Dollar Index at 1-Month Low
June 7th, 2011Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
The U.S. Dollar Index is working its way down again. A break below 72.696 sets up a try for the strategic 70.792 level.
The index is at 73.581 right now.
Via: Reuters:
The dollar fell to a one-month low against a basket of currencies on Tuesday and a record low against the Swiss franc after a Chinese official said the greenback would continue to weaken versus other major currencies.
The head of the international payment department at the Chinese forex regulator also warned about the risks of excessive holdings of U.S. dollars.
Doctors Will Launch Court Fight if Dr. David Kelly Inquest Demand Turned Down
June 7th, 2011Apologies for the Daily Mail link.
Via: Daily Mail:
A group of doctors is preparing to mount a legal challenge if the Attorney General this week refuses an inquest into the death of weapons inspector Dr David Kelly.
Dominic Grieve, who has spent nine months considering the case for a new inquiry, is expected to announce his decision on Thursday.
Campaigners are braced for him to deliver a ‘No’ verdict after Prime Minister David Cameron said last month he did not want the Kelly files re-opened.
If this happens, the doctors – who have unearthed mountains of evidence which casts doubt on the Hutton Inquiry verdict of suicide – will lodge an immediate judicial review. The Attorney General would then have to justify his decision in the High Court.
North China Is Dying
June 7th, 2011Via: New York Times:
North China is dying.
A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.
Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.
The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.
The Gitmo No One Talks About
June 7th, 2011Via: Salon:
President Obama has presided over a threefold increase in the number of detainees being held at the controversial military detention center at Bagram Air Base, the Afghan cousin of the notorious prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. It’s the latest piece of news that almost certainly would be getting more attention — especially from Democrats — if George W. Bush were still president.
There are currently more than 1,700 detainees at Bagram, up from over 600 at the end of the Bush administration.
The situation at Bagram, especially the legal process that determines whether detainees are released, is the subject of a new report by Human Rights First. It finds that the current system of hearings for detainees “falls short of the requirements of international law” because they are not given “an adequate opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating with insurgents and present a threat to U.S. forces.” Human Rights First also argues that cases of unjustified imprisonment are damaging the broader war effort by undermining Afghans’ trust in the military
I spoke to the author of the report, Daphne Eviatar, a senior associate in the law and security program at Human Rights First who traveled to Bagram to observe the situation first-hand.
The Secret History of Boeing’s Killer Drone
June 7th, 2011Via: Wired:
When the pilotless, wing-shaped warplane lifted off a runway at California’s Edwards Air Force Base for the first time on the morning of April 27, it was like the resurrection of the dead. The Boeing Phantom Ray — one of the most advanced drones ever built — came close to never flying at all.
In late 2007, according to company insiders, U.S. military officials ordered Boeing to destroy an earlier version of the Phantom Ray, the X-45C. Exactly why the feds wanted the robotic aircraft dismantled has never been fully explained.
Boeing had just lost out to rival aerospace firm Northrop Grumman in a contest to develop a so-called “Unmanned Combat Air System” for the Navy, capable of taking off from, and landing on, aircraft carriers. That contest, known by its acronym N-UCAS — “N” for “Navy” — was actually the third time in five years Boeing had gone toe-to-toe with Northrop over a government contract to build killer drones, and the second time it had lost.
With each round of competition, Boeing had made enemies.
Even so, the kill order came as a shock to the Chicago-based company. Rare if not unprecedented in the world of military contracting, the command represented the climax of a nearly decade-long drama pitting a rotating field of corporations and government agencies against each other and, bizarrely, even against themselves — all in an effort to develop a controversial, but potentially revolutionary, pilotless jet fighter.
The UCAS development story has all the trappings of a paperback technothriller: secret technology, a brilliant military scientist, scheming businessmen, and the unseen-but-decisive hand of the military’s top brass.
Melted Fuel at Fukushima May Have Leaked Through Pressure Vessels
June 7th, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
The melted fuel at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station may have leaked through the pressure vessels of the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors, the Yomiuri newspaper reported.
The Japanese government will submit a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency that raises the possibility the fuel dropped through the bottom of the pressure vessels, a situation described as a “melt through” and considered more serious than a “meltdown,” according to the report, which cited the document.
Hacker Groups Thoroughly Infiltrated by Government
June 6th, 2011Via: Guardian:
The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.
Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.
In some cases, popular illegal forums used by cyber criminals as marketplaces for stolen identities and credit card numbers have been run by hacker turncoats acting as FBI moles. In others, undercover FBI agents posing as “carders” – hackers specialising in ID theft – have themselves taken over the management of crime forums, using the intelligence gathered to put dozens of people behind bars.
So ubiquitous has the FBI informant network become that Eric Corley, who publishes the hacker quarterly, 2600, has estimated that 25% of hackers in the US may have been recruited by the federal authorities to be their eyes and ears. “Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation,” Corley told the Guardian.
New Flow Battery Technology from MIT
June 6th, 2011Via: Technology Review:
A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make “refueling” such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.
The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system. In this design, the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — are composed of particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane.
…
Flow batteries have existed for some time, but have used liquids with very low energy density (the amount of energy that can be stored in a given volume). Because of this, existing flow batteries take up much more space than fuel cells and require rapid pumping of their fluid, further reducing their efficiency.
The new semi-solid flow batteries pioneered by Chiang and colleagues overcome this limitation, providing a 10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow-batteries, and lower-cost manufacturing than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Because the material has such a high energy density, it does not need to be pumped rapidly to deliver its power. “It kind of oozes,” Chiang says. Because the suspensions look and flow like black goo and could end up used in place of petroleum for transportation, Carter says, “We call it ‘Cambridge crude.’”
Syria Says 120 Forces Dead
June 6th, 2011Via: AP:
Armed men attacked Syrian security forces in a tense northern city on Monday, state television said, and 120 policemen and security forces were killed in a region where the army has carried out days of deadly assaults on protesters calling for the end of President Bashar Assad’s rule.
Communications were cut to the area around Jisr al-Shughour on Monday and the details of the attack were impossible to verify, but there have been unconfirmed reports in the past by residents and activists of Syrians fighting back against security forces.
The government promised a “decisive” response, setting the stage for an even stronger government crackdown against a popular uprising that began in mid-March and poses the most potent threat in years to the 40-year regime of the Assad family.
“We will deal strongly and decisively, and according to the law, and we will not be silent about any armed attack that targets the security of the state and its citizens,” said Interior Minister Ibrahim Shaar.
Jisr al-Shughour, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Turkish border, has been the latest focus of Syria’s military, whose nationwide crackdown on the revolt has left more than 1,200 Syrians dead, activists say. The town was a stronghold of the country’s banned Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. Human rights groups said at least 42 civilians have been killed there since Saturday.
Syria’s government has a history of violent retaliation against dissent, including a three-week bombing campaign against the city of Hama that crushed an uprising there in 1982. Jisr al-Shughour itself came under government shelling in 1980, when it was a stronghold of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, with a reported 70 people killed.
State, Local Governments Set to See Record Job Cuts, Layoffs
June 6th, 2011Via: CNN:
Don’t look to state and local governments to prop up the job market.
To the contrary, this cash-strapped sector is set to go on a record-breaking layoff binge when the new fiscal year starts on July 1.
State and local governments are forecast to shed up to 110,000 jobs in the third quarter, the first time the blood-letting has risen into the triple digits, according to IHS Global Insight.
