily do so with the help of the 6-inch screen below.
Image: hp
HP designed the product to appeal to gamers, particularly in China, who often use their smartphones to chat with friends, listen to music, or watch videos while they game over a PC. Read more...
It's here, peopleBlack Mirror has burst back onto the scene with a suitably creepy trailer for its fifth Season.
Featuring appearances from the likes of Miley Cyrus and Anthony Mackie, the 90-second video includes plenty of familiar Black Mirror tropes: smartphones aplenty, creepy little robots, and basically a whole lot of people looking generally miserable and disturbed with how their lives have turned out.
We can't wait!
Black Mirror Season 5 drops on Netflix June 5.Read more...
Always wanted to set up a home security camera system? Lucky for you, Amazon is offering this eufy Security eufyCam E wireless home security 2-camera system for $269.99 (listed at $399.99) with EUFY88AP code.
Equipped with 1080p IP65 weatherproof-rated cameras, that can run for 365 days per charge. And no monthly fees for using, as these cameras support up to 128GB mircoSD card. An optional cloud storage service is also available.
As this is compatible with Amazon Alexa, you can simply live stream eufyCam E footage via Echo Show or Echo Spot devices. Allowing you to check what's happening around the house without taking your phone out your pocket. Read more...
Stephen Colbert's latest monologue is — you guessed it — all about Trump's ongoing trade war/"squabble" with China.
But before he broke it all down, he got in a quick Game of Thrones-themed dig.
"Yes, it was a must-see television event," Colbert says, mimicking a recent Trump speech in which the president spoke about November 2016. "Everybody tuned in to see me ride my dragon and burn Washington to the ground."
"I'm telling you, I don't know why people complained," he continues. "The writers had been hinting all season that that's how we were gonna wrap up democracy." Read more...
The penultimate episode of Game of Thrones gave us plenty of conclusions to years-long character arcs, but left one much larger question in their stead: What was the point? Like, of any of this.
Let's be clear. The problem is not that the show concluded with the destruction of King's Landing by one of its major heroes. Those who've been paying attention always knew this would end as a story about how people fail, and not about how heroes win or lose.
But in itsclumsy execution of catastrophic proportions, Game of Thrones set fire to its own sense of purpose along with the capital, leaving behind nothing but the taste of ash in our mouths. Read more...
May is National Masturbation Month, and we're celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure.
If you love obsessing over your favorite movies, television shows, or mythical creatures whenever you get a chance, we've got good news: Now you can geek out in the bedroom, too.
From dildos inspired by Marvel characters to vibrators that look like your go-to sexting emoji, there are a whole bunch of sex toys that will not only help you take your masturbation game to the next level, but also let you celebrate your favorite fandom in the process.
Here are 8 lines of sex toys sure to delight any pop culture buff. Read more...
Warning: Contains spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 8, episode five.
The Simpsons has, undeniably, predicted a whole bunch of real-world eventsWhen it comes to politics in particular, America's favourite animated family seems to have a habit of hitting the nail on the head.
But not all predictions are as impressive as they first seem.
Back in 2016, a tweet claiming that The Simpsons predicted Trump's presidency went viral — but the date on one of the images was later shown to be wrong, while another had been taken totally out of context. Read more...
As chic as it is to use those netted bags made popular by influencers everywhere, they're more suitable for Instagram-worthy trips to the farmer's market than your monthly trip to Costco.
When you're actually in a supermarket, bagging your groceries is more akin to IRL Tetris as you try to fit all your goods into a few eco-friendly bags.
Boasting an innovative design with built-in egg and wine holders, these bags allow you to pack your purchases in an organized fashion and in a fraction of the time. They feature removable Velcro handles that let you hang the bags on the back of shopping carts or over your shoulder while transporting them from your cart to your car. Read more...
Itching for a career change? While you may have thought you missed the train on coding jobs, that's not the case. Developers are as in demand as ever before, doing everything from building back-end databases from scratch to touching up interactive graphics on websites and apps for virtually any business that's serious about competing in today's tech-driven economy.
One great place to start: the Legendary Learn to Code Bundle, a massive online learning collection that features more than 120 hours of online training dedicated to coding. It's normally worth $2346.99 altogether, but for a limited time, you can pay whatever price you want for the content. Read more...
The U.S. government is already prohibited from using Huawei's telecommunications equipment. Soon, the same might be true for U.S. companies.
According to a Reuters report Wednesday, president Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would bar U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by companies which pose a national security risk. This would pave the way for an effective ban for companies on doing business with Huawei, and potentially other Chinese companies such as ZTE.
The report, which cites three unnamed U.S. officials familiar with the matter, says the order has been under consideration for more than a year, but has been delayed several times — and it may get delayed again. Read more...
Stranger Things is returning soon, which means brands are rolling out things to throw your money at.
Such as Lego, which has launched a set featuring the Byers' house, where the real world sits up top while The Upside Down lurks below.
The detail is great, as you'll notice from the Christmas light communication system which resides at the back of the house. Yes, it even lights up.
The back of the Lego Stranger Things: The Upside Down set.
Image: LEGO
Will Byers' bedroom is even faithfully replicated, where you'll spot his boombox, bed, desk, desk lamp, drawings and movie posters all in place. Read more...
Everyone loves a good Google Earth easter egg, especially when they're dick-shaped.
First spotted by Reddit user u/adrianmtb and reported by publisher Broadsheet, a collection of phallic symbols have appeared on three parks in the northeast of Melbourne, Australia.
Three penis-shaped glyphs were flagged as visible at T W Blake Park in the suburb of Preston. We checked, they're thereBroadsheet clocked the biggest of the three at 122 metres (133 yards) long.
Boom.
Image: MASHABLE SCREENSHOT / GOOGLE EARTH
News outlets have compared the glyphs to Peru's renowned (and also mysterious) Nazca Lines, a perplexing ancient collection of geoglyphs — zig-zagging straight lines, geometric figures, and renderings of animal and plants — which can only be really viewed properly from above. Read more...
After much speculation, Facebook has imposed restrictions on live-streaming following the New Zealand attacks in March.
Announced on Tuesday, the company will implement a "one strike" policy which will restrict anyone who violates the social network's community standards from using Facebook Live.
Users who violate the network's most serious policies will be prohibited from using Live for a certain period of time, which will begin from their first offence. One example of an offence is a user who "shares a link to a statement from a terrorist group with no context."
Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said in the blog post that the company's goal was "to minimize risk of abuse on Live while enabling people to use Live in a positive way every day." Read more...
"Quiet preferred." That's one way to tell your Uber driver to STFU, politely.
Quiet mode is one of the new preferences available beginning Tuesday evening across the U.S. for premium Uber rides, which means only Uber Black or Uber Black SUV rides. This is the first time the option has been available on the Uber app.
Now when you order a black car (that means professional drivers and luxury vehicles, so no Priuses) you have a list of preferences you can select.
Riders have been clamoring for a "quiet mode" for when you don't want to chat. So in the app you can now say you have no preference, quiet preferred, or happy to chat as your preferred conversation level. There's also temperature preferences and a request for luggage help. Read more...
Twitter has become the latest social media company to address misinformation about vaccines on its platform.
The company announced that it will redirect users to a "credible public health resource" when they search for specific terms associated with vaccines.
"At Twitter, we understand the importance of vaccines in preventing illness and disease and recognize the role that Twitter plays in disseminating important public health information," Twitter's VP of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey wrote in a blog post. "We think it's important to help people find reliable information that enhances their health and well-being." Read more...
The city that has for many come to symbolize the power of tech, both in all its terror and glory, took an important step on Tuesday to rein in some of that power. The city's Board of Supervisors voted 8 to 1 in a veto proof majority to approve a wide-ranging ordinance that broadly regulates surveillance technology and prohibits outright the local government's use of facial-recognition tech for surveillance.
While this ban has not yet technically become law — the ordinance goes back before the Supervisors on May 21 and then Mayor London Breed must sign it — its backers are confident that, having passed this first hurdle, the ordinance's success is essentially assured. Read more...
Have you heard the news? Everyone's running for president in 2020! Well, sort of.
It's still early, but 22 whole Democrats have already announced their plans to campaign, and boy does it feel like a lot of people.
On Tuesday, Twitter user @MorganJerkins posed quite the challenge to followers by asking if anyone was able to name all 22 Democratic presidential candidates.
Can YOU name all 22 democrats running for President?
Jerkins' question was "very serious." She swears. But alas, unable to resist the opportunity to joke, the unhinged people of social media used the question as fuel for a new political meme. Read more...
Facebook is about to let us in on one of its darkest secrets: how many companies can track us outside of its service, thanks to its ad targeting tools.
Though it's been well known within the tech and advertising industry, it's not something the typical Facebook user has been given much visibility into. But that will soon change, thanks to the company's upcoming "clear history" tool.
The long-promised (and much delayed) feature will allow people to see which websites send your browsing activity to Facebook and remove that info from the company's servers. It is expected to launch in the next few months, according to Facebook. Read more...
Sleep can make or break your day. If you wake up feeling energized and refreshed, concentrating and functioning will be a breeze. On the other hand, if you spend most of your nights tossing and turning, the whole day can feel like a challenge. You’ll be fatigued, irritable, and reaching for the nearest caffeine source. Read more...
On this page you will find the trading definition of key terms made simple. There are no long-winded technical explanations- this is Stock Options Made Easy!
I have explained the terms as I perceive them, and as I apply them to my daily trading practice. This works extremely well for me and it can work for you too.
Stocks and Shares
A stock is the collective term for all the shares in one entity.
A share simply means owning a part of a business (corporation or company).
Therefore, you own shares in a specific stock.
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Options
When you buy an option, you are placing a bid on whether a share price will increase (this is called a call option), or decrease (a put option).
A lower amount of money is required to buy into options than shares, but the risk can be higher. A higher risk does bring an increased chance of a bigger profit though, so don't be afraid to take some calculated chances.
Options do offer a much higher potential return in a shorter time than most stocks.
Buying an option entails buying 'lots' of 100. This means that if the price of an option is $1.00, it will cost you $100.00 to buy in.
Options expire on the 3rd Friday of each month. This means that you generally have to sell your options before the expiry date, or risk losing your investment.
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Call Option
When you predict a share will increase in value, the option you would buy is called a call option. See the diagram below.
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Put Option
A put option can be purchased when research indicates that a share will decrease in value. See chart below.
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Day-Trading
This is the type of trading where you buy and then sell shares and/or options in the same day.
The requirement for day-trading is that your account balance is maintained at a minimum of USD25 000. You must maintain this balance in the account in order to keep trading.
If you are day-trading, the trading definition is that you are a 'day-trader.'
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Range-bound Markets A trading strategy that identifies stocks trading in channels. By finding major support and resistance levels with technical analysis, a range-bound trader(or a trend trader) buys stocks at the lower level of support (bottom of the channel) and sells them near resistance (top of the channel). See Strategies for a Range-bound Market! for further in-depth information.
Trading range-bound stock can be great short term money making opportunity by shorting and going long within the range. The range-bound trader may repeat the process of buying at support and selling at resistance many times until the stock breaks out of the channel. The upper boundary of the channel is shown by a trendline that connects the points representing a stock's highs over a given time period. The lower boundary of the channel is identified by connecting the points representing a stock's lows. The downside of this strategy is that when a stock breaks out of the channel, it usually experiences a large price movement in the direction of the breakout. If the breakout direction is not favorable for the trader's position, he or she could lose badly.
Range trading is a non-directional strategy which is based on the underlying assumption that 80% of the time, price action does not trend, but rather channels. Range trading offers several advantages including simplicity, and defined risk reward parameters.
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Backwardation Backwardation is a theory developed in respect to the price of a futures contract and the contract's time to expire. Backwardation says that as the contract approaches expiration, the futures contract will trade at a higher price compared to when the contract was further away from expiration. This is said to occur due to the convenience yield being higher than the prevailing risk free rate. How this Works When backwardation does occur in a futures market it has been suggested that an individual in the short position would benefit the most by delivering as late as possible. Backwardation in futures contracts was called "normal backwardation" by economist John Maynard Keynes. This is because he believed that a price movement like the one suggested by backwardation was not random but consistent with the prevailing market conditions. Backwardation is the opposite of contango.
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Contango Contango refers to the market condition wherein the price of a forward or futures contract is trading above the expected spot price at contract maturity. The resulting futures or forward curve would typically be upward sloping (i.e. "normal"), since contracts for further dates would typically trade at even higher prices.
The graph depicts how the price of a single forward contract will behave through time in relation to the expected future price at any point time. A contract in contango will decrease in value until it equals the spot price of the underlying at maturity. Note that this graph does not show the forward curve (which plots against maturities on the horizontal). An Example of Contango Suppose we enter into a Dec 2011 futures contract, today, for $100. Now go forward one month. The same Dec 2011 future contract could still be $100. But it might also have increased to $110 (this implies normal backwardation) or it might have decreased to $90 (implies contango). The definitions are as follows: • Contango is when the futures price is above the expected future spot price. Because the futures price must converge on the expected future spot price, contango implies that futures prices are falling over time as new information brings them into line with the expected future spot price. • Normal backwardation is when the futures price is below the expected future spot price. This is desirable for speculators who are "net long" in their positions: they want the futures price to increase. So, normal backwardation is when the futures prices are increasing. Consider a futures contract that we purchase today, due in exactly one year. Assume the expected future spot price is $60 (see the blue flat line in Figure 2 below). If today's cost for the one-year futures contract is $90 (the red line), the futures price is above the expected future spot price. This is a contango scenario. Unless the expected future spot price changes, the contract price must drop. If we go forward in time one month, note that we will be referring to an 11-month contract; in six months, it will be a six-month contract.
Conclusion Clearly, it is more precise to say that in contango, futures prices for a given maturity date are falling. In normal backwardation, futures are rising. This is not exactly the same as the shape of the futures curve because futures prices are constantly adjusting to consensus expectations about the expected future spot price.
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Bearish Cross A bearish cross is a trend indicated by a large candlestick followed by a much smaller candlestick where the body is located within the vertical range of the larger candle's body. Such a pattern is an indication that the previous upward trend is coming to an end. A bearish cross may be formed from a combination of a large white or black candlestick and a smaller white or black candlestick. The smaller the second candlestick the more likely the reversal of the direction is to occur. It is thought to be a strong sign that a trend is ending when a large white candle stick is followed by a small black candlestick.
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The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index represents the broadest index for the U.S. equity market, measuring the performance of all U.S. equity securities with readily available price data. The Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index (NASDAQ: W5000), or more simply the Wilshire 5000, is a market-capitalization-weighted index of the market value of all stocks actively traded in the United States. Currently, the index contains over 4,100 components. The index is intended to measure the performance of most publicly traded companies headquartered in the United States, with readily available price data, (Bulletin Board/penny stocks and stocks of extremely small companies are excluded). Hence, the index includes a majority of the common stocks and REITs traded primarily through New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, or the American Stock Exchange. Limited Partnerships and ADRs are not included. It can be tracked by following the ticker W5000.
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Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities - LEAPS Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities, better known as LEAPS, are publicly traded options contracts with expiration dates that are longer than one year. Actually, they are long term options with expiration of up to 39 months that expires every January of the year. Structurally, LEAPS are no different than short-term options, but the later expiration dates offer the opportunity for long-term investors to gain exposure to prolonged price changes without needing to use a combination of shorter-term option contracts. The premiums for LEAPs are higher than for standard options in the same stock because the increased expiration date gives the underlying asset more time to make a substantial move and for the investor to make a healthy profit. Using LEAPS LEAPS are an excellent way for a longer-term trader to gain exposure to a prolonged trend in a given security without having to roll several short-term contracts together. The ability to buy a call/put option that expires one or two years in the future is very alluring because it gives the holder exposure to the long-term price movement without the need to invest the larger amount of capital that would be required to own the underlying asset outright. These long-term options can be purchased not only for individual stocks, but also for equity indexes (such as the S&P 500).
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Calendar Spread An options or futures spread established by simultaneously entering a long and short position on the same underlying asset but with different delivery months. Calendar Spread Option Strategy When you are fairly neutral on the market and you want to generate additional income from your investments, this option strategy is worth consideration. This strategy involves selling an option with a nearby expiration, against the purchase of an option (with the same strike price) which has an expiration date that is further out. A Calendar Spread is an option spread where the strike prices are the same, but they have different expiration dates. These spreads are also referred to as horizontal spreads or time spreads. Calendar spreads can provide a way to add value to your portfolio through your purchase of a long term option with a reduced cost basis, provided by a near term option that you sold. An Example of a Calendar Spread An example of a calendar spread would be going long on a crude oil futures contract with delivery next month and going short on a crude oil futures contract whose delivery is in six months.
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Credit Spread "Credit spread" is an options strategy where a high premium option is sold and a low premium option is bought on the same underlying security. A More In-depth Explanation They are called such because when they are created, they put a "credit" into your trading account, as opposed to a "debit" which normally occurs when you are paying for a stock or its derivative. If, by the time the options in the credit spread expire, the share price hasn't breached a certain level; you get to keep the "credited" funds. The reason it creates a credit and not a debit, is because you're SELLING an option at a strike price which is closer to the current share price, but so as not to leave yourself exposed, you limit your risk by BUYING the same number of option contracts at a strike price further away, both having the same expiry date. The "sold" option, being closer to "the money" (share price), is more valuable than the "bought" option and so you receive a credit. The trick here is to open the spread with a short time to expiry, thus taking advantage of the "time decay" factor in options. Options have a time decay which falls away exponentially the closer the expiry date approaches, so creating a credit spread with a maximum 4-6 weeks to expiry is where we want to be. Sometimes you can even enter with under 2 weeks to expiry and keep your credit much quicker, but you need to be more certain about the short term direction the share will move to do this, because your time frame is shorter. A "credit spread" can also be called a "credit spread option" or "credit risk option". Example An example would be buying a Jan 50 call on ABC for $2, and writing a Jan 45 call on ABC for $5. The net amount received (credit) is $3. The investor will profit if the spread narrows.
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Credit Suisse Credit Suisse is one of Switzerland's top financial services groups, though a distant second to behemoth rival firm UBS. The group provides investment management, private banking, and asset management services to clients around the world. Investment banking offerings include debt and equity underwriting, M&A advisory, and other securities services. The group provides wealth management services in Switzerland through subsidiary Clariden Leu; internationally, it operates under the Credit Suisse brand. Credit Suisse offers asset management services to individual, institutional, and government clients. The group has more than 250 retail branches in Switzerland and operates in more than 50 countries.
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Real Time Streaming This refers to continuous 'live' display of stock and options quotes. Real Time Streaming shows all stock prices from the major American Stock Exchanges.
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Initiating Activity When the market opens above (or below) the value area and does not get inside the value area. Initiating Buying: When the market opens and stays above the value area, this is a strong bullish signal. When this happens, you have dealer and institutional buying going on in the market. When the dealers and institutions are long, you don't want to put on a position opposite of what they are doing. The best chance to profit on a day like this will be from the long side. Buying breaks (dips in the market) to get long will be the best strategy. In fact, when the market has opened above and stays above the value area, you should be afraid of being short. Initiating Selling: When the market opens and stays below the value area, this is a strong bearish signal. When this happens, you have dealer and institutional selling going on in the market. When the dealers are short, you don't want to put on a position opposite of what they are doing. The best chance to profit on a day like this will be from the short side. Selling rallies to get short will be the best strategy. In fact, when the market has opened below and stays below the value area, you should be afraid of being long.
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Responsive Activity The opposite of initiating activity. When the market is above (or below) the value area and does get into the value area. Responsive Buying: When the market opens below the value area and buying starts coming into the market (in other words, the market starts moving higher when it is below the value area.) Buyers are "responding" to the market being below the value area and they are attempting to buy the market cheap, thus pushing the market back towards the value area. When we get responsive buying in the market, there is a good chance we will see the 80% rule come into play. Responsive Selling:When the market opens above the value area and selling starts coming into the market (in other words, the market starts moving lower when it is above the value area.) Sellers are "responding" to the market being above the value area and they are attempting to sell the market at higher prices than yesterday. When we get responsive selling in the market, there is a good chance that we will see the 80% rule come into play.
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Averaging Down Averaging down refers to when an investor buys additional shares of an asset at a lower price than what they originally paid. This is done to lower the overall "average price" of their position. Here's an example:
Joe Smith buys 1,000 shares of Microsoft at $25.00 per share. He believes in the direction of the company and has a great deal of confidence in management. The market's plunge, and Microsoft trades down to $20.00 per share. Joe Smith believes that the fundamentals in Microsoft have not changed, so he decides to buy another 1,000 shares of the company at $20 per share. Joe Smith has "averaged down" on his Microsoft position - he now owns 2,000 shares of the company at an average of $22.50 per share, instead of 1,000 shares at an average of $25 per share. Joe will now break even at $22.50 per share, but he owns double the shares. Take Note: Always have plans in place if you are planning on averaging down. Sometimes this is a good strategy, other times it's better to sell off a beaten down stock rather than buying more shares. Many people will average down in a stock because they are just too stubborn to take a loss - this is a sure recipe for disaster.
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Pyramiding
Pyramiding is an old trading strategy where a speculator adds to their position size by using margin from unrealized gains. This trading strategy is based solely on the power of using leverage and was made popular by one of the greatest traders of all-time, Jesse Livermore. In other words, an investor who is pyramiding uses excess margin from the increasing price of a security in his or her portfolio to purchase more of the same security. This is generally a slow method of increasing one's position size as the margin increases will permit successively smaller purchases. Example of a Pyramiding Strategy A pyramiding strategy is considered a risky investment approach, but with proper money management can produce stellar results. When the market took a nose dive, with little or no retracements, if a trader was short, this kind of market environment would have been a prime candidate for a number or pyramiding strategies. In the chart below, Citigroup took a beating from a swing high of $49 in early October to a low of $3 in November. In a pyramiding strategy a trader will want to add to their positions on each bounce. So, in the example below, when the stock fell from $49 and then had a short rally up to $35, this would represent a 29% drop, which on margin would be a 58% gain on your cash. This additional 29% of paper profits would then be used to add to the short position at $35 for the ride down. This process of adding to the short position would have continued all the way down to $3. Which would have produced much greater returns than simply shorting the stock at $45 and riding it down to $3.
Pyramiding Strategy
Problems Associated with Pyramiding Pyramiding will only work properly in a trending market. This is because if you are trading in a choppy market, the short-term corrections will naturally float towards previous swing points, thus eating into your original gains. So, remember to only consider such a trading strategy when both the markets and stocks are trending heavily in one direction.
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Channel The technical range between support and resistance levels that a stock price has traded in for a specific period of time. Channel traders capitalize on the tendencies of markets to trend.
Channel Characteristics In the context of technical analysis, a channel is defined as the area between two parallel trendlines and is often taken as a measure of a trading range. The upper trendline connects price peaks (highs) or closes, and the lower trendline connects lows or closes. An example of a channel is shown below. Breakout points in channels indicate bullish (on upward trends) or bearish (on downward trends) signals.
Note: 1. Channels are useful for short-to medium-term trading - not long-term trading or investing. The technique often works best on stocks with a medium amount of volatility. Remember, the volatility determines your profit per trade. Channeling also tends to work best when the technique is combined with other forms of technical analysis, at which we take a closer look below. 2. A breakout of a technical channel is seen as a bullish (on an upward breakout) or bearish signal (on a downward breakout).
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STOXX Stoxx is a series of market indexes that are representative of the European and global markets. These indexes cover a wide range of market segments including the broad market, blue chips, individual sectors and global indexes. While there are global STOXX indexes, the majority of the focus is placed on the European market. The STOXX indexes were created out of a venture between Dow Jones, Deutsche Boerse AG, and the SWX group. These indexes are tradable on the futures and options market and are also used as benchmarks for funds that trade in the European and global markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average in the U.S. is similar to the Dow Jones STOXX 50 Index.
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Dow Jones EURO STOXX 50 Index This is a market capitalization-weighted stock index of 50 large, blue-chip European companies operating within eurozone nations. The universe for selection is found within the 18 Dow Jones EURO STOXX Supersector indexes, from which members are ranked by size and placed on a selection list. The largest 40 stocks on the selection list are automatically chosen for the EURO STOXX 50. Any grandfathered index components receive next priority, then stocks ranked between 41 and 60 are chosen to reach the final number of 50 stocks in the index. The index is reconstituted annually and the weightings updated once per quarter to account for changes in market caps. The EURO STOXX 50 closely resembles the Dow Jones STOXX 50 in methodology and construction, with the exception that only companies who have fully transitioned to the euro currency can be members of the EURO STOXX 50. As such, U.K.-based companies are excluded even though many large multinationals trade on the London Stock Exchange.
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The Dow Jones STOXX 50 Index A stock index representing 50 of the largest companies in Europe based on market capitalization. The stock universe used for selection is an aggregate of the 18 Dow Jones STOXX 600 Supersector indexes, which together capture about 95% of the capitalization of the major stock exchanges in 18 European countries. Each sub-index places its largest members placed on a selection list, which is then ranked by market cap to choose the STOXX 50 members. The index, first reported in 1998, is reconstituted annually, and weightings are adjusted quarterly to account for proportional changes in underlying company market caps. The Dow Jones STOXX 50 index closely resembles the Dow Jones EURO STOXX 50 in methodology and construction, with the exception that it does not limit company selection to companies that have fully transitioned to the euro currency. The index limits the weighting of any one member to 10%, but no sector limitations are applied to the index's construction. As such, banking companies dominate the STOXX 50. The index is meant to capture blue-chip companies in the region, so the average market cap is large.
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MSCI All-Country World Index A market capitalization weighted index designed to provide a broad measure of equity-market performance throughout the world. The MSCI ACWI is maintained by Morgan Stanley Capital International, and is comprised of stocks from both developed and emerging markets. As of January 2009, this index contains stocks from 46 different countries. There are 23 countires classified as developed markets and 23 countries considered emerging markets. Typically the index is built first at the country level, and then the 46 indexes are aggregated into the MSCI All Country World Index. A similar index exists that contains the same countries with the exception of the U.S. - the MSCI ACWI Ex-U.S.
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International Monetary Fund - IMF The IMF is the International Monetary Fund, headquartered in Washington, D.C. It's a global organization made up of 185 member countries, founded in 1944 with the purpose to oversee global financial health and provide assistance when needed to its members. It is an international organization created for the purpose of: 1. Promoting global monetary and exchange stability. 2. Facilitating the expansion and balanced growth of international trade. 3. Assisting in the establishment of a multilateral system of payments for current transactions. Today, the IMF states its goals are "to promote international monetary cooperation, exchange stability, and orderly exchange arrangements; to foster economic growth and high levels of employment; and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease balance of payments adjustment."
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EURO STOXX 50 Volatility (VSTOXX) The VSTOXX Indices are based on EURO STOXX 50 realtime options prices and are designed to reflect the market expectations of near-term up to long-term volatility by measuring the square root of the implied variance across all options of a given time to expiration. The VSTOXX Indices are part of a consistent family of volatility indices: VSTOXX based on the EURO STOXX 50; VDAX-NEW based on the DAX; and VSMI based on the SMI. It is not possible to invest directly into the VSTOXX index as this is a theoretically calculated index and is not tradable. There are however VSTOXX® futures which are tradable; these are traded on Eurex.
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Vstoxx Short-Term Futures Index The VSTOXX Short Term Futures Index is an index that maintains a constant 1 month exposure to VSTOXX Futures. It does this by rolling positions in the first and second month futures each day to keep the exposure constant at 1 month. The VSTOXX Short-Term Futures Index is calculated and published by STOXX Ltd., however Barclays Capital has exclusive access to the index for 12 months from its creation.
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Glocalisation (or glocalization) Glocalisation is a portmanteau word of globalization and localization. By definition, the term "glocal" refers to the individual, group, division, unit, organisation, and community which is willing and able to "think globally and act locally." The term has been used to show the human capacity to bridge scales (local and global) and to help overcome meso-scale, bounded, "little-box" thinking. 'Glocals' is a term often used to describe a new social class: expat managers who travel often and switch homes often, and are therefore both global and local. The term glocalization originated from within Japanese business practices. It comes from the Japanese word dochakuka, which simply means global localization. Originally referring to a way of adapting farming techniques to local conditions, dochakuka evolved into a marketing strategy when Japanese businessmen adopted it in the 1980s. It was also used in the Global Change Exhibition (opened May 30, 1990) in the German Chancellery in Bonn by Manfred Lange, the director of the touring exhibit development team at that time. He described the interplay of local-regional-global interactions as "glocal", showing the depth of the space presented and drawn. The term was popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson in the 1990s, the Canadian sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman in the late 1990s, and Zygmunt Bauman. Hampton and Wellman have frequently used the term to refer to people who are actively involved in both local and wider-ranging activities of friendship, kinship and commerce. Thomas L. Friedman, in "The World is Flat", talks about how the Internet encourages glocalisation, such as encouraging people to make websites in their native languages. "Glocal" also pops up as a plot motivator in the 2010 film, "Up in the Air" when the career-ending counselors switch from in-person to videoconferencing terminations.
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Sector Rotation Sector Rotation is the action of a mutual fund or portfolio manager shifting investment assets from one sector of the economy to another. Not all sectors of the economy perform well at the same time. Sector rotation is a portfolio manager's attempt to profit through timing a particular economic cycle. Certain sectors of business profit more in certain stages of an economic cycle. This simple arrangement of stages provides a useful road map to traders of most stripes. Sector rotation, being an investment strategy involving the movement of money from one industry sector to another in an attempt to beat the market, evolved as a theory from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) data on economic cycles dating back to 1854. It's thanks to this cadre of government and academic economists that we know the start, end and duration of each business cycle. NBER are the ones that announce that a recession has officially ended. The data may be slow to develop, and a bit dry, but a little digging can provide insight that investors can use to make decisions. It's important to remember that past performance in the stock market does not always mean future success, and a particular sector may, or may not, be in favor at any time. That said, let's look at the data that can help investors decide what they should be invested in during any given market cycle.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average Index is an important US stock market index, as well as being one of the oldest. It was first published in 1896 by Charles Dow, and it is often referred to as the Dow Jones, the Dow 30, or just the Dow. The original purpose of the Dow was to measure the stock market performance of the industrial sector of the American economy, based on an average of the trading results of selected major US companies. The index initially comprised 12 industrial companies, but now includes 30 major companies; hence the name Dow 30.
Although the Dow retains its original name, many of the companies listed on the index do not have any relationship to traditional industry. The companies represented on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index are from diverse areas including banking and financial services, health care, and entertainment, as well as more typically industrial fields such as manufacturing, mining, or oil and gas.
How Important Is the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index?
There is little question that the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index is the most widely watched stock market index in the world. It is considered to be practically synonymous with market performance to the degree that a comment on the markets being 'up' or 'down' often relates in fact, to whether the Dow is up or down.
Due to the high frequency of trading experienced by the stocks represented on the Dow, throughout any trading session, the index can offer an up-to-the-minute portrayal of the general movement of the market. This ability to reliably and promptly indicate the basic market trend is one of the main reasons that the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index has remained such an important stock market index.
There are, of course, critics of the Dow who claim that such a small number of companies cannot provide a precise portrayal of overall market performance. Another point of contention is that the Dow is calculated as a price-weighted average, which means that higher-priced stocks have more influence over the average than lower-priced stocks, a fact that arguably offers a skewed perspective of the performance of stocks on the index. Often detractors of the Dow suggest that a market-value-weighted index such as the S&P 500 can offer a more accurate indication of market conditions.
Highs and Lows of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index
The level for the Dow in its early years moved between the 60s and 70s before hitting its first dramatic low of 28.48 in 1896. Between 1900 and 1920, the trading range for the Dow was between 53 and 107.23 points, with the highest level being reached at the end of 1919.
In 1928, the number of companies listed on the Dow was increased to 30, and on September 3, 1929 the average reached a new high of 381.17 points. This high was closely followed in October by the Crash of 1929, and the several years following brought the Great Depression. These events led to the Dow closing at a new low of 41.22 on July 8, 1932. The Dow ended the 1930s at around 150 points, which was roughly 40% lower than the level at which it started the same decade.
The 1940s saw the Dow increasing again to just over 200 points, and in the 1950s even greater increase took it to over 600. In the 1960s, the Dow climbed further to the 800 point level. In the 1970s, the Dow experienced a great deal of fluctuation, and reached a high of over 1000 several times, as well as a low of 577.60 in December 1974. Despite all this volatility, the 1970s ended with the Dow at virtually the same level it started the decade – a little over 800 points.
The 1980s included some fairly substantial decreases in the Dow, but overall, marked the biggest ever increase in the average, ending the decade at over 2700 points. On March 29, 1999, the Dow closed above 10 000 points, and just over a month later it exceeded 11 000 points.
Between 2000 and the end of 2009, the Dow experienced some significant drops, as well as reaching a new high of over 14 000 in July 2007. The Dow finished the decade under 11 000 points, a drop of around 9% from the beginning of the decade. From the beginning of 2010 and the end of 2014, the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index experienced an increase of 71%, closing 2014 at 17,823.07 points.
In Conclusion
Although there are some people who believe that the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index does not provide an accurate representation of the general stock market performance, there is no doubt that it is a very important and well-recognized index that provides insight into the market's basic trend, and is closely observed and widely-quoted around the world.
The nation's newest and most advanced nuclear-powered attack submarine and the lead ship of its class, PCU Virginia (SSN 774) returns to the General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard following the successful completion of its first voyage in open seas called "alpha" sea trials. July 30, 2004 (Wikipedia)
The Navy has begun work on a new generation of attack submarines with never-before-seen weapons, quieting technology
The Navy has begun work on a new generation of attack submarines with never-before-seen weapons, quieting technology, undersea attack drones, sonar and communications networking… to emerge at some point over the next 10 years or more.
Will it be the stealthiest, most lethal attack submarine ever to exist? That ….is the Navy plan.
Plans for the new boats, referred to as a new fleet of Block VI Virginia Class-Attack Attack-class submarines, include launching long-range precision strikes, delivering Special Operations Forces on secret high-risk attack missions, conducting ISR missions, networking with platforms and -- perhaps of greatest significance - operating undetected in high-threat waters.
An F/A-18E Super Hornet launches from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Red Sea. Dan Snow/U.S. Navy/via REUTERS
WNU Editor: The above picture came from this photo-gallery .... Editor's Choice Pictures (Reuters).
Satellite photos that purport to show Soviet-made S-300PT air defense systems at a US military site have surfaced online, prompting various theories about how and why they ended up there.
The speculations began after an image of what appear to be two 5P85PT launchers on semi-trailers and a 30N6 fire control system were posted online by a military enthusiast. The installations are an integral part of the S-300PT surface-to-air missile systems.
The United States and other nations worry that Russia's sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles will deny the skies to Western aircraft.
Too bad some Russians aren't so confident.
A Russian military expert warns that air defense missile systems, like the vaunted S-300 and S-400, aren't all they're cracked up to be.
The problem is that NATO can overwhelm Russia's air defenses, argues Anatolyevich Khramchikhin, deputy director of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis.
WNU Editor: Russians are not Supermen. And the S-400 platform can be defeated like platforms before it. And secrets are never kept secret for long .... US military has S-300 systems: Reports (Hurriyet Daily News).
Essay: Beijing's opaque approach to arms control obscures the growing threat of its nuclear arsenal
When it comes to nuclear arms control, China is great at playing hard to get. Beijing is the elusive beauty, a difficult but attractive target for those who seek nuclear disarmament. Powerful yet mysterious, shrouding its nuclear program in a haze of opacity, the Chinese government never actually gives its pursuers what they want. And China knows that only makes them more interested. Indeed, Beijing leads on its suitors with seductive promises of reducing its arsenal of nuclear weapons, only to demand more in return from other states before taking any steps. And then the cycle begins anew, with no fewer nuclear weapons in China.
Gassed up with a biofuel, a U.S. Air Force F-16 Falcon from the 180th Fighter Wing ANG goes through prefight checks before taxing down the runway for take off on February 12, 2012 in Toledo, Ohio. (U.S. Air Force Photo by: MSgt Jeremy Lock)
An F-16 fighter jet with the 180th Fighter Wing performed an emergency landing Tuesday morning at Toledo Express Airport after an onboard weapon jammed during training.
Staff Sgt. Shane Hughes, spokesman for the Ohio Air National Guard base at the airport, said F-16s were conducting routine training in Michigan when one experienced what's known as a "hung gun." He said a 20-millimeter cannon jammed, and standard procedure requires an emergency landing.
"They returned to base to have that checked out," Sergeant Hughes said.
Kayla Lewandowski, a Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority spokesman, said the landing occurred at 11 a.m.
"The aircraft landed safely and without incident, and taxied to the Air National Guard base under its own power," she said.
When President Trump's top national security advisers met for a classified meeting at the Pentagon last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan laid out several U.S. military options for Iran, separated into two distinct categories: retaliatory and offensive.
The revised Iran options ordered by John Bolton, President Trump's national security adviser, have different degrees and redlines for escalation, ranging from airstrikes to targeted incursions, Pentagon officials told Newsweek.
Defense Department officials who have been briefed on the details of the updated military plans for Iran agreed to speak with Newsweek on condition of anonymity. Pentagon officials confirmed a report published in The New York Times on Monday outlining an option to deploy as many as 120,000 U.S. troops to the Middle East if Iran initiates an attack on U.S. forces or continues to work on what the U.S. has alleged were secret nuclear proliferation objectives.
WNU editor: Preparing a wide range of military options is nothing new. As to reports that the U.S. wants to start a war against Iran, I doubt it. Especially since the military assets that would be necessary are not even remotely there. So why the Newsweek story? To me .... this story is a deliberate leak to put pressure on Iran.
Long-term standoff threatens to turn into crisis after alleged sabotage of two Saudi tankers
A festering four-year war, crippling sanctions, threats to maritime oil trade and a US naval battlegroup steaming for the Persian Gulf. Such developments were troubling enough, before two Saudi tankers were reportedly sabotaged off the UAE coast on Sunday – a development set to ratchet tensions between Tehran and Washington to new and combustible highs.
With Riyadh claiming significant hull damage to its ships and the UAE claiming the damage was done inside its territorial waters, what last week was a looming standoff is now a real-time crisis with potent implications for both global energy security and regional stability.
WASHINGTON (AP) — International worries that the Trump administration is sliding toward war with Iran flared into the open Tuesday amid skepticism about its claims that the Islamic Republic poses a growing threat to the U.S. and its allies in the Persian Gulf and beyond .
The U.S. military rebutted doubts expressed by a British general about such a threat. President Donald Trump denied a report that the administration has updated plans to send more than 100,000 troops to counter Iran if necessary. But Trump then stirred the controversy further by saying: "Would I do that? Absolutely."
Marine Corps F-35B Lightning IIs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 based in Iwakuni, Japan, fly in formation next to an Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker over Pacific waters. (Senior Airman John Linzmeier/Air Force)
* A Marine Corps F-35B suffered serious damages after a bird strike in Japan, according to Marine Corps Times. * The initial assessment indicated that this was a Class A mishap, meaning it involved at least $2 million in damages. * Birds have claimed the lives of dozens of US service members, and they cost the US military millions of dollars a year in damaged aircraft. Some airfields have set up bird cannons to disperse the flocks.
A bird reportedly managed to bang up an F-35 stealth fighter to the tune of at least $2 million.
A Marine Corps F-35B Joint Strike Fighter was recently forced to abort take-off after a surprise bird strike, Maj. Eric Flanagan, a spokesman for 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, told Marine Corps Times. The fighter never took flight and "safely taxied off the runway," but it didn't escape the situation unscathed.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves his hand, as he delivers a speech on the first day of Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz in Mashhad, northeast of Tehran, Iran March 21, 2019. Khamenei.ir/Handout via REUTERS
LONDON (Reuters) - Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday Tehran does not seek war with the United States despite mounting tensions between the two arch-enemies over Iranian nuclear capabilities and its missile program.
In comments to senior officials carried by state television, Khamenei also reiterated that the Islamic Republic would not negotiate with the United States on another nuclear deal.
"There won't be any war. The Iranian nation has chosen the path of resistance," Khamenei was cited as saying by the state media. "We don't seek a war, and they don't either. They know it's not in their interests."
WNU Editor: I hope that he is right. But one thing that I have learned over the years in doing this blog is that many people do not want war, but war definitely wants them.
Members of the international force fighting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, some of whose soldiers are pictured with French Defence Minister Florence Parly in February 2019, sees no increased threat from Iran (AFP Photo/Daphné BENOIT)
Deputy commander of anti-Isis coalition rebuts White House justification for sending troops
The top British general in the US-led coalition against Isis has said there is no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria, directly contradicting US assertions used to justify a military buildup in the region.
Maj Gen Christopher Ghika, who is a deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve, the coalition conducting counter-terrorist operations against Isis in Iraq and Syria, was repeatedly questioned by reporters about the threat from Shia militias in Syria and Iraq, cited by US officials over the past week as justification for speeding up the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group in the Gulf and for sending B-52 Stratofortress bombers and an anti-aircraft battery to the region.
The United States and China are headed for a "cold war lite," says Minxin Pei. What does this exactly mean? And what threat does China present to the U.S. that would necessitate such a confrontational posture? Can China transition to a less export-driven economy or will its growth inevitably slow? What are the root causes of corruption in China? Is Xi's anti-corruption campaign successful? These and other questions are explored in this week's episode of Jaw-Jaw.
WNU Editor: If China and the U.S. were in a Cold War right now, even a "lite" one, U.S. tariffs will be replaced with sanctions, and U.S. - China travel will be restricted. But if this continues we are heading that way.
* The US-China trade war has dramatically escalated over the past few days, with both sides announcing tariff increases on billions of dollars' worth of each other's goods. * Chinese state media — which functions as a Communist Party mouthpiece — issued a series of rabble-rousing statements on Monday accusing the US of "greed and arrogance" and calling for a "people's war" against it. * President Donald Trump's administration on Monday night threatened to impose tariffs of up to 25% on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. * If such tariffs were to be imposed, almost all Chinese imports to the US would be subject to tariffs. * Trump tweeted on Tuesday that his "respect and friendship" with Chinese President Xi Jinping was "unlimited" but that "this must be a great deal for the United States or it just doesn't make any sense."
The US-China trade war continues to heat up, with Beijing calling for a "people's war" against Washington and President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.
In a series of editorials and op-ed articles published Monday, Chinese state media slammed what it labeled the Trump administration's "greed and arrogance" and called for a "people's war" against it. Beijing's state-run media effectively serves as a mouthpiece for the Communist Party.
Madrid (AFP) - Spain has recalled a frigate accompanying a US aircraft carrier to the Middle East because of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran, the defence ministry said Tuesday.
"For the moment the frigate Mendez Nunez has left the combat group of the USS Abraham Lincoln," a ministry spokesman told AFP, confirming a report in the Spanish daily El Pais.
"It's a temporary withdrawal, decided by Defence Minister Margarita Robles, as long as the American aircraft carrier is in this zone," the spokesman added.
He said the Spanish frigate had joined the aircraft carrier's strike group for a military exercise.
WNU Editor: Spain's acting defense minister is claiming that this decision was not made because of politics, that it was based on military and technical reasons.
More News On Spain Pulling A Frigate From A U.S. Strike Group Because Of Rising Tensions Between Washington And Tehran
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday it was time for Moscow and Washington to put aside years of mistrust and find a way to work together constructively.
Pompeo is in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi for talks with his Russian counterpart, and later on Tuesday will also hold consultations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
* Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan reportedly presented plan Thursday * Plan does not call for land invasion of Iran, which would require far more troops * Comes after ships in Persian Gulf were 'sabotaged', which was blamed on Iran * President Trump warned Monday it would a 'very bad mistake' if Iran launched any attack in the Persian Gulf * Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned of the danger of a conflict by 'accident' * The Navy has dispatched the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Gulf * Iran or its proxies were behind alleged 'sabotage' of four ships in the region, according to preliminary assessment by military investigators
President Donald Trump knocked down a report that the Pentagon has presented the White House with a plan to deploy 120,000 troops to the Middle East if Iran attacks U.S. forces – then said he would send 'a hell of a lot more' if it came to that.
Trump brushed off the report when asked about it as he left the White House for Louisiana Tuesday.
'I think it's fake news, okay?' the president said.
But even as he disputed a New York Times report, the president kept alive the possibility of inserting a major force into the region, where tensions are running high.
'Now would I do that, absolutely,' Trump offered, after terming the report fake.
More News On President Trump Calling The New York Times Report Of A Plan To Deploy 120,000 Troops To The Middle East If Iran Attacks U.S. Forces As 'Fake News'
US investigators believe Iran or groups it supports used explosives to damage four ships off the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, media reports say.
Military experts were reportedly sent to investigate the incident and found a large hole in each of the tankers.
No evidence has emerged to show that Iran was involved. The affected countries are yet to assign blame.
The incident has increased tensions between Iran, which borders the nearby Strait of Hormuz, and the US.
About a fifth of oil that is consumed globally passes through the strait. Last month, Iran threatened to close it if it was prevented from using the waterway.
This followed a US decision to end exemptions from sanctions for major importers of Iranian oil.
The Pentagon recently presented a military plan to the president's top national security aides that calls for up to 120,000 troops deploying to the Middle East and a potential crippling cyber-attack on Iran's infrastructure should Iran speed up its nuclear program or attack U.S. forces.
Details of the briefing were first reported by the New York Times, which cited more than half a dozen American national security officials, granted anonymity, who have been briefed on the updated plans.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin when world leaders gather in Japan next month for the annual G-20 conclave, the president said Monday.
Trump's announcement comes amid an escalating trade war with China that has roiled markets as both the U.S. and Beijing have upped tariffs on each other's products. After trade talks fell apart last week, Trump raised tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods.
"I'll meet with them directly," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
China launches two Type 052D guided missile destroyers simultaneously on Friday in the Dalian Shipyard, Northeast China's Liaoning Province. The warships are decorated with Chinese national flags. Photo: IC
China is expected to build even more guided missile destroyers, Chinese military analysts said on Sunday as China launched two Type 052D guided missile destroyers on Friday in Dalian, a coastal city in Northeast China's Liaoning Province.
Decked with Chinese national flags, the two Type 052D destroyers were launched in the Dalian Shipyard on Friday with the assistance of tug boats, marking the 19th and 20th of launches of their kind, news website wenweipo.com reported on Friday.
China now has 20 Type 052Ds either in active service or being fitted out for service soon, the report said.
Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military analyst, told the Global Times on Sunday that 20 would not be the end for the ship's development, and China might have more than 30 in the future.
A display featuring missiles and a portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is seen at Baharestan Square in Tehran, Iran September 27, 2017. Nazanin Tabatabaee Yazdi/TIMA via REUTERS
LONDON – The United States is playing a "very dangerous game" as it attempts to "drag Iran into an unnecessary war," a senior Iranian official said Tuesday.
Hamid Baeidinejad, Iran's ambassador to the United Kingdom, told reporters here that the Trump administration's deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group, B-52 bombers and other military personnel and equipment to the Persian Gulf to counter alleged, unspecified Iranian threats risked "serious miscalculation."
Baeidinejad denied that Iran or its "proxies" were behind what Washington has described as the possible Iranian-backed "sabotage" of oil tankers in the Gulf belonging to Saudi Arabia, Norway and the United Arab Emirates. On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia said that drones also attacked one of its oil pipelines and other energy infrastructure.
Tensions between Iran and the United States have intensified since Trump pulled out of a 2015 international deal to curb Iran's nuclear activities and imposed increasingly strict sanctions on Tehran
* Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan reportedly presented plan Thursday * Plan does not call for land invasion of Iran, which would require far more troops * Comes after ships in Persian Gulf were 'sabotaged', which was blamed on Iran
The White House is reportedly planning to deploy 120,000 troops to the Middle East if Iran attacks American forces in an alarming echo of the Iraq War.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented the plan at a meeting of Donald Trump's top security aides on Thursday, reports the New York Times.
Several plans were detailed, the Times said, and 'the uppermost option called for deploying 120,000 troops, which would take weeks or months to complete' - and would be approaching the size of the force that invaded Iraq in 2003.
These plans do not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require far more troops.
WNU Editor: This would be a massive deployment, but it would take far more assets to invade Iran. Such a deployment will be primarily defensive, with the purpose of defending U.S. interests in the region.
More News On The U.S. Planning To Deploy 120,000 Troops To The Middle East In The Event That Iran Attacks American Forces Or Accelerates The Development Of Nuclear Weapons
The news of comes amid a report that the Pentagon revised a contingency plan that includes sending 120,000 troops to respond to Iranian aggression.
A U.S. military team in the United Arab Emirates has reportedly come to the initial assessment that Iran or one of its proxies was responsible for attacks on four oil tankers near that country's port city of Fujairah yesterday, though there are no details yet about how they arrived at this conclusion. This comes amid a separate report that the Pentagon revised at least one of its contingency plans to deploy as many as 120,000 personnel to the Middle East in the event that Iranian forces or proxies launch attacks on Americans or begin apparent work toward building a nuclear weapon.
A Danish politician has taken out an ad on a popular porn-streaming website ahead of the country’s upcoming general elections.
Joachim B. Olsen, a former Olympic shot putter and center-right Liberal Alliance party MP, took out an ad that said “vote for Jokke” on Pornhub, according to CNN. Jokke is a nickname for Joachim.
The politician confirmed in a Facebook post that he did indeed take out the advertisement. “Yes, it’s me on Pornhub,” he said, according to CNN.
“Half of the internet is porn. And you have to be where the voters are. Also on a porn site,” he told the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) in a Sunday interview, according to CNN.
CNN reports that Pornhub receives 100 million daily visits, and Denmark is the website’s 28th highest source of traffic.
Olsen told the DR that the advertisement is a “fun feature” in his “95 percent serious” campaign, reports CNN.
China has expanded its ban on Wikipedia to block the community-edited online encyclopedia in all available languages, the BBC reports.
An earlier enforced ban barred Internet users from viewing the Chinese version, as well as the pages for sensitive search terms such as Dalai Lama and the Tiananmen massacre.
According to Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an internet censorship research group, the block has been in place since late April.
The Wikimedia foundation said in a statement that it did not receive any notice of the censorship.
Wikipedia joins a growing list of websites that cannot be accessed in China, which in recent years has tightened its grip on access to information online. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are among the sites already banned, forcing Internet users to use virtual private networks, or VPN, to bypass what has become known as the “Great Firewall” of China.
Reporters Without Border’s 2019 World Press Freedom index ranks China at 177 on a list of 180 countries analyzed. According to a separate study conducted by the watchdog group, China is not just issuing censorships locally, but is also attempting to infiltrate foreign media in an attempt to deter criticism and spread propaganda.
The top British general in the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS says there is not an increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria, despite claims to the contrary by the U.S. to justify increasing its presence in the region.
“No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the coalition responsible for counter-terrorist operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said in a video briefing, according to the Guardian.
Ghika said that he has not seen Shia militias in Iraq, who have varying ties to Iran, change their stance recently. “I think it’s important to say that many of them are compliant and we have seen no change in that posture since the recent exchange between the United States and Iran,” he said, according to the Guardian.
Ghika’s comments contradict those of U.S. officials, who cited “clear indications” that Iran or Iranian-backed forces were preparing for a possible attack against U.S. forces as justification for the deployment of an an aircraft carrier and a bomber task force to the Middle East earlier this month.
The U.S. Central Command rebuked Ghika’s comments in a statement released late Tuesday.
“Recent comments from OIR’s Deputy Commander run counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian backed forces in the region,” said in the statement.
U.S. officials said that Iran or Iranian allies were responsible for damage to Saudi oil tankers off the coast of the UAE earlier this week.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that she does “not understand” why the United States has failed to change its gun laws in the aftermath of mass shootings.
Speaking with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday, Ardern noted that even though her county has a strong hunting culture and had “pretty permissive gun legislation,” most New Zealanders agreed after the Christchurch attack it was necessary to “draw the line.”
On April 10, less than a month after a white supremacist terrorist shot and killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the country’s parliament voted 119 to one to pass gun control legislation that banned most of the country’s automatic and semiautomatic weapons.
Ardern said while there is a “practical purpose and use for guns,” at the same time, “that does not mean you need access to military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles. You do not. And New Zealanders by and large absolutely agreed with that position.”
She also compared New Zealand’s legislation to the laws passed in Australia in the aftermath of the 1996 Port Arthur shooting, in which a gunman murdered 35 people at a Tasmania tourist attraction. In both countries, Ardern said, single massacres were enough to galvanize the public to support gun control.
“Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest with you, I do not understand the United States,” Ardern said.
In 2019 alone, the United States has undergone 122 mass shootings according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as four or more people besides the shooter being killed or injured. Four of the five deadliest mass shootings in American history have taken place since 2012, including the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino shooting of Oct. 1, 2017, in which 59 people were killed and more than 500 were injured.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Ardern has also established herself as a prominent advocate for combating violent extremism online. The Christchurch perpetrator live-streamed footage of the massacre, which was then disseminated countless times throughout social media.
Beginning on Wednesday, Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron are hosting a summit that aims to curb terrorists’ use of social media. Tech giants will be asked to agree to a “Christchurch Call,” to more aggressively combat violent content, according to the New York Times.
President Donald Trump’s trade war with China could cost the average American family of four up to $2,300 a year, according to a report on the effect of tariffs on the U.S. economy and workers.
The study, by the economic consulting firm Trade Partnership Worldwide, assesses how tariffs will affect American consumers and the economy. According to the report, an average American family of four would pay $2,300 more in goods and services each year if Trump imposes a 25% tariff on all goods from China, as he has repeatedly threatened. If tariff levels remain where they are today, the average American family is expected to pay about $770 in higher costs each year the tariffs remain in place, says Laura Baughman, a co-author of the study and president at Trade Partnerships Worldwide.
The findings come as Trump and China have both escalated the trade dispute in recent days. As U.S. and Chinese negotiations met in Washington last week, Trump announced that he was raising tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. China responded with a plan to increase tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. exports. Then, on Monday, the Trump Administration outlined plans to impose additional tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese imports, providing a list of products that include apparel, children’s toys, crafting products, sports equipment and shoes. That amounts to tariffs on virtually all Chinese imports.
The U.S. imported almost $540 billion in goods from China in 2018, while exporting $120 billion. Meanwhile, the U.S. imported $18 billion in services from China in 2018, while exporting almost $59 billion, though services are not directly affected by tariffs.
Researchers calculated the cost of the trade war on families by estimating the total value of the increased price of goods and services after the tariffs are implemented and dividing that by the average number of families of four. They found that costs will skyrocket if Trump follows through on his threat to extend the tariffs to other goods, including apparel, footwear and consumer electronics. The costs were calculated for one to three years after the tariffs take effect.
But that just takes into account the increased cost of buying things produced in China. Baughman says the total economic costs on American families will be far higher––the result of a combination of job losses, slower economic growth and a drop in exports due to China’s retaliatory tariffs.
“There’s a ripple effect to this because of tariffs,” she says. “If you look at the sectors, the big job losses are in services because it’s about people not going out to dinner, putting off surgery or not using Uber or the subway because they’re not going to the office anymore.”
The tariffs Trump has already imposed are both widespread and steep enough that importers will have to pass on at least some of the increased costs to consumers. There will also be knock-on effects, says Baughman.
“It’s such a huge value of goods that it’s not really possible for importers or retailers to absorb price increases to 25%,” she says. “In addition, U.S. manufacturers who compete with China can raise prices, too. Now, their competition costs more,” she adds. “All of these price increases ripple through the economy in the form of higher costs for goods and services that are all tied in some way, directly or indirectly, to imports from China.”
Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics whose own calculations are in line with the Trade Partnership Worldwide’s findings, says consumers will feel the immediate impact of increased prices on items they commonly buy, such as apparel and electronics, though they are unlikely to feel as directly the higher costs of imported raw materials or equipment, which go into a wide range of products with the “made in America” label.
Where American consumers will feel a real hit, Hufbauer says, are in job losses. The Trade Partnership Worldwide study found that the U.S. faces a net loss of more than 2.2 million jobs if all tariffs continue and cause a sales decline.
“You lose that many jobs and you’re probably going to cut the growth of the GDP by at least a half percent,” he says. “The unemployment impact will hit on new entrants to the job market. Those are the people who notice. For the people who are employed, it makes relatively little difference.”
With WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange likely about to face two separate extradition requests — one already made by the United States on hacking charges, another likely from Sweden related to a recently reopened rape case — his future is less clear than ever.
If Sweden makes a fresh extradition request, the decision over what to do with Assange — who’s currently sitting in a London prison — will fall to U.K. Home Secretary Sajid Javid. In such an event, under U.K. law, Javid would have to weigh specific legal criteria to make his decision. They are:
The relative seriousness of the offenses.
The place where each offense was committed.
The date when each request was issued or received.
Whether the person is accused or convicted of each offense.
Those criteria, however, are broad and leave space for individual judgment. “The Secretary of State has to follow the law; it is highly likely that there will a legal challenge if he doesn’t,” says Katherine Tyler, a leading extradition lawyer at London law firm Kingsley Napley.
The point of contention, Tyler predicts, is likely to be the relative seriousness of each offense. Both sides could argue that their case is more urgent than the other. “It’s hard to predict how the Secretary of State will weigh up the seriousness of each allegation. The accusation of rape, being an offense against the person, is a very different kind of allegation to the password cracking accusation which, in this context, will be said to be a political matter,” she says.
Sweden has not yet re-issued a formal extradition request for Assange. But given the nature of the allegations there, some lawmakers are already pressuring Javid to bow to Sweden’s request, if it makes one. “Allegations of sexual violence in Sweden should clearly take precedence,” wrote opposition Labour Party lawmaker Dawn Butler in a letter to Javid on Monday. “The U.K. Government should send a clear message that we are committed to tackling sexual violence.”
There’s the matter of timing as well. If Sweden issues another extradition request, it would come on a later date than the U.S. request, which was made public shortly after Assange was arrested in April. However, Sweden issued a previous request for Assange’s extradition back in 2010, before he took refuge in Ecuador’s embassy. In 2017, the Swedish case was closed and the extradition request nullified, with prosecutors saying Assange’s whereabouts made further investigation impossible. But if the matter came to the courts, both sides could reasonably argue their extradition request came first.
Home Secretary Javid, a leading contender for beleaguered Prime Minister Theresa May’s job, has cultivated an image of a hardliner. He welcomed Assange’s arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy in London last month, and last year refused to seek assurances from the U.S. that two suspected ISIS members would not be executed if extradited — a violation of convention in the U.K., where the death penalty is illegal. (Capital punishment is not on the table for Assange, who faces U.S. charges of conspiring to gain access to a government computer with a maximum sentence of five years, though experts say the U.S. may unseal more serious charges at a later date.) Geopolitics may play a role as well. Assange’s arrest comes at a time of increased bilateral tensions between the U.K. and the U.S., with the Trump Administration frustrated with May’s resistance to block 5G wireless infrastructure made by Chinese telecom firm Huawei from the U.K. market.
If anything is certain, it’s that Assange may not leave the U.K. any time soon. “Contested extradition hearings can take a long time,” says Tyler. “I would expect the U.S. request alone to take in the region of a year to 18 months; were there to be an additional request from Sweden, consideration of how to deal with this is likely to make the overall process longer still.”
(CANBERRA, Australia) — A powerful earthquake struck Papua New Guinea late Tuesday evening, triggering a tsunami alert for coastal areas up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake measured magnitude 7.5 and was located 45 kilometers (28 miles) northeast of Kokopo, a remote town with a population of about 26,000. It was centered at a relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles), it said.
Shallow earthquakes tend to cause more damage on the Earth’s surface, but the USGS estimated that damage and injuries would be low because of the area’s sparse population.
The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said tsunami waves of up to 1 meter (3.3 feet) were possible along coastal areas up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the epicenter, including Papua New Guinea and the nearly Solomon Islands. It later said the tsunami threat had largely passed and no waves had been observed, but that there were no sea level gauges in the area for measurement.
It said there was no tsunami threat to Hawaii or Guam.
Papua New Guinea is located on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, to the east of Indonesia.
It sits on the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” the arc of seismic faults around the Pacific Ocean where much of the world’s earthquakes and volcanic activity occurs.
A magnitude 7.5 earthquake in February 2018 in the nation’s central region killed at least 125 people and forced another 35,000 from their homes. That quake hit areas that are remote and undeveloped, and assessments about the scale of the damage and injuries were slow to filter out.
The reporting for this project was supported by the Pulitzer Center
It’s hard to grasp the scale of El Salvador’s problem with gender violence. In the Central American country of just six million people, one woman was the victim of a femicide — a man murdering of a woman or girl because of her gender — every 24 hours in 2018. That’s one of the worst rates of femicide in the world, according to the United Nations.
Sixty-seven percent of Salvadoran women have suffered some form of violence in their lifetime, including sexual assault, intimate partner violence and abuse by family members, a 2017 national survey found. But only 6% of victims had reported abuse to authorities. (In the U.S., more than half of domestic violence incidents are believed to be reported to police, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.) Advocates say many fear repercussions for speaking out, aren’t able to access public services to report, or simply don’t consider violent treatment unusual.
“El Salvador is a country with so much gang violence, so much brutality, so many murders, that nobody pays attention to violence against women,” says Almudena Toral, a filmmaker who traveled with reporter Patricia Clarembaux to report on the situation for TIME and Univision. There were 51 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants in 2018, the second highest in Latin America after crisis-stricken Venezuela. “It’s invisible in this huge ocean of violence.”
From September 2018, Toral and Clarembaux followed María, a woman seeking asylum in the U.S. after a lifetime of gender-based violence in El Salvador. When she was 12, a gang member forced her to become his girlfriend. Three years later, having had two of his children and faced constant abuse and death threats, María attempted suicide, nearly becoming a victim of a crime El Salvador calls “femicide suicide.”
El Salvador is the only country in the world with a law against “femicide suicide” — the crime of driving a woman or girl to suicide by abusing them. The law, enacted in 2012 as part of broader legislation seeking to curb violence against women, is a striking recognition by the government of the psychological damage suffered by victims and the need to hold perpetrators accountable. According to government statistics, 51 of the 285 femicides that occurred in the first six months of 2018 were suicides. The majority of cases affect women and girls under 24.
In 2018 El Salvador’s attorney general announced the creation of a new unit to oversee crimes related to violence against women, girls, LGBTQI people and other groups vulnerable to violence. Authorities do seem to be slowly managing to turn the tide. Total femicides fell 20% between 2017 and 2018, to 383. And in the first four months of 2019, 30% fewer women died by femicide than in the same period last year. But that still means that by April, 76 women and girls were killed just for being female.
Impunity remains an obstacle in a country where prosecutors live in fear of retaliation from perpetrators of violence. According to the U.N., only a quarter of femicide cases make it to court and only 7% result in convictions. And, since the femicide-suicide law came in, only 60 cases have been investigated and only one has resulted in charges. “There are good laws, and good intentions from prosecutors,” Toral says. “But there’s also a lot of corruption, a failure to report, a lack of resources. You have to ask, in the end how much are laws worth on their own?”
The reasons for El Salvador’s gender-based violence are complex, Clarembaux says. Women face violence from male family members, who often have authority over them in the Catholic country’s patriarchal social structure. El Salvador’s violent gang culture also plays a key role in the abuse of women. “Gang members see women as sexual objects,” Clarembaux says, noting that women are often dragged into conflicts, “despite not being allowed to have important, decision-making roles in the gang, like decision-making.” María, for example, was initially forced into her relationship because her brother owed her partner a gun.
El Salvador’s gang problem has its roots in the United States. From the start of the country’s civil war in 1980, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled to the U.S. Some got involved with gangs in Los Angeles and formed the notorious MS-13. When the civil war ended after 12 years, leaving the economy in ruins, infrastructure destroyed and 75,000 people dead, the U.S. deported almost 4,000 gang members with criminal records back to El Salvador.
The country’s institutions, depleted by the war, weren’t strong enough to control the gang activity. “You deport that many gang members back to a post civil war society where nothing works, where everything has to be rebuilt, where there’s chaos,” Toral says. “Then obviously it’s going to fuel the violence now.” By 2018, MS-13 was active in 94 per cent of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities.
Today violence against women and femicide are major factors driving Salvadorans to the U.S. again. In 2016, 65,000 women attempted to seek asylum in the U.S. after fleeing gender-based violence in the El Salvador and its neighbors Honduras and Guatemala, which together make up a region known as the Northern Triangle. María joined their ranks in 2018 and U.S. authorities granted her permission to apply for asylum in the U.S. after she passed a “credible fear” test.
But she still faces uncertainty. Only around a quarter of the 23,563 credible fear cases where a migrant filed for asylum ended with them being granted that protection in 2018, according to federal data. If María is not granted asylum and loses an appeal, she could be deported back to El Salvador.
Salvadoran women are at the center of the Trump Administration’s efforts to overhaul the U.S. immigration and asylum systems. Last year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to override a 2014 precedent that allows women to use domestic violence and persecution by gangs as a reason to apply for asylum, using the case of a Salvadoran woman known as A–B. In December, a federal judge ruled there was “no legal basis” for the decision, but Human Rights Watch saysA-B’s case remains “in limbo” and that thousands of women in similar situations may be drawn into legal battles over their status.
In early 2018 President Donald Trump attempted to cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans, paving the way to deport some 200,000 people back to El Salvador, many of whom have been putting down roots in the U.S. since the early 2000’s. Though a federal judge blocked the order, and Salvadorans are currently covered by TPS until January 2020, their future in the U.S. remains uncertain.
Perhaps most worrying for women in El Salvador in the long term, on March 29, Trump announced he was cutting $500 million in aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras over their failure to stem migration flows to the U.S. Critics say the decision will undermine recent progress on violence against women and other violent crime in El Salvador, driving even more people to flee the country.
Whatever the Trump administration’s intention with these policies, as long as they face widespread violence at home, Clarembaux says women will continue making the journey north. “They only do this because they have no choice,” she says. “They want to be safe.”
If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.
For nearly a century, the St. Pierre Manufacturing Corporation has made products such as horseshoes, tire chains, and anchors in a facility near Worcester, Mass. But in recent months, St. Pierre has been struggling. Why? Increased tariffs on goods from China imposed by the Trump administration.
That may seem counterintuitive. Tariffs on foreign goods are supposed to help companies that make things in the United States by increasing the costs of products sold by foreign competitors. Indeed, when rationalizing his administration’s increased tariffs on Chinese goods, President Donald Trump on Monday encouraged consumers and businesses to buy goods from countries other than China, or, in what he called the “best idea,” to buy American-made goods.
“The Tariffs can be completely avoided if you buy from a non-Tariffed Country, or you buy the product inside the USA (the best idea)” he wrote in a Twitter thread about China. “Make your product at home in the USA and there is no Tariff,” he continued in a separate thread on Tuesday.
…completely avoided if you buy from a non-Tariffed Country, or you buy the product inside the USA (the best idea). That’s Zero Tariffs. Many Tariffed companies will be leaving China for Vietnam and other such countries in Asia. That’s why China wants to make a deal so badly!…
China buys MUCH less from us than we buy from them, by almost 500 Billion Dollars, so we are in a fantastic position. Make your product at home in the USA and there is no Tariff. You can also buy from a non-Tariffed country instead of China. Many companies are leaving China…..
But that advice is almost impossible to follow, as products made in America can contain parts sourced from all over the world. Even the most quintessentially American of goods has parts from somewhere else, whether that be a Ford F-150 pickup, a can of Budweiser, or tire chains from Worcester, Mass. “In the last 20 years, businesses have become much more strategic,” says Kara Reynolds, an economics professor at American University. “More and more often, they are looking at where they can find highest quality and lowest-cost parts so that they can be competitive.” More often than not, that’s China — and that means many U.S. businesses are feeling the pain thanks to Trump’s tariffs.
The Trump administration said Friday that it was increasing the level of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, including components like circuit boards and vehicle parts, to 25 percent from 10 percent. Last year, it raised tariffs for imported steel and aluminum, to 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. China on Monday announced new tariffs on $60 billion worth of goods, sending global stock markets into a nosedive, though they have recovered somewhat Tuesday.
The most recent round of tariffs is expected to affect a broad swathe of industries that make products in the United States. “This is playing havoc with the supply chains of Americans producers — increasing their cost and reducing their worldwide competitiveness,” says Robert T. Kudrle, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota. St. Pierre, for example, makes chains and wire rope in its Worcester facility, as it began doing in 1920 when Henry St. Pierre started the company. But as it started facing foreign competition, St. Pierre began buying chain slings and other parts from producers overseas, then cutting them and adding hooks and fittings in the United States.
The cost of those imported chain slings have gone up as tariffs have risen. Even St. Pierre’s horseshoes, which are made completely from U.S. steel, have been affected by the tariffs on foreign goods. As the cost of foreign steel went up, the cost of U.S.-made steel rose too, says Peter St. Pierre, vice president of finance at St. Pierre Manufacturing — and Henry St. Pierre’s grandson. “Everything we do here is steel-related, and over the last year or so, the price of steel has been going up and up,” he said. Increased demand for domestic steel has allowed U.S. producers to raise their prices; one estimate found that U.S. steel prices have more than doubled since 2015.
The trade war comes at a difficult time for some U.S. manufacturers like St. Pierre. Retailers are stocking fewer products on shelves as they try to make stores more intimate to counter competition from e-commerce. When St. Pierre asks them to pay for three or four or five dollars more per product because of the tariffs, they’re even more likely to stop carrying them, St. Pierre said. Meanwhile, his company’s labor costs are increasing as the minimum wage rises, resulting in higher pay for not just low-skilled workers, but for everyone upstream at his manufacturing facility as well. “As time goes on, we’re making less units, and the cost of those goods per unit is going up,” says St. Pierre. “It gets to a point where not enough people are going to want to make horseshoe sets made in the USA.”
Other companies have also said that they’re being affected by the tariffs even though they make goods in the U.S. Arnold Kamler, the CEO of Kent International, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published May 8 that the tariffs have stopped him from expanding his domestic bicycle manufacturing operations, because of rising duties on imported parts. A South Carolina plant that assembled televisions using Chinese parts said last year it was shutting down because of the tariffs. The Beer Institute, which represents 6,000 brewers and 2.2 million American jobs, said that about six percent of the cost of beer is the aluminum used in cans, and predicted that higher aluminum tariffs could cost 20,000 American jobs.
One of the biggest losers amid the U.S.-China trade spat may be the American auto industry, which has already been trimming its workforce. Cars have tens of thousands of parts in them; it would be nearly impossible to make a car in America that contains zero foreign parts. Just 67 percent of a Chevrolet Corvette and 57 percent of a Ford Explorer are made in the United States, according to an index from American University. “The nature of supply chains means that nearly every manufacturing firm producing anything of complexity buys parts from China,” said Michael J. Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State University.
The auto industry relies on parts from China, and it would be difficult today for both car companies and auto repair shops to solely buy American or even to buy from “non-tariffed countries,” as Trump recommends. The Center for Automotive Research estimates that about 12 percent of U.S. motor parts are imported from China. Firms that fix and market used cars are even more dependent on China for parts. Repairing a car’s brakes often means replacing its brake rotors, but 87 percent of brake rotors are imported from China, said Bill Hanvey, CEO of the Auto Care Association, which advocates for aftermarket manufacturers, distributors, repair shops, and retailers. Consumers trying to repair old cars will be hit especially hard; few U.S. factories make parts for old models, and many of those parts come from overseas, he said.
If car companies, car parts manufacturers and other businesses decide that the tariffs aren’t going away, they could start to seek alternative sources for the products they currently import from China, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere. But that would be difficult and time-consuming, says Charlie Chesbrough, a senior economist at Cox Automotive, which tracks auto industry trends. Supply chains take years to establish, and it can be hard to find the right tool and die maker who can make tools quickly and affordably. “To replace a supplier is very difficult, and very expensive,” says Chesbrough.
Doing so also defeats the purpose of a globalized world. International trade enriches the economies of countries that have relationships with each other, allowing them to make some things and outsource what can be done better somewhere else, says Christina Fattore, a political science professor at West Virginia University who studies international trade. The ‘Buy American’ rhetoric started in the 1980s, when U.S. companies hoped to push back against competitors who had moved manufacturing to China, she said. Today, that rhetoric is irrelevant, because almost everything made in America has pieces that originated somewhere else. “Right now, buying American isn’t going to help American workers,” she said, “when something isn’t truly just an American product.”
(DUBAI, United Arab Emirates) — Saudi Arabia said drones attacked one of its oil pipelines as other assaults targeted energy infrastructure elsewhere in the kingdom on Tuesday, shortly after Yemen’s rebels claimed a coordinated drone attack on the Sunni power.
The assaults marked the latest incidents challenging Mideast security after the alleged sabotage of oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates earlier this week amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, whom Saudi Arabia has been fighting against since March 2015, said they launched a series of drone attacks on the kingdom, across the border from Yemen. The spokesman of the rebels, Mohammed Abdel-Salam, told The Associated Press: “This is a message to Saudi Arabia, stop your aggression.”
“Our goal is to respond to the crimes they are committing everyday against the Yemeni people,” he added.
In a statement carried on the state-run Saudi Press Agency, Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said that drones attacked a petroleum pumping station supplying a pipeline running from its oil-rich Eastern Province to the Yanbu Port on the Red Sea.
A fire broke out and firefighters later brought it under control, though the state-run Saudi Aramco stopped pumping oil through the pipeline.
The kingdom’s state security body also said two petroleum pumping stations in the greater region of Riyadh, the landlocked capital, were targeted at the same time. The statement described it as a “limited targeting” of petroleum stations in areas al-Duadmi and Afif in the Riyadh region, without elaborating.
Al-Falih called the attack “cowardly,” saying that recent sabotage acts against the kingdom’s vital installations not only target Saudi Arabia, but the safety of the world’s energy supply and global economy. He said this reaffirms the need of the international community to confront the activities of groups like the Houthis. He also promised the production and export of Saudi oil would not be interrupted.
Benchmark Brent crude traded at $71 a barrel Tuesday, up $1.27 on the day.
The attack on Saudi oil targets comes after four oil tankers anchored in the Mideast were damaged by what Gulf officials described as sabotage, though satellite images obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday showed no major visible damage to the vessels.
Details of the alleged sabotage to two Saudi, one Norwegian and one Emirati oil tanker on Sunday remained unclear, and Gulf officials have declined to say who they suspected was responsible. But it demonstrated the raised risks for shippers in a region vital to global energy supplies as tensions are increasing between the U.S. and Iran over its unraveling nuclear deal with world powers.
The U.S. has warned sailors of the potential for attacks on commercial sea traffic, and regional allies of the United Arab Emirates condemned the alleged sabotage as the tankers were off the coast of the UAE port city of Fujairah.
A U.S. official in Washington, without offering any evidence, told the AP that an American military team’s initial assessment indicated Iran or Iranian allies used explosives to blow holes in the ships. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation, agreed to reveal the findings only if not quoted by name. The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, which patrols the Mideast and operates from a base in Fujairah, has repeatedly declined to comment.
The U.S. already had warned ships that “Iran or its proxies” could be targeting maritime traffic in the region. America is deploying an aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf to counter alleged, still-unspecified threats from Tehran.
On Tuesday, Spain temporarily pulled one of its frigates that was part of a U.S.-led combat fleet from near the Persian Gulf because of mounting U.S.-Iran tensions. The Ministry of Defense said the Méndez Núñez, with 215 sailors on board, will not cross the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf together with the USS Abraham Lincoln. The Spanish frigate was the only non-U.S. vessel in the fleet.
Citing heightened tensions in the region, the United Nations called on “all concerned parties to exercise restraint for the sake of regional peace, including by ensuring maritime security” and freedom of navigation, U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.
Tensions in the region have risen since Trump withdrew America from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, and restored U.S. sanctions that have pushed Iran’s economy into crisis. Last week, Iran warned it would begin enriching uranium at higher levels in 60 days if world powers failed to negotiate new terms for the deal.
The oil tankers were visible in satellite images provided Tuesday to the AP by Colorado-based Maxar Technologies. A boom surrounded the Emirati oil tanker A. Michel, indicating the possibility of an oil leak. The other three showed no visible major damage from above.
Yemen plunged into civil war in 2014 when Iran-backed rebels captured the capital, Sanaa. A Saudi-led coalition entered the war in March 2015 to help government troops facing the Houthi advance. The U.S. supported the coalition for years despite its airstrikes killing civilians, and is only recently beginning to step back after the October killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by Saudi agents.
This isn’t the first time Yemen’s Houthis have used drones as weapons — a bomb-laden drone launched by the rebels exploded over a military parade in January for the Saudi-led coalition, killing at least six people.
The use of drones also raises new concerns over Iran’s influence in the conflict. Coalition officials have recently displayed a series of drones they claim show a growing sophistication of the Houthis, starting first with plastic foam models that could be built by a hobby kit, to one captured in April that closely resembled an Iranian-made drone.
Those drones have been flown into the radar arrays of Saudi Arabia’s Patriot missile batteries, according to the research group Conflict Armament Research, disabling them and allowing the Houthis to fire ballistic missiles into the kingdom unchallenged.
Iran has been accused by the U.S. and the U.N. of supplying ballistic missile technology and arms to the Houthis, which Tehran denies.
Such drones remain difficult to shoot down with either light or heavy weapons. Iraqi forces learned this from driving out the Islamic State group from northern Iraq, where the extremists would load drones with grenades or simple explosives to target their forces.
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Addressing an election rally here under Pataliputra Lok Sabha constituency, Narendra Modi made an emotional appeal to the voters.
ICICI Direct expects USDINR to find supports at lower levels. Utilise the downsides in the pair to initiate long positions.
Hulu, which competes with Netflix and Amazon.com#39;s Prime Video, has more than 26.8 million paid subscribers.
Addressing a press conference here, Shah also said he would not have escaped unhurt without CRPF protection when his convoy was allegedly attacked in Kolkata on Tuesday.
"This year, the statistical model forecast suggests that the monsoon onset over Kerala is likely to be slightly delayed. The southwest monsoon onset is likely to set over Kerala on 6th June with a model error of plus or minus 4 days," the IMD said.
If any single party crossed the halfway mark, there would be a significant rally, but on the flip side, if an unstable coalition assumes power, Nifty could decline towards 9,000,
Kami Rita Sherpa, a native of Thame village located in the shadow of Mount Everest, reached the 8,850-metre (29,035-feet) summit via the Southeast Ridge route, accompanied by another sherpa.
Sharing dais with the chief minister during poll rallies, the BJP candidate is often seen standing alongside the #39;maharaj#39; with folded hands.
