Russia: Trading Halted Across All Markets
September 8th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
Moscow Exchange PJSC, Russia’s main bourse, said stocks and bonds trading will resume at 4:50 p.m. Moscow time after a nearly two-hour outage.
Equities, ruble, bonds and derivatives trading was shut down due to a network equipment failure, the bourse said earlier on its website. Money-market operations have already resumed, while derivative trading will restart at 5 p.m., according to the bourse’s press service. The resumption of currency trading will be announced separately, it said.
The exchange said it is using backup infrastructure to restart trading. The last interruption on the Moscow Exchange was on Aug. 12 when derivatives trading was halted. In March, the exchange stopped currency and precious-metals transactions for more than an hour.
Qatar Sends 1,000 Troops Into Yemen
September 7th, 2015Via: BBC:
Qatar has reportedly deployed troops to Yemen for the first time, according to the Doha-based al-Jazeera news.
One-thousand ground troops, supported by armoured vehicles and helicopters, are reportedly headed for the province of Marib.
Last week, 60 soldiers from the Saudi-led coalition were killed at a base in Marib.
Asia’s Smartphone Addiction
September 7th, 2015Really?
Via: BBC:
Nomophobia – or no mobile phone phobia – the onset of severe anxiety on losing access to your smartphone has been talked about for years. But in Asia, the birthplace of the selfie stick and the emoji, psychologists say smartphone addiction is fast on the rise and the addicts are getting younger.
A recent study surveyed almost 1,000 students in South Korea, where 72% of children own a smartphone by the age of 11 or 12 and spend on average 5.4 hours a day on them – as a result about 25% of children were considered addicted to smartphones. The study, to be published in 2016 found that stress was an important indicator of your likelihood to get addicted.
…
A controversial government app to monitor smartphone usage among teenagers sparked heated debate in South Korea. Officials also imposed a series of measures in 2011 banning children from accessing online games after midnight.
China, one of the first countries to label internet addictions as clinical disorders, set up military-style clinics to stamp out new media addictions.
Consultant psychiatrist Thomas Lee argues that other countries in Asia should follow suit and classify smartphone addictions as “official mental disorders” in the way sex and gambling have been designated.
“Using a smartphone to benefit one’s mood is almost similar to how drugs are able to affect a person’s behaviour,” said Mr Lee.
“Like drug addicts, smartphone addicts will also display withdrawal symptoms like restlessness, anxiety and even anger.”
China Dumps a Record $94 Billion In US Treasurys In One Month
September 7th, 2015Via: ZeroHedge:
On Monday we got the official data from China and sure enough, we find out that the PBoC liquidated around $94 billion in reserves during the month of August and as Goldman argues (see below), the “real” figure might have been closer to $115 billion. Whatever the case, it’s a staggering burn rate and needless to say, were the PBoC to continue to liquidate its assets at this pace, it would necessitate a raft of RRR cuts and hundreds of billions in short-term liquidity ops to ensure that money market don’t seize up in the face of the liquidity drain.
17,500 Refugees Arrived in Germany Over Weekend
September 7th, 2015Via: CNN:
The massive flood of refugees in Europe is pushing Germany and Austria to a tipping point.
Thousands of refugees have poured into the two countries in just the past two days, trying to escape the bombings, terrorists and dire conditions ravaging their homelands.
More than 16,000 have streamed into Austria since Saturday, Burgenland state police spokesman Wolfgang Bachkoenig said Monday.
“We must now, step by step, go from emergency measures to a normality that is humane and complies with the law,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said.
Virtually all the refugees who entered Austria continued on to Germany, Bachkoenig said.
But even Germany, a country with a long history of helping refugees, said it can’t keep taking in asylum seekers at the current pace. More than 17,500 migrants arrived in just the city of Munich over the weekend, police said.
The Oil-Sands Glut Is About to Get a Lot Bigger
September 4th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
The last place oil producers want to be when prices plummet to profit-demolishing lows is midstream on a billion-dollar project in one of the costliest parts of the planet to extract crude.
Yet that’s exactly where half a dozen oil sands operators from Suncor Energy Inc. to Brion Energy Corp. find themselves with prices for Canadian oil now hovering around $30 a barrel. While all around them projects have been postponed or canceled, their investments were judged too far along when the oil game suddenly moved from offense to defense.
These projects will add at least another 500,000 barrels a day — roughly a 25 percent increase from Alberta — to an oversupplied North American market by 2017.
Pentagon Halts Work with Bioterror Germs at 9 Labs
September 4th, 2015Via: USA Today:
The discovery of live anthrax outside a containment area at a military lab in Utah prompted military officials to order an immediate freeze on operations at nine biodefense laboratories that work with dangerous viruses, toxins and bacteria, the Pentagon announced Thursday.
The moratorium, first reported by USA TODAY, came after officials took a detailed look at policies and procedures at the labs and found them wanting, according to Defense officials. Labs at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground facility in Utah have been the focus of international concern since May, when the first clues emerged that the facility had been mistakenly shipping live anthrax — instead of killed specimens — to labs in the USA and abroad for years.
An ongoing USA TODAY Media Network investigation has revealed numerous safety problems at government, university and private labs that operate in the secretive world of biodefense research.
“The mission I have to educate everybody is really an attempt to delay what AI will eventually do to us”
September 4th, 2015In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders.
—Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
And now: “Nanodegrees.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Also see: Humans Need Not Apply:
Via: The Economist:
“BECAUSE of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society,” says Sebastian Thrun.
60,000 Antelopes Died in 4 Days — And No One Knows Why
September 3rd, 2015Via: Live Science:
It started in late May.
When geoecologist Steffen Zuther and his colleagues arrived in central Kazakhstan to monitor the calving of one herd of saigas, a critically endangered, steppe-dwelling antelope, veterinarians in the area had already reported dead animals on the ground.
“But since there happened to be die-offs of limited extent during the last years, at first we were not really alarmed,” Zuther, the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science.
But within four days, the entire herd — 60,000 saiga — had died. As veterinarians and conservationists tried to stem the die-off, they also got word of similar population crashes in other herds across Kazakhstan. By early June, the mass dying was over. [See Images of the Saiga Mass Die-Off]
Now, the researchers have found clues as to how more than half of the country’s herd, counted at 257,000 as of 2014, died so rapidly. Bacteria clearly played a role in the saigas’ demise. But exactly how these normally harmless microbes could take such a toll is still a mystery, Zuther said.
“The extent of this die-off, and the speed it had, by spreading throughout the whole calving herd and killing all the animals, this has not been observed for any other species,” Zuther said. “It’s really unheard of.”
Refugees Pour Into Budapest Train Station
September 3rd, 2015If you’re going to run for your life, it’s best to do so before everyone else tries to do the same thing.
Via: Reuters:
Hungarian police allowed hundreds of migrants to pour into Budapest’s main railway station on Thursday but authorities canceled all trains to western Europe, triggering chaos and confusion.
Hundreds of people, many of them refugees from conflicts in the Middle East, stormed a waiting train, cramming children through open windows in the belief a two-day standoff with police had ended and they were being allowed to continue their journey west to Austria, Germany and beyond.
But signs in Hungarian said there were no west-bound trains. It was unclear why the police had suddenly withdrawn, having prevented over 2,000 migrants from entering for two days.
“There’s a German flag on this train so we though it went to Germany. So it’s not going to Germany?” a man clinging with one hand to the doors of a train told a Reuters journalist, declining to be named.
The standoff had become the latest symbol of Europe’s migration crisis, the continent’s worst since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing wars, as well as economic migrants escaping poverty, have been arriving in Europe by rickety boat across the Mediterranean or over land across the Balkan peninsula, straining the bloc’s asylum system to breaking point and confounding efforts to forge a united policy.
