And Now… Obama Ricin Letter
May 30th, 2013Via: CBS:
A letter addressed to President Obama that may have been contaminated with the deadly toxin ricin is similar to two ricin-laced letters recently sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Secret Service said Thursday.
A screening facility for mail sent to the White House intercepted the recent letter sent to Mr. Obama, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said. The letter has been turned over to the FBI’s joint terrorism task force for testing and investigation.
CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports that the letter was postmarked from Shreveport, La.
Shreveport was also the postmark for the two contaminated letters sent to Bloomberg in New York and his gun-control group in Washington.
Nikkei 225 Takes Another Dump
May 30th, 2013Via: Forbes:
Overnight, it was all about Japan, with the Nikkei 225 tumbling another 5.15% after last Thursday’s drop of more than 7%. Although the Nikkei is still up more than 30% year-to-date, last night’s pullback made it a 14.75% correction from the highs.
Cost to Squid Minion to Avoid Prosecution for Influence Peddling: $100K
May 30th, 2013Via: Reuters:
A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker has agreed to a five-year securities industry ban and a record fine to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges that he broke rules against influence peddling to win bond underwriting business in Massachusetts.
Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Neil Morrison, 38, accepted what the SEC said was the first industry ban for violating “pay-to-play” rules governing the $3.7 trillion municipal bond market.
He also agreed to a $100,000 civil fine, which the SEC called the largest individual penalty in such a case.
Thursday’s settlement was announced eight months after Goldman struck its own $12 million settlement with the SEC over the case, which involved contributions to the 2010 gubernatorial campaign of then-Massachusetts State Treasurer Timothy Cahill.
Pay-to-play refers to the providing of cash or other contributions to public officials in exchange for political favors or the awarding of contracts.
Physicists Unveil World’s Most Precise Clocks
May 30th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Today, Andrew Ludlow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder and a few buddies unveil the two most accurate clocks ever built. They say their new clocks can keep time with an unprecedented precision of one part in 10-18.
Ludlow and co put this in perspective: “A measurement at the 1018 fractional level is equivalent to specifying the age of the known universe to a precision of less than one second or Earth’s diameter to less than the width of an atom.”
EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
May 30th, 2013Via: EFF:
Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a formal objection to the inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) in HTML5, arguing that a draft proposal from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) could stymie Web innovation and block access to content for people across the globe.
The W3C’s HTML working group is creating a technical standard for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the computer language that creates webpages and otherwise displays content online. The working group has accepted a draft that includes discussion of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), which will hard-wire the requirements of DRM vendors into the HTML standard.
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DRM standards look like normal technical standards but turn out to have quite different qualities. They fail to implement their stated intention – protecting media – while dragging in legal mandates that chill the speech of technologists, lock down technology, and violate property rights by seizing control of personal computers from their owners. Accepting EME could lead to other rightsholders demanding the same privileges as Hollywood, leading to a Web where images and pages cannot be saved or searched, ads cannot be blocked, and innovative new browsers cannot compete without explicit permission from big content companies.
Monsanto GM Wheat Not Approved by USDA Found on Oregon Farm
May 30th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Genetically modified wheat created by Monsanto Co. (MON) that wasn’t approved for use turned up on an 80-acre farm in Oregon last month, threatening the outlook for U.S. exports of the grain that are the world’s largest.
A farmer attempting to kill wheat with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide found several plants survived the weedkiller, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said yesterday in a statement. Scientists found the wheat was a strain field-tested from 1998 to 2005 and deemed safe before St. Louis-based Monsanto, the world’s largest seedmaker, pulled Roundup Ready wheat from the regulatory approval process on concern that importers would avoid the crop.
“I would imagine even the perception that GM wheat is out there would have some impact on our exports” with so many countries “putting their foot down on not accepting” gene-altered crops, Ryan Larsen, an assistant professor of agribusiness and applied economics at North Dakota State University in Fargo, said by telephone. “This continues that bad persona that GM crops have. It allows people to say ‘See, it’s out there and we’re not being told it’s out there.’ ”
Syria Receives Russian S-300 Air Defense System
May 30th, 2013Via: Deutsche Welle:
Russian S-300 air defense missile systems have arrived in Syria, according to the Syrian president. Israel has long feared the delivery of the long-range missiles, calling them a “threat” to its own security.
In an interview with Lebanese broadcaster, Al-Manar TV, the Syrian president confirmed that Damascus had received the surface-to-air missile system from Russia. The quotes were released in a preview for an interview slated to be aired later on Thursday.
“Syria has got the first batch of Russian S-300 missiles … The rest of the shipment will arrive soon,” President Bashar al-Assad said.
‘Devastating Consequences for the Ecosystem’ If GM Salmon Escape and Breed with Wild Species
May 30th, 2013Madness.
Via: Independent:
Genetically modified salmon could escape into the wild with devastating consequences for the ecosystem, a new study has warned.
Researchers from Canada say that there is a risk of GM salmon mating with the closely-related brown trout species to produce a hybrid fish. GM salmon grow faster than normal salmon and scientists observed that their hybrid offspring grow even faster allowing them to out-compete existing species for food.
Let’s Be Clear: Establishing a ‘No-Fly Zone’ Is an Act of War
May 29th, 2013Via: The Atlantic:
Kudos to Josh Rogin for breaking the news that “the White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a no-fly zone inside Syria.” But wouldn’t it be a more powerful story without the euphemism?
Relying on the term “no-fly-zone” is typical in journalism. But that is a mistake. It obscures the gravity of the news.
Here’s how an alternative version of the story might look: “The White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for bombing multiple targets inside Syria, constantly surveilling Syrian airspace alongside U.S. allies, and shooting down Syrian war planes and helicopters that try to fly around, perhaps for months.”
The term “no-fly-zone” isn’t analytically useless. It’s just that folks using it as shorthand should make sure everyone reading understands that, as Daniel Larison put it right up in a headline, “Imposing a No-Fly-Zone in Syria Requires Starting a New War.” That becomes clearer some paragraphs later in Rogin’s article, when he discussed Senator John McCain’s advocacy for a “no-fly-zone.” “McCain said a realistic plan for a no-fly zone would include hundreds of planes, and would be most effective if it included destroying Syrian airplanes on runways, bombing those runways, and moving U.S. Patriot missile batteries in Turkey close to the border so they could protect airspace inside northern Syria,” he wrote.
On the Road to a Japanese Debt Crisis
May 29th, 2013Via: The Exchange:
The initial results of the Abenomic program would be cause for true celebration if they did not also have the unintended consequence of drawing the market’s attention to the appalling state of Japan’s public finances. However, seemingly this is now occurring as markets have begun to question the logic of holding Japan’s very low yielding government bonds knowing full well that the Japanese government is intent on cheapening the country’s currency and on reigniting domestic inflation through an unprecedented policy of massive money printing. The incipient loss of market confidence has been reflected in a more than doubling in the 10-year interest rate on Japanese government bonds from a low of 0.4 percent in April to its present rate of over 0.9 percent.
The prospect of a further loss of investor appetite for Japanese government bonds would not be so serious were Japan’s public finances in reasonable shape. In truth, however, it is difficult to conceive of a worse state of public finances for the country. Japan’s government still has to finance a budget deficit of around 10 percent of GDP at at time that its gross public debt amounts to close to 240 percent of GDP, or almost 2 1/2 times the corresponding public debt ratio for the United States.
Compounding the dire state of Japan’s public finances is the fact that Japan’s population is now aging at by far the most rapid rate among the industrialized countries. As a result of this aging, Japan’s domestic saving rate is already now declining at a rapid rate, which will make it increasingly challenging for the government to continue financing itself at very low interest rates.
The Bank of Japan could very well soon find itself faced with a terrible dilemma. If it does nothing about rising government long-term interest rates, Japan’s government finances would appear to markets to be all the more unsustainable and Japanese banks would suffer increasing losses on their large portfolio of Japanese government bonds. If, on the other hand, the Bank of Japan were to step up its policy of bond purchases to keep the government’s long-term borrowing costs low, it would very likely accelerate the pace of Japanese yen depreciation and increase inflationary expectations. Such a course would make investors even less willing to hold those bonds which would require yet another round of Bank of Japan buying.
Needless to say, being the world’s third largest economy means that developments in Japan have very important implications for both the global and the US economic outlook. This is yet another reason that one has to hope that Japanese government bond holders do not lose confidence in Japan’s very compromised public finances anytime soon.
